Published: Philip Venables' Below the Belt

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Delighted to have my poetry featured on the debut album from composer Philip Venables. Phil and I worked on a piece for the London Sinfonietta's blue touch paper scheme some years back, it explored boxing and fistic percussion, entitled The Revenge of Miguel Cotto. 

You can listen to five excerpts from our collaboration https://www.nmcrec.co.uk/recording/below-belt

Phil has created some remarkable work since we worked together so it's grand to revisit this project through this CD and I'm really pleased it has a second life forevery on disc http://philipvenables.com/2018/02/06/below-the-belt/

Fight Music & Silk

A week of seeing my work thrown back at me in forms that utterly supersede my perception of its initial value. First I got to sit anonymously in St Lukes in Old st. and see the work of Philip Venables crescendo with our piece the Revenge of Miguel Cotto. It's been said before but Phili's ability to set music and text is truly groundbreaking and it was such a lovely moment to see our work appear so dynamic and valuable, it made me feel a poet, though Id normally eschew or ignore that feeling. Quite rightly the concert was a laudable success for Phil, whose application to his craft is intimidating. I hope we get to further Cotto. It was a nice audience to be in too, friendly and erudite and I took the time to chat to people afterwards, asking their opinion of Cotto without telling them I was involved in it. All good. Richard Baker conducted the balls off it too.

Then I had the joy of seeing my old friend Thomas Duggan before he jetted off again, and took possession of our work for the Hardy Tree Enemies exhibition. The glory of the work is not that is utterly unique, made of a material never seen in public before, that it is technologically trailblazing, the future of biodegradable material and has world significance in that, and that it probably cost a fucking packet, but that it is aesthetically so understated it appears before one as a jelly film on black, unassuming and gentle. People will walk past it in the gallery, such is its precision. Little will they know what they are walking past. So precious is it that a framer turned down setting the material, for fear of destroying it. For if water touches the silk, it disappears.

Fight music: an evening celebrating the work of Philip Venables

I'm really delighted to say on June 30th at the amazing LSO St Luke's on Old Street in London, at 7.30pm, there will be a portrait concert of the recent work of Philip Venables, who I worked with for the London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper project on our piece the Revenge of Miguel Cotto.  The concert will be one hour and is free to attend.

The concert features five recent pieces, all focusing on muscular music, spoken text and themes of violence, socialist protest and memory.  Performers will include the Ligeti Quartet, Ashot Sarkissjan, The Warehouse Ensemble, Melinda Maxwell, Leigh Melrose, Richard Baker and The London Sprechchor.  The concert is being supported by LSO Soundhub, the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust and Arts Council England. 

It will include a performance of the Revenge of Miguel Cotto, so my sound poetry and words will grace a really incredible stage once again, something I am very proud of.