Day 5

What a great day!

Firstly, we headed to Gullet Quarry [PDF] in The Malverns, for a recording session. We had a lot of fun playing within that acoustic landscape. Improvised, sparse drones seemed to be the order of the day. Towards the end of our time there Alex went down to the water to play some solo stuff.

Following on from this we played a gig at short notice in the EC Arts space in The Mailbox shopping centre, Birmingham. We were joined by our guest Alex Sramek and a great group of improvising musicians including Trevor Lines, Lydia Glanville and Simon Gray. We were really pleased with how this went. A few more people in attendance would’ve been great but we did far too little in promotion to expect anything else. It was a great experiment and EC Arts are keen to have us back!


Photo: Simon Riley

Day 4

A storming day of playing and recording. Everyone thoroughly knackered at the end.

Tomorrow we hope to record some stuff in a quarry and we’ll be performing, with guests, at 8pm in the ground floor Harvey Nichols shop in The Mailbox, the EC Arts space. Free entry, limited capacity. Playing alongside the other great improvising musicians tomorrow will be our primary contrabass collaborator Alex Sramek. Expect sounds like THIS from him!

Hope to see you there.

Day 1

As mentioned in a previous blog post ORE are currently taking a week to explore ideas with contrabass clarinet player Alex Sramek, culminating in our performance together at The Cube Cinema in Bristol on Saturday the 25th.

We aim to keep putting snippets up here and there. Today, an excerpt from our dabblings with Seven Angels by Earth. This was only the second piece we have ever played together and also only the second time ORE have covered this tune. Our day with Alex started well though, with an EPIC fifty minute improvised set that included our new tune “Morton” along the way.

For those of you who can’t make the Bristol gig, keep the evening of Thursday the 23rd free for some improvised group drone in Birmingham. All will be revealed soon.

Tomorrow we are joined by David Morton, for some proper recording. Enjoy!

AUDIO: ORE – Demo, acoustic recording of Seven Angels by Earth(excerpt)

Stuart notating the piece for Alex: