Colin Riley In Place for singer and ensemble

Colin Riley’s extended multi-media song-cycle for voice and ensemble In Place is to receive its premiere and album launch at Oxford’s North Wall Arts Centre Friday 11th May.  Riley has worked with writers  Robert Macfarlane, Paul Farley, Nick Papadimitrou, Daljit Nagra, Jackie Morris, Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, creating a work of multiple styles, cultural viewpoints and personal histories from a contemporary perspective weaving together place names, folksongs, other found texts.

In Place has its roots deep in the loam of language and landscape. Colin Riley has set out to show how grained words are into our places, and places are into our words. He has made – with his numerous collaborators & contributors – a kind of musical deep-map, which it seems to me plots and celebrates one quality above all others: diversity. The voices that speak here come from many different communities, draw on different histories, even reach out to different species. Landscape here is no singular simplicity, and the smooth consolations of the pastoral are resisted at every turn. Instead we hear – we listen to – landscape as a polyphony, fabulous and irreducible in its complexity, to which this song-cycle is just one among countless testimonies. Robert Macfarlane

The tour continues:
13th June, 8pm – Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast Book Festival
15th June, 8pm – Hall 1, Kings Place, London Time Unwrapped
18th July, 5pm – Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham Music Festival

Supported by Arts Council England, Sounds Scotland, PRS for Music Foundation and Brunel University London

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Tags: album launch, Autumn Richardson, Colin Riley, Daljit Nagra, In Place, Jackie Morris, Nick Papadimitrou, North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, Oxford Contemporary Music, Paul Farley, Richard Skelton, Robert Macfarlane