n quentin woolf

sleepless in whitechapel

Adrian Morris

This week’s show was a real treat to present, although a sleepless night left me sounding a bit flat. Alexes Walker and Thomas were first in to the studio. Alex T has the most complex-looking customised electronic set-up connected to his violin, consisting of a home-grown laptop program and an impressive-looking set of pedals, all of which produce the amazing sound you can hear on the recording. Alex Walker’s voice is great – all the brooding aggression of Lou

Alex Walker

Reed or Nick Cave, with the addition of that Scots snarl. I haven’t come across any acts like Ura-Ana.

Actually, we had quite a music-heavy show this week – and about as diverse a mix as could be dreamt up. It was great to welcome Kalia from London Greek Radio and her nay, and Alex Farrell and Kleibans from London Afrobeat Collective, who gave me a guided tour of a musical world I

Alex Thomas

hadn’t heard of a week ago. Their music is a defiant marriage of the chilled to the deft, and I’ve had it on my MP3 player all day today.

Fran Millican-Slater and I often run into each other at critique groups in the area, so already had an idea she’d sound good on radio but – what a voice. I swear she could make the ingredients of a packet of Monster Munch sound interesting. The situation reminds me a little of my much-missed friend, writer Dan Nicolai, currently waiting for rain in the Pacific NW, who used to attend the same critique groups and who also has a calming, almost hypnotic, reading voice; occasionally you could tell from listeners’ blissful

Francesca Millican-Slater

expressions that they’d long abandoned the narrative he was reading and were just lost in his voice…

Artist Gareth Williams and Adrian Morris of the Whitechapel society were getting on like long-lost friends before the recording; so much so that I felt bad breaking them up. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, by any means (there was a good debate going between Francesco Benenato and Jacob Sam La Rose last week, I seem to recall), and I think I may be missing a trick: perhaps I should

Gareth Williams

save myself a lot of trouble and just mic up the green-room. Individually, both men gave interesting angles on social responsibility as integral parts of what they do. Adrian was particularly keen to talk about the responsibility he feels for highlighting the plight of women at the time of the Whitechapel murders, while Gareth’s views on community art seemed to chime with those of Marsha Bradfield of HTAP, a few weeks ago.

So plenty to entertain and entrance, and even more to think about. By

Kleibans and Alex Farrell

the end of the show the sleeplessness had been blown away.

Listen to this edition of The Arts Show.

reach

This week’s show was big on music. My headline interview was with

James Hesford

composer James Hesford, a genuinely charming fellow who, like all of my guests this week, is completely committed to his art. His collaborations with artists Ivanov and Chan, which take place non-stop over 24-hour periods, sound exhilarating and exhausting; James’ descriptions of the process reminded me of marathon runners, when they talk about breaking through ‘the wall’. I gather I + C are stationed up in the Orkneys, on Papa Westray; apparently a group of about 70 folk from the local community gathered around the laptop, WW2 fashion, to hear James’ piece. Certainly a wider reach than I’d anticipated our East End station achieving. But that was before I started getting emails from our Canadian listeners…

Lucy Tomlins and Marsha Bradfield turned up in a whirlwind of press releases and highlighted scripts – by far the most

Lucy and Marsha

organised interviewees to date. Their HTAP project sounds like an invaluable resource for future historians, quite apart from its relevance right now. The democratisation of urban planning manifest in Lucy’s board game artwork really appeals to me – as an architect chum agrees, a big part of the challenge with buildings is seeing it through the eyes of the people in and around them, rather than from the perspective of some deity playing with his model town.

I can’t wait to see what David Snoo Wilson does with his disused Heathrow warehouse – I’ll be following progress, and

David Snoo Wilson

 maybe we’ll try to get some pictures of the artwork onto the blog. Dave has an intensity and seriousness about him which leaves one in no doubt that he is the real deal; some artists get caught up in grant application jargon, but with DSW there is no intermediate layer between the artist and the world. For me, the enduring image from this

Hackney Map

week’s show is that of DSW attempting to explain, in gestures, to German border police, why he was taking away some soil from the site of a WW2 massacre. A sentence I predict I will never again have cause to write.