PASSING NANCARROW

‘Jazz and blues seem to sweet-talk us into the eye of a hurricane’ is how legendary American broadcaster Helen Borten describes the wild, proto-electronic music of American-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow.

Marking 30 years since the iconoclast’s passing in 1997, UK composer and turntablist Matt Wright teams up in 2027 with BL!NDMAN and jazz pianist Alexander Hawkins to pass through that hurricane, creating brand new music that collides the influences of Nancarrow, late 90s ‘electronic music’ that was prominent in the UK at the time of his passing, and the current Black MIDI movement of ‘impossible music’ he posthumously inspired.

Wright sees Nancarrow as part of a diaspora of radical musical thinkers who have looked to the unreal to make new futures possible. Expect fractured rhythmic grooves that collapse through the floor, whilst BL!NDMAN [hybrid] create wild flurries of notes that raise the roof.
 

‘Whilst Nancarrow looked to the improvised jazz of his time, effectively ‘sampling’ jazz ideas via paper rolls and then combining this with irrational rhythms to create a new form of post human music, with the Passing Nancarrow project we sample today’s improvised jazz in real-time, not with paper but with software, and layer that to produce irrational rhythmic textures for both humans and technology.’ – composer Matt Wright