#2: taupe return

After a couple of months away from this website, I find myself lucky to be in a position of writing an entry shortly after a tiring, fulfilling and much-needed three weeks of immersive activity with Taupe. For those that may not know, Taupe is a noisy-riffy-improvised-jazzish trio founded during my undergraduate in Newcastle. I play saxophone with effects, and get to stare into the whites of Mike Parr-Burman and Adam Stapleford’s eyes throughout. We’ve been going now for not far off ten years, and it’s in many ways my first love with respect to the life of original music making I’m still scrabbling around trying to piece together.

The music we make is either spontaneous and highly interactive, or collaboratively pre-composed – often with a lot of time devoted to various minutiae. We live in three different cities and COVID-19 left the group unable to do much; even after our album tour for Not Blue Light was cancelled, various attempts at online collaborating never seemed to spark the imagination in the way we had hoped. Oftentimes the latency was frankly just too noticeable, and facilitated for an even more sluggish reaction speed than I'm often guilty of when we're just sharing a stage...

Photo: Harrison Reid

Score Excerpt from Foreign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy by James Joys

Considering the above, it was a delight to spend the first week of August at the Sage Gateshead as part of their summer studios programme where we had a room for a week to rehearse, write and generally reignite the artistic flame. The rehearsal period was an intense experience after so long away, as was driving the hire van into central Manchester for our first gig since October 2019. The show at the Peer Hat was a proper sweaty basement evening, and the first of four shows across four very different venues. Any musician friends out there, do check out Colchester Arts Centre, The Vortex, and Kazimier Stockroom. Great venues, great cities, great people!

The final leg of this three-part Taupe-stravaganza was a recording in Glasgow’s Dystopia Studios. It began life as a funeral parlour and is now overseen by Luigi Pasquini who knows how to make things sound good but, to my knowledge, hasn't had much past involvement with corpses.. This recording was a first for Taupe as we were recording scores to form part of James Joys’ new work Foreign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy. The pieces were, flatteringly, written with us in mind and are often a mixture of written instructions, melodic fragments, visual stimulus, certain harmonic trajectories or any/all of the above. It was often a wrenchingly moving texture to be immersed in and to add to; the scores themselves are as beautiful to look at as the genuine excerpts from the UK’s immigration policy and asylum paperwork are horrendous to read. I can only hope that we have done it some justice, and I can’t wait to hear it once James has done his thing and sent them to band-friend and experimental turntablist Mariam Rezaei.

I’d also urge people to check out Marco Woolf’s new release on Phlexx Records. I was asked to improvise some saxophone a long while ago, and hearing the tapestry he has woven together is quite something. Other new things from friends include Chloe Foy’s amazing new record Where Shall We Begin. The album launch gig was quite special but was also my first time being surrounded by people I knew for a long while so I had to run away as soon as it was finished. Here’s a more public ‘thank you for inviting me, and congratulations!’ than I could muster at the time.

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