Electric Umbrella #33 with Moor Mother, Alister Spence and more tba

A very, very special edition of the Electric Umbrella: first of all because we welcome back an old friend: Moor Mother! Secondly, from the other side of the world comes a remarkable improviser and composer, Alister Spence, who will have a "right go" on WORM’s Fender Rhodes electric piano.

Moor Mother (US)
Moor Mother is an international touring musician, poet and visual artist. Her work speaks to many genres, from electronic to free jazz and classical music. Through the lens and practice of Black Quantum Futurism, the art she makes is a statement for the future, as well as a way to honour the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes.

Alister Spence (AUS)
The Fender Rhodes is a vintage instrument from our sound studio that is rarely played. But… when we heard Spence’s album Within Without, featuring only the Fender Rhodes but in a radically inventive and unconventional way, we said: we need this guy over here to breathe some new life into it! During Electric Umbrella #33 he will use preparations, effects pedals and percussion with the Rhodes.

Some press quotes about Within Without:
‘The album opens up the famous and yet somehow mysterious Rhodes…and finds an orchestra inside.’ Derek Walmsley, The WIRE.
‘The Fender inches toward warped generator territory…subtly piercing scrapes of surprising harmonic complexity’. Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street.

Spence himself wrote:
"I first owned a Fender Rhodes electric piano in the late 1970s. It was a Mark 1 model (wooden key action). I had a band with my younger brother and my best friend from school and this was my ‘portable’ gigging instrument that weighed ‘a ton,’ and only just fitted in our small car. I had one effects pedal, a Boss chorus. Sadly — due to the rise of synthesizers and electronic keyboard instruments — I sold this lovely instrument in the late 1980s.
Fortunately in 1990, I was able to buy a Mark II model (plastic keys). As time went by my approach to the instrument began to change as my interest grew in more broadly sonic forms of musical expression. The Rhodes became for me a place of exploration where any part of it was open for investigation as a sound source. I used it in tandem with a growing selection of sound modifying guitar pedals and slowly began to settle into a collection of those and a sound area that I enjoyed delving into. It is in paired back solo exploration that I find the strongest connection with the instrument."