NAWR 74 - Bhob Rainey / Radio Free Ponty

Bhob Rainey and Radio Free Ponty play Tangled Parrot on Saturday 28 November, part of the NAWR series. It's a double bill that brings together an American saxophonist and a Swansea-based multi-disciplinary artist, each working from very different places.

Rainey is a saxophonist, composer and improviser whose playing has built a distinctive, hallucinatory vocabulary that often sounds electronic, held together by a mastery of multiphonics. In 1998 he co-founded the duo nmperign with trumpeter Greg Kelley, and later formed the eight-piece ensemble The BSC, whose work was explored in the 2011 book and album Manual. A 2013 Pew Fellow in the Arts, he's also a SuperCollider 'power user' known for plugins and digital instruments like 'Peev', 'These are They', 'xynthii' and 'Dumber from Another Mother', and has long-running collaborations with Whit MacLaughlin of New Paradise Laboratories and dancer JungWoong Kim.

Radio Free Ponty is the work of Syd Howells, a neurodiverse musician, vocalist and multi-disciplinary artist from Swansea whose material has aired on Radio One and Radio Wales. He's played in Steveless/Syd Howells, Photographed by Lightning, My-Ra Superstar, The Disasters and Agronauts. Now living in Pontardawe, Howells imagines an unlicensed radio station that he describes as an unholy accidental collage of The Wicker Man, Under Milk Wood, the Cold War and Cwm Tawe.

It's a pairing of a long-established improviser and a local artist working with a very specific, local set of references. The night starts at 19:00 at Tangled Parrot, 61 Kingsway, SA1 5HN, and tickets are £10.