Dear all,
It's been three years of planning and refining, months of negotiations, hours of meetings and several terabytes of email correspondence and I've just realized that our Bays' Orchestral tour is abut a week away and we haven't yet prodded you all into taking notice, buying tickets and telling your friends all about what we're up to. When there are lorry loads of flat-screen monitors to order, miles of cabling to coil, huge video projection screens to furl and a small bottle of sherry to stash in the sleeper bus, you tend to forget the little things like telling people to come. Having an audience always helps.
If you who saw us play at the Liverpool Phil at the beginning of the year, or came to Birmingham for our performance with the Norwegian ensemble Bit 20, or stayed to the sweet end of The Big Chill festival for that matter, you'll be aware that we've devised a way of combining our electronic improvisational approach with an orchestral ensemble. If you didn't attend any of those events, and haven't seen the short film Tom Oldham made about the Liverpool show then here's a brief explanation:
Not wishing to become complacent or too settled in our ways as a four-piece, we've stretched the concept of spontaneous, unrehearsed live music to accommodate a large number of players, without the performance falling into a chaotic din (well, no more chaotic than our usual Bays' noise). While we get on with the usual business of playing as we always do, we have two composers - John Metcalfe and Simon Hale - on stage manning computers, and an orchestral ensemble on stage with flatscreen monitors in front of them in place of sheet music. As the music develops, our composers write musical parts for the orchestra to play and these parts are relayed to conductor Jules Buckley and the players of the Heritage Orchestra. This way the ensemble gets to play the notes as they appear on their screens, and the audience can see the music projected onto large screens as it is written.
Couldn't be simpler, eh?
As you might imagine, a venture of this kind takes a massive amount of planning, and, more crucially, funding. We've been lucky enough to get the support of MBM/Arts Council, who fund hair-brained schemes of this kind that simply couldn't happen without public funding. Yes, that's right - your tax contributions are going to us so we can play live music that will never be repeated or commodified as a manufactured record. Given that you part own it anyway, you might as well come along and see where your money's gone. Details of the gig dates and venues are on our website, but here's a basic list:
11/11/08: Manchester RNCM
12/11/08: Gateshead Sage
14/11/08: Bristol Colston Hall
15/11/08: Warwick Arts Centre
17/11/08: Liverpool Philharmonic Hall
18/11/08: Northampton Royal Derngate
19/11/08: Leicester De Montfort Hall
20/11/08: Basingstoke Anvil
21/11/08: Brighton Dome
22/11/08: London South Bank Centre
These are not shows we're going to be able to throw together very often, so if you don't get to see any of them, chances are you may never get to see this unprecedented project. As the Olympic money pit deepens and the international financial crisis drains resources to pay for food and shelter, let alone edgy electronic improvisational performances (I mean, where are the IMF's priorities?), this kind of thing is going to become more and more rare. I know times are hard, but if we don't get your support on things like this, how on earth are we to continue to convince people to allow us to get on stage and play music that has nothing to do with the lowest common denominator, the tv ad or the X Factor? And if we can't get out there and carry the non-Olympic torch for independent music, sooner or later it'll be impossible for anyone not endorsed by Carling, Nintendo or Pepsi Max to put on a show.
So effectively you will be saving music by buying a ticket to see us, and we appreciate that. As I said, there are more details about the event on our website - and links to all the venues and ticket offices, so you can find out all you need to know from there. See you at one, or more, of the gigs.
Simon Palmskin.
http://www.thebays.com
http://www.myspace.com/thebayslive
Tickets are a bit pricey, as you'd expect for something of this nature, but I'm gonna try and get to the Leicester performance.
