With a subtle blend of folk, rock, and experimentation, This Is The Kit is one of the most captivating acts at the moment. This Is The Kit is the musical project of British singer-songwriter Kate Stables. She creates banjo-driven folk; beautiful songs often adorned with piano, percussion, guitar, organ, or trumpet. With her intimate, hypnotic folk sound and poetic lyrics, Stables has built a loyal following of fans.
The music of This Is The Kit is hard to categorize. The songs are often more complex than usual, yet they soothe the ear from the first note to the last. Stables has been building a unique and truly beautiful body of work for over fifteen years.
For Birds of Paradise, Kate is putting together an exclusive set with special visuals and, among others, multi-instrumentalist Ben Lanz (The National) by her side. A truly one-off performance.
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favourite writers and someone who has hugely influenced my work. A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited onto this radio program to talk about her life and work. She really is one of the greats and it was quite an experience getting to talk about her with documentary film maker Arwen Curry, who made a great film called ‘The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin’. I cannot recommend it enough!
I‘m very lucky to get to work with so many different talented and golden souls. And for this concert I feel especially spoiled to be working with Ben lanz, Lucien Chatin and visual artist Pete McPartlan.
Ben makes beautiful music and plays an alarming array of instruments.He’s the unsung hero of a very long list of musical projects. Here is his website where you can find out a bit more about what he gets up to https://benjaminlanz.com/
Lucien Chatin has played drums for This is the Kit quite a bit over the years and more recently I’ve had the pleasure of being part of his own musical project ‘Hannah Miette’. We wrote this song together…
Pete McPartlan has been a hero of mine since we were in the same A-level art class at 6th form college back in the late 90’s. He’s a genius visual artist and moving image maker as well as being an excellent improviser and musician. Here’ are a few things that Pete has been up to recently…..
Quietly sitting still for a bit. Years ago when I lived in Bristol I attended a pinhole photography workshop run by photographer Justin Quinell at the Cube Cinema. I found it so exciting and inspiring.It felt like the opposite of the current bulimic approach to taking photos quickly and constantly. A slower way of thinking and choosing and behaving. I love that you have to still still for the duration of the exposure of the photo. And that stillness usually leads to silence as well.
Quietly sitting still is a nice by-product of pinhole photography. Also I just really love the images and the fact that you can do it all yourself without needing to own any expensive or mass produced equipment.
I’ve always had a thing for flutes and whistles and ocarinas. And at some point started kind of collecting clay whistles and ocarinas that were in interesting shapes. They make good creatures with their own personalities and voices brought alive by the breath of the blower. Different every time.
Ever since doing A-level art as a teenager in the UK , my favourite way to draw is without looking at the paper and without taking the pen/pencil off the paper. It’s something I mainly do at gigs. Kind of a way of getting deeper into the music and what I’m looking at and listening to. Here are a few of the drawings I’ve accumulated over the years.
It’s fun to make my own videos sometimes. Videos that show something a bit more personal of what I’m like and what makes me tick. Making videos is also a nice way to shine a light on certain bits of music (alternative versions of songs or remixes) that might otherwise slip by unnoticed.
Something I very much enjoy doing is making mixtapes. And when it’s tricky to access a tape player or when the person I’m making the mix for doesn’t have a tape player themselves. I enjoy making mixes/sound collages on my computer. It’s a nice way of sharing music, noises and field recordings. For a while I was putting them on mixcloud and here are a couple of the most collage like ones.