Indian and Flamenco traditions combine in a remarkable way in this MBM touring project based on Anoushka Shankar’s album Traveller.
Traveller brings together the passionate and diverse music of Spain with the vibrant sounds of the Indian tradition, tracing the gypsies’ journey from their homeland in Rajasthan to finally settling in Southern Europe.
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR, one of the world’s greatest sitar players, performed this MBM tour with her specially selected group of all-star Indian and flamenco musicians on percussion, flute, shehnai and vocals.
Music Beyond Mainstream’s second foray into projects exploring music and cinema. French art house director Claire Denis creates remarkable work and Tindersticks create remarkable music. Together they create something very special.
This MBM tour combined Tindersticks’ unique sound with compelling, sensual and alternately meditative and shocking visuals handpicked from across Denis’ striking work.
For lovers of intensely beautiful and thought provoking film and music, this collaboration between world-renowned French film-maker Claire Denis and TINDERSTICKS front man Stuart Staples was a match made in heaven.
TINDERSTICKS are one of the most original and distinctive British acts crafting dense, meaningful songs layered with literary lyrics, intertwining melodies, brooding vocals, and gently melancholy orchestrations. Claire Denis, a Paris-based film director and one of the major artistic voices of contemporary French cinema.
African Soul Rebels showcases the gretest contemporary talent from accross a continent that is as diverse and as exciting as any music anywhere. This was an ASR speicial featuring the awesome Seun Kuti.
African Soul Rebels is a concept created by MBM to showcase some of the most amazing talent from the continent. Vibrant, contemporary, relevant music from a continent as diverse as it is stunning. Normally the ASR concept features a triple bill but for this ASR special we settled on Seun Kuti as the ambassador of contemporary afrobeat and a performing tour de force.
Seun Kuti is an unbelievable force in Nigerian Music, having inherited his father Fela Kuti’s band, he is now the crowned king of Afrobeat. Having not been eclipsed by his father , who was the biggest 20th century star of African music, for some, Seun now outshines him.
His music, dance, politics and funky Yoruba Afrobeat never let tradition down and Seun plays with such dynamism, precision and energy that everyone lucky enough to have seen his father’s show live, is now left in awe of his son Seun.
A double bill of extraordinary composition and musical talent brought together for the first time by MBM. Original, inventive and classy musicianship.
For this project MBM brought together on the same bill two of the most original musical artists around.
PENGUIN CAFE’s music has infiltrated daily life from films like Napoleon Dynamite to countless theme tunes, and they’ve played festivals from Bestival and The Big Chill to a sold out Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms. Their unique, quintessentially English sound is influenced by folk, bluegrass, avant garde classical music and pop.
Electronica meets 21st century-jazz in PORTICO QUARTET’s melodic, rhythmic music that mixes the inspiration of Philip Glass and Steve Reich with a very contemporary kind of improvisation. Their hook-laden, darkly atmospheric post-jazz has pushed them to the forefront of the contemporary music scene and got them nominated for a Mercury Music Prize.
From the townships of apartheid to the opening concert at the World Cup, South African music has travelled a unique road. Two legends unite to present their songs of resistance and the colour and carnival of the greatest show on earth. Masekela returns to Britain with his band, in the company of the three doyennes of mbaqanga, the Mahotella Queens.
A landmark concert bringing the warmth and optimism of South African music to the stage through two of the rainbow nation’s finest artists.
HUGH MASEKELA has been at the heart of the music of his country since the 1960s through the years of struggle to liberation; his soaring, joyful trumpet sound that nourishes the soul and frees the spirit, continues as an expression of resistance and a celebration of resilience.
THE MAHOTELLA QUEENS, who performed a stunning a cappella set, are an award-winning vocal trio that has exerted enormous influence on the musical life of South Africa.
Arts Council England – Grants for the ArtsVisually and sonically stunning performance skillfully articulating the musical connections between the traditions of the old world and the newly discovered world of the Americas.
Packed with all the intensity, depth and raw energy that have become this maestro’s trademark. Some of the world’s best flamenco dancers combine with a sensational band of musicians and virtuoso singers in this brand new show from legendary flamenco guitarist PACO PENA and toured by MBM.
Revisiting an often overlooked part of the flamenco repertoire, world-reknowned virtuoso Peña explores a musical fusion that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century – when touring Spanish musicians toured South America and discovered a rich musical culture and folklore which resonated strongly with their own music.
This ground-breaking tour took the idea of live improvisation to exciting new territories fusing a myriad of musical styles and approaches from jazz and classical to drum & bass and breakbeat.
“Totally liberating. Scary as hell.”
This ground-breaking tour took the idea of live improvisation to exciting new territories fusing a myriad of musical styles and approaches from jazz and classical to drum & bass and breakbeat.
Through-out the 2000s THE BAYS established themselves as one of the most exciting, innovative bands on the UK live circuit mixing high octane dance music with live jazz instrumentation. Their trade-mark was only playing live, they never recorded or rehearsed.
For this project this mentality was fused with THE HERITAGE ORCHESTRA where composers John Metcalfe and Simon Hale notated music live for the orchestra to improvise with thrilling results.
A young astronomer sees a spaceship crashland in the Arizona desert. He tracks down the occupants who can adopt human appearance at will. The aliens just want to go home…
Another unique tour from MBM saw influential American alternative rock band Pere Ubu perform its own score to a rare screening of the 1953 classic Sci-Fi film in its original red/green anaglyphic stereoscopic 3D format.
Using a parallel, synched soundtrack technique which removes most of the original musical score while preserving the dialog, a format conceived and produced by Reality Film’s Marek Pytel, Pere Ubu generates a throbbing, dark and atmospheric replacement score which features additional dialog and voice-over narrative restored from Bradbury’s ‘lost’ script treatments.
“1950s cold war paranoia with the dark vision of Pere Ubu” — The Guardian
