Author Archives: ORE

Day 6

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By the sixth day of recording and exploration our lips were practically falling off us.

We wanted to conserve our energy for our gig the next day so went for a fun session up at Gullet Quarry again. David brought along a second furry friend, so we could explore some exciting recording techniques.

At one point we all wondered off around different sides of the quarry and fired notes across the space at each other. Sonic weapons!

And…relax. A whole day off until our gig at the Cube Cinema the following night. One funny from day six was when we contemplated what the reaction might be if we put “large boulders to sit on” put on our gig rider.

Day 5

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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

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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

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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:

Preview:
Richard by Sunn O)))

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Behold, a preview video of Stuart playing his multiphonic arrangement of Richard by Sunn O))). Sam has yet to learn his (also multiphonic) part but it’s pretty bloody clear is going to sound HEAVY!

[flv:http://www.soundofore.com/video/richard_multiphonic_tuba_ORE.flv http://www.soundofore.com/video/richard_multiphonic_tuba_ORE.jpg 550 330]

A week of exploration

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On the 25th of February, we have our third formal performance as ORE, featuring our special guest, Alex Sramek. We are so pleased to be playing in Bristol and at such a great venue as The Cube Cinema, an old favourite of ours.

In the run up to our gig we will be spending some time in the studio exploring our collaboration with Alex and his contrabass clarinet, the sound of which is something to behold. We will be developing some ideas for our performance, recording some bits and getting out and about to odd venues to explore the effect of our surroundings on our sound, and for some pop-up performances. These will mainly be around Birmingham and Worcester and might be over before you even get there…but if you want to be kept informed about what we are up to, please check our updates on Twitter.

We hope to see you at some point on this journey. We are very excited to have Alex over from the US to work with us. This is a rare combination and we hope you will come to hear / witness it in Bristol on the 25th February, or at least one of our pop-up performances beforehand.

Special guest

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We like to collaborate with like-minded musicians, which is why we were delighted when Alex Sramek got in touch with us towards the end of 2011. It was obvious from the first conversation that we should make some noise together. Alex plays contrabass clarinet and has been described by The Clarinet as “The world’s loudest clarinet player”. He also shares our love of long, low drones and improvisation.

Alex is coming to the UK in February for the SABRe (Sensor Augmented Bass clarinet Research) event at Keele University. It seemed like an obvious opportunity to get some stuff done together, culminating in a live performance together at The Cube Cinema in Bristol on the 25th – lovely poster below, designed by another Alex.

We are currently trying to organise something to take place in Birmingham while Alex is over, alongside some recording time, pop-up performances (well, not that pop-up with two tubas and a contrabass clarinet), playing in some odd spaces, etc. If you’d like to suggest something you want to see / hear us do during the last couple of weeks in February, please get in touch or post a comment below.