Larry Goves – composer

Here is the recording of a new piece Two from Dr Suss. The piece is a setting of two sections of Matthew Welton’s wonderful long poem Dr Suss and was commissioned by Trio Atem. It’s scored for bass flute, low female voice and prepared cello. This is the first performance of the piece at the University of Manchester and I’m very grateful to Trio Atem for their skill and sincerity in preparing and performing this music.

Movement 1. Getting into the car of the south side of Main Street, ‘It’s just a lot of cold treacle,’ was all Filippino Lippi would say.

Movement 2. ‘And I was feeling a little worried before you mentioned James Watt.’

Next Sunday I’m doing a short set for the lovely folk of slips discs and Sounds of the Other City – a music festival of interesting music  in mainly small venues on or near  Chapel Street in Salford. I have three reasons to be happy about this – Ian Vine is going to be doing live guitar and electronics from his new album held/always/immer/gehalten, I’m going to be alongside slip discs veterans Tom Rose, Aaron Parker and Chaines and I’m also going to be joined by composer and violinist Bethan Morgan-Williams. See you there. Details here and festival poster below.

Looking forward to this next venue. Very intimate venue in East London. I’m going to be joined by Olly Coates (who is also performing his own set) and I’m looking forward to hearing Leo Abrahams and Chris Vatalaro live for the first time. Tickets here.

I’ve recently finished a new piece for Manchester based Trio Atem. The premiere is at lunchtime on 14 February at the University of Manchester (information here or here). I can’t wait.

This new piece is scored for bass flute, low female voice and prepared cello (no blu-tack in the end though) and is a continuation of my setting of sections of Matthew Welton’s extraordinary long poem Dr Suss. I set a section of this poem last year (for EXAUDI) and this piece took the patterns and repetition from the Welton original as well as the related material from Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear and employed a complimentary musical pattern with the compression of a Monteverdi madrigal.

For Trio Atem the musical patterns do not use borrowed material but the disintegration of the text into a musical line/melody and then (in the second song) the reforming of the text as a new melody exchanges from instruments to voice.

Here are a couple of very short extracts from the two songs.

I had an excellent session with Alice Purton and Nina Whiteman last week as my new piece for Trio Atem gradually takes shape. Most of the sketching, rhythms, structure and pitch is done/selected so I’ve been looking to find more fragile, temperamental sounds that will suit the repetitive piece. We tried blobs of white tack on the strings but had more success tying the C and A string together. Tomorrow I’m trying to find some matching sounds with flautist Gavin Osborn.  The text is two sections from Matthew Welton’s extraordinary long poem Dr Suss.

Thanks to Jack Chuter for this kind and thoughtful review.

Review from Ian Pennington in Now Then Manchester of the forthcoming EP. This is a Manchester magazine which you can read here or read their blog here.

I’ve been called pensive before and, in my darker moments, solemn but I don’t think I’ve ever been called sober before…

I have been revisiting the music I made with mira calix on a year-long+ project exchange and return. It was an intense process at a very busy time but I’ve been enjoying listening to the music again and in particular the final piece we made together onn/off which sees us back in our more ‘traditional’ roles (i.e. I wrote the acoustic music and mira made the electronic music – hardly our traditional roles any more) but music filtered through the lens of having worked together on this for some time. I’ll put some or all of the track up at a later date if I can but in the meantime here are a couple of exchange and return images from our recording sessions at Aldeburgh Music.

Second ever GOVES set on 28/11/2012 at the Sandbar in Manchester courtesy of the good people of ddmmyy – more information here.

I’ll be playing a set of the upcoming ep with some new bits and piece joined on this occasion by cellist Dave McCann.

We’ll also be selling some of the forthcoming GOVES ep A crèche for the lonely and peculiar ahead of its release on 2 December. There will be some CD and vinyl copies. I’ll write more on the EP in another post soon.

I hope to see you there. There are some great sets and DJing in this supremely relaxed and excellent bar.