KIRAN LEONARD

LIVE FROM STUDIO 8

We were delighted to welcome Kiran Leonard to Studio 8 for a live-streamed session in January 2022. This was the maiden voyage for the brand new studio, and we were really happy to be able to kick things off in such a great way.

SET LIST

00:00 - Third Day of February

04:06 - Living With Your Ailments

13:22 - Unreflective Life

18:38 - Body of Worry

KIRAN LEONARD

The “TRESPASS ON FOOT GROUP” was convened to support Kiran Leonard’s new record of the same name, a record in two 59-minute parts released on double cassette/double CD in October 2021. The first half of Trespass on Foot was recorded alone in six days, consisting of five long pieces for voice, electric guitars, and radio and feedback collages; the second half, with shorter, acoustic songs, was recorded over three years across different houses, with friends contributing strings, woodwind and voices. Inspired by Jonas Mekas’ ‘epic home movies’, the complete record takes the ‘domestic’ as its primary subject matter, and everything that very nebulous word contains: interiority, frontiers, safety, desire for escape, joy, sadness, stasis, changes.

This new five-piece is an attempt at finding a midpoint between the noisy electricity and quiet sparseness of discs one and two. The knotty and dense pieces performed by this group – new arrangements of songs from Trespass on Foot and from earlier records – are (as Kiran tells himself) “a bit more like chamber music, actually”. The unique instrumentation of the line-up allows for a broad dynamic range, ranging from quiet, reverberant chord clusters to fractious polyrhythms.

First premiered at last year’s End of the Road Festival, Trespass on Foot Group features members of Caroline, Shovel Dance Collective, Dear Laika and Historically Fucked. “One of the UK’s most underrated singer-songwriters” - The Guardian “I tried to find something wrong with it to avoid sounding crazy and hyperbolic in my praise—because how could anything sound this powerful—but I came up empty” - Paste “Typically dense/intense double album from the Saddleworth subversive: one disc of solo guitar and electronics, the other with a chamber group” - Uncut

https://kleonard.bandcamp.com/

ART SCHOOL LIVE

Art School Live is a series of performances and events live-streamed from around the Manchester School of Art. The events are a collaboration between students and the technical team here at the university. Each show is used to promote a local band or artist, with production duties carried out by the students.