Daylight Music at 15: Autumn/Winter Season (November- January) 2024

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Attached is the press release for the 2024 Autumn/Winter Season, part of Daylight's Music's 15th Birthday Year. Events take place at various venues in London and Kent.

We have received the following press release;

Saturday 16/11/2024 | 12 – 2pm at St John’s Leytonstone, E11 1HH
EFG London Jazz Festival: Sonic Pieces - Deaf Center, Erik K Skodvin (solo) + Sumie
details | https://buytickets.at/arcticcircle/1346698

Sunday 17/11/2024 | 1– 3pm at The Hot Tin, Faversham, ME13 88D
Sonic Pieces - Deaf Center, Otto A Totland (solo) + Sumie
details | buytickets.at/arcticcircle/1346699

We collaborate again with fellow birthday organisation, the boutique Berlin based record label Sonic Pieces. Founder Monique Recknagel has been quietly curating and hand-crafting each release (now numbering fifty) creating a small but strong community of artists, whose ideas explore the border between contemporary classical and avant-garde. Today we present three of them from across Europe.

Deaf Center comprises Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Erik K. Skodvin and pianist Otto A. Totland, who operate at the axis of ambient, contemporary classical and drone
music. Old school friends, they both grew up in a small village in southern Norway, each having a history of music-experimentation during the early internet days. At the start of the 2000 ́s they finally decided to collaborate. Deaf Center has released several recordings through the last 20 years, including albums Pale Ravine (2005), Owl Splinters (2011) and most recently Low Distance (2019) on Sonic Pieces. In their music the importance is placed on timelessness, friendship and the combination of warm human connection with otherworldly abstractions.

The Gothenburg-resident impressionistic singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist Sumie has just completed the recording of her third album. It is the follow-up to Sumie, her selftitled debut, and Lost In Light, both issued by the UK’s totemic Bella Union label, also the home of Father John Misty, John Grant, Mercury Rev and Susanne Sundfør. Sumie’s as-yet untitled new album will be issued in 2025. These rare appearances are the first opportunity – anywhere – to hear a selection of her new songs. Expect lyrical obliqueness, and the marriage of understated intensity with filigreed atmospherics.

Saturday 23/11/2024 | 12 – 2pm at St John’s Leytonstone, E11 1HH
EFG London Jazz Festival: Goldsmiths Improviser Collective, SlowWormHole,
Fahaka + Mathew Follis details | https://buytickets.at/arcticcircle/1349718

For their second Daylight Music at the EFG London Jazz Festival, Goldsmiths Music present three eclectic, post-genre sets that celebrate the spaces in between Jazz, Electronic, Noise, Ecology, Experimental and Contemporary Classical, with original compositions, improvisations, and mixed media. Combining instrumental and vocal creative work developed as part of their Masters Programmes in Performance and Sonic Arts, and the BMus in Music degree, graduates, current students and staff combine and collaborate in a spirit of experimentation to explore new meeting places for sonic creativity.

The curation will include Iris Garrelfs with Goldsmiths Improviser Collective in a performance which includes all manner of instruments, technologies, voices and crisp
packets - plus ensembles led by musicians and composers Katy Neve (Fahaka), Tom Pardoe-Matthews (SlowWormHole) and Mathew Follis.

SlowWormHole fuses instrumental music together with electronics, improvisation and heavy riffs. Exploring the relation between the audience, music, time and space. It is both intrusive and ecstatic. The band relies on a memory. An embodied knowledge. An improvised approach to creating music. It is the freedom to create and change. Sound as sharing, people coming together. Sound as individual, it’s about dreaming. Painting time.

London based Fahaka present their eclectic fusion of acoustic folk, jazz and avant garde, take inspiration from Charles Mingus, Joni Mitchell, Abel Selaocoe and Kinkajous. Folk inspiration is rooted in the musical upbringing of the group in different ways taking influence from trad folk and singer-songwriter material entering a sense of comfort and childlike joy. The group take a raw and acoustic approach to their compositions holding audiences in a gripping musical journey.

Mathew Follis is a Welsh guitarist operating within the fields of contemporary jazz and improvised music. Follis’ work mainly concerns itself with smaller format jazz ensembles, performing a mixture of original compositions alongside sections of group free improvisation these two contrasting approaches to music work seamlessly together. Performing music from May 2024’s ‘Crosstalk’, written with co-performer and composer Charlie Hall, as well as unreleased compositions and improvisations.

Saturday 07/12/2024 | 12 – 2pm at St Mary Magdalene Church, N7 8LT
15th Year Big Birthday Christmas Festive Fuzzy Feeling Fundraiser
details | https://buytickets.at/arcticcircle/1455562

Over the last few months, we’ve been secretly messaging VIPs, (very important penguins) musicians and artists – a small selection of those who have come through our various wooden doors since 2009. It is unfortunately a bit unpractical to squeeze a thousand artists onto one stage but instead we’ve settled on a near impossible selection of a dozen or so who we feel reflect the spirit and community of the series and returned our calls!

Also, this all happened (very near to) where it all began as we return to Islington for the first time in five years in the new and welcoming setting of St Mary Magdalene Church in Islington, just a few minutes from the train and overground station.

So we’d love you to join us for an afternoon exploring the story of Daylight Music – with the themes of past, present and future in a our first fundraising concert with some
special musical guests. Details of those performances will be slowly revealed but with limited capacity in the church we strongly advise reserving your seat in advance for this fuzzy festive gathering.

We will be going live again as our video and sound team will allow us to stream the event - so we hope we can welcome back as many people as possible across the globe. The profits we raise from merch, mince pies and admission from this concert will go towards our Winter 2024/2025 series and towards continuing on into our 16th year!

Saturday 25/01/2025 | 12 – 2pm at St John’s Leytonstone, E11 1HH
Lost Map - Afterlands, Pictish Trial + Flo Lines details |
https://buytickets.at/arcticcircle/1400517

A new year and a new opportunity to book in for a musical check-up with our distant Hebridean friends at Lost Map recordings. A self-proclaimed micro-label and collective, a decade or so since it began, is very much pushing forward, onwards, upwards and away, uncovering new idea and new sounds, unshackled by style or genre.
Anything but boring and predictable, the label’s guiding voice Pictish Trail will debut new songs and stories alongside the Scottish Album of the Year nominees Afterlands.

We will also introduce you to a new voice and member of the label - producer and songwriter Flo- Lines.

When the pandemic descended, Rick Anthony (The Phantom Band / Rick Redbeard) and David McAulay (Strike the Colours) began exchanging ideas remotely, creating the
contours of what would become their new project together Afterlands. The captivating album We Are the Animals in the Night’ released in 2023 on Lost Map carves a crepuscular sound world, where shadows, dreams, memories and fears overlap and intertwine with astonishing results as you’ll hear first hand today.

Released as part of Lost Map’s Postmap Club subscription service, Flo Lines’s debut single” I was biding my time” revealed an extended collage-like approach to music making, informed by her background in radio production and audio-visual art. Combining sounds both found and played, she blends compositions from different takes of songs captured in different spaces both indoors and out, to create slow sonic medleys that transport the listener through different places and feelings.

Isle-of-Eigg dwelling electro-acoustic psych-pop wonder Pictish Trail, AKA Johnny Lynch, released his fifth album Island Family in 2022 to critical acclaim from The Observer and The Times to Mojo, Uncut, Loud & Quiet and BBC 6 Music. Having toured the world both as a headliner and as support for artists including Belle & Sebastian, Pavement, Mogwai, Sea Power, Slow Club and KT Tunstall, he has performed at festivals including Glastonbury, Field Day, Bestival, Deer Shed, Celtic Connections, the Edinburgh Fringe and Green Man* (*all 22 instalments to date).

15 Years of Presence: Arctic Circle’s Daylight Music at 15

It’s time now to once again present the most magical of music this Autumn and Winter, featuring friends old and new as Daylight Music returns. For this weekend series
ensembles once again travel from across the globe, the country or just across tube and train lines to be part of our matinee series. It goes without saying but we’d like to invite you and your friends and family for an afternoon of music- a unique, affordable and accessible experience accompanied by cake, tea and the most welcoming of acoustics and surroundings across venues in London and Kent.

This November we carefully transport artists from across Europe with boutique Berlin label Sonic Pieces as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, this December we present an afternoon exploring the story of Daylight Music with the themes of past, present and future with special musical guests, and we end up in the capable curating hands in January with the thumbs of Pictish Trail and his Hebridean Lost Map.

Expanding and developing we split our time and attention between London and Leytonstone and newer venues in our story such as the 1885 Victorian flat-pack tin church – The Hot Tin in Faversham. We also are also very pleased to present our first events in the former Margate Synagogue, ARK - Cliftonville Cultural Space, in October and December. Finally we’ve just announced we’ll be returning to Islington for the first time since 2020 as we bring a special Christmas show to St Mary’s Magdelene Church.

As it’s an important milestone moment it is a good time to weigh the legacy of the series. For fifteen years the series has been featured regularly in Time Out’s 101 Things To Do in London, cited in The Rough Guide to Make the Most of Your Time in Britain and featured in many other publications such as The Guardian. Many audiences have come to depend on that moment of human interaction, catching up with hands around a warming cup of tea or coffee, with sunlight streaming through the stained-glass window, starting the weekend on a beautiful note, or in this case on the many notes and melodies that we provide.

It’s almost impossible to pick a favourite artist, ensemble, instrument, performer or moment from the last fifteen years BUT we do occasionally like to look back with a sense of pride at presenting the London Bulgarian Choir, Blick Bassy, Alabaster DePlume, Frank Sidebottom, Nils Økland, Lula.xyz, Radie Peat, Frank Chickens, Lætitia Sadier, Alexis Taylor, Catherine A.D, Jherek Bischoff, Gold Vox, Poppy Ackroyd, Nick Heyward, Hiss Golden Messenger, Laura Cannell, Terry Edwards, Haiku Salut,
James McVinnie, Trans-Siberian March Band, Kathryn Williams, Darren Hayman, Andrew Wasylyk, Charles Haywards, Keith Tippett, Ed Dowie, Nils Frahm and School of Noise.

Who has been your favourite artist, moment, instrument, artist, poet, handbell choir, gamelan ensemble, mutli-award-winning wonder horse or dancing troupe? Every one of the two-hour editions or expeditions has contained surprises, delights, discovery, noise, the regulars, the as-and-whens, the must-catch-that-one, the occasionals, the when-in-towns, the newbies or volunteers. And as always, we can’t wait to get back and open the doors once more and welcome you inside for another slice of music, tea & cake.
Thank you to our community - to you- for supporting us so far,

Ben Eshmade
Daylight Music