Network Membership

OUTLANDS is a network of organisations, producers, promoters and venues who develop, support, produce and promote performance-led experimental music activities. Network membership offers the opportunity to be part of an active, connected national community.

Archived

Feb 27 2021
Feb 28 2021

The Joyous Thing #2

The Joyous Thing

The Joyous Thing is a live gig and a chance to talk. A place to meet with fellow adventurers around the country who live, work, and play across myriad forms of new music, art, and performance.

In turbulent times there is an urgent need to work as allies, to face challenges in supportive, collaborative, and creative ways. As we continue to be physically separated by the ongoing covid crisis, The Joyous Thing is a chance to come together online, to explore new connections, and share new methods of working, producing, and creating.

In this edition, the focus is on how we continue to reach audiences. How could online platforms and new thought help break old barriers? How does the landscape of online production intersect with pressing conversations around diversity, inclusion, and equality within our scene and beyond?

Join us for a weekend of commissioned performances from artists and network members from across the UK. Talks and Q&A’s. Hang-out sessions where you can meet like minds. Guest mixes and DJ Sets. A chance to cut loose at virtual after parties… plus a good old pub quiz to round things off.

This is a free event made possible with support from Arts Council England.

Artists & Programme

Klein: Stadium
“an Off-Broadway play set in a never-ending game show capsule.”
Outlands are proud to present this new online commission, conceived, written, scored, and directed by UK artist Klein.
Developed during a residency in February 2021 at Beaconsfield Gallery, London in February 2021.
Taking references from cultural locations as wide apart as television commercials for Japanese toys and Ant and Dec’s Gameshow Marathon, Klein weaves an intriguing context in which London based actor and grime MC, M.I.C takes centre stage to deliver a one person performance accompanied by a new experimental score.
Klein is a multi-disciplinary artist based in London. Her music releases, films and performances have established her as a singular voice who uses disjunctive experimentalism to create a sensory world that melds popular reference points with personal associations.
‘Lifetime is marked by aesthetic and personal conflict, and while it doesn’t uncover easy resolution, its beauty (and it is a remarkably beautiful record) derives in large part from the acceptance, or even embrace, of those conflicts as what generates a lifetime’s meaning.’— Pitchfork
‘Lifetime is a culmination of Klein’s autobiographical experiments, tying up the scattered archives of the religious upbringing glimpsed in previous works. Without succumbing to simplicity, Klein’s latest release delivers an intimate vision of the mayhem, loss and detachment that can ensue from a whirling cycle of panic and redemption.’ — Resident Advisor
Kathy Hinde: Deep Listening Walk
The Avon Gorge, Bristol (Audiovisual, on location, live stream)
Join Kathy for a walk to pause, reflect and listen to Bristol from an underwater perspective at the point where the floating harbour meets the Avon Gorge. Contemplate Bristol’s unique tidal changes from an edge point of the city, demarcated by a shifting watery passageway carving a space between the urban and the rural.
The Bristol Channel has the second largest tidal range in the world and many interventions keep Bristol’s relationship with water in balance. Interwoven between sessions of live, underwater listening, Kathy will investigate the water balancing systems at the floating harbour, and share some watery compositions created from underwater sounds shaped by tidal data. Uncover a fresh connection with the watery environs of Bristol by pausing to reflect and listen from an underwater perspective, culminating at sunset, on a waning full moon, at a spring tide.
This walk emerges from Kathy’s research as a SWCTN data fellow, and her Deep Listening Walk for Control Shift in October 2020.
Kathy Hinde is an audio-visual artist who creates experiences that combine sound, sculpture, image, light and location. She embraces open methods, indeterminacy and evolving processes to echo phenomena found in the natural world to explore our relationship with other species, each other and the earth’s systems. She has toured work to Europe, USA, Russia, Canada, China, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia & New Zealand. Awards include an Ivor Novello Award, and Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica, a British Composer Award, and an ORAM award. She is part of the Cryptic Artist programme, and a member of Bristol Experimental Expanded Film.
Pretty Grim: My Whole World Is Coming Apart
Commissioned by Fat Out & Outlands and premiered at Fat Out Fest 2020.
My Whole World Is Coming Apart’ is an intense, cathartic, joyful rage of sonic frequencies paired with visuals and poetry from Samiir Saunders and dancer/drag queen Black Peppa. Pretty Grim are Kaila, Anna & Meesha. Based in Birmingham they are a supergroup made up of members of Dorcha, Youth Man, Blue Ruth & Limpid as well as engaging in cross-discipline art projects Queef, Supersonic Festival & Shout Festival.
Samiir Saunders is an artist, poet, and filmmaker from Birmingham, UK. He primarily creates mixed-media poetry; which takes the form of films, zines, animations, performances and/or websites. Samiir’s work explores themes of digital technology, fragmentation, and Black mental health.
Black Peppa – is a local Birmingham drag queen who has been on the drag scene since 2019. Since then, they have performed on many stages as a klubkid gogo boy and drag queen. They are currently the reigning queen of Church of Yshee 2019, and Eurodrag England 2020 . This Fierce Caribbean born queen has a background of dance & theatre, their performance numbers can range from high energy death drops, splits and high kicks to emotional ballads.
Kate Carr: The Cyclical and the Linear
Presented by TACO! – recipients of an Outlands member commission for The Joyous Thing.
The Cyclical and the Linear is a new speculative performance piece made for live broadcast by Sound artist and composer Kate Carr. In the gallery space at TACO! Carr has installed a bespoke, sculptural instrument made from taut wires , transducers and contact mics, which she will use to perform an improvised composition for camera, broadcast online and via RTM.FM. Kate Carr is a London based Australian artist who work is is grounded within the practice of field recording. Using microphones Carr finds sounds within a body of water, the internal vibrations of a building, or the rumbling noises deep within the earth, which she then uses in thoughtful ambient compositions, that blur the boundaries between instruments and ‘found’ sound.
Carr has exhibited and performed Internationally. Her audio work has been broadcasted and presented on Radio 6, Late Junction and she has performed lives at International platforms such as MazerMuski Festival – Berlin, Sonorities – Belfast, Café OTO and the Horse Hospital – London and Norðanvindur sound art festival, Iceland. Her work has been shown at galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Australia, the Kochi Muzaris Biennale – India, and Transition- Mken, Sweden. In 2018 her installation Under Construction was presented at TACO!, London. She is currently undertaking a commission for Forma. Her work has been released on labels including Rivertones (UK), Helen Scarsdale (USA), Galaverna (Italy), and Soft (France). Kate Carr runs and owns the record label – Flaming Pines (UK).
Mercury In The Midnight Sky
A film by Tommy Husband feat. music by Joel C Murray & lighting design by Venya Krutikov.
Presented by Invisible Wind Factory – recipients of an Outlands member commission for The Joyous Thing.
Joel C Murray is a drummer, composer & improviser based in Liverpool. He plays regularly with Barberos & a.P.A.t.T and collaborates with many different visual and physical artists throughout the UK and beyond.
Tommy Husband is a filmmaker based in Liverpool. He studied Film Production at the Arts Institute in Bournemouth before joining Warp Films where he worked across various projects/production roles, including as a camera-operator on Four Lions and This is England ’86. At Warp he produced ‘From ATP’, 6 short-films that premiered at All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival and online on Pitchfork.com. As a director he’s worked with artists such as The Kazimier, Ex-Easter Island Head and Stealing Sheep.
Venya Krutikov is director of the Kazimier and heads up the Creative Technology department. The Kazimier create interdisciplinary work from intimate installations to mass audience spectacles. They explore how sense and perception can be manipulated, wrapping creative technology within deeper mystery.
Rory Ballantyne is a Musician, Producer, Sound Engineer, Broadcaster, and Production Technician. Since arriving in Liverpool in 2008, he has been involved with various grassroots and experimental music scenes as a performer, sound engineer and producer. Recently Rory produced Ad Finitum for LightNight 2019, produces and presents for The Popular Music Show on BBC Radio Merseyside and works as a recording engineer at The Fade, Liverpool.
Mothwasp: Unlive
Re-broadcast from Outlands Screen Tests, November 2020.
Unlive investigates the juncture of expanded film and live musical performance for online audiences. Rhythmic noise, feedback, and field recordings both sonic and visual are merged as a visual poem to the ‘live’, the analogue, the non-partisan and the un-digital.
Mothwasp is an ongoing audio-visual collaboration between Stephen J Taylor and Matthew J Watkins.
B.O.S.S (Black Obsidian Sound System)
Presented by Outlands network member Berwick Film & Media Festival & introduced by B.O.S.S member Kiera Coward-Deyell
The B.O.S.S programme features a screening of Collective Hum (2019) – A short film exploring the polyphony of collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British sound – followed by a specially created B.O.S.S Mediation Soundscape.
B.O.S.S Black Obsidian Sound System was established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non-binary black and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Following in the legacies of sound system culture they wanted to learn, build and sustain a resource for our collective struggles. The system, based in London, is available to use or rent by community groups and others with the purpose of amplifying and connecting them.
Black Obsidian Sound System collective are: Adedamola, Alice Darko, Deborah Findlater, Evan Ifekoya, Gin, Jenny, Marcus, Mali Shy One, Mellowdramatics, Mwen, Nadz, Nadine Peters, Naeem, Natasha Nkonde, Onyeka Igwe, Phoebe Collings-James, Shamica Ruddock, Shenece Oretha.
Luke Fowler: Patrick (2020)
Presented & introduced by Outlands network member Berwick Film & Media Festival along with the artist
Patrick is made entirely from 16mm film and sound recordings produced during a residency at Headlands Centre for the arts, Marin County. The film focuses on the life and work of Patrick Cowley; a singular producer of dance music who pioneered the hi-NRG “San Francisco Sound” in the late 1970s. — Luke Fowler
Following studies on English musician Xentos “Fray Bentos” Jones, English composer Cornelius Cardew, Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, Canadian composer Martin Bartlett and Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait, Fowler turns his faithful 16mm camera to the legacy of electronic music innovator Patrick Cowley.
A musician himself, Fowler draws on the audacious and experimental spirit of Cowley’s sound to throw an affectionate cinematic parade celebrating the life, work and memory of the music producer who we lost too early to AIDS in 1982, at the age of 32. Not preoccupied with constructing a neat and Wikipedia-alike “classic” profile, Patrick instead lingers through the places and spaces in San Francisco that Cowley inhabited and mixes them with the gentle testimonies of Maurice Tani, former classmate, musical collaborator and friend. The result is a visually and sonically joyful and textured elegy to a creative spirit who was both of his time and ahead of it. More commonly known for his audacious remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and his disco-infused, legendary and prolific partnership with Sylvester—Cowley’s visionary and talented creative skills led him to launch two solo albums as well as numerous artistic collaborations within the immensely rich gay cultural scene of the late 70s and early 80s, including creating gay porn soundtracks—Ana David, BFMAF Associate Programmer
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is an artistically ambitious, accessible and inclusive organisation for new cinema and artists’ moving image. Based in North Northumberland, the Festival leads through collaboration and research. With a resolute commitment to peer support, artistic production and community development, the Film Festival is recognised for its innovative programming and critical engagement.
University of Brighton, Digital Music and Sound Art - Open Call
The Digital Music and Sound Arts department at University of Brighton is notable for being the first in the UK to formally offer a qualification in the sonic arts. For over two decades the BA course at Brighton has explored all things sonic, producing a number of acclaimed alumni. Recently expanding to add an MA option, the department continues to support a wide range of pioneering sonic research and practice.
Outlands is proud to present three new short form audio-visual works from current students. The selected works and artists are:
I Am Fya – Second Home
Anthea AKA I Am Fya is a self-produced artist, radio presenter, session vocalist, DJ, and performer based in Brighton, UK. Her debut 2019 album, A Womxn is a mix of sexy, dark n dubby, experimental dance beats, and social commentary lyrics. More recent work is based on field recordings from her homeland, Barbados, and focuses on identity, culture, spiritual connections to land and ancestors, family, the power of radical self-love, life-changing connections to chosen family, otherness, and acceptance. I Am Fya is currently working on a concept album & performance piece, Heavy Flow which will be released in early 2022.
Alex Lewis-Whitaker – Morgo [Outlands Edit]
Alex Lewis-Whitaker is a 21-year-old artist and musician from SW London, currently studying Digital Music & Sound Arts at the University of Brighton. His audiovisual project Morgo revolves around the hijacking of the psyche by sexual fantasy, sonified through seductive plunderphonics and visualised through animated surrealist collage. The project has been optimised for headphone listening, with sounds coming at you in 360 degrees.
Instagram: @alexlw.art // Youtube: Alex Lewis-Whitaker
Lee Davis – The Burnin Cold
“Hi I’m Lee Davis and I’m a 22 year-old Geezer from Vienna in my second year at DMSA. I am a jazz musician and sound artist trying to create out of the beauty and richness of life. The Burning Cold Project is a collaboration between Gabriel Krajanek (cinematographer and soul brother) and myself and is an audio-visual vignette representing the ambience of a deep winters day.”
Club Clam Dancehall Party with DJ Terror Wogan
CLUB CLAM is a Manchester-based collective born out of the depths of lockdown boredom. They create immersive, provocative and peculiar performances and events and will bring the SATURDAY night CLAM GIRL dancehall party to The Joyous Thing 2 for all your dancing needs!
Sign up to their ONLY CLAMS and plunge deep into their murky waters.
Outlands own out-house garden DJ will be providing bangin’ tunes to get deep down and muddy to.