Vondelpark, Slime and youth orchestra rehearse 'A City Symphonic'

Two of our favourite London firms ISYS and NTS have joined forces to create a one-off music performance at London’s Tate Tanks. ‘Paved with Gold / A City Symphonic’ takes place this Friday, August 24th. Expect live performances, film screenings and a recorded audio track, all unearthing a day in the life of London.

The full line up of artists playing live on the night is Slime, Vondelpark, My Panda Shall Fly, Dark Sky, RPBLC of Many Voices, James Massiah and CKTRL. It’s currently all booked up, but there a few tickets left on the door for those who get down early.

Below are some stunning pictures and quotes from the rehearsals which involve the talents of Slime and Vondelpark collaborating with the youth orchestra, which has been formed especially for this event and is made up of an array of young classical musicians based in east London.

Slime

[The track is about] the evening. There’s about four stages in an evening; when you’re out and you’re having fun and it’s all lively, then that moment where you realise it’s not going to get any better than this, that would be the second bit of music and the third bit would be on the way home on the night bus for example and the last bit would be sitting down on the sofa when the sun’s coming up, really really tired and reminiscing on the sort of nice memories and thinking about the next day to come.

I realised the music I scored for the young people in the orchestra on paper was really really ambitious and it didn’t really work that way but it’s come together quite naturally from my side and theirs and over three weeks of trying to understand each other a little bit more. Obviously they’ve come from a completely different world, there are big gaps between us.

Vondelpark

Lewis: ISYS came to me with this idea of doing morning and evening and I think our music suited the morning more as it was quite gentle and (about) just trying to soothe yourself into the day with nice tones, as you’re waking up – just getting ideas – the oboe makes that really possible.

Matt: I’ve quite enjoyed teaching, trying to get our Ideas across to the youth orchestra. We have our own sort of musical terms, our way of sort of… Lewis: It’s quite interesting how people interpret your way of describing music, they’re obviously from a classical background, we’ve learnt our own thing from hanging out since we were 15, 4 times to them is maybe 16 bars Matt: We have a different musical language Lewis: When they interpret what you’re trying to say though cos sometimes it isn’t actually what you ask for but that’s what’s interesting, they’ve got their own ideas.

Lewis: I’m looking forward to the echoey sound of an orchestra in the tanks

Orchestra

Khemi Shabazz – oboe: Being able to collaborate with other musicians, especially with my instrument (the oboe) we don’t often get to collaborate with producers, it’s usually just orchestral or classical. We went through different ideas and worked with (the musicians) ideas and then formed what we are going to be performing. I like that the project is focussed around young artists and London.

Chadra Iyengar – bassoon: It was fun seeing how the electronic music can go with the classical instruments.

Ani Movsisyan – violin: Working with different kinds of musicians, I’ve never worked with electronic music before but I’ve always really been interested by it. We’ve been listening to some of the samples that the artists have been making and they’ve been telling us some clues as to what we can do with those sounds. We’re all playing different parts that suit our instruments and we’ve been working that out quite a lot throughout the process but I think we’ve gotten to a good stage now. It’s mostly improvising and playing along and seeing what works and what doesn’t. I’m really interested in live art as performance so the opportunity to perform in the tanks is pretty amazing, it’s going to be really fun playing with the acoustics in the tanks. I think the interiors there will really set the scene and it really goes with the themes and ideas that our work is all about – London and youth culture.

You can hear more interviews with the artists about the project on Tuesday 28th on the ISYS show on NTS at 6pm.