WHO
EVEN is a group that has been organised to establish a new permanent venue in Norwich for experimental music, moving image, performance, literature, and even…
Even, working alongside invited organisers and promoters based in the city, presents a rich programme of music, sound, performance, literature, poetry, and film throughout the entire month of May. 

WHAT
The month of events begins on Bank Holiday Monday with screenings of celluloid films from the East Anglian Film Archive that explore the radical and popular origins of May Day. As well as Even’s own programmed events, we have invited the noise collective Euphrasie, writer Rose Higham-Stainton, and promoters Cinecide. For the full line-up, including the likes Laura Cannell, John Wall, and Sian Croose, and to purchase tickets, check the listings above or scroll down this page for the long read.

WHERE
The Undercroft, Norwich, NR21ND – View on: Google Maps / What3Words
All events will take place at The Undercroft Gallery, Market Place, Norwich. The entrance is at the top of the market next to the public toilets and the steps towards the forum. The entrance is via a ramp, click here for accessibility Information.

HOW
Even is a voluntary organisation that does not receive any public funding or support. All events have a paying bar serving soft and hard drinks. Income from the bar and ticket sales goes towards venue costs and artist fees.

Get in touch: Email / Instagram

May Day began as an ancient rite of summer, later evolving into International Workers’ Day. Throughout its history it has been a time to leave work behind, party, and dream of different ways of living. 

In this event the East Anglian Film Archive will show archive films from its collections that evoke the sweetness of life outside of work. 

eafa.org.uk | @EAFilmArchiv

About the East Anglian Film Archive: Founded in May 1976, the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) was the UK’s first regional film archive. From its pioneering roots it has evolved into the accredited film archive for the East of England region and a part of the University of East Anglia. EAFA holds many thousands of items including the work of significant regional artist filmmaking groups such as The East Anglian Film-Makers Co-Operative, and the internationally significant Institute of Amateur Cinematographers collection.

DJ Reg Tubby’s Great Lift Journeys of Norwich and other stories (1997) was inspired by an encounter with a talking lift. With ambient DJ Alpha Seven, he recorded the lifts and mixed them in between tracks in their SOFA nights – an ambient club night that ran in various venues in Norwich in the mid to late nineties.

The lift recordings reached national news with Debenhams being the big hit.

Harmonium is an experiment in vocal sound, layering live voices with interlocking rhythms and harmonies, inspired by the minimalist and systems musics of composers such as Meredith Monk and Phillip Glass. The singers aim to create the effect of an instrument being played in an acoustic space rather than a projected performance, inviting the listeners to immerse themselves in a sound world.

Sian Croose is a singer, composer and performance-maker with over 30 years experience creating and directing music projects. After an apprenticeship in bands and alternative theatre, she trained on the innovative Community Music programme founded by John Stevens. She co-founded The Voice Project, an open access choral theatre project with composer and singer Jonathan Baker in 2008. Together they create large-scale site-specific choral performances.

Jem Finer is an artist and musician. Since studying computer science in the 1970s, he has worked in a variety of fields, including photography, film, experimental and popular music and installation. His 1000 year long musical composition, Longplayer, represents a convergence of many of his concerns, particularly those relating to systems, sustainability, long-durational processes and extremes of scale in both time and space.

Recent music includes hrdy-grdy, an album of hurdy-gurdy and minimal electronics.The Hurdy-Gurdy Song by Local Psycho, a collaboration with Jimmy Cauty, will be released on 1st May 2023. They are currently researching the building of a stone synthesiser.

Link: Bandcamp

Rising 5th (Re-staging of a test for an unrealised memorial to Benjamin Britten) is a video work and sound installation that re-stages the story of the architect H. T. ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown’s unrealised memorial to the composer Benjamin Britten. The memorial was to be a huge hulk of wood standing on Aldeburgh beach with two holes in the top designed to sound a pair of signature notes from Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes, when the wind blew fiercely.

During the design process for this memorial Cadbury-Brown needed to determine what size holes would be drilled in the wood to create the right notes. To do this he strapped two organ pipes to a car and drove it up and down the Aldeburgh–Thorpeness Road.

The film is a re-staging of this experiment. The memorial was never constructed but the story surrounding it is intriguing, if absurd. Britten used sound ‘as found’ in his compositions alongside traditional orchestration so perhaps would have seen this as a fitting tribute.

Emily Richardson is an artist filmmaker who makes films about the trace of human presence and our changing relationship with the environment and landscape.

^{Rising 5th, 2013, HD Video and Sound}

Laura performs a set based around her latest EP ’NO SOUND IS LOST’ released March 2023. The music was written and recorded inside an empty shipping container on the edge of a Norfolk field. The sound of the violin and voice ricochet around the dented metal box. The container holds sound inside a room that shouldn’t be there. Up close it’s a non thing, an empty vessel, but after the twist and crank of the heavy door handles there is a vast space where there shouldn’t be.

Laura Cannell is a Suffolk based international composer and performer whose music draws on the emotional influences of the landscape. She has released seven critically acclaimed solo albums, numerous EPs and is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 6Music, she has also been recorded in session at the iconic Maida Vale studios.

Laura has toured extensively in the UK & Europe including solo at: The Barbican, Royal Festival Hall, LSO St Lukes, Unsound Poland, Flow Helsinki, Copenhagen Jazzhouse and many more. She has collaborated with writer/comedian Stewart Lee, Kate Ellis (Crash Ensemble/U2), Lori Goldston (Earth, Nirvana) and Mira Calix. Her music was recently featured in Comme de Garcons show at Paris Fashion Week and Vogue Runway, and on the BBC2 TV show “What we do in the Shadows”.

www.lauracannell.co.uk

Robert Cox’s ongoing attempt to fuse the music of Terry Riley and Captain Beefheart with a touch of English psychedelia, Rimarimba is the safety valve for the interest in music, electronics and guitars which Cox formed in his teenage years and has not managed to shake off yet, despite being old enough to know better.

He is very grateful to have become something of a minor living legend thanks to his 1980s recordings as The Same and latterly Rimarimba and is considering a change of name to Coelacanth or maybe even Archeopteryx.

Since the Euromaidan revolution of 2014, Ukrainian politics has largely been contested between pro-European Union neoliberals and far-right nationalists, united only by their hatred of the Soviet past. Revivification looks at how contemporary artists in Ukraine, inspired by radical ideals as well as queer and feminist theory, are trying to work in this context, looking back at the socialist past and trying to build a more utopian future. Directed and narrated by Juliet Jacques, shot and edited by Oksana Kazmina, and commissioned by CHASE (Consortium for the Arts and Humanities in the South-East) and the Izolyatsia platform for cultural initiatives in Kyiv.

Juliet Jacques is a writer, filmmaker and podcast host who is interested in modernist and postmodernist art, literature, film and music, radical politics and LGBTQI+ issues. For EVEN, Juliet will read a short story set in Norwich titled ’Standards of Care’ from her debut short story collection Variations (Influx Press, 2021)

Vostok is the moniker of trio Dylan Clarke, Miles Lukoszevieze & Graeme Smith, formed out of experimental rock band Red Mar. Within Vostok, they present a compelling and expressionistic blend of industrial harsh-noise and orchestral electro-acoustic movements, influenced by the long lineage of industrial artists and their contemporary peers.

They are known for their fiercely emotive live shows which combine mellifluous moments of harmonium, guitar, feedback and synthesis with intensely confrontational performance.

That Travis is a London-based singer-songwriter and a sound artist. Their work intersects between sound, experimental theatre and visual arts. Primarily working with themes like intimacy, history, and time, they use their voice as an investigative tool towards finding a personal anthropology.

They currently release music under their label Graceful Gymnastics, exploring pop music and songs of a folk tradition with influence from electronic and classical music.

Nan’s practice is based on poetic destructive live art, researching on the combination of poetry and destruction, tangential associations, simultaneously precise and loose, and subtly packed emotion, sensation and affect. 

In artist-audience empathetic engagement, their work indicates their own state of malaise and misery by different visual and physical metaphors while utilising noticeable body destruction to repulse the audience with either subtle or pungent human conditions.

Elly Lynn is a multi-media artist who specialises in illustration, film, painting, and sculpture and is currently studying a fine arts degree at NUA. Her recent work centres around her love for the crustacean – in it she strives to deify the humble Prawn through manipulation of its imagery within a broader context. Elly also explores the female form, researching personal ideologies of connection, fertility, ritual and liberation within it.

She is a founding member of the Euphrasie collective which has seen her artistic practise explore new territories in film. These collaborative works have been exhibited at previous showcases, projecting them to a state of magnitude within disused spaces of spirituality.

Elly will be presenting her latest work, a ritualistic film piece, exploring connection amongst the female form, the crustacean, the land and all that we take and receive from it.

Ross Pearson’s video work is an absurdist take on our relationship with media. Through the use of repurposed footage from old television programmes, advertisements, and films, the artist constructs futility-ridden narratives that challenge our perceptions of video.

By subverting the original context of the footage, the artist creates a surreal and satirical exploration on the ways in which media constructs and manipulates meaning.

Jacob Watkinson is a filmmaker working in Norwich. His recent work delves into the experimental, collaborating with decay in analogue media to unite structuralism and narrative filmmaking. His films focus on memory, dreams, and entropy; exploring their thematic links with the fragile material of celluloid in its state of flux

Alongside his work as an artist and as head of the Cine department of a digitisation lab, Jacob is the Founder and Director of ‘EFEA’ – Experimental Film East Anglia, an Arts organisation championing transgressive and bold moving-image artists in the East of England.

Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė is a Lithuanian artist and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Film and Screen, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on artists’ moving image installations and their capacity for affect and experiential critique. Geistė works at the intersection of film and screen studies, contemporary art, and philosophy. In her creative photographic and moving image practice, she explores notions of belonging, alienation, and the unknown.

Overall, Geistė’s practice is defined by encounters with the eerie, which is understood to be both the cessation of a comfort zone — whether self, human, habit, habitat, milieu — and alertness to a yet-to-be-identified presence. Since 2014, her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Norway, Taiwan, South Korea, and China.

A recent publication: Overflow (2021).pdf
geistekincinaityte.com
@geistek

Hannah Levene is a writer living in Norwich. She runs PIGS publishing platform. Her poetry can be found littered over the internet. And her novel Greasepaint is forthcoming from Nightboat books in September 2023.

Novel forthcoming in Sept 2023: https://nightboat.org/announcing-the-2021-prose-reading-period-selections/

PIGS publishing platform and new poetry available here: https://pigszine.bigcartel.com/

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New Republic.

She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater

Philippasnow.co.uk

Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer and critic based in Norfolk. Her work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and published internationally in LA Review of Books, Texte Zur Kunst, Apollo and The White Review, Art Monthly, Bricks from the Kiln, Worms and X-Tra in LA.

She has written several chapbooks including Herēma (Sticky Fingers Publishing) and has a book out with JOAN publishing later this year.

rosehighamstainton.com / Instagram
https://rosehighamstainton.substack.com/

What bits of speech is ignored by speech2text softwares? Could forcing errors be a creative method? 
Anna Barham is a London-based artist working with video, sound, print and installation. Her work considers language as it moves between different forms, technologies and bodies.

A new online sound work ZYX is at apria.artez.nl/zyx/ and her 2009 video Magenta, Emerald, Lapis is currently on display in The Tanks, Tate Modern.

Merging electro, avant-pop, techno and dub, Maria Uzor is a half Barbadian half Nigerian artist living in the flatlands of Norfolk, UK. Previously one half of post-punk duo SINK YA TEETH, her solo music twists and mutates its way through its influences, chewing up the sun of its parts and spitting out a groove-laden mash-up that nods to both 90s rave culture and Afro-futurism.

Maria self-released her first EP ‘Hard Ears’ in September 2020; a collection of four songs that had been sitting on her hard drive for a couple of years and that were never quite suitable for Sink Ya Teeth. It was followed a year later by her second EP ‘Innocence and Worldliness’, four dance tracks with themes of expansion and growth. Her latest release, ‘Songs For Luminous Living’ marks the third in a trilogy of EPs written and released in the two years since Covid. She has gained support and radio play from JAMZ SUPERNOVA, AMY LAME, STEVE LAMACQ and JOHN KENNEDY.

In the past year, Maria has opened for BLACK MIDI, YOUNG FATHERS, LONE LADY and BABA ALI, and performed at The Great Escape and Shambala festival. Recent collaborations have included ACID KLAUS (Adrian Flanagan / Moonlandingz / Eccentronic Research Council) !!! (CHK CHK CHK), A CERTAIN RATIO and MERA BHAI.

‘Songs For Luminous Living’ is out now on Hey Buffalo Records.

https://mariauzor.com
@_mariauzor

Born 1950

Started composing 1990 and still going.
Played and collaborated with some good people.
There is no promotional visual youtube material.

Adam Bohman and Jonathan Bohman have been recording together since their early teens and playing live since 1984. The BBC (aka Bohman, Bohman, Crow)

The BBC specialise in dramatisations of neglected texts. Through the use of what might be termed ‘foley effects’ they seek to re-animate or reimagine material from literature, tv & film.

Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of underground music for decades. Working with home-built instruments, found objects, tape cut-ups, collages, ink drawings and graphic scores. Favouring acoustic sounds over electronics, he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments and objects. He is a member of British experimental groups Morphogenesis, The Bohman Brothers, Secluded Bronte and The London Improvisers Orchestra. Adam’s music is unique and experimental, incorporating songs, sound poetry and free improvisation.

https://adambohman.bandcamp.com
https://thebohmanbrothers.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/BohmanBrothers/

Richard Crow aka Crow lives and works in London. His work as an inter-disciplinary artist transverses multi-media platforms including sound, experimental film and video, installation, and live performance. Crow has an MA in Sonic Arts from Middlesex University (2006). Crow manifests sound and noise for its disruptive, visceral and affective qualities and its psycho-physical implications for the listener. His solo and collaborative performances have consisted of highly conceptualized interventions into base materiality, investigations of alternative systems of organisation and research into a certain material decadence, most notably with the cult project The Institution of Rot.

https://institution-of-rot.org/
https://richardcrow.bandcamp.com/

Ryan & Luke Jordan work between live art, text, sonic art, sculpture, installation and their documentation; often combining many of these elements in anomalous configurations and hybrid entanglements. Investigating speculate upon the relationship between the human and non-human through the psycho-physical process of creation, immersion, and fatal meetings between objects / entities, approaching ontological destabilisation and disintegration.

Luke Jordan
https://l-r-jordan.tumblr.com/
https://lukejordan.bandcamp.com/

Ryan Jordan
http://ryanjordan.org/
http://nnnnn.org.uk/

Illustration, Animation and Sounds. Based in Norwich, UK. Experimental video and sound art inspired by constructivism, early experimental animation, with a D.I.Y aesthetic

www.robterrestrial.com

Mark Aerial Waller’s fine art practice explores relationships between cinema, sculpture and live performance, where the spectator, art object and its relative position in space and time become an interdisciplinary medium.

www.markaerialwaller.com

Recent retrospective at CAAM, Gran Canaria (2020), screenings and commissions at Tate, Hayward Gallery, BFI Southbank and Channel 4. In 2000 he founded a research platform for radical exploration of cinematic practices, The Wayward Canon. Events include Horror Yoga (2014) Tate Britain and 40 Days at the Rhumba (2018) Kunsthall Oslo. Represented by Rodeo and video distribution LUX. Publication: The Wayward Canon, is published by CAAM.

^{Glowboys, 1998, 16mm film to video}

Gwilly practices a form of composition that disavows fixity and rehearsal, preferring an approach that dissolves the line between ‘life’ and ‘performance’ in ways that compromise neither.

Having coined the term Wild Pop to describe his aesthetic as both a solo artist and as Gustav Thomas in YEAH YOU (est. 2013), his embracing the age of evaporation is manifest in a relentless autopathology oriented towards devotional sublimation.

GWILLY EDMONDEZ – "PISS WAR" from Felt Beak on Vimeo.

This performance work will be an open piece that invites all members of the audience to participate. The media will be the breath, the subtle energy body, paper, chalk and charcoal. 

This poemperformance investigates the Indo-Tibeto Tantric Buddhist practice of experiencing the four different levels of sound experience. Using our breath, our subtle energy body, chalk, charcoal and paper this is an open invitation to the audience to collectively perform and mark-make the score of this listening experience. There will also be a group performance of Dom Sylvester Houédard’s typestract ‘Helicoital Investigations 2’. 

Nicola Simpson is a researcher, curator and poet who investigates, meditates and plays with the influence of Zen and Tantric Buddhisms on aleatory and graphic scores, kinetic, sound and visual poetry and performance. Examples of her recent work can be found on BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Concrete Poetry: BBC Radio 3 – Free Thinking, Concrete poetry and ‘Dom Sylvester Houédard: Tantric Poetries’, Lisson Gallery