soon:

Fri 3 Sept 2010, 11.30 pm, live on Resonance FM, CB with The Nuclear Family (CB, Sylvia Hallett, Maxwell Hallett). Programme is Johny Brown's Mining For Gold
Sat 4 Sept 2010, 8 pm, Jah Wobble's Nippon Dub Ensemble and Talvin Singh at Covent Garden Opera House as part of Deloitte Ignite 2010.
Further Jah Wobble shows: see 30 Hertz Records
CB & Jaki Leibezeit, Klangbad 2010, photo by Manuel Wagner.
recent:
August 2010, CB with Jaki Leibezeit (Can), Robert Lippok (To Rococo Rot) & Jochen Irmler (Faust) at Klangbad Festival, Germany.
New short films by Louise Oliver with songs written by Louise & CB: Who Bathes The Dust; Morning, Time To Sing; En Suite; Five Red Leaves; Mud And Air; Day And Night; Songs Of Absence - all the old hits are here.
July & August 2010, tour with Jah Wobble's Japanese Dub: see 30Hertz Records.
June 2010 Spitalfields Festival, Clive Bell with Chris Dowding and Ruth Goller (Acoustic Ladyland).
New Jah Wobble album Welcome To My World, featuring CB and Sylvia Hallett. Hear "New Delhi" at 30 Hertz Records
Free download of Third Site Live by Paul Schütze, played by CB, Paul Schütze, Raoul Björkenheim and Simon Hopkins. Another free download: Paul Schütze's Partial Site, originally recorded for BBC Radio 3's Mixing It.
Feb 2010 Okeanos & [rout] ensemble at Oxford Brookes University. Part of Sonic Art Oxford 2010
Jan 2010 played Japanese Music with Rie Yanagisawa (koto & shamisen) for Tokyo City Promotion in QEII Conference Centre, London.
MySpace: a page for Clive Bell, designed by Maxwell Hallett aka MaxHasWax & Maximus Drumus. Another page for Floating World Ensemble
November 2009, Okeanos (contemporary music & Japanese traditional instruments) presented concert in Cutting Edge series at the Warehouse, Waterloo, London: collaboration with Paul Whitty's [rout] (gtr/bs/drums/electronics group). These pieces are being recorded in summer 2010.
Autumn 2009, David Sylvian's album release Manafon. CB contributed introductory essay to Deluxe Edition of CD and DVD Amplified Gesture. Samadhisound label
September 2009: Floating World Ensemble (Japanese classical music, Clive Bell & Melissa Holding), performances in Glasgow University & Edinburgh Central Library, supporting an exhibition of Japanese prints.
Clive Bell onstage with Jah Wobble's Nippon Dub Ensemble, photo by Paul Cantrell

Summer 2010: Brainwave, a new touring show by The Whalley Range All Stars: music by Clive Bell, featuring Max Hallett on English Hammered Dulcimer, and Richard Bolton on electric guitar. "Their latest show, "Brainwave", is for audiences of 200-300 with gigantic puppets, animators and a stage within a giant head within a garden shed," The Guardian, October 2009.
August 09: performed at Dartington Summer School concerts with Okeanos Ensemble Two UK premieres of works by Somei Satoh, composer in residence. Late night show of Japanese tales with with ghost-story-teller Kumiko Mendl.
June 09: new release by TWINKLE3 (Richard Scott, David Ross & Clive Bell): Let's Make A Solar System. Vinyl only, limited edition on the ini.itu label (Belgium). Cover photography by Judith Goodman. HEAR TWINKLE3 HERE. Reviews here. Buy it here.
"The album features a trio whose combined experience in the field of sonic exploration easily justifies claims of them constituting a friendly supergroup. Over decade-long careers, their reach has been global, their appeal broad, their sound eclectic. While Richard Scott has immersed himself in the world of modular synthesizers and untiring acoustic curiosity, David Ross's continuous journeys to the heart of the moment have made him one of the UK's most revered improvisers. Clive Bell, on the other hand, has worked with artists as different as Jah Wobble, David Sylvian and Karl Jenkins – signs of a mind finely attuned to music's inherent qualities rather than public images. The fine friction between Ross's and Scott's digital dots and dances and his Shakuhachi lines is indeed one of the most distinct characteristics of "Solar System", which makes a point of contrasting organic with synthetic material, mood work with proficiently unfolding themes and tranquilly agitated passages with intricately agitated tranquility." Review of Let's Make A Solar System by Tobias Fischer from Tokafi.com :

2009 in The Wire magazine : CB contributed feature articles on Aki Onda, Yan Jun, Chinese Experimental Music, John Wynne and the Sublime Frequencies April tour featuring Omar Souleyman and Group Doueh.
Videos of Clive playing (and teaching) shakuhachi at ESS London Summer School

***

recent recordings :

March 2010: Japanese Dub by Jah Wobble on 30 Hertz Records

available here

***

Car Ad Music, CD by Jah Wobble on 30 Hertz label , featuring BJ Cole and CB

***

Released November 2008, Jah Wobble's Chinese Dub on 30 Hertz Records

David Honigman in the Financial Times on WOMAD 08:

"Away in the arboretum, Jah Wobble gave the performance of the festival. His new project, Chinese Dub, started as a relatively modest commission for Liverpool 08, marking the city's year as European capital of culture, and grew into a tour and an album. Wobble, in grey suit and hat, played forceful basslines that could have performed CPR two fields away. Dodging about the stage, he cued other players to drop in and out. His wife, Zi Lan Liao, sat playing the guzheng, a plucked zither. Clive Bell played Chinese pipes.

Dub and Chinese music proved a perfect mixture. The earnest folk melodies leavened the dub's conceptual self-importance; the dub hardened the Chinese music against kitsch. As if to demonstrate the kinship, the band played Augustus Pablo's “Java”, echoing with melodica and a guzheng solo dovetailed in as the rhythm dropped out. Later, Claire Rose sang Dawn Penn's “No, No, No”, rising from a low growl to impressionistic wails, accompanied by the Tibetan singer Gu Ying.

Midway, Wobble brought on two mask-changing dancers. As they twirled and high kicked, red and yellow silk cloaks whipping around them, their masks constantly changed from one eyeblink to the next, expressions and colours and designs constantly transforming as hands flashed across faces. It was a moment of stage magic so surprising, and so inexplicable, that the audience was dumbstruck."

Watch Chinese Dub on YouTube , plus more from the WOMAD 08 show here.

***

The Rooms by Philip Clemo, released October 2008.

"This all adds up to pretty much a dream ticket. Clemo's 'compositions' meander into your peripheral auditory field and recede again with dreamlike nuance. It's beautiful, transcendent and yes, indefinable." 4/5 . Chris Jones, BBC Online , UK.

"Its best track is actually the longest - a 16-minute opener called "The Place". Clemo's hypnotic grooves form the backdrop for rich and satisfying textures from his repertory company of improvisers, ably recorded and mixed by Talk Talk engineer Phill Brown." John L Walters, Guardian.

More info at Philip Clemo's site

***

numb and number: different fish

numb and number are clive bell (flute, shakuhachi, khene, duduk, bansuri, norwegian seljefløyte, zither) & david harrow (monome 128, theremin, juno 106). album recorded los angeles / london 2008 produced and mixed by david harrow at workhouse studio LA.

"successfully illustrates Bell's ruminative, intelligent style." Nick Cain in The Wire.

available now as digital download from iTunes via www.workhouse.us

***

Wood Wind Tide by Ampanman is an album by Clive Bell (shakuhachi) and Richard Scott (processing). Trippy, spectacular landscapes, all generated from the sound of the Japanese flute. On Chinese indie label KWANYIN RECORDS. Cover by Kazuko Hohki.

"Clive Bell is always a treat when it comes to new approaches to traditional instruments, and a true master of the shakuhachi for that matter. This CD, which risks being buried under an undeserved coat of mystery given that it's not exactly easy to find (here goes a tip of my hat to Yan Jun, label honcho, who gracefully sent me a bunch of releases including this one), sees the English improviser lending his abilities to Richard Scott's processing.

Let's make it perfectly clear: this is not a “Clive Bell with delay and reverb” kind of a record. Scott thinks in instrumental fashion with his machines, capturing the essence of the partner's flute and building from it, or deciding instead to rape that very wooden soul by transforming its purity in the asphalt of a highway that leads to mesmerizing positive hollowness, an engrossing alternance between gigantic “chords” made of harmonized pitches and ever-mutating shapes where the shakuhachi starts with its regular timbre but soon morphs into some sort of quavering extraneous propagation.

The overall sound is ominous in traits, luminous quite often, engaging throughout, taking possession of the listening environment with firm levity in a cross of extreme dissonance and disciplined stretching of unknown harmonies. Beautiful, in a word - and worthy of being tracked down." By Massimo Ricci

***

Acoustic Dream is the February 08 release of trio improvisations from CB, Sylvia Hallett and pianist Roberto Filoseta, on UH RECORDINGS

"Through various manipulations Bell, Filoseta and Hallett successfully tap into forgotten worlds and the subconscious to communicate with musical voices that have since passed into memory but still evoke a powerful presence." The Wire Magazine, June 2008

***

An Account Of My Hut is an album of improvisations for shakuhachi and nay (Arabic flute), by CB and Bechir Saade. Cover painting by Sylvia Hallett. Hear extracts on the Another Timbre label website. Released March 2008.

“British shakuhachi player Clive Bell seems to have found a soul mate in Lebanese ney player Bechir Saade. The pair use a variety of extended techniques to put their point across. The main feeling one gets from their music is that of overt peacefulness and a state of rest. It's not that the music stands still, but rather that it doesn't particularly move into places of eruption, nor does it wander off into unchartered, murky waters. Though the state of calm prevails, there are still moments of improvised vitality here. The bursting, breath-popping, tongue-rolling can clearly be pictured as the duo rev up their collective engines on "Withered Leaves". Haunting, exhilarating but mostly calm improvisations that see the two musicians become one single unit, An Account of My Hut is naked and honest music of the highest timbre.” Review by Tom Sekowki, Gaz-eta.

Hear the Simon Reynell "Wire Wind Mix" from The Wire's Adventures In Modern Music radio programme on Resonance FM.

***

David Sylvian's When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima,

featuring Clive Bell, Christian Fennesz, Arve Henriksen, Akira Rabelais and David Sylvian.

review by Chris Jones on bbc website:
"...Conceived as a work in progress to be completed by the external sounds of the actual Chichu Art Gallery, When Loud Weather… is a collage of found sound, drones and contributions from a ensemble of big-hitters in the European avant fraternity including shakuhachi maestro Clive Bell, guitarist Christian Fennesz and Norwegian trumpet/electronics genius, Arve Henriksen.
... it shows how far the man has come in recent years and how carefully and wisely he's choosing his fellow travellers. Never less than beautiful, When Loud Weather... deserves to be given space next to his more mainstream work."

Samadhi Sound label

Benesse House art museum

***

CB playing pi saw flute at Klangbad 2010, photo by Manuel Wagner

***

CLIVE BELL: NEWS LATE SUMMER 2010
Clive Bell and shakuhachi, picture by Barry Macdonald

soon: Fri 3 Sept 2010, 11.30 pm, live on Resonance FM, CB with The Nuclear Family (CB, Sylvia Hallett, Maxwell Hallett). Programme is Johny Brown's Mining For Gold Sat 4 Sept 2010, 8 pm, Jah Wobble's Nippon Dub Ensemble and Talvin Singh at Covent Garden Opera House as part of Deloitte Ignite 2010. Further Jah Wobble shows: see 30 Hertz Records CB & Jaki Leibezeit, Klangbad 2010, photo by Manuel Wagner. recent: August 2010, CB with Jaki Leibezeit (Can), Robert Lippok (To Rococo Rot) & Jochen Irmler (Faust) at Klangbad Festival, Germany. New short films by Louise Oliver with songs written by Louise & CB: Who Bathes The Dust; Morning, Time To Sing; En Suite; Five Red Leaves; Mud And Air; Day And Night; Songs Of Absence - all the old hits are here. July & August 2010, tour with Jah Wobble's Japanese Dub: see 30Hertz Records. June 2010 Spitalfields Festival, Clive Bell with Chris Dowding and Ruth Goller (Acoustic Ladyland). New Jah Wobble album Welcome To My World, featuring CB and Sylvia Hallett. Hear "New Delhi" at 30 Hertz Records Free download of Third Site Live by Paul Schütze, played by CB, Paul Schütze, Raoul Björkenheim and Simon Hopkins. Another free download: Paul Schütze's Partial Site, originally recorded for BBC Radio 3's Mixing It. Feb 2010 Okeanos & [rout] ensemble at Oxford Brookes University. Part of Sonic Art Oxford 2010 Jan 2010 played Japanese Music with Rie Yanagisawa (koto & shamisen) for Tokyo City Promotion in QEII Conference Centre, London. MySpace: a page for Clive Bell, designed by Maxwell Hallett aka MaxHasWax & Maximus Drumus. Another page for Floating World Ensemble November 2009, Okeanos (contemporary music & Japanese traditional instruments) presented concert in Cutting Edge series at the Warehouse, Waterloo, London: collaboration with Paul Whitty's [rout] (gtr/bs/drums/electronics group). These pieces are being recorded in summer 2010. Autumn 2009, David Sylvian's album release Manafon. CB contributed introductory essay to Deluxe Edition of CD and DVD Amplified Gesture. Samadhisound label September 2009: Floating World Ensemble (Japanese classical music, Clive Bell & Melissa Holding), performances in Glasgow University & Edinburgh Central Library, supporting an exhibition of Japanese prints. Clive Bell onstage with Jah Wobble's Nippon Dub Ensemble, photo by Paul Cantrell Summer 2010: Brainwave, a new touring show by The Whalley Range All Stars: music by Clive Bell, featuring Max Hallett on English Hammered Dulcimer, and Richard Bolton on electric guitar. "Their latest show, "Brainwave", is for audiences of 200-300 with gigantic puppets, animators and a stage within a giant head within a garden shed," The Guardian, October 2009. August 09: performed at Dartington Summer School concerts with Okeanos Ensemble Two UK premieres of works by Somei Satoh, composer in residence. Late night show of Japanese tales with with ghost-story-teller Kumiko Mendl. June 09: new release by TWINKLE3 (Richard Scott, David Ross & Clive Bell): Let's Make A Solar System. Vinyl only, limited edition on the ini.itu label (Belgium). Cover photography by Judith Goodman. HEAR TWINKLE3 HERE. Reviews here. Buy it here. "The album features a trio whose combined experience in the field of sonic exploration easily justifies claims of them constituting a friendly supergroup. Over decade-long careers, their reach has been global, their appeal broad, their sound eclectic. While Richard Scott has immersed himself in the world of modular synthesizers and untiring acoustic curiosity, David Ross's continuous journeys to the heart of the moment have made him one of the UK's most revered improvisers. Clive Bell, on the other hand, has worked with artists as different as Jah Wobble, David Sylvian and Karl Jenkins – signs of a mind finely attuned to music's inherent qualities rather than public images. The fine friction between Ross's and Scott's digital dots and dances and his Shakuhachi lines is indeed one of the most distinct characteristics of "Solar System", which makes a point of contrasting organic with synthetic material, mood work with proficiently unfolding themes and tranquilly agitated passages with intricately agitated tranquility." Review of Let's Make A Solar System by Tobias Fischer from Tokafi.com : 2009 in The Wire magazine : CB contributed feature articles on Aki Onda, Yan Jun, Chinese Experimental Music, John Wynne and the Sublime Frequencies April tour featuring Omar Souleyman and Group Doueh. Videos of Clive playing (and teaching) shakuhachi at ESS London Summer School * recent recordings : March 2010: Japanese Dub by Jah Wobble on 30 Hertz Records available here * Car Ad Music, CD by Jah Wobble on 30 Hertz label , featuring BJ Cole and CB *** Released November 2008, Jah Wobble's Chinese Dub on 30 Hertz Records David Honigman in the Financial Times on WOMAD 08: "Away in the arboretum, Jah Wobble gave the performance of the festival. His new project, Chinese Dub, started as a relatively modest commission for Liverpool 08, marking the city's year as European capital of culture, and grew into a tour and an album. Wobble, in grey suit and hat, played forceful basslines that could have performed CPR two fields away. Dodging about the stage, he cued other players to drop in and out. His wife, Zi Lan Liao, sat playing the guzheng, a plucked zither. Clive Bell played Chinese pipes. Dub and Chinese music proved a perfect mixture. The earnest folk melodies leavened the dub's conceptual self-importance; the dub hardened the Chinese music against kitsch. As if to demonstrate the kinship, the band played Augustus Pablo's “Java”, echoing with melodica and a guzheng solo dovetailed in as the rhythm dropped out. Later, Claire Rose sang Dawn Penn's “No, No, No”, rising from a low growl to impressionistic wails, accompanied by the Tibetan singer Gu Ying. Midway, Wobble brought on two mask-changing dancers. As they twirled and high kicked, red and yellow silk cloaks whipping around them, their masks constantly changed from one eyeblink to the next, expressions and colours and designs constantly transforming as hands flashed across faces. It was a moment of stage magic so surprising, and so inexplicable, that the audience was dumbstruck." Watch Chinese Dub on YouTube , plus more from the WOMAD 08 show here. *** The Rooms by Philip Clemo, released October 2008. "This all adds up to pretty much a dream ticket. Clemo's 'compositions' meander into your peripheral auditory field and recede again with dreamlike nuance. It's beautiful, transcendent and yes, indefinable." 4/5 . Chris Jones, BBC Online , UK. "Its best track is actually the longest - a 16-minute opener called "The Place". Clemo's hypnotic grooves form the backdrop for rich and satisfying textures from his repertory company of improvisers, ably recorded and mixed by Talk Talk engineer Phill Brown." John L Walters, Guardian. More info at Philip Clemo's site *** numb and number: different fish numb and number are clive bell (flute, shakuhachi, khene, duduk, bansuri, norwegian seljefløyte, zither) & david harrow (monome 128, theremin, juno 106). album recorded los angeles / london 2008 produced and mixed by david harrow at workhouse studio LA. "successfully illustrates Bell's ruminative, intelligent style." Nick Cain in The Wire. available now as digital download from iTunes via www.workhouse.us * Wood Wind Tide by Ampanman is an album by Clive Bell (shakuhachi) and Richard Scott (processing). Trippy, spectacular landscapes, all generated from the sound of the Japanese flute. On Chinese indie label KWANYIN RECORDS. Cover by Kazuko Hohki. "Clive Bell is always a treat when it comes to new approaches to traditional instruments, and a true master of the shakuhachi for that matter. This CD, which risks being buried under an undeserved coat of mystery given that it's not exactly easy to find (here goes a tip of my hat to Yan Jun, label honcho, who gracefully sent me a bunch of releases including this one), sees the English improviser lending his abilities to Richard Scott's processing. Let's make it perfectly clear: this is not a “Clive Bell with delay and reverb” kind of a record. Scott thinks in instrumental fashion with his machines, capturing the essence of the partner's flute and building from it, or deciding instead to rape that very wooden soul by transforming its purity in the asphalt of a highway that leads to mesmerizing positive hollowness, an engrossing alternance between gigantic “chords” made of harmonized pitches and ever-mutating shapes where the shakuhachi starts with its regular timbre but soon morphs into some sort of quavering extraneous propagation. The overall sound is ominous in traits, luminous quite often, engaging throughout, taking possession of the listening environment with firm levity in a cross of extreme dissonance and disciplined stretching of unknown harmonies. Beautiful, in a word - and worthy of being tracked down." By Massimo Ricci * Acoustic Dream is the February 08 release of trio improvisations from CB, Sylvia Hallett and pianist Roberto Filoseta, on UH RECORDINGS "Through various manipulations Bell, Filoseta and Hallett successfully tap into forgotten worlds and the subconscious to communicate with musical voices that have since passed into memory but still evoke a powerful presence." The Wire Magazine, June 2008 * An Account Of My Hut is an album of improvisations for shakuhachi and nay (Arabic flute), by CB and Bechir Saade. Cover painting by Sylvia Hallett. Hear extracts on the Another Timbre label website. Released March 2008. “British shakuhachi player Clive Bell seems to have found a soul mate in Lebanese ney player Bechir Saade. The pair use a variety of extended techniques to put their point across. The main feeling one gets from their music is that of overt peacefulness and a state of rest. It's not that the music stands still, but rather that it doesn't particularly move into places of eruption, nor does it wander off into unchartered, murky waters. Though the state of calm prevails, there are still moments of improvised vitality here. The bursting, breath-popping, tongue-rolling can clearly be pictured as the duo rev up their collective engines on "Withered Leaves". Haunting, exhilarating but mostly calm improvisations that see the two musicians become one single unit, An Account of My Hut is naked and honest music of the highest timbre.” Review by Tom Sekowki, Gaz-eta. Hear the Simon Reynell "Wire Wind Mix" from The Wire's Adventures In Modern Music radio programme on Resonance FM. * *David Sylvian's When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima,* featuring Clive Bell, Christian Fennesz, Arve Henriksen, Akira Rabelais and David Sylvian. review by Chris Jones on bbc website: "...Conceived as a work in progress to be completed by the external sounds of the actual Chichu Art Gallery, When Loud Weather… is a collage of found sound, drones and contributions from a ensemble of big-hitters in the European avant fraternity including shakuhachi maestro Clive Bell, guitarist Christian Fennesz and Norwegian trumpet/electronics genius, Arve Henriksen. ... it shows how far the man has come in recent years and how carefully and wisely he's choosing his fellow travellers. Never less than beautiful, When Loud Weather... deserves to be given space next to his more mainstream work." Samadhi Sound label Benesse House art museum * CB playing pi saw flute at Klangbad 2010, photo by Manuel Wagner *