Speak Cities is a follow up to Trance Map, Matt Wright’s critically acclaimed 2011 duo record with regular collaborator Evan Parker. Working here with Philadelphia-based saxophonist Keir Neuringer, who considers Parker an important mentor, Wright spent two years assembling the six tracks that make up Speak Cities in his Canterbury UK studio after an April, 2013 recording session in Brooklyn’s Seizure’s Palace.
But Speak Cities is not merely a studio composition made up of samples of Neuringer’s alto and Wright’s turntables. Nor is it an edit of in-studio improvisations. What we hear is something akin to a Neuringer solo - the emotional intensity and performative acrobatics that marked his 2014 solo double LP Ceremonies Out of the Air - and something similarly akin to a Wright composition, with its obsessive and unpredictable repetitions and elastic structures.
The architectural grids of the city might find a neat metaphor in the beats and bars of formally composed music, but here Neuringer and Wright are interested not in the city as place, but the city as lived experience, full of contours and contradictions, chatter, murmuring and wails.
Matt Wright and Keir Neuringer met in 2002 while studying composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Finding quick affinities in their overlapping musical roots - spanning European avant-garde concert music and improvisation, American hip-hop and jazz, and English club music - they began working together soon after, playing each other’s works, improvising together, and eventually forming the trio MTK (with computer musician Tom Tlalim), which during its few years of existence in the mid-aughts made several tours of England and the European continent. After a few years’ break, during which both musicians relocated several times and became fathers, they return with the smudges, glitches, and wails of Speak Cities, beginning the next stage of their collaborative work.
credits
released April 18, 2017
KEIR NEURINGER ALTO SAXOPHONE, CO-COMPOSITION
MATTHEW WRIGHT TURNTABLE, COMPUTER, CO-COMPOSITION
IMPROVISATIONS RECORDED 11 APRIL 2013
AT SEIZURE’S PALACE, BROOKLYN
JASON LAFARGE, RECORDING ENGINEER
RESAMPLING, SOUND DESIGN AND MASTERING BY
MATTHEW WRIGHT, CANTERBURY, 2014–16
ARTWORK, DESIGN AND LINER NOTES BY
KEIR NEURINGER, PHILADELPHIA, 2016
ADDITIONAL SLEEVE DESIGN BY
DAN DIZETTE, RAMSGATE, 2017
PRODUCED BY MATTHEW WRIGHT AND KEIR NEURINGER
MANUFACTURED IN THE EU BY KEY PRODUCTION, 2017
MADE POSSIBLE WITH QR FUNDING FROM
THE SCHOOL OF MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS
AT CANTERBURY CHRIST CHURCH UNIVERSITY.
THE ARTISTS WOULD LIKE TO THANKJASON LAFARGE IN BROOKLYN,
KYLE McCALLUM IN RAMSGATE, SEBASTIAN PETSU
IN PHILADELPHIA AND EVAN PARKER IN FAVERSHAM.
LOVE FROM MATT TO HELEDD, EUEN AND MABLI IN CANTERBURY,
AND FROM KEIR TO BRIT AND EMIRI IN WEST PHILLY.
EXTRA NORMAL RECORDS WOULD LIKE TO THANK
NICHOLAS DE CARLO AT MASH STUDIOS,
REBECCA GORDON-NESBITT AT HOME AND
MATT AND KEIR FOR THEIR GOODWILL
AND DEDICATION TO THE PROJECT.
(P) 2017 WRIGHT (PRS) AND NEURINGER (ASCAP)
(C) 2017 WRIGHT (PRS) AND NEURINGER (ASCAP)
The independent label responsible for Contra Pop Festival, Ramsgate, the Vacant World Radio Show on Repeater Radio, the Extra Normal Show on Margate Radio and the Lumpen Nobleman Show on Tak Tent Radio.
A complete and satisfying musical experience which, though very accessible will take an age to sink in..It's one of those pieces you can get lost in and keep coming back for more.
Recorded in Huddersfield, a mill town I lived in back in the 60's.The days of the legend Frank Worthington,the high rise of the Lonsbrough and Ibbotson flats,Harold Wilson! Yet so much more to the place than that as this terrific album gives testimony to.There will always be something fresh in the air of that valley ! MIKE ANDERSON
YES! The bass and the drums together with the horn section and a voice and message that goes straight through your spine. What an unbound force! Every track a gem. neltz
Bruce Russell of The Dead C comes to Bandcamp, bringing with him an archive of rare & unreleased material, with more in the coming months. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 22, 2021
A brave experimental record from the Cecilia Lopez & Ingrid Laubrock running darting sax lines through dense electronics & processing. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 10, 2023