About

Our summer concert programme kicks off on June 7th with a performance by London’s @floating_world_pictures_ and local favourite @jimsun.__

Led by Chestnutt, producer & member of Snapped Ankles (The Leaf Label) and graphic / sound artist & instrument builder Raimund Wong, Floating World Pictures’ live show is driven by improvisation and collective gestures within the framework of cassette tape-loop manipulations, live signal processing and analogue synthesis. Alongside a shifting cast the duo spin a sensuous, densely populated soundscape: grounding drones and flowing waterfall synths, a rainforest of hisses and a thrumming hive of life with distant metallic snaps that conjure up the images of day-to-day scenes of ordinary people working. Fragments of found dialogue, melodies and environmental sounds navigate impressionistic passages, focussing the performance into a new form of searching and recontextualising.

As with many of our acts there is a strong visual meaning and presence in their music. The name comes from a Japanese artistic movement popular during the Edo period (1615 – 1868). Colourful woodblock prints, known as Ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’), depicted scenes from everyday Japan.
The ‘floating world’ referred to the licensed brothel and theatre districts of Japan’s major cities during the Edo period, inhabited by prostitutes and Kabuki actors (a traditional form of Japanese theatre). Despite their low status, actors and courtesans became the style icons of their day, and their fashions spread to the general population via inexpensive woodblock prints which were accessible to everyone.

This will be a fantastic evening, and there’s talk that we’ll be lighting up our new barbecue in the afternoon.