Westport Sound Weekend - Artists

Saturday 12th October

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Brace - 2.30 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

Brace at Westport Sound festival 2024, Malmesbury.

A duo of Ollie Moore (saxophone/keyboards) and Aidan Searle (drums/percussion). As a founding member of Pigbag, Ollie is a veteran of the Bristol post-punk scene and has collaborated with Au Pairs, Red Snapper & Craig Davies. Aidan has drummed extensively across Bristol’s improvised music scene including in bands such as Dominions of Glue, the Freetone Collective with towering free music saxophonist Aaron Hughes (Fuzz Against Junk) & in free-improv supergroup Broken Numbers.

The music of Brace is a kinetic collision between free & spiritual jazz, no wave & dub music in a stream of experienced composition with the charged edge of free improvisation. Their 2022 debut album, Quaternity, is a quietly vital & cohesive document of recorded jazz improvisation from the Bristol scene.

★ Watch Brace live at Friendly Records
Brace website

Rachel Musson Trio - Saturday 3.30 at St Mary's Hall

Rachel Musson is a saxophonist, improviser & composer living in London who has collaborated extensively with leading players such as Pat Thomas, Hannah Marshall and in a recent Supernormal festival highlight with Paul Dunmall. Rachel’s new album Ashes and Dust, Earth and Sky explores the shifting relationship to rural & urban landscapes through field recordings and a dissolving line between composition & improvisation.

Alongside Rachel in the trio, Olie Brice (Evan Parker, John Butcher, Louis Moholo) is a double bass player with a deep commitment to free improvisation and has performed, toured & recorded across Europe with many of the leading figures in this music. Mark Sanders (Derek Bailey, Henry Grimes, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith & William Parker) is a renowned drummer who has performed at major festivals across Europe, Brazil & the UK’s WOMAD & Glastonbury with saxophonist John Tchicai. As a trio they have played together for many years yet only this year released their debut recording, the brilliant, exploratory Immense Blue.

"A free-improviser sensitive to melody-like narrative and dramatic pacing" – John Fordham, The Guardian

★ Watch: 2017 Vortex set
Rachel Musson website

Double Pelican - Saturday 4.45 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

A Bristol-based, free music trio of guitar, drums, bass & lap steel that have evolved from a shared love of American Primitive style guitar music into a freeform improvised group that draws on West African guitar lines, avant garde & psychedelic music with all the verve & further out exploration of trailblazing British folk quintet Pentangle.

All extensive record collectors & energetic players on the Bristol alternative scene, it’s great to bring them to Westport as they continue to expand their musical conversations.

★ Double Pelican website

Longstone - Saturday 5.45 at St Mary's Hall

Longstone at Westport Sound festival 2024, Malmesbury.

Longstone are an experimental, electronic music collective, orbiting around the central duo of Mike Ward & Mike Cross that formed in 1996 in Cheltenham. With a whirling electronic pulse, they draw on 70s German groups such as Cluster, Neu!, Kraftwerk & Can as well as avant-rock & improvised music. A propulsive motorik sound collage of analog synths, guitar, reeds & percussion. On stage the collective includes a lineup of Chris Cundy (Guillemots), Stuart Wilding (Keith Tippett, Lol Coxhill) & Kev Fox (Brickwerk) and they have also been joined on occasion by Echo & the Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant.

West Country stalwarts that have graced festivals from CMJ in New York to Cheltenham Jazz Festival. It’s exciting to bring them to Westport’s St Mary’s Hall.

"indefinable music propelled through reverberant spaces by staccato rhythms and slashes of artful noise" - The Wire.

★ Watch: Live at Xposed Club, Cheltenham. 2017
Longstone website

Harpoon - Saturday 7.00 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

Harpoon at Westport Sound festival 2024, Malmesbury.

Harpoon is a duo project between Bristol DIY stalwarts, Tina Hitchens (Viridian Ensemble) and Aron Ward (Olanza, Repo Man), that conjures a brutalist texture of entangled & taut, techno-like pulses of distortion, glitched synth-loops & a frenetic rhythmic physicality. Recording since 2014, their new album Heat Pump was released earlier this year on Bristol label Totality and has been picked up by Jennifer Lucy Allan on BBC Radio 3’s experimental music mecca Late Junction. Synced up Volca Beats machines charged through FX pedals & live improvisation delivers post-industrial euphoria.

"Fists are pumping" - Noel Gardner, The Quietus.

★ Watch: Non-Golden House
Harpoon website

Mohamed Errebbaa - Saturday 7.30 at St Mary's Hall

Mohamed Errebbaa at Westport Sound festival 2024, Malmesbury.

Mohamed Errebbaa is a Moroccan master musician, a highly regarded and unique practitioner of the Gnawa tradition active in the UK, currently based in Bristol. Gnawa practice holds a deep trance power and is an ancient tradition of religious observation through ritual poetry, dance and rhythmic music.

Born in Rabat, Morocco, Mohamed began performing with traditional Sufi brotherhoods from the age of ten and later spent a decade travelling throughout the country, studying with Gnawa masters and drawing on rich regional musical traditions. He plays the three-stringed Gnawa bass lute, the guembri, and received the title of Maalem (master of the Gnawa tradition) at the age of 26, making him one of the youngest masters.

Mohamed has performed internationally and across the UK including recent festivals WOMAD, Sheffield's Migration Matters & Shambala. He is a lively fixture of Bristol’s international musical community and alongside the rich practice of his Gnawa tradition, Mohamed is an increasingly celebrated and exciting musical collaborator, most recently leading Afro-jazz & funk group Tagna Groove & in a quartet with global music adventurer Justin Adams (Robert Plant / JUJU / Mauro Durante / Tinariwen).

Tonight, Mohamed performs in a duo with percussionist & dancer Driss Yamdah.

"Time after time, these musicians took the audience on a trip in which time stopped, the insistent rhythms and riffing strings filling the venue with an energy that was as contagious as it was thrilling" - Mark Kidel, The Arts Desk

★ Watch: Mohamed Errebbaa live at the Trinity Centre in Bristol
★ Watch: "Bania" live at Saffron Hall
Mohamed Errebbaa website

Blurt - Ted Milton, Steve Eagles, David Aylward - Saturday 9.00 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

Formed in Stroud in 1979, Blurt share an angular, wired & jittery street funk with their late 70s Bristol neighbours Maximum Joy & The Pop Group with a more hardened punk skonk edge that evokes the no wave wildness of New York’s James Chance. The rasp of alto saxophone, distorted, taut guitar riffs & percussive crescendos frequently let loose amongst Ted Milton’s free form beat poetry - a Beefheart/ Dury-esque spit & splurge. A claustrophobic, uncompromising, anti-commercial sound that saw them record a John Peel session and have an early dalliance with Factory Records before becoming a hit on the independent charts and propelled through Europe’s underground music circuit. With the sound and aesthetics of post-punk in vogue, the ever free spirited Blurt have had a deserved critical reevaluation..

Turn up the volume for a punk-funk & skonk Saturday night in Malmesbury’s own downtown district, Westport.

"A band that sounds like they could fall apart at any minute is ok in my book. In fact it’s essential." - Ioan Humphreys - Louder than War

Link to recent review.
Blurt website
★ Listen: Dog Save My Sole
★ Listen: The Fish Needs A Bike

Debra - Saturday 1.00 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

DEBRA, a duo comprised of producer/vocalist Enys Mottet and vocalist Tuisovivi Rokotuni strive to locate the agents at Earths core. Meshing mazes of writing with meticulous software vomit, their hip-hop inspired mind child is growing.

Their upcoming album ‘Die Erde ist Mein’ being released later this year is a return from hiatus. Clambering out of a deep well with the combined strength of The Earth Ensemble, DEBRA visualises their spiralling that found them looking up at a circle of blue.


Sunday 13th October

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vlchr - Tina Hitchens, James Gow, Dan Johnson - Sunday 1.00 at St Mary's Hall

vulchr featuring Tina Hitchens, James Gow and Dan Johnson performing Stravinsky's Firebird.

Nervio Cosmico - Sunday 2.15 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

Nervio Cosmico at Westport Sound festival 2024, Malmesbury.

Nervio Cosmico are a Bristol-based duo formed in 2021 by Chilean composer Daniel Linker and Italian sound artist Matteo Amadio. With a focus on electroacoustic composition & improvisation, the duo draw on conceptual frameworks such as deep ecology, the ritual & shamanic traditions from the Peruvian Upper Amazon, known as vegetalista, and traditional music practices from across the Andes such as bailes chinos from central Chile. Their acoustic palette is generated by their own handcrafted clay whistle collection based on pre-Columbian models as well as shamanic instruments from the Amazon such as the shacapa, a shaker made of dry leaves.

Their debut recording Singing Vessels is an album length single piece recorded at the historic Real World studios in Box. It is a densely landscaped, environmental soundscape that dissolves the spaces between meditative, acoustic sound & darker, electronic dissonance.

Their debut recording Singing Vessels is an album length single piece recorded at the historic Real World studios in Box. It is a densely landscaped, environmental soundscape that dissolves the spaces between meditative, acoustic sound & darker, electronic dissonance.

★ Nervio Cosmico website

Rhodri Davies - Sunday 3.15 at St Mary's Hall

Rhodri Davies at Westport Sound festival 2024, Malmesbury.

Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies’s recent landmark 8 disc magnus opus was given 5*s in leading world music magazine Songlines. Indeed, Davies moves through countless sound worlds, across borders both imagined & actual, and brings the harp into new musical territories.

Rhodri is one of the leading players in composition and free improvisation and has amassed a diverse catalogue of over 60 recordings including work by Cornelius Cardew, collaborations with David Toop, Max Eastley, Derek Bailey & Angharad Davies and has had compositions for him by leading avant-garde composters Eliane Radigue, Phill Niblock & Christian Wolff. He has even appeared on recordings by Charlotte Church, Cinematic Orchestra & Richard Dawson.

For this afternoon, Rhodri shall be drawing on his Witches Harp solo set repertoire and it is an honour to have him join us.

"electrifying, destroying, and rediscovering some of its arcane forms." - The Quietus

★ Watch: Grand Opening, 2022
Rhodri Davies website

Theo May and Ashley John Long - Sunday 4.30 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

Malmesbury’s own prodigy, a hometown favourite with progressive vision & classical technique. Theo was born in the late 1990s and excited by his father’s love of jazz & extensive collection of music began to play the violin at 4 years old. Formal education came through the Southwest music school in 2009, the Purcell school of music and then the Royal College of Music. Theo has an energetic, expansive practice immersed in jazz, free improvisation, folk & classical music under the guiding light & support of Keith Tippett & his wife Julie.

Theo May’s Odd Unit released their debut album Alive in the Forest of Odd in the Spring of this year. The quintet’s wild set of European folk, modal jazz & avant-garde compositions was released with a triumphant sold out hometown show & airplay on BBC Radio 3’s specialist jazz programme Round Midnight.

Theo was a recent highlight of Way Out Westport alongside Tina Hitchens & Jo Kelly in a masterful trio display of improvisation.

For Westport Sound, Theo is joined by award-winning double bass virtuoso and composer Ashley John Long. Ashley is active in a diverse range of musical idioms including jazz and improvisation, early and contemporary chamber music, and as a soloist. He has performed & recorded with some of the UK’s leading jazz musicians as well as visiting international artists. Over 20 composers have written new works for Ashley as a soloist and he has performed recitals featuring music by Xenakis, Bussotti & Stockhausen. He works as an educator and lecturer in musicology, composition and performance at Cardiff University.

This promises to be a rich exercise in the art of listening.

★ Listen: Theo May - Alive In The Forest of Odd
★ Watch Theo May's Odd Uniit
Theo May website

Ruth Goller's Skylla Duo with Paul Glaser - Sunday 5.30 at St Mary's Hall

Ruth Goller is a London-based, Italian-born, bassist, vocalist, composer, & environmentalist. Celebrated by the Guardian for her ‘thunderous bass-guitar hooks’, there is a jagged & angular post-punk style that mixes with an intimate vulnerability & melodic sensibility. Ruth is an energetic collaborator, bringing a distinct voice to a wide range of projects from Acoustic Ladyland, Melt Yourself Down & Vula Viel to Let Spin, Alabaster dePlume & Shabaka Hutchings. Oh and even Paul McCartney.

Earlier this year Chicago-based International Anthem released Ruth’s latest solo album, Skyllumina, a tapestry of layered electronic tones through an imaginative late night haze of haunting science fiction, multi-tracked choral harmonies & a percussive cast of drummers including the great Seb Rochford, Sons Of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, & Vula Viel’s Bex Burch.

For Westport Sound, Ruth will present works in a duet with Will Glaser, an in-demand drummer across British jazz & experimental scenes and a lecturer at Guildhall School of Music. Will has performed extensively in a number of projects including Sly and the Family Drone, Soweto Kinch, Kit Downes & Yazz Ahmed.

"An intimacy so deep…almost blasphemous to be privy to its wonders" - ECM

★ Watch: Below My Skin
Ruth Goller website

TBC - Sunday 6.45 at Hayloft at The Three Cups

Details shortly...

Festival Finale

Paul Dumnall, Mark Sanders, Julie Tippetts, John Edwards - Sunday 7.45 at St Mary's Hall

The spirit of Keith Tippett, a towering foundational presence for Westport Sound, reverberates at Sunday’s close with a superb quartet led by Paul Dunmall and very special guest, Julie Tippetts. Paul is a giant of the international jazz & improvised scene. A heavy reed player with a distinct musical voice; a rich & lyrical melodic line through exhilarating free improvisation.

Paul has collaborated extensively including with greats such as Alice Coltrane, Danny Thompson, Keith Tippett in Mujician, & Alan Skidmore along with contemporary players such as Chris Corsano & fellow Westport Sound attendees Olie Brice & Rachel Musson.

Julie Tippetts has been one of the foremost European vocalists across contemporary jazz and improvised music for the last 50 years. Her recording and performing career began in the mid-1960s with the soul, jazz & R & B group, Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll, & The Trinity and they scored a hit record with Bob Dylan’s ’This Wheel’s on Fire’. Soon after Julie committed to expanding her musical horizons and has since explored new musical languages, vocal techniques and modes within song form.

Julie is a seasoned collaborator including with musicians such as Martin Archer, Maggie Nicols & Robert Wyatt and has a significant body of work with her late husband Kieth Tippett such as the big band Centipede & Couple in Spirit.

It is an honour that Julie will be with us for our inaugural Westport Sound.

The all-star quartet is completed by double bass virtuoso John Edwards (Evan Parker, Sunny Murray, Mulatu Astatke & Peter Brötzmann) & renowned drummer Mark Sanders (Derek Bailey, Henry Grimes & William Parker).

"When I listen to Paul I hear the whole history of everything. You hear the history of the saxophone. You hear what Yusef Lateef called 'The Great Tradition.'" - Hamid Drake in conversation with Soweto, BBC.

★ Watch Paul Dunmall Quartet

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