The festival season starts in earnest next month with Land of Kings, which returns to Dalston after a year’s hiatus.
Starting at midday on Sunday 3 May, the festival will see 16 hours of live music, food and film in venues across Dalston.
Live acts announced include electronic maverick Tom Vek, who will be performing a special a/v set alongside techno artist Nathan Fake, female choir Deep Throat, melodic indie funk act Boxed In and 90s-influenced power pop act Juce.
On the DJ front, Dalston’s backrooms and basements will welcome the likes of Hot Chip spin off The 2 Bears, house specialists Waze & Odyssey, plus NTS resident Moxie who will spin an eclectic mix of techno, grime and hip-hop.
Aside from the music, the festival programme is reaching into the realms of immersive performance with Gideon Reeling’s flamboyantly irreverent Land of Queens at the Arcola.
Film curators Lost Picture Show will be hosting a roof top cinema, and Dalston’s Rio Cinema will be hosting a late show of shorts by local filmmakers.
New for the 2015 festival is Royal Thoughts, described as a “salon of talks, interviews and ideas”, and cultural journal Let’s Be Brief will be holding a creative forum.
Street food pioneers Street Feast will be serving up their signature nosh, and women’s group the Dalston Darlings will also be in attendance.
Confirmed venues include the Alibi and Birthdays, the Arcola, the Bunker, Dalston Roof Park, Eastern Curve Garden, Rio Cinema and back-live music den the Servant Jazz Quarters, while Oval Space will be throwing open its doors to hold the Land of Kings Afterparty.
By day, Alan Audrain manages Bouchon Fourchette café on Mare Street. But making coffee and serving customers is just the tip of his talents. When off duty, he is Alan A., a singer-songwriter with a penchant for extravagant outfits. A regular performer at Gay Pride festivals, last month Alan A. released Astray, an electro pop album that is fun and melodic but with plenty of attitude – and innuendo.
Alan, how did it all begin?
I moved to London in 2004 from Nantes in the west of France. I’ve always been singing, whether it’s taking singing lessons or in a choir. When I was a kid I used to jump on benches and do concerts for my schoolmates. Then I started writing here and there, bits and pieces, nothing serious. In 2008 I moved to Montreal and met my first arranger, Frank, and we worked on the first album together. This is the third album.
Can you describe the style of your music?
It’s very poppy, very British pop. It’s kind of orientated to a gay audience. I always say gay audience and their lovers because it’s kind of like a story of a gay man in London. And it’s a bit witty and a bit cheeky, but at the same time I don’t want to shock people – I prefer to amuse them.
Your song ‘So What?’ tackles homophobia with lines like “So what if I’m a homo, any more you want to know?” How has being gay informed your music?
Well, I grew up in a very small village so when I discovered I was gay it was kind of hard to come out. It took me a couple of years to come out to my best friends and a few more years to come out to my family. It’s quite hard to discover something about yourself but not be able to express it, or have to hide yourself. The song is just a way of saying well that’s me and you have to take me for who I am or move along!
Your French identity is very part of your music as well. How important is it to let the audience know that you’re French?
I think that was quite ambiguous until this album really. That’s why I wrote the song ‘Excuse My French’ because I wanted it to represent that part of me. That’s who I am, that’s where my family is and where I go back to regularly.
If you were able to do a collaboration with anyone who would it be?
I think I would aim high if I could choose anyone. Maybe I’d collaborate with a DJ like David Guetta, because he’s French as well and he’s on the scene everywhere in the world. DJs like that would be great but obviously doing a record with Jimmy Somerville or Duran Duran or the Pet Shop Boys would be amazing.
It’s hard to introduce Chick Corea without getting mired in hyperbole or desiccated by lists. Briefly risking both: he was a key figure in Miles Davis’ electric excursions of the late 1960s, was at the forefront of the ensuing nascent fusion movement with his band Return To Forever, and has continually innovated in both solo and group contexts since then, bringing to bear flamenco and twentieth century classical influences onto both acoustic and electric jazz. He has also won twenty Grammys in the process.
At the heart of all of this has been his relationship with the piano; no matter how many analogue synths and MIDI patches he used over the seventies and eighties he is principally a pianist, and it was a solo piano date that brought him to the Barbican. Solo piano was good for two reasons. Firstly when multiple jazz statesmen take to a stage together the result can sometimes be stifled by their collective reputations as much as the audience’s stratospheric expectations. Secondly, given that much of his oeuvre has been electric, it was an opportunity to hear him in an unadorned and relatively transparent context.
Despite the gravitas of solo piano in a big concert hall, he was keen not to make things too formal. An impish Chick mounted the stage, his Saga Holiday issue beige velcro trainers belying his seemingly perpetual effervescence. Having exhorted us to imagine we were in a small club, it wasn’t long before he’d shown us some jazz hands standing on one foot, played Bartok over the PA from his mobile phone, and invited audience members up for duets.
The theme for the solo gigs, Chick explained, was a revisiting of various pieces he’d found influential, either in themselves or through being connected to him by the musicians who had popularised them. In doing so there would be an inevitable reinterpretation as he filtered them through the prism of his musical life over the last 50 years, together with a night-by-night re-honing during the series of solo gigs.
Things started with Van Heusen’s ‘It Could Happen To You’ – a tune popularised by Miles Davis. This saw lithe right hand lines shimmering on maudlin chord inversions. The right hand strand kept afloat in Jobim’s ‘Desafinado’. This had a non-brittle delicacy and almost holographic iridescence, as loud pedal releases created staggered, slowly decaying harmonics. Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’ saw some dense reharmonisation but with Chick circumventing the knots with trademark playful exuberance. This is Corea’s genius. He can present dense harmonic ideas and abstruse chord voicings, but 99 per cent of the time things are entirely digestible. He leaves enough space for the peaks and troughs of tension/release to settle and be fully absorbed.
This carried on in the next piece: Bill Evans’ sublime ‘Waltz for Debby’. Only partially resolved left hand chord inversions built up an ill-defined wanting, before the right hand salve instantiated the famous melody. All this was given time to crystallise and the resolution button wasn’t pushed too soon. We got there, but after a slow ascent and a sustained subtle release.
There was then a percussive nod to Thelonius Monk – with his right foot audibly keeping time through Monk’s ‘Work’ – and an unexpected liaison as Stevie Wonder’s ‘Pastime Paradise’ segued into Chopin’s ‘Opus 17 No 4’. Muted staccato runs and harp like glissandos were allied in Corea’s own ‘Yellow Nimbus’, a piece dedicated to flamenco legend Paco De Lucia and quite possibly the cigarettes that eventually killed him. His own ‘Children’s Songs’ then got an airing – somewhat subdued given that they were to encapsulate children’s energy – before two London locals Hossam Ramzy (darbuka) and Tim Garland (sax) joined for an encore.
None of the evening was marred by any of the aforementioned high expectation. In being condensed into a succinct form, Corea’s omniscient content saw him focus half a century of jazz history into nuanced and articulate pieces that were all highly digestible. This by no means meant a lack of substance, and his panoptic interpretations yielded plenty of complexity to ruminate on, just without the need for the slug of Gaviscon that a lot of jazz with meat on it requires. It was a privilege to be in the same room as this man and a piano. History is still being made, fifty years on.
The Beyreuth Festival in northern Bavaria is a mecca for opera lovers and a pilgrimage destination for fans of Richard Wagner, who himself conceived the idea for a special festival to showcase his own works.
So when in 2011 the experimental Opera singer Lore Lixenberg stood outside the Beyreuth Festspielhaus to give a rendition of John Cage’s ‘Aria with Fontana Mix’ to a crowd of opera purists, it was something of a bold move.
Lixenberg, originally from Brighton but who has lived in Stoke Newington since the mid-1990s, is a risk taker and iconoclast, operating in arguably the most change-resistant artistic form there is.
“With opera the boundary is very clear, you’re either a composer or a singer,” she says. “I make pieces but I don’t see myself as a composer – it’s just an extension of singing. There’s an interesting movement I suppose of opera singers who are moving more into creation not just interpretation.”
Lixenberg leads a cosmopolitan life. With her boyfriend she has just opened a gallery space in Berlin, and when we meet she tells me about a new project that involves streaming performances live from Berlin to Stoke Newington, and vice versa.
“I’m really interested in combining opera with things like physical theatre and visual arts – that’s why I like John Cage because he started that all off,” she says.
Opera may forever be be considered traditional, but this doesn’t bother Lixenberg. In one of her pieces, ‘Bird’, she undergoes a metamorphosis, speaking before making vocalisations, which finally evolve into full blown bird song. Another recent project is about an opera singer who finds herself at the end of the world, gathering all the bits of opera she can to save them from oblivion.
Lixenberg blurs the boundary between composition and performance, but there is no mistaking her operatic voice. She describes her voice as “a bit of a synthesiser”, and gives me a quick blast – leaving me momentarily startled.
‘Startled’ also describes the audience who heard her that time in Beyreuth, though they were soon won over by her chutzpah and originality.
Props such as a roll of sellotape, a toothbrush and even a packet of crisps were all part of the performance. At one point she even cries theatrically on the shoulder of an audience member. Is this how John Cage would have wanted it? Almost definitely, though what Wagner would have made of it is anyone’s guess.
Open The Gate is proudly hosting their unique alternative fair, The African Market
Zimbabwean superstar Anna Mudeka will be performing live, alongside DJ Koichi Sakai playing a authentic African, Funk, Latin and Afrobeat music.
One Drum’s drumming circle performance and workshop will teach you how to drum and dance in true Ghana style. For a taste of the latest African trends, visit the two exclusive catwalks that will be showcasing the leading fashion, homeware designs, jewellery & accessories and kids fashion by the talented designers of the African Market.
The catwalks will also feature looks by award-winning body artist Christelle Kedi, hair styling by Joy Phido (World of Braiding), makeup by Bibish Mbemba (Lady B.) and a head wrapping demonstration by Sista E. of the Calabash Hub.
Plus, explore your creative flair with a number of workshops taking place throughout the day – try making your very own African-inspired mosaic with artist Dionne Ible, immerse yourself in a storytelling workshop with performer Cowfoot Prince Usifu Jalloh, or take part in a face painting and glitter tattoo workshop with the talented artist Kemi.
For full details on activities taking place at The African Market click here or to explore the latest programme of exciting events at Old Spitalfields Market click here.
Clarinettist and composer Arun Ghosh. Photograph: Naomi Goggin
Spitalfields Music Summer Festival once again brings superb early music, new sonic explorations, innovative music-theatre pieces, family music-making and more to East London’s most interesting spaces including Christ Church Spitalfields, Shoreditch Church and Wilton’s Music Hall.
The programme is led by Associate Artists the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and clarinettist and composer Arun Ghosh, who respond to the architecture and history of the local area, including the world premiere of Ghosh’s Spitalfields Suite.
Complementing them are the brightest and best in early music; a series of collaborations between music, theatre and film, and 15 world premieres.
Spitalfields Music also celebrates 25 years of its Learning & Participation programme, one of the first of its kind, with a number of events, including the London premiere of David Lang’s Crowd Out, written for 1000 untrained voices.
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Spitalfields Music Summer Festival
Booking information
Phone: 020 7377 1362 On the door: 30 minutes in advance of the event start time (subject to availability)
Tickets start from £5 with many events free
Full details at Spitalfields Music
Tower Hamlets residents wanting to make a first foray into the festival may be eligible for free tickets via Spitalfields Music’s ‘No Strings Attached’ ticket scheme.
The scheme allocates tickets ‘gifted’ through donations from Spitalfields Music ticket bookers to members of the local community who might not otherwise be able to attend.
More information via nostringsattached@spitalfieldsmusic.org.uk or on 020 7377 1362
Young players on_Ebor Street. Photograph: James Berry
With his subtle use of classic neo-soul samples, a penchant for female vocalists and a varied musical upbringing, East London-based producer Mom Tudie (real name Tom Mudie) is an intriguing and versatile new talent.
At only 18 years old, Tudie’s musical tastes lean towards modern R’n’B, and a huge chunk of inspiration comes from greats such as Thom Yorke. “Recently I’ve got into Drake, James Blake, King Krule, and Katy B. I also like a lot of the stuff coming out of East London at the moment and one of my favourite releases is Southpaw’s Out of Oak EP,” he says, listing his influences.
With so many musical role models, it might be difficult to incorporate them all into a music he can call his own. Tudie, however, has one rule of thumb. He says: “I tend to tell people that my music is a mix of electronic ideas. I’d prefer people listen and make up their own mind.”
Past tracks have a garage-tinged edge, but Tudie’s latest offering, a song called ‘Human Heart’, is strikingly mature. In it he contrasts a sparse and melancholic synth with a glitch-hop driven beat. Added vocals by Bridget Spencer and some electronica infused lounge-jazz brass samples make it a serene but eminently danceable number.
Female vocalists such as Nicola Thoms and Abigail Glasser are prevalent in his music, although he assures that he is definitely not discriminating against the men of the musical world. “I am about to release a track with Tom Misch, who is a male vocalist, and a really talented guitarist and beat maker.”
While fellow musicians gear up for festivals, Tudie’s plans for the summer are surprisingly uncertain. “I am travelling until July, so I don´t know if I am going to have the funds to go to any festivals this year, which is a shame. If I could, I would definitely go to Brainchild Festival – it was amazing last year.”
Catering for opera: Fernando Messulam. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Performing arts is part of Fernando Messulam’s life. Originally from Rosorio in Argentina, he used to live in front of the city’s Opera House. His mother was a ballet dancer, as were all his nannies.
Unsurprisingly, he too entered the arts, but in a less traditional discipline – breakdancing. Later, while auditioning for a musical, he discovered he was able to sing opera as a tenor.
But alongside artistic ambitions, he started catering and managed a café located inside the Opera House. His waiters were mimes and there was a tap dancer at the bar. It was “quite a bohemian gathering”, he says. “Beyond food it was about the social experience.”
It is this experience that Messulam decided to reproduce in London. Since last year, he has managed De La Panza, an Argentine steakhouse on Southgate Road. He tries to be different but not “mechanically different”, preserving the local feel of the restaurant alongside the kind of vibe you might find in an Argentine bodega.
Music is a big part of this, and once a month on a Sunday musicians gather to play and sing. “Cinderella here is the Opera” he insists. “It is not rehearsed, there are no numbers. We all know what we are doing, so we just bring it on!”
The next Opera Day is on 27 April when Messulam will be accompanied by tenor Yuri Sabatini and Orpheus Papafilippou on violin. The event will last from 2-7pm and people are welcome to stay all afternoon, as if they were in their own living room. “The only thing is that they don’t have the keys!” he quips.
Do some free association on Yoko Ono and what do you get? John Lennon, New York, the Beatles’ split, world peace, dark glasses, bed-ins, Fluxus/performance art. Looming over all of these is John’s shadow, and the fact she may be viewed by many as an appendage to his latent messianic complex. Yoko herself may well be aware of this, as much of the evening involved a febrile self-explanation that at times boiled over into self-justification.
This started explicitly – not just in the sense of the opening video close up of some ambulant buttocks with interstitial vulva in evidence – but with a collaged biopic accompanied by a succinct narration: “Yoko is provocative, confrontational and human”. We saw Yoko playing piano aged around five, the bed-in with swarming press photographers, Yoko the flâneur in New York, and then her naked body being traipsed over by a fly.
Just as the fly was preening itself over her mons pubis, the real Yoko appeared to rapturous applause, a sprightly 4′ 10” in trainers and dark glasses. The expounding then continued, with brief descriptions of her views on fracking and an obligatory nod to some perennial world peace obfuscation, interspersed with instructions on “not to try” when hugging, dancing and making love. In something of a knight’s move, there was a stern word about not taking photos during the show.
Then the music started. Stellar names get stellar backup, and tonight Yoko was joined by Thurston Moore (guitar) and Steve Shelley (drums); both members of recently disbanded Sonic Youth.
Something other than self-explanation next supervened: the fact that Yoko is 81 and in her dotage. This was born out by a ticking wrist watch held to Moore’s neck pickup, to which Yoko plangently listed all the things she might one day miss, “clouds, mountains, trees, snow, city lights”. Shelley joined the throng with rich cymbal swells, before Yoko deflated everything with a long sigh.
This sigh together with her vocal delivery – bridging the gap between narration and music – combined the fly-on-the-pudenda film, led me to the possibly facile idea that in inhabiting the liminal zone between music, performance art and – on this occasion at least – short film, appraisal through the prism of one of these was impossible. It did however allow Yoko to exploit their intersections to maximum effect.
This was exemplified by the next piece. It started with a fragile call and response between Yoko’s octogenarian pulmonary reserve and a tremulous metallic sliver from Moore’s Fender. Both were mirrored physically with Yoko exhorting Moore with outstretched arms, just as his body contorted with every stuttered response. This then built up as the fly decamped to Yoko’s areola, whilst she began to unfurl a spectrum of abstract ‘ahhh’s’ ranging from sarcastic hyena snicker to paroxysmal post-lacrimal gasping. The emerging cacophony plus its associated delivery neatly mirrored what was being projected. The buzz of the fly, Yoko’s scissors cutting black cloth and a purple bra being unclasped were all obliquely recreated by the band.
Things then swirled around on this frenetic inter-disciplinary level before the denouement really sealed things. Yoko and Moore prowled around each other – both wearing but not playing guitars – in a fashion combining some kind of mating ritual with hunching Japanese deference, before they suddenly came together clashing strings with the ensuing feedback abruptly bringing things to a close.
Yoko has been through a lot (bereaved; estranged from a child; never viewed outside prism of John; mauled by popular press), and it is inspiring that at 81 she’s still going for it. If not exactly liberated from this historical baggage herself, seeing her deal with it in her cross-disciplinary way was in itself liberating. Would Yoko Ono be who she is without John Lennon? An answer in the negative would be a truism, not a criticism. After all she’s human – and provocative and confrontational.
Yoko Ono played Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL on 23 March 2014.
Krista Papista, 24, is unlike other musicians. Since the age of 14 she has written, mixed and recorded music and done so entirely on her own. Today, operating from out of a small bedroom studio in Dalston, she remains unsung and unsigned, though with the determination and potential to go far.
But that is not all. Papista’s songs are open to interpretation – something she unquestionably advocates.
“My sound unravels elements of Riot Grrl chicness, requiem ballads and film noir trumpets with rabbit hole transitions … my mind is naturally preoccupied by melancholic thoughts and mood swings that manifest in my music,” she says.
The self-coined ‘sordid pop’ musician makes her eclectic tastes and strong sense of self more apparent by using dark, emotive lyrics and deep electronic beats. Her brawny voice echoes the androgynous and otherworldly tones of Karin Dreijer of Swedish experimental duo, The Knife. It is safe to say she is no wilting wallflower.
Papista’s roots are in Cyprus and Australia, and her early experiences growing up in Cyprus led her to discover artists who were non-commercial and far from the mainstream. “I wasn’t particularly interested in anything that was accessible to me,” she says. “I liked punk rock, electronic and pop music, and was never able to see my favourite artists live or even hear the music I liked anywhere. But there are many Cypriot/Greek artists I adore: Soteria Belou, Arleta, Manos Hatzidakis and many more.”
After moving to East London six years ago, Krista is enjoying feeling more settled. “I feel comfortable here. I like the restaurants, I like the gayness, I like the bars, I like the Mediterranean supermarkets and I like the dodgy-ness,” she specifies.
This spring Krista is planning to release her first album (all on her own, naturally) and from there see where ambition takes her. But first comes her morning cup of coffee. “My typical day usually consists of jogging first thing, after that I drink coffee and I either work on my music, read, day dream or get paranoid about everything,” she says.
