Friday night at Arnolfini finds Coby Sey and Beatrice Dillon, two key protagonists in UK experimental music, opening up their soundworlds to different modes of contemporary classical influence in the form of players from London Contemporary Orchestra and Indian percussionist and composer Kuljit Bhamra – all complemented by the deft and minimal Bristol languor of Tara Clerkin Trio.
Beatrice Dillon feat. Kuljit Bhamra
London-based composer Beatrice Dillon explores a peculiar no man’s land between UK bass, house and contemporary music, with a style that’s rhythmically complex, transparent and both danceable and cerebral. Her latest album Workaround was The Wire Magazine’s best album of 2020.
Kuljit Bhamra is a British tabla player and composer, and one of the pioneers of Bhangra, a popular musical style from the Punjabi diaspora in the UK.
Beatrice and Kuljit will perform an improvised set focusing on synthetic and rhythmic patterns, as developed in residency at STUK in Leuven, Belgium last Autumn Bhamra’s nimble-fingered percussion seamlessly interweaving with Dillon’s complex rhythmical structures.
Coby Sey with London Contemporary Orchestra
Coby Sey is a musician, producer and DJ from South East London who offers a shifting, disorienting vision of club music. Coby’s prolific and scene-galvanising activities have seen him release a string of EPs, remixes and collaborations, as well as establishing CURL with Mica Levi and Brother May and co-writing/performing with Tirzah, Lafawndah and more.
London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO) is a leading global orchestral group focused on playing, commissioning and developing new music and artistic output. Alongside working with well-known artists, LCO focus on developing a diverse next generation of players, conductors and composers by creating opportunities for them to work at the highest professional level.
This performance sees Sey and members of the LCO continuing to develop a collaboration involving expanded arrangements of Coby’s material, as premiered at a sold-out Purcell Room concert at London’s Southbank Centre in Dec 2021.
Tara Clerkin Trio are Pat Benjamin, Sunny Joe Paradisos and Tara Clerkin, three musicians involved in a number of cult Bristol bands over the years before confidently settling down in triangle formation. Twirling the most appealing strands of jazz, trip hop, electronica, psychedelia & minimalism into a sound somehow quintessentially ‘of the West’, yet also fresh and universal in flavour, their self titled debut LP was released in 2020 and was a sleeper hit, featuring in the Wire’s top 100 albums of the year.
