Outlands, a new event series produced by a network of promoters of experimental music around the UK, is to present a new live collaboration from Matana Roberts and Kelly Jayne Jones around the UK this May. The tour by Roberts and Jones will be presented by promoters Qu Junktions.
With the collaboration having been developed and premiered in residency at Bristol’s Cube Cinema, this tour will mark the first time Matana Roberts has played around the UK on this scale, reaching locations she has never performed before.
Sound artist Kelly Jayne Jones will join her leading a series of group workshop sessions that explore improvisation as a means of building community. You can find out more details on the collaboration here.
"Over the decade of the The Quietus’ existence we’ve seen the infrastructure around live music in the UK change beyond all recognition, with venues closing, festivals going to the wall and the government continuing to squeeze arts funding," our own Luke Turner comments on the launch of Outlands. "This has been really frustrating thanks to its coinciding with a fertile and thrilling time for the odd sounds we like to cover on our website, not to mention a great community of people who are entirely invested in what they do. All of us at The Quietus are therefore very excited to see how Outlands develops over the coming years."
In June, Outlands will presents shows from Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and Susie Ibarra & Yoshimio of Boredoms and OOIOO, while November will see a collaboration between Raster Noton and Drift. In total, the programme will span two years, taking in six flagship tours. The full list of dates for Matana Roberts and Kelly Jayne Jones’ May tour can be found below.
"The tour will be the fruits of an encounter between the two artists last year, when Matana played a show with Kelly as part of a short run of UK dates in DIY/experimental contexts," says Qu Junktions’ John Stevens. "They spoke at length afterwards and the seeds were sown for a collaboration exploring their mutual tastes for improvisation in a range of musical modes, rich live wind instrumentation in dialogue with subtle electro-acoustic dreamworlds, and the broader common theme of sound as a tool with which to interrupt familiar and obsolete narratives, musical, cultural, political or otherwise."
Outland Presents Matana Roberts & Kelly Jayne Jones
May
4th – Cube Cinema, Bristol
9th – Ghost Notes, London
10th – De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
11th – St. Barnabas Church, Cambridge
12th – MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
17th – The House, Peninsula Arts, University of Plymouth, Plymouth
18th – Centrala Gallery, Birmingham
19th – The Portico, Salford
20th – Fuse Gallery, Bradford
