Thursday May 2nd 2024
7.00pm
£8 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Trio Sowari is an English electronics specialist, a Swiss/French saxophonist and a German percussionist, all of them play an important role in the European contemporary experimental music scene.

They sound like this :

They are members of ensembles like Mimeo, Hubbub, Polwechsel and countless others, they have released their music on labels such as Another Timbre, Erstwhile, Matchless, Potlatch, Confront, Hat Hut, For4Ears, Emanem, Leo, and many others.

Moving within evolving electro-acoustic fields Trio Sowari investigate their asymmetric structures and multilayered ambiguities.

They say their music is not a dystopian or retro sound, their music aims to face the present in a boldly and spirited way!

Here is what the press have to say about it:

“This is disciplined, focused music, the sound of people really thinking and playing, and close attention is consistently rewarded.”
Clive Bell, The Wire

“Musicianship and creativity of the highest order.”
Dan Warburton , ParisTransatlantic

“Leçon du son sans laisse.”
Antoine Le Roy, Journal de Jura

“The result of these alluring and positively sensual investigations is a dense and coherent sound composed of a myriad of building blocks, which allows both for macro- and micro-listening.”
Tobias Fischer, tokafi

Since forming in 2004 the group has played countless venues and festivals all across Europe.

Hearn Fell Duo

Features Safehouse co-founder Geoff Hearn on tenor sax and Milo Fell on drums.

+ Wildcard Quartet
+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Thursday June 13th 2024
7.00pm
£8 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Faradena Afifi: viola, violin and voice
Steve Beresford: piano, electronics and toys
Paul Khimasia Morgan: guitar body and electronics

Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over forty years, freely improvising on the piano, electronics, and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, John Zorn, and Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack).

He has written songs, written for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows, and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of Musics and Collusion magazines, writes about music in various contexts.

Faradena Afifi is the curator of ‘The Noisy Women Present’ and the ‘Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra’. She plays bowed string instruments, piano and percussion and uses voice and movement. She is also a community musician, street and folk musician.

Paul Khimasia Morgan is an improvisor who uses an amplified acoustic guitar body. He has performed in regular and ad-hoc groupings with Steve Beresford and Blanca Regina, Cristián Alvear, Richard Sanderson, Jason Kahn, Simon Whetham, Seth Cooke, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Ryu Hankil, Charlotte Keefe and Mark Wastell’s THE SEEN.

The trio have a new CD coming out on Discus Records which will be available at the gig.

Matt Clark, Toma Sapir and Annie Kerr

+ Wildcard Quartet
+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Tuesday July 9th 2024
7.00pm
£8 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Marija Kovačević: Music for Broken Violins

Marija Kovačević is based in New York and has traveled internationally to Paris to Sun Tunnels in Utah to Hvar in Croatia. She has been featured on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and Freeness programme as well as WFMU’s Strength through Failure. In addition to three volumes of Music for Broken Violins, broken violins also appear on a duo cassette with Thierry Müller and Push Broken Duet with RoRo Perrot released on the Brighton-based label Chocolate Monk.

CRUSH!!!

CRUSH!!! are Sonic Pleasure (bricks, masonry, metal tools, flute), Mark Browne (saxophones, collected objects, percussion, game calls) and Paul Twine (guitar). The group utilises a vast array of found and home-made sound making devices combined with more traditional instruments. Sonic Pleasure is famed for her unique crafting of sound from bricks and masonry, reducing much of her instrumentation to dust by the end of a concert. Mark Browne plays castrato saxophone, broken glass, percussion, whistles and bones. Paul Twine will play guitar in an extraordinary manner.

+ The Wildcard Quartet
+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Wednesday September 11, 2024
7pm
£8 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Eddie Prévost: drums
Silvan Schmid: trumpet
Olie Brice: bass

Eddie Prévost

Eddie Prévost began his life in music as a jazz drummer. A recurring interest in this form has been maintained, although always with an experimental ethos. Along the way he has maintained his fifty-year plus experimental credentials with AMM and numerous other improvisation projects, including his now twenty-year long weekly workshop. But drumming has generally been backgrounded to his experimental percussion work.

“Prévost’s free drumming flows superbly making use of his formidable technique. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or Max Roach.” – Melody Maker

“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star

Olie Brice

Olie Brice is a committed free improviser, who has performed, toured and recorded with many of the leading names in the music. Frequent collaborators include Mark Sanders, Paul Dunmall, Rachel Musson, Tobias Delius, Cath Roberts and Luis Vicente, and he has also appeared with the likes of Evan Parker, Tony Malaby, John Butcher, Ingrid Laubrock, Ken Vandermark, Eddie Prevost and Louis Moholo. He is part of several ongoing improvising ensembles including Somersaults (with Tobias Delius & Mark Sanders) and The Acrylic Rib (with Albert Cirera & Nicolas Field).

Silvan Schmid

Silvan Schmid is a trumpet player based between Zürich and Maastricht. He plays live and does recordings with people and projects such as Solo, Gamut Kollektiv,Miao Silvan Makossiri, Alex Riva, Mraolia, Félicie Bazelaire, ТЕПЛОТА x RIVASCHMID, Lotus Eddé Khouri, TZUSSS, Fabian Saul.

He is a member of the Gamut Kollektiv, whose purpose is to explore, to seek and to set new things in motion. The collective serves as a fruitful breeding ground for ideas, experiments and new processes. In addition to the annual Gamut Festival, they run the label Edition Gamut and organize different concert series in Zurich.

Plus

Mutter

Gus Garside – double bass
Adrian Southby – baritone electric guitar
Marc Muir – voice

Wildcard Quartet

DJ Fiery Biscuits

Thursday 24th October 2024
7.00pm
£8 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

A special Safehouse double bill featuring Japanese pianist Yoko Miura.

Yoko Miura is a pianist currently living in Fukuoka, Japan. Born in Tokyo, she started studying classical piano from the age of 5 and later became interested in jazz and improvised music. She says of her musical approach: “I am trying to make a kind of different universes interweaving and exchanging with different process, values and ways, with people, not only the musicians but also painters and dancers”. She has performed and recorded with many players including Gianni Mimmo John Russell, Lawrence Casserley, Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, Mia Zabelka, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra and many more.

Concentrating these days on improvised music, free jazz and contemporary music, double bassist Gus Garside plays in several different groupings including his longstanding string trio Arc (with Sylvia Hallett and Danny Kingshill). He has worked on three highly acclaimed albums as part of the Ron Caines/Martin Archer Axis and a duo album with the French saxophone player Hervé Perez released on the New York 577 label in 2021. He has created structured improvisations for performance in the UK and Canada featuring leading players in both countries and is making a welcome return to working with dance building a project with Mim King. He was a founding member of the Brighton Safehouse collective.

James Parsons is a drummer with an affinity for free, improvised playing, and has performed in a wide range of groups over the years including Bolide, Ron Caines Trio, Bare Springs, God’s Teeth and the Interstellar Tropics, The Burbling Mind and Grass Balloon.

Viv Corringham is a US-based British vocalist and sound artist, described as “a vital force in improvised music since the late 1970s” (Corey Mwamba, BBC Radio 3). She has worked with many musicians including Pauline Oliveros, Charles Hayward, Mike Cooper, Elliott Sharp, and Maggie Nicols. She has done concerts and sound work in twenty-six countries in venues such as Hong Kong Arts Centre, Fonoteca Nacional de Mexico, Issue Project Room New York, and Institute of Contemporary Art London. “From cool Brion Gysin–esque wordplay to looped and multilayered operatic wails” (The Wire).

Lawrence Casserley has devoted his career to the creation and promotion of live performance electronic music in a wide variety of ways. He has worked with many of the leading improvisers, particularly Evan Parker and his Electracoustic Ensemble. Casserley’s instrumental approach to live computer sound processing is the hallmark of his work, which is documented on many CDs, and he has performed and given workshops throughout Europe and in North and South America, Asia and Japan.

+ The Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Sunday 10th November 2024
12-5pm workshops
5-8pm gig open to the public
£8 / £6 members

Safehouse has been a hub of activity for Brighton’s improvised music community for the last 20 years, so we’re having a workshop / gig / party to celebrate!

The day will run like so:

12pm-3.30pm – workshop with Cosmic Transmissions
3.30pm – 4.15pm – workshop on Gus Garside’s new piece ’20 Years’

break

5pm – 8pm – gig open to public featuring:

Rachel Musson / Mark Sanders / Olie Brice Trio
Cosmic Transmissions (conducted improvisations)
Gus Garside’s ’20 Years’

Tuesday December 17th 2023
7.30pm
£8 / £6 members + concs
At The Coach House, 22 Walpole Road, Brighton, BN2 0EA

Note the different venue! Coach House, not Rose Hill

Zimmermann/Lienhard

Swiss experimental duo Zimmermann / Lienhard have been active since 2018, exploring the similarities and differences of acoustic accordion and electronic oscillator sounds, playing with psycho-acoustic effects and blending.

Through the many years of playing together an impressive delicacy and intimacy of their improvised interplay has emerged.

ACZ

The trio of Safehouse members return with their often instruction-based improvisations.

Andrew Greaves: keyboards
Clive Craske: percussion
Z*qhygoem: electric guitar / electronics

Plus The Wildcard Quartet 

Plus DJ Fiery Biscuits

Thursday January 30th
7pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

“The Bohman Brothers and Romuald Wadych have at last risen from the cinders of The Dave Craught Five. On this evening, after seven months of two shows a night at The Varna Club in Memel – they will arrive in Brighton to present a salute to some of those other members of the DC5: Jack McGrumber, Kenneth Trompette, Shane Forte. They will play a selection of the old material and a few new ones.”

The Bohman Brothers

Adam Bohman and Jonathan Bohman have been recording together since their early teens and playing live since 1984.

Their repertoire includes a combination of sounds created in the moment and distinct compositions including songs. They use unconventional instruments, household objects, dislocated text from found, literary and commercial sources and collaged layers of recordings.

“It’s hard to describe the raw, explosive audio art they perpetrate. Everyday objects and sounds are worked on until they become saturated with lurid suggestion, resulting in a bizarre, hysterical immediacy. The convulsive beauty bears comparison to both composers Helmut Lachemann and James Dillon and to sound terrorisers Bark! and Furt. Nevertheless, in the traditions of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the Bohman Brothers kitchen-sink realism laughs at the grand claims of lofty art. They will show you fear in a sponge from a drainer.”
– Ben Watson, The Wire Magazine

https://thebohmanbrothers.bandcamp.com

The Burbling Mind

Karen Constance & Dylan Nyoukis, James Parsons and Al Strachan come together for a fourth time for more mental burblings via electronics, tapes, percussion, voice and cornet.

+ The Wildcard Quartet
+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Sunday 2nd February 2025
5pm-7pm
The Con Club, 139 High Street, Lewes, BN7 1XS
£5

Safehouse Collective and the Free Range Orchestra from Canterbury join forces to play John Zorn’s Cobra and other experiments in group improvisation.

Cobra was conceived as a system with very detailed rules but with no pre-conceived sequence of events – a ‘game piece’ – for a group of musical improvisors and a prompter. The title was inspired by a table-top war game.

Zorn said his goal with Cobra was to harness the creative developments in improvisation and extended techniques by New York City’s downtown scene musicians in a semi-structured way, but without hindering their performances; he was interested in telling the musicians when to play, and with whom, but without telling them what to play.

Plus-Minus (1963, 1974) by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was a key inspiration for Zorn, inspiring him to develop methods play with or against each other and in response to his cues but without dictating specific notes, sounds, or other formal structures.

Safehouse and Free Range Orchestra are pictured below in the first of these joint gigs, which happened in Canterbury in November.

Thanks to Outlands Network Exchange Programme for the commission that made this possible.

Tuesday April 1st
8pm
£8 / £6 members + concs
@ The Cowley Club, Brighton

PLEASE NOTE! Different venue to usual: The Cowley Club!

Raymond MacDonald & Jer Reid

Safehouse are very happy to welcome two key members of the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra – the main hub for improvisation in Scotland!  Saxophonist Raymond MacDonald and electric guitarist Jer Reid met through the GIO.  They’ve been touring the UK and recording together since 2017, have released several CDs together over the last few years.

Raymond MacDonald is a saxophonist and composer who has released over 60 records and toured and broadcast worldwide. His work explores the boundaries and ambiguities between what is conventionally seen as improvisation and composition.

Much of his recent performing work has been in collaborative free improvisation contexts, however his roots in jazz and pop music are always evident in his playing and writing. MacDonald collaborates widely and has worked with visual artists, dancers, writers and filmmakers and has produced music for film, television, theatre and the concert hall.

MacDonald has worked internationally with many of the current pioneers in avant-garde music including David Byrne, Damo Suzuki, Nurse with Wound, German trumpeter Axel Dorner, the sublime US pianist Marilyn Crispell,  US trombonist and educator George Lewis, The Necks and ex-Sonic Youth guitarist Jim O’Rourke .

His album Buddy was also named in top CDs of year in Wire magazine, Jazzwise and All about Jazz.

Jer Reid is an electric guitarist with a very raw and dynamic approach.  He has spent a lifetime engaged with live and recorded music in a whole gamut of forms:  from working with dancers, to sound design, dramaturgy and film composition. He has improvised with poets, played music or sound teched in about 30 countries; facilitated improvising workshops and sessions;  released records and had his music played on Radio 1, 3, 4 and 6.

Andrew Clare & Iain Paxon

Andrew Clare is mostly known as the singer, guitarist and founder of the band I’m Being Good,  but he’s also had a hand in many experimental and improvised projects over the years, going all the way back to an early collaboration with Thurston Moore and Derek Bailey called ‘The Thirteen Ghosts’.  His label Infinite Chug has been releasing records for over 30 years.

“slinging deliriously woozy lead guitars over tightly wound, angular art-rock foundations.” Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times.

Iain Paxon  has made 20 albums with the group Hamilton Yarns, as well as numerous solo projects, such as his bicycle-based album Inside the Wheel.  Regular Safehousers will of course know him as the host of the monthly Safehouse Lewes sessions!

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Thursday April 24th
7pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

John Butcher, Dominic Lash & Emil Karlsen

John Butcher – saxophones
Dominic Lash – double bass
Emil Karlsen – drums

A trio of three acclaimed improvisors, who released their debut album ‘Here and How’ on Bead Records in 2023.

“Dominic Lash brought this trio together for a recording session at the end of 2022, reasoning that there is only ever one chance of capturing the first time a group plays together. Not that the trio was starting from nothing – although the session that resulted in the album Here and How represents the first time John Butcher and Emil Karlsen had ever played together, Lash and Butcher have a collaborative history going back about fifteen years, while Lash and Karlsen have worked together with increasing frequency.

There is also the heritage of the sax/bass/drums trio format, which this band treats as a resource to be drawn upon rather than a template to be limited by. This allows the music to move seamlessly from pure sonic exploration to dynamic momentum and back again. The album garnered positive reviews and the group has since been featured on BBC Radio 3 and performed regularly. ”

“A master class in closely attentive group playing… anticipation and responsiveness become indistinguishable.” – Julian Cowley, The Wire

“The technical skill on display is incredible, giving these wild, angular jaunts an undercurrent of precision that elevates them to new heights.” – Foxy Digitalis

+ In Threads

James Parsons – drums, percussion
Daniel Spicer – piano, voice, percussion
Verity Spott – cello

In Threads have been playing for over 10 years, with slots at Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival, the Verdict jazz club, Safehouse, the Hi-Zero series of contemporary poetry readings, and at various other events and happenings, including a poetry/music event curated by Dan Spicer at Café OTO in London.

Their first full-length record ‘Orange Justice’ came out on Eyeless records in 2020 and features live and studio recordings that draw on their their light-footed, fun and informal approach to spontaneous composition.

+ Wildcard Quartet
+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Thursday May 22nd
7pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Caroline Kraabel + Khabat Abas

Caroline Kraabel is a saxophonist, artist, conductor, and composer who has been a key part of London’s improv scene for at least 25 years.

She is the founder of the large improvising group ONe_Orchestra New, made up of women, non-binary, and transgender improvisers. She regularly plays live in duos and trios with John Edwards, Zhuyang Liu, Bex Burch, Charlotte Hug, Maggie Nicols and Pat Thomas among many others. Over the years she has also recorded with the likes of Robert Wyatt , Louis Moholo, Cleveland Watkiss, Hyelim Kim, Annie Lewandowski, Susan Alcorn, Mark Sanders, Veryan Weston , Mariá Portugal, Neil Metcalfe, Charlotte Keeffe, Alex Ward, Cath Roberts, Dee Byrne, Damsel Elysium and Chris Corsano.

Kraabel’s soundfilm, London 26 and 28 March 2020: imitation: inversion won the 2021 Ivor Novello Award for Best Sound Art Composer.

Khabat Abas is a cellist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist from Kurdistan-Iraq. Her work explores time, space, and memory through music, everyday sounds, and noises. She delves deeply into how we experience sound, particularly in various geopolitical contexts. Abas uses her instrument beyond traditional norms—improvising, composing, creating videos and sound installations, crafting cellos from diverse materials, and incorporating her body into performances. Through this approach, her work merges politics with personal expression, challenging conventional values and control.

Khabat has performed with various ensembles, including the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, Sulaymaniyah string orchestra, Gothenburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, and the Non-Ensemble for experimental music in Sweden, London Improvisation Orchestra and ONe_Orchestra New, Noise women. 

Simian Carbuncle

Simian Carbuncle are a guitar duo exploring the sonic possibilities of unorthodox techniques. Matt Clark and regular collaborator Ade Southby (Dragons of Disgust, Cosmic Transmissions Collective) are two likeminded and exploratory improvisors regularly performing and partaking of the heady improvised music scenes of Brighton and London.

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Thursday June 5th
7pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Geoff Hearn – tenor sax
Olie Brice – double bass
Spike Wells – drums

Geoff Hearn has been playing tenor and soprano saxophones and flutes for many years in a wide range of genres and now mainly free improvisation. For the last 20 years he has been playing shakuhachi in a meditative mood in sharp contrast to his more energetic free jazz. One of his main interests is improvisational ‘sonic sculptures’ which is most evident in his work with his trio TORQUE with legendary drummer the late Steve Harris and extaordinary Canadian guitarist Jim Black and the ground breaking ‘shape shifting’ ensemble ZAUM.  He was also one of the co-founders of Safehouse!

Olie Brice leads and composes for two groups, a trio with Tom Challenger & Will Glaser and an Octet with Alex Bonney, Kim Macari, Jason Yarde, Rachel Musson, George Crowley, Cath Roberts & Johnny Hunter. Both of these groups were featured on the critically acclaimed double album ‘Fire Hills’.   Frequent collaborators include Mark Sanders, Paul Dunmall, Rachel Musson, Tobias Delius, Cath Roberts and Luis Vicente, and he has also appeared with the likes of Evan Parker, Tony Malaby, John Butcher, Ingrid Laubrock, Ken Vandermark, Eddie Prevost and Louis Moholo.

Spike Wells is a phenomenal sympatico drummer who has played with the best of British and American jazz exponents during his career. He played as a regular member of Tubby Hayes’ quartet and big band from 1968 to Tubby’s death in 1973. As well as playing with Hayes, in both his quartet and his big band, Spike spent a year in Humphrey Lyttelton’s band, and also worked with many visiting soloists at Ronnie Scott’s, including Stan Getz (with whom he also toured Scandinavia), Roland Kirk, Art Farmer, Johnny Griffin and James Moody.  He’s currently part of QOW Trio, a saxophone-double bass-drums trio who continue to explore the territory Sonny Rollins first mapped out on Way Out West.

Ron Caines Trio

Ron Caines – saxophones
Gus Garside – double bass
James Parsons – drums

Saxophonist Ron Caines co-founded the ground breaking experimental prog rock group East of Eden. After becoming disillusioned with commercial music he moved to Bristol and became involved in progressive jazz playing with Keith Tippett, Larry Stabbins, Paul Dunmall, Julie Tippetts, Steve Lacy and others.  His string of albums released in the last decade on the Discus label have been met with great acclaim:
“This is outstanding! Record of the week!!” Matt Parker, British Progressive Jazz
“An impressive and original collection – one of the most worthwhile CDs I’ve heard this year” London Jazz News

Gus Garside is a double bassist mainly concentrating on improvised music, free jazz and contemporary music. Gus plays in several different groupings including his longstanding string trio Arc (with Sylvia Hallett and Danny Kingshill). He has worked on three highly acclaimed albums as part of the Ron Caines/Martin Archer Axis and a duo album with the French saxophone player Hervé Perez released on the New York 577 label in 2021. He has created structured improvisations for performance in the UK and Canada featuring leading players in both countries and is on a new collaboration with dancer Mim King. He is also founding member of the Brighton Safehouse collective.

“…where he differs from the average jazz bassist is in the range of sonorities he conjures from his instrument” Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD.

James Parsons is a drummer with an affinity for free, improvised playing, and has performed in a wide range of groups over the years including Bolide, Ron Caines Trio, Bare Springs, God’s Teeth and the Interstellar Tropics, The Burbling Mind and Grass Balloon.

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Wednesday July 23rd 2025
7.00pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Mark Wastell is a versatile improvising musician who has played a central role in the British improvised music scene for over a quarter of a century. He has performed and recorded extensively and his varied resume includes projects with Derek Bailey, Phil Durrant, John Butcher, Evan Parker, John Zorn, David Toop, Stewart Lee, Maggie Nicols, Thurston Moore and David Sylvian among many others.

Tansy Spinks is an artist, sound artist, and performer. She has been a regular member of The London Improvisers Orchestra, the weekly London Improvisation Workshop (with Eddie Prevost) and has performed in many alternative venues such as Café Oto, Iklectik, Hundred Years Gallery and many more, playing alongside many notable performers of live improvisation, on violin, objects and with voice.

Gus Garside is a double bassist mainly concentrating on improvised music, free jazz and contemporary music. He plays in several different groups including his longstanding string trio Arc. He has worked on three highly acclaimed albums as part of the Ron Caines/Martin Archer Axis, and has created structured improvisations for performance in the UK and Canada featuring leading players in both countries and is on a new collaboration with dancer Mim King. He is also founding member of the Brighton Safehouse collective.

Adrian Southby plays in the prepared electric guitar duo Simian Carbuncle with Matt Clark, a duo with Daniel Spicer – Fettucini Spicer – and is a long-standing improvisor at Safehouse. He has also released numerous solo albums, including the recent The Parasitologists’ Songbook, a musical homage to parasitic creatures. He plays with The Golgis, and leads the avant prog jazz metal power trio Dragons of Disgust.

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Wednesday September 10th 2025
7.00pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Jessica Ackerley is a Canadian guitarist, improviser and composer based in Honolulu and New York City and has been described as “one of the most exciting guitarists to have emerged from the US free music scene in recent years” by Wire Magazine. Since 2017, Ackerley has released 19 albums to much critical acclaim with features in Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, BBC Radio, and Bandcamp.

Eli Wallace is a pianist, improviser, and composer who resides in Brooklyn, NY, leading his own projects, and collaborating with other like-minded artists. His work as a pianist displays a proclivity to free improvisation, incorporating elaborate piano preparations that John Lewis (The Guardian) says is “…pushing the boundaries of the prepared piano.”

Mark Sanders has worked with a host of renowned musicians including Derek Bailey, Henry Grimes, Mathew Shipp, Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, in duo and quartets with Wadada Leo Smith and trios with Charles Gayle with Sirone and William Parker.

“ubiquitous, diverse and constantly creative, drummer Mark Sanders always outdoes himself, whether playing with restraint or erupting like a dynamo.” Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery. NY

Rachel Musson is a saxophonist, improviser and composer living in London, UK. She is involved with a variety of improvisation projects, and works regularly with Mark Sanders, Pat Thomas, Hannah Marshall, Julie Kjaer, Corey Mwamba, Olie Brice, Alex Ward, Alex Hawkins amongst others.

“A free-improviser sensitive to melody-like narrative and dramatic pacing” – John Fordham, The Guardian

Plus support from:

Annie Kerr (violin) and Andrew Greaves (synth)

Debut gig from a new duo formed by two longstanding Safehouse members.

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Wednesday October 22nd 2025
7.00pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Charlotte Keeffe – Sound Brush / trumpet, flugelhorn and compositions
Ashley John Long – double bass
Ben Handysides – drums
Moss Freed – guitar

With her Right Here, Right Now Quartet Charlotte Keeffe enables raw musical ingredients and individual expressions to come together and flow. She is captivated by trumpeters like Jaimie Branch, Peter Evans, Tomasz Stańko, Nate Wooley and Lester Bowie, and inspired by abstract painters – referring to her horns as ‘Sound Brushes’.

“The radical spirit of offhand precarity which radiates throughout this session frequently bubbles over into an effervescent sense of the imperative to explore. In a word? Fearless.” – PRESTO MUSIC

“A messy emporium of raw, raucous realness. Alive.  Keeffe and her quartet nailed it.” – Sammy Stein, FREE JAZZ BLOG

“Charlotte Keeffe is rapidly developing a reputation as one of UK’s finest improvisers” – Tony Dudley-Evans

Charlotte vividly describes the quartet as “a breeding ground for squelchy, sploshy, splashy sound-brush playing …Overtly over-blowing, splitting, splattering, squirming, squeaking and squealing out ALIVE! Howling and hooting, chomping and chaffing… Dusty, distorted, flimsy, fragile, manic, ghostly, guttural sound strokes rip through whirlwinds and whirlpools of wholesome gooey-sound-dough! A turbulent tease, staggering, swaying, abruptly plunging into intentional vagueness… A messy emporium of raw, raucous realness. Alive. Right Here, Right Now. It is as it is…”

Larker

Matt Clark is an improvising guitarist and composer from Brighton, drawing on free jazz, avant-garde, experimental and electronic music. He is currently working with MC3, a London-based improvising trio with Charlotte Keeffe and James Edmunds – the trio engages in musical conversations and sonic exploration; interweaving dialogues between three distinctive voices: guitar, trumpet and drums; and with Simian Carbuncle, a guitar duo exploring the sonic possibilities of unorthodox techniques, with regular collaborator Ade Southby.

Annie Kerr draws on a wide range of influences to create improvised soundworlds using violin, piano and text in performance, session work and studio collaborations with dancers, artists, actors and filmmakers. She plays in regular and ad hoc combos with musicians in Brighton and London.

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits