First Terrace # Live From Southbank Centre

A selection of experimental frequencies, interviews and sessions plus cuts from the First Terrace label by Alex Ives (Specimens) and Joe Summers.

On the 2nd October 2022 First Terrace went live on Resonance Extra from Southbank Centre as part of the label's fifth anniversary celebrations, with a curated triple bill for the Purcell Room, featuring Peter Broderick’s tribute to The Beacon Sound Choir, the premiere of a dance opera by Bianca Scout and an AV performance by Specimens.

First, the premiere of The Heart of the Anchoress, a contemporary dance piece from Bianca Scout's upcoming multimedia project The Mortal Instrument of Bones. This newly commissioned gothic opera, produced with the Daughter Mary ensemble, establishes a richly seductive sensory field, where fractal patterns of poetry, moving image and sound design are sampled, remixed and looped, through subtle, episodic mutations of classical dance.

Next, a set by Sofheso in which he offers his singular selection of broken rhythms and blacklight textures.

Then, Specimens presents Power, Pain and Privilege, a specially commissioned audiovisual work made in collaboration with filmmaker and photographer Lucie Rox. The work explores both artists’ experiences as mixed race people living in the UK, from hair salons to racial slurs, and the uncomfortable relationship between skin tone and privilege.

Finally, Peter Broderick breathes fresh life into the euphoric group singing practices of The Beacon Sound Choir, his erstwhile community choir in Portland. With the help of the anarchic, virtuosic experimental choral group Musarc, they perform new arrangements of the original choir material – short and odd original songs, experimental compositions and the BSC’s unique brand of half-improvised, half-structured vocal drones.