The Howling Plays Manchester's Rainy Heart Thursday 24 July

I am very pleased to announce that The Howling are performing in Manchester next Thursday, 24 July. This will not only be the first time The Howling visits Manchester, but it also the first time I have been in front of an audience there in over 15 years. I’m sure very little has changed. Many thanks to Graham Massey for inviting us to take part in such a fabulous spoken-word evening. Robin and I both looking forward to having a more meaningful contact with some of our favourite tongues.

 

Hosting us is the Rainy Heart Film Club – tickets and details are available here.

 

And here’s the press release for the longer version: Thursday 24th July

 - House of Tongues - An Evening of Spoken Word, Sound and Images guest curated by 808 States Graham Massey. Biting Tongues - the pioneering Manchester post-punk band who released music on New Hormones and Factory records was made up of members with expansive creative practices, who originally formed to record the soundtrack to a film. Graham Massey brings together various Biting Tongues members for an evening of performances that show the range of those creative practices; from art writing, to carousel slides to experimental sound work:

 

- The Howling - is a collaborative project by Ken Hollings and Robin The Fog. Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster who has been featured on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4. His numerous books are all published by Strange Attractor/MIT Press with his latest book for them being The Trash Project Volume Three: Paradise. Robin The Fog is a sound designer and radio producer, who also creates recordings, performances and installations entirely from manipulating magnetic tape on a quartet of vintage tape machines. Described in The Wire as ‘the missing link between John Cage and Suicide’, The Howling serves up intense collisions of spoken word and pounding analogue tape effects. Collaboratively they have released 3 albums, with their latest LP, Be Quiet In This Church, due from The Tapeworm in summer 2025.

 

- I Looked Into Their Eyes And I Saw Only Pixels - A new performance work by Howard Walmsley. An filmmaker, artist and anthropologist living in Manchester, where for the last ten years in particular, there has been considerable redevelopment: an explosion of new buildings and reconfigured public space. These construction sites are surrounded by hoardings printed with giant illustrations of the proposed structure, complete with images of digital citizens inhabiting the space. Imagined people presented in yet-to-be places. This performance, made up of 35mm slide Carousel presentation, commentary and live soundscape takes the figures from these hoarding - known as entourage cutouts, which are printed onto acetate and dissected, corrupted, scalpel sliced and layered into the frames of 35mm glass slide mounts. In these slide collages, the figures overlap and collide, become framed in new relationships and chance meetings. Illuminated in a new world, they begin to reflect the chaos of the city.

 

- Meadow - an ongoing text based project by Flo Goodliffe, an artist and writer, previously published by: Worms, Spam, Travesties, Deleuzine. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art Master’s Writing programme. This performance of Meadow samples sections of material from a longer work of writing-in-progress. The project relates to the imagined interiority of the character Meadow Soprano, of The Sopranos TV show, in fan-fic style. Meadow is reframed in this work as a protagonist. Her perspective is inter-sliced with a speculative account of the experience of actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who reckoned in secrecy with diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis during the filming of The Sopranos. Flo’s voice rounds out the cast participant in this heady work of auto-fiction and biography. The work describes experience of chronic illness and performance. Its choral narration projects yearning for community. Meadow probes thinking on narrative ownership, intellectual property and of capacity for perception, sharing and understanding. 

 

- Four Winds - Graham Massey presents an exploration of his bespoke woodwind collection in 4 parts:

WIND 1 - A 1950s Noblet Alto Clarinet with Jupiter 8 Synthesizer - I Chun Ling (traditional arr)

WIND 2 - A modified Selmar Clarinet with Maestro Woodwind System - Sweet Song Of Summer by Bee Gees 

WIND 3 - The Iguarglaphon -A homemade Chalumeau used on many recordings since the 70s - Norfolk Lightning

WIND 4 - The Reed Cornet -A Woodwind /Brass Hybrid - Tripolis from Kicked From The Stars

 

House of Tongues 

18.30 – 23:00

Thursday 24 July

Rainy Heart Film Club

The Bungalow

Kampus 

Aytoun Street

Manchester M1 3DA

Admission £6.50 – cheap

 

Pictured above

KH at the Horse Hospital by Rachel Hollings, Graham Massey IG post with details, Robin the Fog and The Howling in full effect at Café OTO by Beth Arzy