This is a very rough mix, part of some things I've been working on with the excellent Lisbon-based composer/producer Andre Nascimento. Andre has radically remixed/recomposed some of my work for the choreographer Jane Turner and her Magog dance project last year. This is part of a larger project that's taking recordings made in some of the churches along the Portuguese leg of the Camino, using the numbers from the coordinates as a starting point.

Magog - glitch 4b

a collboration between Kevin Flanagan and Andre Nascimento

Tunis mix 07

These are a series of trio recordings (Flanagan/Gordon/Brown)with the poet Malcolm Guite made in Cambridge in the ARU Recital Room in 2011

The Cutting Edge

Another rough mix from my friend Andre Nascimento and I, from a live recording at the Sta Maria Anjos along the Camino santiago in Northern Portugal.  We're slowly accumulating enough material for a gig one of these days.

Sta Maria Anjos mix

This is the last movement in a solo violin piece that Steve Bingham recorded earlier in the year; for the whole thing, visit his Bandcamp page: stevebingham.bandcamp.com/album/cuckoo-seven-new-works-for-violin
credits
released November 22, 2024
Composer: Kevin Flanagan
Violin: Steve Bingham

Last Drop:  Steve Bingham

Piazza Sant’Agata:
Overture for chamber group to accompany Tony Clark’s Unsculpted exhibition.
Kevin Flanagan

I first met Tony and encountered his work about a decade-and-a-half ago in Sicily. I was immediately struck by his use of a powerful limited palette, usually of four colours. That, and the stillness of the neoclassically referenced images, often disembodied, took me straight into a world of Italian Baroque stage sets, calling up images of Commedia dell’arte, with Pulcinella holding forth.

The problem in a collaboration where one encounters a different medium is to find a way in. The minimal elements and directness of Tony’s work called for an equivalent response, and because of the Italianate references of both the work and the location of Tony’s studio, I began by looking at Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for an inspiration, .wanting to re-create the motorific, open textures of the first Toccata, and echoing Renaissance antiphonal choral textures by using three spatially-displaced instrumental groups which call and respond to each other across the performance space.

I have  been interested in composing pieces  for landscape-based projects  in which I   use the coordinates of a location to create both melodic and structural elements, in this case,  the coordinates of Tony’s base in Sicily. A series of numbers can be used to create a melodic line, a chord or a rhythmic cell, among other things. For this piece, I discovered some software that allowed me to analyse the colour codes of Tony’s palette , the numbers yielding a series of notes. For instance, his shade of blue came out as the notes D, E, A, B and C#, which was used as a   melodic  phrase . The directness of his work called for simplicity on my part: sparse, open textures and minimal harmonies usually consisting of shifting two-note harmonic cells, either fifths or seconds. That, and I tried an often static rhythmic and harmonic backing to create a stillness to match that of the paintings. In the end, I used the codes of the four colours, plus the coordinates of Tony’s base in Sicily, Militello; for instance, those of the Piazza Sant’Agata suggested a line for the bass clarinet.

Piazza Sant'Agata

This is the start of a new project with dancers from Stockholm using the Medieval churches at the southern tip of the island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea off the Swedish coast.  It's a modified recording of a single handclap under the tower.  we're hearing a low G (-ish) with a group  of shifting harmonic reflections off the 12th century space.

Fide Kyrka handclap

Over the course of a year, I watched Jane gather materials and experiences to create her piece "Containing Time", transforming these into the objects and text which in turn are given a larger meaning through their place in the overall structure. 
The piece, '52', came about from the practice of tapping each vessel to see whether it rang true after being fired, or contained a fault. It gave me the idea of using the sounds as samples, which were taken from the striking  of eight selected bowls. These were combined with the ambient sounds of the garden outside Jane's studio. The sounds of the eight bowls are placed into 52 time segments, as suggested by the work's time structure. 
  Structural elements are from the calendar-based configuration of the installation; the shape within each segment is created by the use of a bell-ringing sequence, the Hedingham Bob Major, arranged into groups of ever-smaller numbers of "instruments" (6,5,4, etc), which then reverses itself to begin growing again, like the seasons.
Some of the bowl sounds are slowed (and occasionally reversed) by 52 times, again reflecting the time span of the overall work, creating sustained textures to contrast the bell-like samples of the bowls in real time. The chaotic and complex sound of a struck bowl, when slowed, reveals an intriguing range of hidden color in its harmonics, which normally decay too quickly to register. All this is used to create an auditory experience of the work to augment the visual; the whole surrounds and transports the observer.
So far, this has been in galleries in the USA, Sweden, Wales, Scotland and around England

Containing Time: 52

final mix of the Old Year for the Snow-Blue Night Cd, recorded in Cambridge. This started life as a spacious, dark minimalist setting for a Seamus Heaney reading; a sort of dark children's song,  but Andy suddenly came up with a bass line at the end of the session....

this piece is dedicated to an old friend, bandmate and housemate, Ray Brunelle.

Dave Gordon, Russ Morgan and Andy Brown...

more to come

Old Year

stuff from the new CD... In pieces such as The Beck,  one of six commissioned by the TS Eliot Festival (June 2009) for a performance with the writer and poet Grevel Lindop, and Sighting the Tiger, one of  five pieces written for a performance with the poet Ruth Padel at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, (October 2009),  these combine the “mistaken” mis-matching isorhythms found in classic gagaku Bato forms (thought to be caused as a result of 1100 years of a ‘Chinese whispers’ process in the handing down of a largely oral tradition since it arrived from China the 10th century) with the 10-chord system used by the Shō with its anchoring dyads of seconds. These techniques are employed in the interest of creating disruption; using asymmetrical, isorhythmically-derived structure that prevents the poet from settling into their normal, often strophic reading styles and forces them into re-assessing the rhythmic structure of their text to “show something new”. 

The Beck

not from Cuba at all, and, in fact, more of a tango (in 7). It was inspired by the snake-hipped Grevel Lindop's poem of the same name.

Cuba Cafe

Riprap's first album, released in 2007, with Kevin Flanagan, Dave Gordon, Russ Morgan, and Andy Brown. We got the kind permission  of Gary Snyder to set some of his poems to our compositions about 15 years ago. Allegedly (according to Gerald Nicosia) he liked it....

Riprap

This is the beginning of my piece The Peddars Way, based around the coordinates of the church at Stanton, Suffolk and the resonance of Brettenham church.  It features Jess Lawrence-Hares, Steve Bingham, Paul Jackson and was recorded at Stapleford Granary Arts Center

peddars way

Peddars Way part 1 Stanton-Brettenham

This is a work in progress that is destined to be an installation as part of a touring gallery exhibition by Jane Perryman. It is based on local birdsong recorded at dawn through the year, the structure of the annual solar cycle, modified sounds taken from the studio and sculptures in the exhibition, and Alexander Kosovichev at the Stanford Observatory in a realization of the sun's electromagnetic pulse, with his kind permission, which also supplies the note series, taken from the inherent harmonics present in the drone..

sun project

From Light to Dark From Dark to Light

I'm an ex-pat muso from Northern New England now based in the UK (how did I ever end up here?) . My interests are composition and improvisation and combinations of the two. Plus mildly obsessing about 2-wheeled conveyances and Beat poets. 

kevin flanagan

Pinned to spotlight

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