first Free Range of the season

6th October 2016
Water Lane Cafe, Canterbury

This started with some solo prepared piano from tireless FR organiser Sam Bailey. That then led into a highly entertaining "blessings"/"blastings" poem by ZONE collective poet Kat Peddie (with some input from the audience) to celebrate the opening of year five of Free Range. There was a decent audience (including most of the "Chai-Angles" crew I worked with at Smugglers Festival a few weeks ago), but not overpacked as it can get in this rather small space.

The main attraction was some traditional Korean bamboo flute (taegŭm) and drum by Hyelim Kim and Jeunghyun Choi, respectively. There were no electronics involved (despite what the blurb promised), but I don't think anyone was disappointed. The best bit came at the end: Sam asked if they wanted to play one more, and Hyelim (who just confessed that she'd fallen in love with Canterbury, this being her first visit) suggested they all do an improvisation together. So Sam returned to the piano for some sparse but perfectly placed tone clusters, Kat read some select lines with impeccable timing, the whole thing worked superbly — I'm looking forward to the recording on the FR audio archive.