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Mojo ‘Folk Album of The Year’ winner and BBC2 Folk Awards nominee Lisa Knapp’s “grippingly fresh… superb” (fRoots) debut album Wild & Unduanted, was at the forefront of the current folk renaissance in Britain. Her vocals “as strange and stirring as a spring day” (Observer), backed by a curious array of acoustic instruments and sonic delights from the technological age, create a “uniquely timeless sound, raw in emotion and feel.. beautiful” (Youth, Killing Joke, producer) – and a highly anticipated 2nd album release awaits in 2013.

Lisa participated in BBC Electric Proms 2008 for the ‘Tribute to Lal Waterson’ concert where she sang with legendary singer Mike Waterson, and alongside the Waterson/Carthy family and James Yorkston.  Lisa has also played numerous times at London’s South Bank Centre; with the likes of Folk Supergroup Bellowhead (Christmas 2007);  A Tribute to Sandy Denny in the Royal Festival Hall where she sang with fiddle legend Dave Swarbrick;  ‘Close of Play’, a weekend of both traditional music and new music inspired by it, curated by long time heroine of Lisa’s, Shirley Collins, which culminated in a Royal Festival Hall appearance where she performed two songs with Gerry Diver and also sang with Linda Thompson and Shirley Collins.  Lisa took part in the last ‘Daughters of Albion’ production singing alongside Lou Rhodes, Kathryn Williams, national treasure Norma Waterson and Bishi.  A highlight was the version of ‘Scarborough Fair’ with legendary Martin Carthy and Lou Rhodes. In May 2009 as part of ‘Tune Up’ tour of Scotland Lisa played with the talented singer/songwriter James Yorkston and the Atheletes (Sarah Scutt, Reuben Taylor and Doogie Paul), with whom she also played for the duration. In September 2009 Lisa was commissioned by Sound UK to take part in an intriguing project called Canal Music.  This was in collaboration with Electronics artist Leafcutter John and included a series of perfomances along the Grand Union Canal starting in London and finishing in Birmingham.  The material for this was entirely written by both Lisa and John and was performed mostly on canal boat ‘Chiswick’. In Autumn 2009 Lisa took part in her first televised recording for BBC 4’s Alternative Christmas Session programme aired in Dec 2009.

“..it’s like opening up a Victorian music box to hear the most beguiling and captivating singing and sounds; an original concept throughout, and utterly disarming…  Her song ‘Jack’ is very fine indeed, and if it doesn’t win an award for best new song I’ll eat my May Garland!” Shirley Collins

“Lisa takes us out of our comfort zone and plants us in  a garden of England we didn’t know was there, but it’s one we’d like to explore further. Her singing and arrangements suit the mood perfectly…  Enchanting” BBC Radio 3, Late Junction 

“Hunt the Hare excels with ingenuity and magic and sets Lisa Knapp at the forefront and heart of the English Folk Renaissance, an incredible EP.” Folk Radio UK 

“..Knapp’s unique voice is earthy, elfin and breathlessly mischievous all at once, proving beyond doubt that, whether with self-penned or traditional material, she is an innovator and creative artist par excellence.” The Living Tradition 

www.lisaknapp.co.uk

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Basquiat Strings is a strings-based jazz quartet led by the cellist Ben Davis. Released in 2007, their first album, entitled simply Basquiat Strings with Seb Rochford, was one of the 2007 Mercury Prize nominees. The second incarnation of Basquiat Strings now features:

Ben Davis – cello and composition

Seb Rochford – drums

Graeme Stephen – acoustic guitar

Fred Thomas – double bass

“With the completion of the second album, I’d reached a point where I needed to experiment with different instrumentation and approaches to writing. I am still very interested in blending specific sounds, but want to get away from heavily arranged parts so I’ve brought a natural comping instrument, in the form of Graeme Stephen, into the frame. Graeme’s steel string playing combines perfectly with the broad tonal range of the cello and allows the band to play entirely acoustically if needed. Bass player Fred Thomas was brought up in a classical household which reflects in his sensitivity as a jazz musician. His main instrument is the piano but I’ve seen him as a drummer on many occasions! Seb Rochford, of course, has a great sense for the overall sound of a group and adjusts accordingly. Its been a pleasure to play and record with him over the years. The repertoire well include some material from the second album but will mainly be made up of new material. An interpretation of a standard or two will be included. I’m looking forward to touring this band in a double-bill with Jonny Phillips’ stunning band Oriole. We will be starting again on the exhilarating road of developing new sounds.”
Ben Davis

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The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

– Oscar Wilde

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Fourteenth century France was a place of radical musical developments, particularly in rhythmic structures, polyphony and notation systems. The greatest testament to this style is the Chantilly Codex, a book of music by French and Italian ‘Ars Subtilior’ composers featuring the exquisite mannerist notation of the time. Containing heart-shaped musical scores and canons set out in 33-bar spirals, this codex is one of the most exquisite syntheses of two artforms: graphic design and musical notation. The experimentation of composers such as Solage) and Trebor (Robert backwards) gave birth to an effervescence of richness and strangeness, a radical pushing of the boundaries of notational complexity, a period of highly idiosyncratic art which left little in the way of posterity. In this respect it has the capacity to connect deeply with contemporary artists; this fleeting and isolated style, in leaving no immediate descendants, retains its perennial novelty and remains forever gilded in mystery.

 

Fred Thomas is currently preparing a recording of this music using contemporary recording techniques and a wide range of strange instruments, both old and new.

 

….more to come….

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“Music is everywhere. Countless radio stations pump it out 24/7. It sells cars, shampoo, drinks – even political parties. Music is always there to cover up a lull in the conversation; it soothes us on take-off and on landing, and it makes us feel good… or does it? Subconsciously we crave for something that goes much deeper: well-crafted, inspiring music with real emotional meaning.

Thankfully, each new generation is blessed with a few young people who embrace music as an art form. They explore, invent, discuss, rehearse, and live their music. What they create enriches and entertains the audience without patronising it.

The artists in the F-ire Collective will give you depth, inspiration, surprise, and above all, hope.”

– Django Bates

www.f-ire.com

f-ire record label

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Fred arranges traditional tangos for Madrid-based Tango Orchestra, Ayahuasca Tango.

www.ayahuascatango.org

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Stevie Parle’s Dock Kitchen: music by Fred Thomas

 

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Nicolas Sarkozy: music by Fly Agaric

[youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg1Cda8wN40&feature=plcp[/youtube]

 

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the lea

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2013 marks the tenth anniversary of Stephen Cracknell’s project The Memory Band whose first EPs were released on his own Hungry Hill label in 2003, run in conjunction with Spinney Records. Cracknell’s intention from the outset was for the band to be “an imaginary band, built inside a computer and made flesh by the contributions of numerous musicians. Live an acoustic band of ever changing numbers and on record a new approach to traditional music”

That manifesto has been applied for a decade now. In 2004 their eponymous debut album was released, displaying an early fascination with landscape and place. There followed a prolonged period of live work, travelling all over the country and being embraced by the emerging independent festival circuit. The second album Apron Strings followed in 2006, licensed to Peacefrog in the UK and to Discristina Stairbuilders in the US.

After taking a sabbatical to produce and perform on “There Were Wolves” by The Accidental in 2008, Cracknell returned to re-cast the Memory Band, expanding its range of work, the number of musicians involved, and developing a number of specific side-projects. These included performances of the music and songs from Paul Giovanni’s score to classic film The Wicker Man as well as The Balearic Folk Orchestra; conceived in conjunction with Welsh film-maker Kieran Evans. And in 2012 Cracknell most recently revealed a new show entitled Folk on Film, continuing his fascination with soundtrack music. In 2011 The Memory Band found time to release its third album “Oh My Days” it’s most soulful album to date.

2013 sees the release of the fourth Memory Band “On The Chalk (Our Navigation of the Line of the Downs)” which was conceived by Cracknell in the downtime between live performances and marks a full circle “return to the machine” in it’s programmed style. After ten years of leading a band predicated upon the inevitability and necessity of change it stands as another turning point, another beginning on one of the oldest journeys we know.

The Memory Band features Fred Thomas on piano, percussion and arrangements.

www.thememoryband.com

thememoryband.bandcamp.com

 

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Born into the great line of Kouyate Griots in southern Senegal, Kadialy plays original songs inspired by his traditional repertoire. Kadialy and Fred have been playing together for over 15 years, with Kadialy on kora and vocals, and Fred on double bass.

“Senegalese kora virtuoso/singer Kadialy Kouyate showcases his fleet-fingered skills on this mesmerising instrument, complementing it with his hauntingly, darkly beautiful voice, to create a Toumani Diabate-meets-Youssou N’Dour sound.” Time Out

© Emma Werner

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El Ultimo Tango is a quintet created by Eduardo Vassallo, Principal Cello of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in 2002. The ensemble consists of flute, sax, cello, bass and piano and it specializes on Argentinian music with particular emphasis on the music of Astor Piazzolla. Fred Thomas was pianist from its formation in 2001 until 2007.

www.ultimo-tango.co.uk

Buy their record here:

Amazon
iTunes

 

“The high spot is Adios Nonino, here given an unusual treatment with the opening half entrusted mostly to the piano, with the rest of the ensemble taking up the final half, quite the best arrangement of it that I have heard” – Gramophone

 

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The Irreverents is a 5-piece instrumental party funk band, an organic groove factory, providing hard hitting funk, sweet riffs & bouncy tunes for ass-shaking occasions.

Some of the music is composed by Francesc Marco; some of it is left unplanned. The band has been developing for some time its own way of collectively improvising music for dancing, focussing on groove and form, seeking to move away from the jazz-funk territory where solos and improvisation tend to detract from dancing. The band’s approach might be better desrcibed as spontaneous composition than improvisation as such. All the musicians are familiar with jazz in one of its incarnations and strongly rhythmical musical traditions from Africa and Latin America.

There are many influences. Groove, sound and attitude are inspired by old style funk bands such as the Meters, the JBs and Fela Kuti’s Orchestra. For composition and arrangement, the M-Base movement has paved the way for decades. On a local level , the F-IRE Collective, with which all band members have collaborated, and especially Barak Schmool’s Timeline, has helped and inspired the them to explore creative and meaningful rhythmical music.

Fred was electric-bassist with the band from when it was formed in 2006 until 2009.

www.alivism.com/projects/theirreverents

 

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Fred Thomas formed this band with singer Emine Pirhasen in 2006. Band members included Alexis Nuñez, Ben Moorhouse, Jiri Slavik, Johnny Brierley, Nat Keen & Jim Hart.

Listen here

“The sexy wah-wah sounds of London lying on a bed of blues from which it is impossible to roll off from – so snug and stinky is the allure. Em Pirhasan’s voice truly leaves Amy Winehouse banished in the ‘whine house’ and lyrically, they leave Lily Allen in the La La land of lightweight candy floss. Thank you for opening my ear waves into my soul” Billy Jenkins

“From the opening rump-moving bass notes, the self-titled debut by London’s Sister Mary & The Choir Boys impresses and entertains throughout…These guys have their own character and plenty of soul… Emine Pirhasen and Fred Thomas have produced a catalogue of tunes documenting modern woebegone love-done-gone life. I doubt many bands could go from a Cow-Cow Davenport boogie-woogie to Wurlitzer-drenched soul without it jarring, but here you go. This has been on my portable Victorola since I got it” Blues in London Records