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Bittersuite are a company exploring how to re-imagine the classical concert through the senses.

 

 

They have developed two original concerts – one for Debussy’s String Quartet in G and one for an original commission with composer, Tanya Auclair. At their core they are about collaboration, experimentation and playing with the senses as a way to enhance the experience of listening to music.


Their concerts to date have been one-to-one experiences. A performer blindfolds an audience member and leads them through a powerful sensory experience, in which gourmet tastes, bespoke scents, choreographed touch and movement have been carefully designed to enhance and lie in harmony with the music.

 

Bittersuite commissioned Fred Thomas to write a piece for String Quartet and Percussion in 2017 for their program “Tapestries”.

 

 

 

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Fred has worked with Filter since 2014 and has toured USA, India and the UK with ‘Twelfth Night’.

Innovative sound and music based theatre company Filter’s cult version of Twelfth Night re-imagines the madness of Illyria as a chaotic gig in which the audience becomes complict in the action.

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“Filter is converened with passion, conflict, truth and trust, and the technological mechanics of how its members communicate all these are laid bare” – Adrian Hilton, The Spectator

“Sound Maestros” – Time Out

“Work that dazzles the eye, enchants the ear, and stimulates both the mind and heart” – Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph

“Filter is an experimental company famed for its sonic virtuosity” – Michael Billington, The Guardian

“Filter’s sheer boldness of invention, its ground-breaking use of sound, makes it a company to watch.” – Rachel Halliburton, Evening Standard

 

 

 

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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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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 Fred Thomas/Oren Marshall Duo, a London-based F-IRE Collective project, draw on their deep experience in classical, jazz and improv to conceive a music at times highly structured and composed, at others boundless and playful. Their performances employ an abundance of mood and colour, often through use of instrument preparation, travelling seamlessly from serenity to anarchy occasionally by way of humour.

Fred Thomas – (prepared) piano

Oren Marshall – tuba, orenophone

 

Listen to live recordings from F-IRE Klang Codex below:

 

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Shows

No shows booked at the moment.

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A New Series presented by F-IRE Collective and Kammer Klang, curated by Fred Thomas.

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 Ars Subtilior composers featuring the exquisite mannerist notation of the time. This Codex, with it’s heart-shaped musical scores, staves representing the strings of a harp and riddle canons set out in 33-bar spirals, has become something of an obsession, hugely influencing my own composition. The experimentation of composers such as Solage, Johannes Ciconia and Baude Cordier gave birth to a brief effervescence of richness and complexity, a period of highly idiosyncratic art which left little in the way of posterity. In this respect it seems to me to have 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.

The F-IRE Klang Codex monthly concert series is an attempt to gather my musical thoughts and influences into one beautiful place: a church. Churches are profoundly peaceful spaces in which deep focus and concentration become a little  easier, but they are also resonant spaces where, tired of grating PA systems and excessive volume, one can revel in rich, natural, acoustic resonance. The beautiful St. George-in-the-East Church is one of six Hawksmoor Churches in England and houses an organ and a very special Bluthner grand piano. It is also situated by the infamous Ratcliffe Highway, an old Roman Road known in the 19th century as home to, according to one visitor, the “lowest types of humanity of almost every nation”, as well as the opium dens frequented by Oscar Wilde, and was later the site of the historic anti-fascist Cable Street Riots.

In the programming of this concert series my own musical experiences have been combined with those of other F-IRE Collective and Kammer Klang members – in particular Lucy Railton – to compile an unwritten codex that represents our present-day activities in London. The music therein is full of bizarre and inescapable 21st Century contrasts – from Ars Subtilior to Griot music, from Gyorgy Kurtag to Hildegard von Bingen –  and certainly has a more nebulous identity than the Chantilly Codex. That is an inexorable fact of our current musical lives, but the hope is that through the haze of eclecticism these strange combinations will be strangely illuminating.

Listen to live recordings from F-IRE Klang Codex below:

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Shows

No shows booked at the moment.