2023: Return

2023: 28.10.2023: Return, Govan & Linthouse Parish Church

Performers:

Voices: Jj Fadaka, Lisa Fannen, Babs Nicgriogair, Susannah Stark.
Strings: Elena Inei (violin), Una McGlone (double base), Simone Seales (cello), Semay Wu (cello).
Pipes: Mairearad Green, Malin Lewis.
Drums: Eilidh Graham, Amy Redford.

Jj Fadaka (she/her) is a feminist writer and workshop facilitator living in Edinburgh. In a mix of non-fiction and storytelling, she explores community, feminism, and love as a path to change. Jj’s workshops are based on black feminist radical traditions that allow us to imagine the world without barriers. Jj was featured as Poet in Residence for the 2023 StAnza International Poetry Festival. Her poetry zine ‘3 Days in Community’ is available from Lighthouse Books.

Lisa Fannen (she/her)
Lisa has been writing, and sharing words solo and with musicians/ soundmakers, in particular as part of a duo Claquer with Jer Reid. She published a poetry collection Faultline in 2018 and released it as a collaborative recording project in 2021. Lisa is also a bodyworker and activist concerned with dialogue and information exchange about health in the broadest sense of the term as part of movement for social justice.
lisafannen.uk
inthebody.uk

Babs Nicgriogair (they/them)
Babs Nicgriogair is a stornoweegie poetician, a lover of hybrid and liminal spaces with a commitment to worker power, community building and collective joy.

Susannah Stark (she/her)
Susannah is a musician, printmaker, cleaner and gàidhlig learner who likes to blur the boundaries between all of this through song, improvisation & collaboration with other musicians, with the aim to communicate in multiple levels through music and evoke places, both internal and external. Her debut album ‘Time Together (Hues And Intensities)’ came out on Stroom record label in 2020. she is currently working on new music and interdisciplinary art project ‘Minor gestures’ due out in 2025.

Elena Inei (she/her)
Elena Inei is a violinist and improviser based in Glasgow. She is a member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Collective Endeavours and The New Strings Collective. Elena also collaborates with Barrowland Ballet’s intergenerational dance company Wolf Pack, and plays in various other project based formations.

Una MacGlone (she/her)
Una works across improvisation, jazz, traditional and classical genres. She also collaborates regularly with dancers, actors and poets, using improvisation as a key transdisciplinary process. Some career highlights include recording with a film soundtrack and two albums with David Byrne; touring with Savourna Stevenson; recording three albums, touring and performing at two Celtic Connections festivals with Rab Noakes and playing at the Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. As a founder member of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, she has an important role in performing and leading on creative projects such as an innovative annual exploration of Gaelic culture and improvisation with Ceòl ‘s Craic, a leading Gaelic Arts organisation. As well as these collaborations, her own music has been commissioned for and played on BBC radio 3.
A new album with Jim McEwan has just been released on Scatter:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/sun-shadow

Simone Seales (they/them)
Originally from Florida, Simone Seales is a Glasgow-based cellist who completed their postgraduate studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2021. They focus on free improvisation, both tonal and atonal, and devising music for theatre.
Simone is passionate about exploring sound, how sound can reflect emotional states of being and how emotions are embodied. Their creative influences come from Black feminist leaders such as Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur and bell hooks. Within Simone’s creative work, they centre Blackness, sexuality, intersectional feminism and anti-racism. They believe Western Classical musicians are capable of making meaningful social change.
simoneseales.com

Semay Wu (sē mā wo͞o) (she/her) works as a composer, cellist/improviser, and media/sound artist. Greatly influenced by improvisational frameworks, Semay often uses interdisciplinary relationships to explore ideas of play, through collaboration and spontaneity. Recent performances and recordings have developed as solo cello and electronics, however, Semay’s other works have found shape as video pieces, performance/interactive-installations, graphic scores, as well as creating an online audio cookbook for Manchester’s communities. 
semaywu.com

Mairearad Green (she/her)
Having grown up in the West Coast Coigach peninsula of the Scottish Highlands – an area steeped in culture and local traditions – Mairearad was introduced to folk music at an early age. Renowned for her deft and lyrical accordion style, as well as her dextrous piping, Mairearad is in great demand as a performer and composer. Many of her compositions are well known in the Scottish music scene. Among the favourites are ‘Maggie West’s Waltz’ and ‘Dram Behind the Curtain’. As a visual artist also, Mairearad’s work can be described as impressionistic, and a visceral response to the landscape she is so familiar. Her latest limited-edition vinyl release ‘Hearth’ seamlessly combines Mairearad’s two passions – art and music.
mairearadgreen.co.uk

Malin Lewis (they/them)
Malin is a queer multi-instrumentalist inspired by humans, queerness and the universe. One of Scotland’s most exciting creators, Malin melds tradition with innovation on a unique newly invented, self-made bagpipe. Malin’s long awaited debut album Halocline, is named for the layer between salt and fresh water. Halocline is a sequence of compositions reflecting on the liminal spaces between Malin’s outer and inner worlds as a trans person. Recently Malin has been touring the UK with Making Tracks international Residency, Recording film music in Berlin, studying folk music in Helsinki and learning the tradition of the extinct Finnish Bagpipes as well as writing and performing music for theatre and contemporary dance.’
malinmakesmusic.com

Eilidh Graham (she/her) works in community cycling and community arts. Supporting people to take part in wellbeing and creative activities such as group percussion sessions, craft sessions from a cargo bike, group bike rides to explore nature, connect with people and services in the community. She has played in a Glasgow Samba Band for 15 years, and she cycles everywhere on her colourful bicycle!

Amy Redford (she/her)
Amy settled for a guitar at 16 because despite 4 years of pestering up until then, they just wouldn’t get her a drum kit. She’s been hitting guitars increasingly harder ever since. She finally realised the drumming dream when she joined SheBoom in 2009, where she now teaches and leads that drumming ensemble. On guitar, she’s currently co-fronting Sequence 369 and busting out riffs with They Theory. Previous acts include Electric Ladygarden, Blood Of The Bull, Touch And Go, and Stotally Toned. Amy is a nihilistic malcontent with a fair amount of existential dread, which is expressed in her riffs, solos, and frenetic drumming.

Behind the scenes & crew:

Lisa Fannen (she/her) Concept, script, music and movement score, director: see above.

Jer Reid (he/him) Dramaturgy, sound design, music & movement score: Jer Reid is a musician, sound engineer and dramaturge based in Glasgow. He has and does play in bands (dawson, sumshapes, Painted X-Ray, God Is My Co-Pilot etc) and improvising ensembles (he has played a lot with Luke Sutherland, Raymond MacDonald, Rafe Fitzpatrick etc and with Lisa Fannen in their spoken word and guitar/ sounds duo Claquer). He organises gigs and tours, runs Gruff Wit Records and for six years he has done the monthly open improvising sessions on behalf of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra called GIOdynamics. In 2010, with Solène Weinachter, he founded the music/dance group Collective Endeavours who’s performances have included Tectonics Glasgow and Dance International Glasgow as well as lots of places that dance isn’t usually seen in and who’s members now include Aya Kobayashi, Molly Danter, Alex South, Elena Inei, Beth Edwards and Dylan Read. His dramaturgy work has included working with long time dancer collaborator Rosalind Masson and visual artist and writer Corin Sworn. He was thrilled last year to, along with Una MacGlone, make the music for Cloudberry MacLean’s singular film Low Rent. He has toured in thirty countries and has had his music played on BBC Radios 1, 3 and 4. In 2023 he released his first book of writing called Days and Diary Entries.Photo credit: Luke Sutherland

Nora Winstanley (she/her) Live Sound Engineering: Nora Winstanley is a sound engineer, educator and musician deeply rooted in Edinburgh.

Marix Leahy (she/they) Stage Management & Live Sound: Marix Leahy (she/they) is a community musician, teacher, facilitator, songwriter, and budding sound engineer/technician. Experienced in community events, making spaces where art and magic can happen. Having worked with National Theatre Scotland, Tron Theatre, Givin’ It Laldie, LGBT Health & Wellbeing, and more besides. Marix is both alert to and appreciates those details that should be carefully tended to so that an audience, artist or participant can have a smooth, engaging and enjoyable experience. How making spaces with heart and intent means that taking part in a creative process is unobstructed and enhanced. Marix leads choirs, works with kids and adults in community music settings across Glasgow and loves to dabble in sound engineering.

Cloudberry MacLean (she/jher) Production: Cloudberry MacLean (she/her) has made an interesting film called Low Rent about the year she spent secretly living in a hut built on her allotment in Edinburgh back in 2005. It follows the full cycle of the seasons and captures moments such as early dawn from the hut doorway, a fox running with a scavenged egg in her mouth and trees bending with fruit. In its course she explores questions that continue to preoccupy her about land ownership in Scotland, class, poverty, colonialism and how the violence of capitalism and the joy of life meet in our bodies.cloudberrymaclean.com

Rex Chakley (they/them) Image creation & design: Rex designed the Return poster and programme. For the imagery, Rex made cyanotype prints from ritual and domestic objects and plants, which they reworked in Photoshop. Smitten with words, images and movement through space since they were a kid, Rex is currently engaged in metalsmithing, design, accessibility, building queer and trans community, and lifting heavy things.

Ise Gross (they/them) Altar design & making: ise is a trained cabinet maker and artist. they also practice as a somatic counsellor and love all these vocations. they can be found most thursdays in galgael:)

 

 

Pipe tune: Looking Through by Mike Vass.

Understudies: Rose Dagul (cello), Rafe Fitzpatrick (violin), Evangelos Saklaras (double base), Beth Frieden (voice), Shelby Johnston (drums).

Mugort burners: Gehan MacLeod (she/her), Nosheen Khwaja (she/her), Ise Gross (they/them), Soraya Bishop (she/her).

Front of House: Lucy Mason (she/her), Dot Whelan (they/them), Sam Peachey (they/them).

Documentation: Monika Smekot, Kirstin McMahon (film).