We’re pleased to announce a new concert. On Friday 7 October at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Raise Your Voice Collective present an evening of music from Trio Atem, the Raise Your Voice Ensemble and Efpi Records’ 265 Quartet, a fascinating world where experimental and contemporary classical music mingle with jazz. More details soon!

Thanks to all those involved and everyone who came to see our exhibition Cities of Sound at FutureEverything Festival two weeks ago. For posterity, here are some photos from the exhibition at Kraak Gallery. (Photos by Sam Salem & FutureEverything.)

You can also find a few photos and a video of Pond Life on Fat Roland’s blog.

Read more about the artworks in our exhibition booklet (PDF, 750kb)

We are excited to announce that Raise Your Voice will be taking part in this year’s FutureEverything Festival in more than one way.

Following our appearance at last year’s festival, this year sees an innovative project that combines an exhibition of sound installations with live performance under the title Cities of Sound. From 11–14 May, Kraak Gallery will host internationally recognised works by Manchester-based artists — including Sam Salem and Patrick Sanan’s Pond Life III — exploring ideas of the city, living and lived-in systems, the facts of urban life, and the sounds these produce. An opening night on 11 May will offer a performed introduction to the exhibition, including new compositions, experimental electronics and improvisations involving the sound installations themselves.

Separate from the main Raise Your Voice event, Michael Jones (violin) and Anna Menzies (cello) will be joining fellow FutureEverything Showcase winners The Electronic Exchange on Friday 13 May for an exclusive project also involving members of Manchester Camerata. Themes of playful experimentation and remote working will culminate as the artists all meet for the first time to perform together a series of pieces that they have been developing in an online space. There are more details on The Electronic Exchange on the FutureEverything website and you can buy tickets here.

We will be announcing details of the full programme in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled.

Composer Richard Scott, who we worked with on his Onomatopoeia for our February concert last year, has mashed-up the recordings of Raise Your Voice musicians he made for that piece to create an ‘orchestral’ electroacoustic composition. Combining samples made in rehearsal of Raise Your Voice’s string and wind players with samples of double bass, trombone and percussion from musicians in Berlin, the new piece turns the chamber sound of the original into that of a screeching, full-on electronic orchestra. Click play to hear it:

We are pleased to have been featured in Sound and Music’s new Artists’ Toolkit, a comprehensive toolkit to help artists, composers and musicians build their careers. Our contribution is to the section about promoting your own events and we talk about how we’ve gone about realising our goals so far:

Through Raise Your Voice we hope to be able to provide a platform for music that might otherwise go unheard and introduce it to audiences that might not come into contact with it. To this end, our nights take place in venues where the strictures of classical performance are broken down.

Check out the whole thing here.