Outlands

Outlands is a new national experimental music touring network, championing the genre-resistant and  bringing adventurous interdisciplinary music to the forefront. The first event in this series presents a new live collaboration from artists Matana Roberts and Kelly Jayne Jones at The De La Warr Pavilion around the UK this May.

Outlands developed out of a motivation to pool expertise and resources, to encourage diversity and accessibility, build local audiences, and to support engaging and ambitious interdisciplinary music productions across the country, and the organisations that strive to promote them.

With the collaboration having been developed and premiered in residency at Bristol’s Cube Cinema, this tour will mark the first time Matana Roberts, a self taught mixed media composer from Chicago, has played around the UK on this scale, reaching locations she has never performed before.

“At my artistic core,” says Matana Roberts, “I am firmly dedicated to creating a unique and very personal experiential body of sound work that speaks to, and reminds, people of all walks of life to reach, stand up, give voice, regardless of difference, created from mere labels of intellectual classification. In my ideal world, the idea of ‘difference’ is an illusion designed only for the purpose of modern economic division and elitist intellectual hierarchy. Through my life’s work, I stand creatively in defiance.”

Kelly Jayne Jones is a Manchester based artist making work that combines performance art, installation, sound and music. Influenced by musique concrète, she works with improvisation, graphic scores, instructions, actions, movement, installation-performance, and audience participation/interaction.

She is interested in creating a multi-sensory experience, of sight, sound, smells, space, interaction, communication and exchange. Her recent work has been based upon the themes of the unconscious and asking how can art have the potential to be a supportive environment to explore visceral emotion, psychological awareness and performance as a site for transformation; interpersonally and communally.

Roberts and Jones are two artists from disparate backgrounds, finding affinity in practices charged by fiercely personal philosophies on sound. Both artists embrace improvisation, resist accepted narratives of sound, are community-minded and believe in democratic, shared, free-music making that erodes barriers. In other words, they perfectly embody what Outlands is striving for.

Listen to their NTS 2 Radio takeover here.

Outlands with Matana Roberts and Kelly Jayne Jones at The De La Warr Pavilion on Thursday 10 May at 7.45pm. Tickets £10, £6. Book here. 

More information about Matana Roberts.

More information about Kelly Jayne Jones.

Also in: Arts News