You Are Here relaunch and Paddy Steer(!) at Free Range

Thursday 1st Feb, 2018
Garage Coffee, Canterbury
 

For details on this week's gig featuring Paddy Steer and Matthew Watkins' book launch please see our Facebook event page https://t.co/pH93bfInBS Come to @GarageRoasted tomorrow - doors 6:30 for show at 7:30, entry free, no ticket required, just come! pic.twitter.com/nn3ZNonMbi

— Free Range (@Free_Range_) 31 January 2018

This happened to be the "official" release date for my local/cosmic history book You Are Here, which had been unofficially launched back in August 2017. Sam Bailey didn't know this when he'd asked me weeks before if I wanted to do something for the 2018-02-01 Free Range. I'd put together an audio-visual performance based on the book involving Sean Williams (a friend of the Evil Usses, electronic sound artist and now local resident) on modular synths, Will Glanfield (Happy Accidents, Miserichords) on processed bass clarinet and Oli Chilton on projections. I was reading a sequence of snippets from the text as we accelerated from the Big Bang to noon on August 15th, 2014 (the end of the book). Chilton projected appropriate images from the book in sequence overlayed with wonderful blobby video feedback and other effects. Sean and Will created some wonderfully appropriate soundscapes and I got fully into the spirit of the thing.

Then a long, brilliant set from the incomparable, indescribable Paddy Steer (just go and see him). He swapped a copy of his The Fortified Herd album for one of my books before I headed down to the Black Griffin for their open mic. Some Italian hippies were playing, then an unlikely chap played "Folsom Prison Blues" > "Ring of Fire", some Springsteen and "Wagon Wheel" to the drunk crowd and Pete Edlin (The Boot Lagoon) did did some weird/interesting acoustic guitar stuff. A happy Imbolc.