Sam Bailey spent 6 years doing a practice-led PhD in improvising music. You can read his PhD here

Below is a draft of a chapter about Free Range from The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music: Scene, Identity and Myth. Published by Emerald in 2021.

‘Free Range: a Canterbury scene’

by Sam Bailey

It is a bitterly cold night in January and people are wondering if they’re in the right place. They’re in a car park down a tiny lane in the centre of Canterbury and there are no street lights. Phone screens light up faces as people contact their friends to ask where the gig is. A door at the top of a fire escape opens and people are beckoned up the metal staircase into the back entrance of the Veg Box Café.

It is packed, with standing room only. The main set features saxophonist Evan Parker with Matt Wright on electronics. A lurching, shawm-like drone on soprano saxophone over a backdrop of chirping cicadas starts a 45-minute set that reveals an intricately layered and interconnected sound-world of insects, birds and breath. Like those alien images that could equally be the surface of your skin or the surface of the moon, this music combines a microscopic level of detail with a sense of moving slowly through macrocosmic sonic environments like a muggy rainforest or a desert plain at night.

Years later, I can still remember the listening amongst the audience that night: many of the people there had never heard music like this before. But something about the friendly, focused informality of the situation defused the alienation and defensiveness that can occur when something unfamiliar is presented with a status that presupposes value. This was just strange music to a general audience who listened with a rare openness and curiosity.

These are my memories of the first Free Range night. Free Range is a series of award-winning, free-entry adventurous music, film and poetry events that take place in Canterbury. At the time of writing (November 2019) there have been 197 events involving approximately 800 artists and 12,000 audience members. These events have helped to create, and have become a hub for, a strong regional community of artists, audience members, institutions and organisations that care about experimental culture.

This purpose of this chapter is primarily to describe the current scene around Free Range. However, I will be listening out for any connections between this scene and the Canterbury Sound from the 1960’s and 70’s. I will start by sketching the history, aspirations and motivations behind Free Range before providing examples of the range of events that have been presented. This will be followed by an anecdotal exploration of possible connections between Free Range and the idea of a Canterbury Sound based on conversations with musicians and audience members and an overview of current related music scenes in the city. I will then provide a brief description of some of the historical, cultural and social features of Canterbury that I believe have shaped the scene around Free Range before finishing with a discussion of the important role played by the audience at these events.

As the founder director of Free Range I have eight years’ experience of presenting and performing in experimental music events in the city and I write primarily from my perspective as a musician and promoter. Underlying my discussion here, and underpinning my activities as a musician and promoter, is the belief that there are a number of cultural, social, historical and geographical factors that contribute to an unusual receptivity to musical experimentation amongst the communities of audience members that attend Free Range events. I argue that this receptivity is a distinctive feature of the scene around Free Range and that it might be more meaningful, at least in relation to aspects of the current music scene in the city, to talk about a Canterbury Listening rather than a Canterbury Sound. A detailed account of the extent to which a similar receptivity to experimentation characterised what has become known as the Canterbury Scene, is beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will attempt to point out where such connections might be made as the discussion unfolds.

How Free Range started

Free Range started in 2011 as I was finishing a practice-based PhD in improvised music. I envisaged a weekly jam session with local musicians who wanted to experiment and I sent out emails to people who I thought might be interested in this idea. It is relevant to mention here that I had been active as a student, musician and teacher in Canterbury since 1996 and this gave me access to a considerable network of friends, colleagues and other contacts. In November 2011 a group of us met up to discuss plans for the events and put a programme together. A friend and student gave me an old baby grand piano and some other friends let me put it in their café. The name Free Range was suggested to me by another friend, the composer and improviser Matthew Wright. The mention of friendship is important here: in my experience the web of musical and aesthetic connections that make up a music scene always have a strong social underpinning. The role of privilege (of access to resources and education) is also a key ingredient here. It could be argued that these factors were also important ingredients in the Canterbury Scene of the 1960’s and 70’s.

An interdisciplinary approach

After some discussion it was decided that each month would be curated by a different group of people: the Zone poetry collective (based around the Centre for Modern Poetry and the School of English at the University of Kent), Canterbury Eye and Ear (a small group of film makers and musicians based around the media and music schools at Canterbury Christ Church University), the Sounds New festival (a contemporary classical music festival active in Canterbury from 1996-2017) and myself. In addition to curating events, I also planned to play a short improvised piano set at the start of many of the events. The development of my personal practice as a musician was one of the reasons I started Free Range and has remained a crucial factor in the sustainability of the events. There is very little personal financial reward in Free Range, it’s longevity is due partly to the extent to which the events contribute to the development of my creative practice.

The role of free improvisation

The initial model for these nights was the Little Theatre Club: a venue that was important in the development of free improvisation in London during the 1960’s and 70’s. I had read about the guitarist Derek Bailey lugging an amplifier up four flights of stairs to play a solo gig and when no audience turned up he decided to play anyway, to an empty club. I suspected that Free Range would be similar to that lonely night at the Little Theatre Club but unexpectedly, right from the beginning, lots of people turned up. Our first event, described at the beginning of this chapter, featured the saxophonist Evan Parker playing material from the album Trance Map (2011) that he had made in collaboration with Canterbury-based composer and turntablist Matthew Wright. This seemed fitting because Evan had been a key figure in the London free improvisation scene associated with the Little Theatre Club. This scene played a part in a wider network of overlapping experimental cultural ecosystems in the 1960’s and 70’s that fed into what became known as the Canterbury Scene. A further connection between both scenes (London free-improvisation and the Canterbury Scene) is that they have been subject to a similar degree of post-construction and myth-making in the intervening 60 years, especially as the webs of social connections and the exchange and retelling of anecdotes that constitute such elusive phenomena as music scenes have solidified into text as part of their assimilation into academia.

Events

‘it’s not a question of what we did but what we felt allowed to do ... you can do anything ... I hope that is the legacy’ (Robert Wyatt on the Canterbury Sound at Gavin Eisler in conversation with Robert Wyatt, University of Kent, 2016).

These ingredients: an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to programming and a thread of free-improvisation running through many of events, combined with an extraordinary audience (more on this crucial ingredient later) allowed the development of a programme that covered a very wide range of aesthetic territory. A full list of Free Range events can be found in the appendix (FR7 = Free Range 7, e.g. the seventh event in the series). Examples of the range of events include:

• FR7 How I Learnt To Stop Worrying & Love 24-Hour CCTV Surveillance: one of a series of expanded cinema events with costumes, props and extensive audience interaction.

• FR27 Euler’s Theory: a maths lecture that functioned as a score for improvising musicians.

• FR50 Eating Sound: an event where eating wild food was used to deepen listening.

• FR66 Spleen: a night where members of the public were invited to speak on topics of local interest they felt strongly about with optional musical accompaniment.

• FR73 Portrait Improvisations: an event in which audience members took turns to choose musicians to improvise their sonic portrait.

• FR110 The Six Tones / Juha Virtanen: an event that started with a poet writhing on the floor in chains and ended with Vietnamese musicians in glass boxes demonstrating stylized performance gestures.

• FR124 Free Range City: an event where the Rutherford cloisters at the University of Kent were reimagined as a creative utopia populated by musicians, poets, filmmakers and dancers in a day of overlapping and simultaneous performances, screenings and installations.

• FR130 The Jellyland Café Takeover: a night where flavoured jelly, bartering and schizophrenic poetic references created a profound awareness of the fluidity of identity and borders.

• FR137 1890’s Night: an alternative 90’s club night with magic lanternist Jeremy Brooker paired with Stroh violinist and wax-cylinder sound artist Alex Kolkowski that was gatecrashed by a group of Victoriana enthusiasts requesting absinthe.

• FR155 Songs & Dongs: Christmas celebrations where the audience used bells to trigger a handbell ensemble and a community choir in an interactive carol.

• FR172 Lapis Lazuli / World Peng: a night of local hip-hop and prog-rock that started with a candlelit ritual involving an axe, a naked woman, lots of paint and a rapper dressed as death.

• FR187 UCA Design Night: a night of projections, animations, live drawing, installations and music from University of the Creative Arts students.

These 12 events have been selected to show the breadth of the Free Range programme but they only represent 6% of the 197 events that have been presented at the time of writing.

As a curator I rarely get the chance to step back and survey what has been achieved by the team of volunteers, trustees, audience members and artists behind Free Range. Our creative output fades into the past and we’re left with the fragmented documents, re-told anecdotes, moments changed through repeated recall, acquaintances, rivalries, enmities and friendships that remain after something that brought people together has passed. With a transient art-form such as music these nebulous traces are all that can be called a scene. Even the labelling of something as a scene is often a nostalgic attempt to fix something as it passes by.

Connections and shared values

The breadth of interdisciplinary creative activity that has taken place over the course of these events has some parallels with strands of creative activity from the Canterbury Scene of the 1960’s and 70’s. For example, the UFO club in London was aiming towards Allan-Kaprow style happenings with performances that involved simultaneous film, poetry, music and light shows and The Soft Machine were briefly the house band at the club (Wikipedia, n.d & Ubuweb n.d.). And improvisation, poetry and music certainly played a role in performances by many artists associated with the Canterbury Sound including Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen and Lady June.

It is possible that Free Range was inspired by these events and artists but I would prefer to think that such creative activities are connected by a shared set of cultural values and beliefs. Underlying much of the creative activity around Free Range is the belief that one of the roles of culture is to shake people out of their habits of perception. Professor Michael Tucker articulates this idea clearly in relation to the role of the shaman:

The great service of the shaman has always been to help shake people out of the rut of experience – out of the sheer forgetfulness of mystery and awe which so often infects everyday life … the essence of mystical experience has always been to free the self from the premature death of routine, of habit, of boredom, as one comes to know the world anew. It was for this purpose that shamans entered a trance; that they were drummed into a dancing ecstasy; that they acquired a secret language … that their followers performed a dance. All partook of the (ultimately healing) shock of awakening to other realities … ‘they were able to see their own world with new eyes’ (Tucker, 1996, p.73)

If there is a connection between the creative activity around Free Range and the creative activity associated with a Canterbury Sound I would hope that it can be found in the cluster of beliefs and values articulated above. Obviously, the notion of a musician as a shaman-like character aiming to open people’s eyes and ears through transcendent experience is not localised to Canterbury (although Kevin Ayer’s singing ‘Why Are We Sleeping’ from the The Soft Machine (1968) is a particularly vivid incarnation of this idea). However, it was a key feature of the psychedelic culture of which the Canterbury Sound was a part and the importance of these ideas in relation to the micro-scene around Free Range is made clear through the promotional copy that has been included, in varying forms, on brochures and websites since 2018:

Listening to rich, complex stuff like improvised music or modern poetry is an active, creative process of finding and making meaning whilst remaining present and alert to a dense flow of ambiguities and associations. It is demanding, or it should be demanding. It requires openness, patience, generosity, deftness, imagination and discrimination. Such listening is important work: it keeps us awake, keeps our habits of perception pliable and helps us to engage with the world afresh (Bailey, 2018)

This promotional copy starts to tease out some of the values that are implicit in Tucker’s description of shamanism. There seem to be two main threads to this: firstly, that one’s experience of life will be fuller if it is possible to shed, even momentarily, the habits of ‘everyday life’ and secondly, there is an implication in the phrases ‘see their own world with new eyes’ and ‘see the world afresh’ that this new level of awareness has an ethical dimension: that we would be kinder, more considerate humans if freed from habitual ways of being and interacting.

You might be forgiven for thinking that this essay has lost its way at this point. But it seems to me that the health, longevity and impact of cultural activity (like a music scene) is partly dependent on the extent to which stakeholders share a set of values and beliefs. To understand the cultural activity around Free Range it is necessary to try to identify and articulate the values that have kept audience members and artists returning to these events for eight years, week after week. While I cannot say with certainty whether these values are shared by the communities of audience members and artists associated with Free Range, the fact that they have been clearly articulated on promotional material means that they are at least part of the conversation.

Anecdotal connections

Occasionally musicians or audience members at Free Range refer to the Canterbury Scene from the 1960’s and 70’s. Sometimes they make connections between the two scenes.

When multi-disciplinary artist Graham Lambkin came to Free Range in March 2018 he made a semi-improvised piece (based on field recordings made around the city earlier in the day) called Canterbury: Four Locations / Four Abstractions. Graham had grown up in the nearby coastal town of Folkestone and he recalled travelling into Canterbury to buy records at the little shop that used to be in the basement of an indoor market on the high street. He remembers that the bassist Hugh Hopper would often be looking after the shop while his friend, the owner, was busy elsewhere. It is possible to make connections between these personal memories, Graham’s appreciation of many of the recordings made by artists associated with the Canterbury Sound and the work of his band The Shadow Ring who, in the early 1990’s, fused a D.I.Y. post-punk aesthetic with folk music, cracked electronics, and surreal wordplay (Lambkin, 2019).

A year later Yumi Hara’s group Lindsey Cooper Songbook played at Free Range (Yumi Hara: arrangements, piano, keyboard, harp, voice / Chris Cutler: drums / Chloe Herington: bassoon, soprano sax / Mitsuro Nasuno: bass, voice / Tim Hodgkinson: alto sax, clarinet / Atsuko Kamura: voice). The composer and bassoonist Lindsey Cooper, along with two of the musicians playing in this group (Tim Hodgkinson and Chris Cutler) were members of Henry Cow, a band loosely associated with the Canterbury Sound of the 1960’s and 70’s. This event was a collaboration between Free Range and Canterbury Sans Frontiéres (2013). The latter is a ‘boundary-dissolving’ podcast focussed on music loosely related to the Canterbury Sound created by mathematician, author, music promoter, podcaster, DJ, live maths performer and unofficial archivist for the Canterbury Sound, Matthew Watkins. The technical specifications for the Lindsey Cooper Songbook (e.g. speakers, drum kits, microphones etc.) were well beyond what Free Range was able to supply but because this particular group and the music they played meant something to a wide range of musicians in the city there was a team willing to help. Josh Magill from the band Syd Arthur drove up to London to transport Chris Cutler’s drum kit, Neil Sullivan from the band Lapis Lazuli was the sound engineer for the night, Free Range provided guaranteed fees for each of the musicians which allowed them to put together a successful bid to Arts Council England for funding for a three-date tour. This was an example of several members of the current music scenes in Canterbury working together because of a mutual appreciation of music and musicians loosely associated with the Canterbury Scene from the 1960’s and 70’s.

The bass player for the Lindsay Cooper Songbook, Mitsuro Nasuno, spoke to Matthew Watkins after the performance. He said that he had been a fan of music associated with the Canterbury Scene for a long time and had long dreamed of playing in the city. The packed out event and highly enthusiastic audience may have misled him into thinking that every gig in Canterbury was as extraordinary as that night.

Members of the audience (mainly men in their 60’s) have told me that the venue used by Free Range between 2012-2014 (upstairs at 1-2 Jewry Lane) and 2017-2019 (downstairs at 1-2 Jewry Lane) used to be a café called The Foundry in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and that the band Caravan played there. It has also been pointed out to me that this same venue is almost exactly in the centre of the circle described by the city walls. Several members of the audience have said that they are glad that experimental music presented in a grassroots style is still continuing in Canterbury.

Related overlapping scenes

My earlier description of the Lindsey Cooper Songbook event touches on the existence of several overlapping and related musical scenes in Canterbury. To get a full sense of the cultural activity around Free Range, and how aspects of it might be thought to be connected to the Canterbury Scene from the 1960’s and 70’s, it is important to describe these related scenes (all of which are active at the time of  writing). The Crash of Moons Club present ‘alternative, progressive and psychedelic acts’ usually on a monthly basis. This night is run by members of a prog rock band called Lapis Lazuli (this band played at the event that formed the basis for this book: The ‘Canterbury Sound’: Place, Music and Myth, 2017). The Smugglers Festival in Deal has also hosted Free Range events and has curated events at Free Range. The festival has an aesthetic that blends folk, world music and progressive rock. It is partly through the Smugglers collective (who also run a record shop, a record label, a venue, a touring festival and the Riberola festival in Spain) that a connection between music in East Kent and the music of the Bristol-based Bloom collective has been forged. Bloom describe themselves as a ‘collective of musicians and friends from an experimental corner of Bristol’s buzzing music scene’ (2019) and include artists such as Leonie Evans, The Evil Usses, The Spindle Collective, Tezeta and Dubi Dolczek. All these artists have played at either Free Range, The Crash of Moons Club or Smugglers Festival in recent years. This connection with Bristol-based musicians has also been fostered by the band Syd Arthur who have toured the UK and US extensively (opening for veteran prog-rock band Yes in the US). Members of Syd Arthur run the record label Dawn Chorus Recordings that features recordings from yet more bands connected to these scenes: Nelson Parade, Joshua, Jack Hues & the Quartet (The New Canterbury Sound, 2019). Syd Arthur and the Smugglers collective were recently involved in curating an event as part of the Gulbenkian Theatre’s 50th anniversary celebrations called The New Canterbury Sound (2019) and, on the following night, Jack Hues & the Quartet joined forces with members of Syd Arthur to play on the same bill as Caravan and Soft Machine (The Canterbury Sound: a 50th Birthday Celebration, 2019). Lastly, there has been a long running series of text-invite-only music events that take place in private woodland near Canterbury that have featured nearly all of the musicians mentioned in this paragraph.

A conservative city

it’s a nice little town, it’s got a cathedral and in the Summer it looks good. But not much is happening here really. (Hugh Hopper in Bennett, 2002)

Despite the cultural activity described earlier in this essay, on the surface Canterbury remains a small, conservative city (or, as the musician Richard Sinclair (1994) describes it, the biggest village we've got in this part of England’). And this small city is divided up into even smaller segments along institutional fault-lines that stretch back hundreds of years in some cases (Watkins, 2018). In the past, these institutions were associated with state or church (the distinction between monastic orders for example) and today they include universities, local and county councils, schools, commercial districts and churches. Most cultural activity in the city happens in relation to one of these institutions. Despite the city’s affluence, there is no independent arts centre. It is not difficult to make a connection between these historic divisions, the entrenched wealth they imply and the city’s cultural conservatism. This conservatism is manifest literally in the prevailing heritage and conservation culture associated with Canterbury’s status as an UNESCO world heritage site.

Yet the city has three universities, a huge student population and is close enough to London to benefit from the ongoing exodus of the creative classes from the capital. There is a demand for cultural alternatives in the city and the prevailing conservatism actually fuels this demand.

Venues that provide an independent cultural offer in Canterbury rarely survive long (e.g. The Farmhouse 2008-2012 or Orange Street Music Club 2006-2011). Free Range has had to change venue three times over eight years because the small venues that have hosted the events have had to close, often with only a few weeks’ notice. New, small businesses struggle in the city. According to the Kent County Council’s Kent Economic Indicators report, “Canterbury scores below the national median in 6 indicators, most significantly for ... 3 year business survival rates” (2019).

The audience

The discussion now turns to what is arguably the most important asset of Free Range: the audience. Artists and audience members frequently (at almost every event) comment on the quality of engagement amongst the audience. However, before I discuss this further it is relevant to provide some details about the average audience attendance and touch on how the events are financed.

A thorough, in-depth audience survey has so far been beyond the limited means of Free Range (although this has been included as part of a recent funding bid). Currently our available data is limited to audience figures and monthly donations. Over the course of the 23 events of the 2018-2019 season the average audience attendance was 64.5 people per event (with a lowest turnout of 19 and a highest of 110). Based on a substantial amount of anecdotal evidence from artists, audience members and promoters these figures are high in comparison with other regular experimental performance art events in the UK.

Free Range is a charity (reg. 1161891) whose aims are to present ‘high-quality and innovative music, film and poetry events with a policy of free entry for the benefit of people in East Kent’ (Charity Commission, 2015). The charity is financed through two types of donations. Firstly, on-the-night donations are sought by myself after each event by going around with a velvet donations pouch (made by local artist Tim Long) and a card reader asking individual audience members whether they would like to help us to continue to present events like this in Canterbury by giving what they consider the event to be worth. Over the course of the 23 events in our 2018-2019 season this raised £1856. Secondly, we receive regular monthly donations that amount to £174.41 each month. These amounts can vary significantly from season to season. Free Range has also received funding from Canterbury Christ Church University, University of Kent, University of the Creative Arts and Arts Council England. However, over the course of the 23 events in the 2018-2019 season and the 14 events in the Autumn 2019 season the charity has received no external funding. 

I mention audience attendance and how the events are funded because they affect the nature of people’s engagement. There is a substantial attendance each week. While the audience is always slowly growing and changing the majority are regular attendees. Regular weekly attendance is encouraged through the policy of free-entry, monthly donations and the social dimension to the events: this is a community of people with overlapping interests and values. To return to Richard Sinclair’s description of Canterbury: ‘it's really the biggest village we've got in this part of England. Everybody half-knows each other and has been involved in something with cross-references’ (1994). In a small city like Canterbury, where there is little experimental culture on offer, a diverse range of people are drawn to Free Range simply because it provides an alternative. Our recent audiences have included poets, visual artists, academics, musicians, writers, dancers, puppeteers, cabaret artists, wood sculptors, wild food experts, event promoters, music therapists, teachers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, sixth-form students, dogs and children. This last sector of the audience is important, I have found that when children are present, adults are encouraged to give up some of the social and cultural anxiety often associated with experimental culture. In turn, the children feel as if they have privileged access to an adult world and are (usually) curious and attentive.

To examine the nature of the audience at Free Range events more closely I have chosen to focus on one interview with a semi-regular attendee (there is a substantial amount of anecdotal and written evidence for the points made here but this single example articulates the themes clearly). The interviewee is Kristin Fredericksson, she is a theatre maker and Feldenkrais practitioner. She is 46 years old and has been working in theatre since 1995, her solo shows have toured internationally, she has lived in Paris and London and she has recently finished an AHRC-funded PhD on Feldenkrais at Royal Holloway University. She attends one or two Free Range events each month and is involved with the Free Range Orchestra.

A lot of professional ears

When asked how she should would describe the listening at Free Range, Kristin said:

It feels like there are lots of professional ears in the room, and the result of that is that there is a generous and open and curious kind of listening ... which is, from my point of view as a theatre practitioner, a contrast ... often if I’m performing and there’s a lot of professionals in the room that’s often quite a hard audience (K. Fredericksson, personal communication, November 1st 2019)

The audience at Free Range events can be described as a general audience of specialists. Kristin goes on to describe how this quality of listening encourages her to focus; ‘from my point of view, because I’m not so used to close listening to music ... I feel like I need to pay attention to try and get it’. The attentive listening in the room encourages others to do the same.

Limited choice and cross fertilising audiences

Kristin goes on to say:

Canterbury is probably not big enough to support an avant-garde puppetry scene AND an avant-garde poetry scene AND an avant-garde music scene. But actually that’s really interesting ... Free Range kind of brings those things together ... there’s definitely music that I never would have gone to see ... if I was in Paris or London, you know, I can’t go and see everything ... I’d be more selective and I’d just go to see my kind of thing  ... [in Canterbury] you can either just go and see, you know, like massive commercial whatever at the Marlowe, you know, or you can go to London. If you want to not do those things [you can go to Free Range] ... that’s quite a radical thing ...

This point has been reiterated by many visiting musicians: larger cities often have specialist audiences or venues for niche interests such as modern poetry or free-improvised music but in Canterbury there is, in bassist Hugh Hopper’s words, ‘not much happening here really’ (Hopper in Bennett, 2002). Because Free Range is one of the few places providing experimental culture in the area there is a diversity of interest amongst the audience that would be less likely in a larger city. This is reflected in the range of events in the programme. Often events and programmes are specifically designed to cross fertilise audiences (e.g. FR140 where Zone poetry presented an LGBTQ poetry night alongside the debut performance of a new septet by local composer/clarinetist Will Glanfield). Kristin provides evidence of how this might work across the course of a season of events:

I might look at the Free Range programme and I might have gone, ok ... I’m really interested in that, I’ll go to that, and I’ll think, oh, well that was good maybe I’ll go to some other things.

Presentation

Kristin’s made some observations about the presentation of Free Range events that reflect her expertise as a theatre practitioner:

I wonder whether the size of the space affects the fact that’s there’s a closer sort of listening. I wonder if the fact that the ... general lighting, means that as an audience member you’re sort of in the performance space, I mean you’re included in the performance space, in some way ... your listening is part of the music .. the performers can see you, everyone can see each other and maybe that’s kind of, is a cause of tension for everyone that intensifies the quality of listening ... There is a special kind of atmosphere

The informality of the presentation of the events has an effect upon the quality of engagement. Free Range events have always taken place in café’s: spaces that are between the formality of a concert hall or theatre and the informality of a pub or night club.

Exclusive?

A couple of times Kristin mentions a kind of peer pressure or entrainment amongst the audience: ‘I feel like I need to pay attention to get it’ and ‘everyone can see each other and maybe that’s kind of, is a cause of tension’. These comments suggest that there are a set of social pressures and expectations at Free Range that could create a sense of exclusivity. One of the most remarkable things about the events is the extent to which these potentially negative aspects of a scene, especially a scene focussed around a network of specialised micro-scenes, are diffused. Whilst some people might expect to find the atmosphere at Free Range events rarefied, elitist or exclusive this is mitigated by the policy of free-entry, the informal presentation, the quality of the events, the diversity of the events, the diversity of the audience, the sense of ownership created through providing donations and the fact that there is a person associated with the events (myself) who introduces each artist and, through the process of soliciting donations, communicates with most members of the audience on an individual basis. The prevailing conservatism of Canterbury also works in our favour: the independent, grassroots nature of Free Range is unusual in the city and goes a long way towards diffusing the alienation and defensiveness that can occur around unfamiliar or experimental music.

A Canterbury Listening

To conclude, I have argued that the current scene around Free Range is characterised by an unusual receptivity to, and demand for, experimentation. The listening at events is exceptional and there is consistently high audience attendance (in comparison to other regular experimental art nights in the UK).

While the main focus of this chapter has been to describe the scene around Free Range, links with the Canterbury Sound from the 1960’s and 70’s have emerged. Some of these links between the two scenes include: 

• interdisciplinary art events that cross fertilise audiences and encourage artists from different fields to collaborate, especially in the fields of poetry and music.

• aspects of experimental ‘high’ culture presented in an independent, idiosyncratic fashion that goes some way towards making a ‘difficult’ aesthetic accessible.

• a diverse, creative community of artists and audience members.

• privileged access to resources and education.

• an interest in experimental rock music, modern jazz and free-improvisation shared amongst a network of inter-related musicians, bands, scenes, festivals and record labels.

• strong connections with experimental scenes.

• shared beliefs about the value and role of art.

• providing an antidote to, or reaction against, the prevailing conservatism of Canterbury.

I was born in 1975 so I am unable to comment on whether the receptivity to experimentation–what I call a Canterbury Listening–that characterises the scene around Free Range, played a role in the Canterbury Sound of the 1960’s and 70’s. But I hope that this chapter has provided an example of what Brian Eno called ‘scenius’. In his John Peel lecture (2015) Eno coined the term scenius to refer to the ‘talent of a whole community’, as opposed to genius, that refers to ‘the talent of an individual’. He points out that cultural narratives have often focussed on individuals but that, in reality, creativity always exists as part of a scene or cultural ecosystem:

Now this thing about ecosystems is that it’s impossible to tell what the important parts are. It’s not a hierarchy, you know. We’re used to thinking of things that are arranged in levels like that, with the important things at the top and the less important things at the bottom. Ecosystems aren’t like that. They’re richly interconnected and they’re co-dependent in many, many ways. And if you take one thing out of the ecosystem, you can get a collapse in quite a different place. They’re constantly rebalancing. And I feel that culture is like that. And I think that British musical culture in particular has been like that. (Eno, 2015)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayers, K., Ratledge, M., & Wyatt, R. (1968) Why are we sleeping? On The Soft Machine [CD]. London: Big Beat.

Bailey, S. (2018). Free Range promotional material [brochures]. Self-published.

Bennett, A. (2002). New tales from Canterbury: the making of a virtual scene. In Bennett, A. & Peterson. R. A. (Eds.), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp.205-220).  Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press.

Bloom (2019). Retrieved from: https://www.bloommusic.co.uk/about/

Charity Commission (2015). Free Range. Retrieved from http://apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/CharityFramework.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=1161891&SubsidiaryNumber=0

Dawn Chorus Recordings twitter profile. (2019). Retrieved October 28, 2019, from https://twitter.com/DawnChorusRec

Eno, B. (2015). The John Peel Lecture [audio streaming]. Retrieved at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p033smwp

Graham Lambkin (n.d.). Retrieved from https://grahamlambkin.com/About

Kent County Council (2019) Kent Economic Indicators 2019. Retrieved from https://www.kent.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/8187/Kent-economic-indicators-report.pdf

Parker, E. & Wright, M. (2011) Trance Map [CD]. London: Psi.

Sinclair, R. (1994). [Interview with Richard Sinclair by Ken Egbert]. Retrieved from http://calyx-canterbury.fr/interviews/rsinclair1.html

The ‘Canterbury Sound’: Place, Music and Myth (2017, October). Canterbury Christ Church University, Augustine House, Canterbury.

The New Canterbury Sound (2019, June). Concert curated by Dawn Chorus Recordings and Smugglers Records featuring Nelson Parade, The Selkies, Lapis Lazuli, Falle Nioke & The Evil Usses. Gulbenkian Theatre, University of Kent, Canterbury.

The Canterbury Sound: a 50th Birthday Celebration (2019, June). Concert featuring Soft Machine, Caravan, Syd Arthur + Jack Hues & the Quartet and the premiere of a new audio-visual piece by John Harle and Simon Armitage called ZOOM performed by Soft Machine. Gulbenkian Theatre, University of Kent, Canterbury.

Tucker, M. (1996) ‘The Body Electric: The shamanic spirit in twentieth century music’, Contemporary Music Review 14 (1-2) [online]. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07494469600640171 (Accessed: 10 January 2012).

Ubuweb: sound Allan Kaprow (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ubu.com/sound/kaprow.html

UFO Club [Wikipedia entry]. (n.d.). Retrieved October 28, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_Club

Watkins, M (2018). You Are Here: The biography of a moment. Canterbury, Kent:The Inamorata Press.

Wyatt, R. & Eisler, G. (2016) Gavin Eisler in conversation with Robert Wyatt. Talk presented at Colyer-Fergusson Hall, University of Kent, Canterbury, U.K.