UNFORTUNATELY THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED - WE WILL KEEP YOU POSTED WITH RESCHEDULED PERFORMANCES

BEAM SPLITTER
LEDLEY (Chris Williams and Raph Clarkson)
Music for 100 metronomes

Thursday 23 October
Shoe Factory Social Club, St Mary's Works
Doors 7pm, music from 7.30pm

BEAM SPLITTER - Audrey Chen (US) and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (NO) - is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics based in Berlin, Germany. BEAM SPLITTER have been touring globally since 2015, playing over two hundred concerts in a wide variety of spaces and contexts, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed.

They join together their two individual voices into a distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and trombone, while utilizing analog electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play.

Their latest duo album "SPLIT JAW" was released on Nat Baldwin's Tripticks Tapes in 2023. This bite size format packs an entire universe of their crafted sputter, breath and glitch inside its forty-five minute magnetic tape loop. The album is one third introspective Berlin studio production and the rest, live from a splintering concert given at Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, their last concert of 2022 where audience and the duo alike giving it their all center of room, split open like hollow bones head to clavicle, muscles twitching and air spewing, breaking ground and mending it with alien hums. Edit

LEDLEY, the duo of saxophonist Chris Williams & trombonist Raph Clarkson, celebrate the release of their self-titled debut record, an absorbing psycho-geographical North London jazz suite on the chronology of the duo’s long friendship, season tickets & shared passionate love for a football club.

The band’s namesake, Tottenham Hotspur and hero player Ledley King is at the centre of this narrative thematic arc. An album that sits in the rich, though particular, company of Mogwai’s 2006 film score for the portrait of French footballer Zinedine Zidane and Will Gregory’s Moog Ensemble orchestration for a film study of Tim Henman. This, however, is less character study of a totemic sporting figure than explorations of where it takes us - ritual, friendship, commitment, glory & struggle, pride in place & one’s roots; a dense meditation on what forms & shapes community.

We hear the swinging street music of a London township jazz, evoking rehearsal rooms, schools, big bands & community celebrations. Then a landscape of monochrome synth wash; long, processed trombone fades in and dissolves out with the soaring, suspended elegance of melodic alto lines that recall Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen, who has himself explored places of worship & loss. Ledley’s musical voice sits in the lineage of jazz music’s integral position in London's evolving identity and social history. Here, saxophone and trombone bring light and colour to grey match day streets with a knowing nostalgic air and nod towards the football terraces of old.

This is a powerfully rooted record of place and memory, from specific locations to the in-the-room intimacy & trust of improvising musicians. Moments of joy & uplift counterpoint suspended & unresolved tensions. 

Raph Clarkson (trombone/FX): Raph is a trombonist, improviser, composer / arranger & workshop leader. His guiding principle is the power in music to form connections in community and collaboration. Raph has an inviting, open spirit and his playing and approach celebrates loved ones, mentors and musical inspirations. Raph is a noted collaborator, applauded by Adrian Pallant of London Jazz News for his ability to create 'challenging but engaging music' of deep feeling with openness and experimentation. He has collaborated extensively with musicians such as Paul Dunmall, Charlotte Keeffe & Laura Jurd & leads the South African / UK group Equal Spirits.

Chris Williams (sax/FX): Chris is perhaps best known as a co-composer and integral member of Mercury Prize finalists Led Bib and he continues to forge new ground through highly charged & exploratory projects - both in his own playing and academia. Chris has collaborated and toured with Sarathy Korwar, award-winning clarinettist Arun Ghosh, modal ethnic jazz group Collocutor, London Nuyorican big band New Regency Orchestra as well as being 4 albums in with his own group, the post- jazz whirlpool Let Spin including the agitated punk bass playing of Ruth Goller.

Poème symphonique is a 1962 composition by György Ligeti for one hundred mechanical metronomes. It was written during his brief acquaintance with the Fluxus movement. Due to the fortunate acquisition of dozens of metronomes alongside the fanastic acoustic of the Shoe Factory Social Club, Eastern Ear have taken the opportunity to recreate this iconic postmodern masterpiece.