Tuesday 10 November 2026: One Orchestra New at The Vortex,
11 Gillett Square, London, N16 8AZ.
More soon.
Tuesday 28 July 2026: ONe_Orchestra New at THE PIEHOUSE co op – a fundraiser for this august venue! 213 – 214 Edward Place, Deptford, London SE8 5HD @piehouse.coop. £5 concession, £7 general, £10 solidarity
SCHEDULE:
ONe_Orchestra New Workshop in Free Improvisation 7.00 PM-8.00 PM
… and ONe_Orchestra New performances!
Small group 8.30 PM
Whole group 9.15 PM
Workshop in Free Improvisation. All acoustic instruments, voices, and dancers welcome. For electric instruments – if you can bring your own SMALL amp that’s OK too. Get in touch, or just show up.
Why is improvising important?
Why would we want to make different sounds, that could be perceived as wrong, ugly, mistaken, transgressive?
Who gets to describe sounds and how they are heard? What does it mean to “listen”?
If we have rarely been heard, can we subvert and extend the dominant sound-worlds (including the expected sonic textures of “European Improvised Music”)? Can we create our own individual and group sounds that are not part of those worlds?
In a larger improvising group, how do we play safely and with mutual respect along the fruitful zone between each person’s freedom and that of every other person? How do we balance the power dynamics and differences among different instruments and players?
In free improvisation, what IS respect? What does responsibility entail?
Some might argue that a contradiction exists between wanting to explore “other” sounds and specifying that we need always to respect each other in large group improvising – that respecting the freedom of others impedes their own… But respect does not preclude “other” forms of relation, on the contrary! In large group free improvisation, the discipline of equality and mutual trust/support allows much greater freedom for ALL and each, to go farther and more safely in to the scary, forbidden, transgressive zones.
“There is a Grain of Sand in [Deptford] that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it: tis TRANSlucent & has many Angles”
Wm Blake
Photo by Guilherme Pelluci
Sunday 31 May 2026: ONe_Orchestra New at The Horse Hospital, London
After a little bit of difficulty (for musicians and audience) in getting to the venue, because of the severe congestion caused by “circuses-not-bread” sporting fans whose betrayed hopes were invested in a futile and distracting mass gathering, our Horse Hospital gig on 31 May felt like a step into a new world for us! We were mostly acoustic (apart from turntables, keyboard, sitar); we did three small-group improvisations and then the entire group played:
Miraku/Casling/Perrot/Lewis were exploring very quiet improvising, drawing us in to their textures and interplay. Not all playing at once all the time, they trusted themselves and each other in solo improvisations, too, of hushed voice or whispered bass, emotional and very concentrated (in several senses). There were tantalising hints of speechlike song… quiet sounds were given full value, and held their importance BECAUSE they stayed quiet and spacious.
Then Drozd/Byrne/Roberts/Lynch/Kraabel took up the acoustic challenge of a four-saxes-plus-violin combination… and unassumingly rewrote instrumental stereotypes to make a varied and adventurous improvisation that foregrounded the violin.
The third and final subgroup, Rahman/Steinberg/Ferguson-Lewis/Wielebska, reconfirmed the connection between turntablist and sitarist, who pushed each other sonically, often taking turns in an almost conversational way while the contrasting textures of the two voices shifted forward and back. Again the roles assumed were very much against the grain of expectations, and all the better for it.
Finally, the thirteen of us improvised together. Having had the chance to play in, and hear, those novel combinations we were primed to do something different, and so we did. There was a transparency to the sound, and an awareness that, with such a large group, NOT making sound contributes as much as (if not more than) uttering does… the improvisation twisted, swelled, halted and raced forward, and drew us towards genuinely new, unexpected, ways of interacting. Thanks to Guilherme Pelluci for the photos. Special thanks to Grace Black and The Horse Hospital for unfailing support!
pre-gig reflections:
Free improvisation is mostly unrecordable.
Some documentation is possible,
but improvising while physically present
together, performers and listeners, is so intensely
specific to its time, place, and participants
that technology traduces it even more than
it does other live arts. This is the most
fleeting, fugitive, precious kind of LIVE sound.
SEE AND HEAR FOR YOURSELF!
Saturday 18 April 2026: ONe_Orchestra New at Konszrukting Soundz, at The Fisherman’s Chapel, Leigh-On-Sea from 19h00! Subgroups from the orchestra, followed by the whole she-bang. (This orchestra was limited to eleven performers…: Saadet Türköz; Jane Perrot; Bara Noha; Barbara Mukoda; Rosa Theodora; Megan Steinberg; Sue Lynch; Iris Casling; Teresa Hackel; Shama Rahman; Caroline Kraabel)
Photos by Dawid Laskowski; video compilation (thanks to Lev Dudas) here.
Sunday 21 December 2025: Members of ONe_Orchestra New are part of a 12-hour free improvisation at The Horse Hospital! Life-changing beauty.
Sunday 14 September 2025: ONe_Orchestra New will be improvising at Cafe Oto, drawing on their in-depth monthly explorations and investigations of identities in life, society, and improvisation… using materials (sonic, object, structure, bodies) that are othered… thinking about desire and its complement (or opposite), pleasure, in improvised music and dance… attempting non-binary or fluid structures, communications, and sounds in improvisation. Trying to get beyond standard forms and interactions as well as standard sounds.
Featuring improvisers Khabat Abas, Dee Byrne, Teresa Hackel, Caroline Kraabel, Olga Ksendzovska, Sue Lynch, Kate Mellors, Rosa Theodora … and many more – watch this space.
Saturday 6 September 2025: ONe_Orchestra New will be improvising at Ad Lib, Open Ealing, from 19h30!
19 July 2025: ONe_Orchestra New improvising in vocal and instrumental music, and dance, for SEVEN hours nonstop as part of TRACES art biennial, in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park (Mile End tube). Approximate location on what3words: translated.home.light
14 December 2024: Release of ONe_Orchestra New Live at The Vortex July 2024! A live recording of the two sets ONe_Orchestra New played at Dalston’s Vortex Jazz Club on 10 July 2024. Beautifully recorded and mixed by Bella Unwin.
Photo by Tom Ward
Personnel:
Sofia Vaisman Maturana, cello
Julia Brüssel, violin
Lisa Elde, voice
Sharon Gal, voice
Rosa Theodora, keys
Olga Ksendzovska, keys
Shima Kobayashi, chromatic harmonica
Maureen Wolloshin, oboes
Dee Byrne, alto sax
Caroline Kraabel, alto sax
Sue Lynch, tenor sax, flute, clarinet
Cath Roberts, baritone sax
Barbara Mukoda, flute
Damsel Elysium, violin, double bass
Shama Rahman, sitar
Kirke Gross, cello
Lu Greco, dance
Paula Riofrio, dance
Sunday 6 October 2024, 15h30-19h00
The next performance by ONe_Orchestra New will be at Jazz Rumours, 12 Pine Grove, Finsbury Park, London, N4 3LL.
(Provisional and partial line-up for 6 October.)
An opportunity for ONe_Orchestra New to play completely freely and for longer than is usual in performance, stepping away from the aids of conducted and devised pieces to put into practice our Improvisation Lab work on large-group free improvisation – based on equality, respect, courage, originality. There will be snacks.
Wednesday 10 July 2024, 19h45
ONe_Orchestra New at The Vortex, 11 Gillett Square, London N16 8AZ, on Wednesday 10 July 2024.
Tickets £15 /£12.50 (members) /£10 (students and Universal Credit)
New members Barbara Mukoda (flutes), Paula Riofrio (dance), and Julia Brüssels (violin) will be joining us, along with many original and more recent members!
8 March 2024, 19h00-21h15
ONe_Orchestra New will be performing risky, inspiring, original large-group improvised music at the Chapel, Kings College London, Strand campus.
Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/visit/strand-campus
Admission £10, £5 concessions. No tickets on the door, please buy via Eventbrite (link coming soon)
Music that was lost, damaged or never made/heard.
Since distinctions between people are too often used to justify unequal treatment, and as subjects of this unequal treatment ourselves, the source and foundation of our music is rooted in the belief that our equality springs from our shared humanity. We assert that all instruments, all musical education/cultures, and all sounds are different, but fundamentally of equal worth. We believe it’s possible to challenge roles, hierarchies, rules, and conventional trajectories through our collective musical practice.
How can we make the most of our differences — in how we pay attention, in our ways of listening and uttering? How far can we go into difference? Our improvising together is what transmutes our histories and sounds into music.
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The next performance by ONe_Orchestra New will be at London’s Cafe Oto on 6 July 2023.
https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/one_orchestra-new/
ONe exciting thing about improvising as a person who is not a cis-gendered white man is working to find a new musical language, freeing oneself from the default assumptions built up over millennia… this may produce musics and processes that sound strange in some ways, or to some ears, but if we can conceive of them and allow ourselves to explore them it opens up novel, important and unfamiliar sound-worlds.
Improvising is also a way for us to be together safely in sound, life and communication while we search for these new languages through: mutual respect; listening, uttering; knowing when we can be trusted NOT to listen; learning to listen in new ways… every time ONe plays there are new ways of hearing, as well as new things to hear.
Improvisation is also, by necessity, a big part of just being, and surviving as, ‘other’ … conversely, otherness – that everyone has in their heart, in some tiny or huge place – is a big part of where improvisation comes from.
We don’t want to be granted the special privileges from which we’re currently excluded, but to re-make music and the world so all can be heard!
oneorchestranew.com 