For over a year, working with East London community music project Stow-lab, we’ve been co-organising a series of music events and workshops called Plugged, with the ethos of connecting people through music. We were also successful in receiving funding from Arts Council England to organise a whole programme of events.
After a number of awesome social events and workshops in 2019 and early 2020, we’ve had to move things online because of the Covid-19 situation. With lockdowns in full swing around the world, and with everyone staying in, we’ve named the events ‘Plugged In‘ and the first live stream took place on May 15th 2020 – a fantastic event that was shared over 50 times during the actual stream and was watched by nearly 3000 people. We, ourselves, performed a short Orchestra of Samples set, with Graham in London and Alex in Paris, followed by Kuntari performing his new project from his studio in Indonesia, as part of the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme (that we were part of with him). Others on the night included Nicolas Bras – the French artist behind the massively popular Facebook page Rare & Strange Instruments (and who we recorded in 2018 and features in our recent track Return of Django), and from his studio in Bogota, Colombian artist Járanatambó (aka Alejandro Escallón) who we recorded in 2017 and features in our track East to West playing piano. We’ve re-uploaded just our performance here which includes those two tracks.
And to watch the whole Facebook stream, check here. Looking ahead with Plugged, on Wednesday July 15th we’ll be running an online workshop with music teacher and composer Michael Neo, showing how an Orchestra of Samples track can be remixed using the free app GarageBand. As part of Plugged we’re also involved with this year’s Make Music Day on June 21st, Make Music is part of the international Fête de la Musique which started in France in the 1980’s and now takes place in over 700 cities in more than 100 countries. The daylong musical free-for-all celebrates music in all its forms, encouraging people to come together through music.
For more info on Plugged, check out www.plugged.org.uk