Martin Green (Lau) and special guests Kate Young and Nathaniel Mann (Dead Rat Orchestra) swap songs and tunes and stories, exploring tunes & songs that they love and delving into themes relating to Martin’s project The Portal.

Best known as accordionist and electronic experimentalist with the visionary folk trio Lau, Martin Green is increasingly recognised as a composer, arranger and collaborator in his own right. His recent work has included Flit, songs inspired by first hand stories of human movement around the world, and Aeons, a sound walk along the river Tyne.

The Portal explores dance culture, trance, tradition, and collective experience, asking whether trance is innate to these islands. Martin will be releasing the Portal as an audio experience in the next few months, and this one-off concert will give you a glimpse into the ideas Martin is exploring in the making of the project as well as the tunes that are in his head these days.

Kate Young has emerged as one Scotland’s most innovative composers and musicians. She is driven by the exploration of new sounds found in traditional musics around the globe, which feed into her compositional world. Her work delves into British plant lore and folktales, as a means to perpetuate and empower traditions at high risk of being lost. Kate combines voice with fiddle-playing techniques to conjure intriguing soundscapes as she navigates her way across musical genres.
She is a violinist and singer with Kathryn Tickell’s The Darkening and recipient of the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers.
https://kateyoungmusic.com/

Nathaniel Mann is one third of the experimental folk ensemble, Dead Rat Orchestra, an experimental composer, performer and sound designer, and a recent recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.
Nathaniel’s diverse works include object-led compositions and performances which often push the boundaries of musical practice by overlapping with instrument building and design, ethnography, folklore and storytelling. Notable projects include Pigeon Whistles for custom pigeon-flutes and 14 Birmingham Roller Pigeons and Rough Music for bespoke Bronze Meat Cleavers.
http://nathanielmann.co.uk/

Presented as part of Folk Weekend Oxford 2020