Walking home across Walthamstow Marshes this evening. She landed about 6 feet away from me.
Dr Leo Chadburn
@leochadburn.bsky.social
Composer, performer, writer. FKA Simon Bookish. 🏳️🌈 www.leochadburn.com leochadburn.bandcamp.com
Coming up in September: a new album by your favourite intrepid vocal ensemble EXAUDI. Music by me, alongside astonishing works by Cassandra Miller, Andrew Hamilton and Geoff Hannan. Looking forward to this one.
John Smith's brilliant, witty short films = a big inspiration. Strong recommend for this programme at the Whitechapel Gallery running till September, including his unsettling masterpiece of ingenuity and resroucefulness, The Black Tower: www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/...
Dr Leo Chadburn@leochadburn.bsky.social · last mo.I worked at Reckless Records, early 2000s. Staff took it in turns choosing the music in the shop. One afternoon, I chose Anthony Braxton's Composition no. 247 (sax and bagpipes); all the customers left, then the manager went home early. Great music. anthonybraxtonleo.bandcamp.com/album/compos...
A wonderful, unique album, that I think is a bit overlooked: 'Endless' by Vainio Vaisanen Vega (the collaboration between Pan Sonic & Alan Vega). Frenzied vocals + glistening machines. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgKA...
Vainio Vaisanen Vega - No Home Kings
YouTube video by Jeam_True
youtube.com
Pierre Boulez's Provence home. It's a miracle the man lived to the age of 90, having had the stairs of death installed in every room.
Caroline Potter@carolinefrmus.bsky.social · 3w agoContemporary country home in Provence formerly owned by #Boulez for sale! Includes what's described as a 100m2 'crypte sonore' which might be used as a cellar. Yours for 1.1 million euros www.architecturedecollection.fr/produit/mais...
Really interesting gig in Clapham this Sunday (12 July): music including my string quartet with the names of 70 species of moth, 'The Indistinguishables'. Ticket link: www.omnibus-clapham.org/whatson/to-y...
Christoph Büchel’s vast, nightmarish 2006 installation “Simply Botiful” (with its hideous title). Rooms that were too cluttered, too hot, or too loud. Rooms that smelt wrong. There aren’t any photographs online that portray how truly bizarre and oppressive it was.
Jodi Pickens 🏳️🌈🖖✨@jodipickens.bsky.social · 4w agoArt question 🎨 What painting, photograph, sculpture, or piece of visual art has stayed with you long after you first saw it? Not necessarily your favorite. The one that lingered.
Currently on show on a street in London, E10: "Cello" (2026, mixed media: granite, television screen and urine) by unknown artist, clearly influenced by Nam June Paik.
My current album, Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator, is four tracks, corresponding to the seasons, of course. The 'Summer' track is "Magic Flora of the East Midlands", which opens with a list of plants, their folkloric powers, and heat-haze harmonies... leochadburn.bandcamp.com/track/magic-...
Magic Flora of the East Midlands, by Leo Chadburn
from the album Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator
leochadburn.bandcamp.com
There's a 1965 orchestral piece by Stockhausen called 'Stop'. What's remarkable is that he wrote it at the blackboard, in a single, seven-hour composition seminar, after a student asked a question about his process for creating a new work. What an amazing, exhausting session that must have been.
I worked at Reckless Records, early 2000s. Staff took it in turns choosing the music in the shop. One afternoon, I chose Anthony Braxton's Composition no. 247 (sax and bagpipes); all the customers left, then the manager went home early. Great music. anthonybraxtonleo.bandcamp.com/album/compos...
Composition No. 247, by Anthony Braxton
1 track album
anthonybraxtonleo.bandcamp.com
Easter egg for anyone who has a CD or vinyl copy of the new Squarepusher album: I am the uncredited hand model for one of the booklet images (photos by the brilliant Joanna Apps). My paws at the harpsichord.
The first Simon Bookish album, Unfair / Funfair, is 20 years old this year. I have a lot of feelings about it, and I'm thinking of writing about it in greater depth at some point. For now though, if you’d like to hear it, it's available on Bandcamp here: leochadburn.bandcamp.com/album/unfair...
Unfair / Funfair, by Simon Bookish
9 track album
leochadburn.bandcamp.com
Live with Abstruckt percussion ensemble 10 years ago, performing some angry songs I made for the occasion: "you can't reform profit capitalism; just kick it, kick it till it breaks."
The moment in Roxy Music's Re-make/Re-model, where everyone in turn plays a *ridiculous* solo: a squiggle of noise, cluster chords, anachronistic Beatles quote, Ride of the Valkyries on sax. Introducing the band, absurdly. A genius way to open an album/career: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWNs...
Re-Make/Re-Model
YouTube video by Roxy Music - Topic
youtube.com
I love Grace Jones (78 today!) so much: the drama of her voice, her superlative skills as a performer, her role as creator and subject of the most indelible images in music. I'd love to see her masterpiece music videos remastered and reissued (lots currently circulating on YouTube in very low-res).
David Munrow: what an amazing and inspiring musician. Great to see him getting some plaudits. A career cut short after only a decade, but he changed the direction of not just early music and musicology, but folk, prog, film music, music education and broadcasting. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/m...
The connoisseur of the crumhorn, the showman of the shawm: the brilliance of early music pioneer David Munrow
Six decades ago, Munrow’s passionate and persuasive advocacy for early music opened audience’s eyes and ears – and took the rackett on to primetime TV. Fifty years after his early death, we look back ...
theguardian.com
Big fan of harpsichordist Jean Rondeau's playing. Listen to how beautiful this is... www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKCr...
Jean Rondeau plays John Bull on original 16th-century virginal (Melancholy Pavan)
YouTube video by Warner Classics
youtube.com
The music download platform Subvert launched today. It's a cooperatively owned alternative to Bandcamp. I'm very interested in seeing how this kind of model works, so I've made my music available on it, here: www.subvert.fm/leo-chadburn
Throwback to 20 years ago today (10 May 2006): here's me onstage at the short-lived but brilliant London venue The Luminaire. The other acts on the bill that night were Grizzly Bear and Owen Pallett as Final Fantasy.
"Prince of Wales": song by me with lyrics by David Shrigley, originally released c.20 years ago. Part of 'Worried Noodles', a compilation album: Grizzly Bear, Max Tundra, David Byrne, et al setting Shrigley's words. The album is currently unavailable everywhere else. soundcloud.com/leochadburn/...
This feels like quite a heritage activity, but I've overhauled my website to make it more "archival", with programme notes, album lyrics, score excerpts, a whole load of press cuttings, and information about things I have worked on in the last 25 years - there's a lot:
Leo Chadburn - Composer and Performer
UK composer, performer, producer and writer.
leochadburn.com
I just found this photograph, taken by me c.1990, on a school trip to Sellafield. There was quite a lot of this kind of thing in my childhood. As I recall, its history as the site of the UK's worst ever nuclear accident wasn't mentioned.
(1/4) I'm still not sure many people release the full impact that Section 28 had on LGBT people growing up in the UK in the late 1980s / 1990s (such as me). This was Thatcher’s legislation banning "promotion of homosexuality" in schools and other institutions funded by local authorities.
If you haven't already heard my album 'Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator', and you'd like to buy a copy, today is the ideal day, it being Bandcamp Friday... leochadburn.bandcamp.com/album/sleep-...
Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator, by Leo Chadburn
4 track album
leochadburn.bandcamp.com
I've never given much thought to the work of Bridget Riley, which has always seemed a bit like trendy wallpaper to me, but I saw some images of this painting, "Vespertino" (1988), yesterday and I'm completely mesmerised by it. I'd really like to see the real thing somewhere...
Like a motorway journey, the landscape changes incrementally, but the hum of the engine remains constant. This piece by me, 'Freezywater', premiered 10 years ago this week. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUkl...
Leo Chadburn - Freezywater (2016)
YouTube video by LibraryOfNothing
youtube.com
Kenneth Williams' 1963 reading of Gogol's 'Diary of a Madman' is on Radio 4extra this afternoon (part of a whole day of programmes to coincide with his centenary). It's an extraordinary performance: unexpectedly dreamlike, haunting. What a great dramatic actor he was. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
BBC Radio 4 Extra - Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol
An insight into the mind of a man sliding into madness. Read by Kenneth Williams.
bbc.co.uk