Free Range Orchestra - CD release "D R I F T"

The new CD from Canterbury-based improvising group the Free Range Orchestra was released on 27th of February, produced by OU lecturer in Music, Sean Williams and featuring a new commission from composer Stevie Wishart funded by an Arts Council grant. The piece was performed in Canterbury at the Colyer-Fergusson concert hall in October 2024, and the CD captures the other pieces played in the same concert. This includes a piece focused around a text by poet Kat Peddie, as well as featuring Stevie Wishart on hurdy gurdy.

Stevie writes: " D R  I  F    T was composed for the Free Range Orchestra, whose musicians contribute their own creative ideas into the score: in performance this is something like a two-dimensional black and white score fleshed out to a full-colour multi-dimensional entity. 

The musicians are divided into three ensembles representing three ICEBERGS with individual sonic imprints which gradually drift into an amorphous musical mush over the four soloists (bass flute, cor anglais, viola and double bass) who play a strictly notated 4-part polyphonic motet. I then edited the recording adding a layer of compositional rigour onto the improvised content derived from my score. 

This is my favourite way of working - yet rarely do musicians have the skill and generosity to give me the chance to do so - thank you Free Range Orchestra for D R  I  F   T."

The Free Range Orchestra is a group of musicians, spoken word, movement, film makers and other performing artists from all over East Kent sprining from Free Range, which is a charity devoted to promoting award-winning adventurous music & combined arts events in Canterbury. Our previous CDs have featured Maggie Nicols and Evan Parker, connecting our practice with the rich history of free improvisation stretching back to the 1960s.

The work of the Free Range Orchestra deals with questions of authorship and creative agency within an environment thatchallenges, minimises, and sometimes completely rejects pre-organised structures and hierarchies. We also provide workshop opportunities for postgraduate students and have performed various compositions by students at Canterbury Christchurch University. 

Kat Peddie is a published poet working with spoken word within the context of performance within a larger group. She is a core member of another Free Range offshoot group, Free Women.

Sean Williams writes about live electronic music technology and practice, having recently presented a keynote in Halle, Germany on his various practice-led research projects, and a paper at the Orpheus Institute in Gent, Belgium on the personal narrative elements behind the design of his own modular synthesizer over almost a decade's worth of performances with the Free Range Orchestra.

FRO members Panos Ghikas and Daniel Herbert will be working with other FRO members within their Unrealtime music improvisation system at this year's New Instruments for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in London in June.

The CD is available in strictly limited numbers directly from Free Range, so come along to a performance if you're interested!