Mailing List
Coming Up
sm^sher
Sun 23 March 2025, 7.00pm Doors, 7.30pm Music :: £10
sm^sher is the moniker of Stroud based artist and producer Imogen Mason. Her debut album Pit of Mine was released last year on Scrawl, garnering praise from the likes of BBC 6 Music, The Quietus, Stereogum and Electronic Sound.
sm^sher's sonic world is impulsive, visceral and tapestried; weaving meditations on memory, grief, addiction, introversion and hope around industrial soundscape, fractured beats, drone-backed folk song and collage.
Performing live with prolific London-based drummer, Louis Giannamore (Arlo Parks, Gang Of Youths), whose debut album ‘World Tour!’, made entirely from iPhone voice memos and field recordings, is well worth checking. As a drummer with a penchant for samples, dark brooding synths and lush and grandiose ambience, Louis is the ideal live collaborator.
Already Happened
Bex Burch & Laurel Pardue ::
Rachel Musson
Tue 11 March 2025, 7.30pm :: £10
Bex Burch & Laurel Pardue
Composer, percussionist and improviser, Bex Burch describes her music as “messy minimalism”. Her 2023 release, 'There is only love and fear' was The Guardian's Contemporary Album of the Month.
Laurel Pardue is a violinist whose background in both folk and classical has led to her playing with artists and ensembles from Sam Lee to Bang On A Can. Her improvisatory language is draws on both these musical worlds.
Rachel Musson
Rachel Musson (PHF Awards for Artists 2024) is known as a bold, adventurous, and contemplative saxophonist, an established figure in the free improvisation scene, and a creative and imaginative composer.
Sanctum presents
Unfurl :: Bethany Ley
Fri 21 Feb 2025, 7.30pm :: £10
Your local monthly dose of exploratory noise making, Sanctum (curated by sm^sher) returns to Rattle and Brash with Unfurl and Bethany Ley.
Unfurl (Mike Flynn and Rowan Porteous)
Bassist and producer, Mike Flynn (editor Jazzwise magazine) and gifted Stroud-based trumpeter, Rowan Porteous (Giffords Circus)y combine immersive pedal-board-brewed soundscapes, heady melodies and intuitive interaction.
Bethany Ley
Bethany Ley is a Bristol-based producer, composer, harpist and vocalist known for crafting intricate arrangements that blend their classical background with electronic music.
Sanctum presents
Rory Salter :: Rachel Musson
Fri 24 Jan 2025, 7.30pm :: £10
Sanctum is a concert series of exploratory noise making curated by Imogen Mason (sm^sher, Voka Gentle).
Rory Salter
Rory Salter experiments with acoustic & electronic instruments, faulty & functional technologies, cassette tape, and feedback. Rory co-runs the Infant Tree label and curates a series of concerts between Cafe OTO and Spanners.
Rachel Musson
Immersed in improvised music, saxophonist Rachel Musson has been gradually introducing composed elements into her work, drawing on text, field recordings and processing sounds.
Christopher Haddow &
Jamie Bolland
Sun 3 Nov 2024, 7.00pm :: £10
Exploring a musical landscape somewhere between Brian Eno’s layered ambience and John Fahey’s finger-picking guitar, Christopher Haddow (tape loops, atmospherics, lap steel) is joined by long-term collaborator Jamie Bolland (piano), to conjure the deconstructed ambient country of his October debut, An Unexpected Giant Leap.
Sarah Nicolls Piano Bath
Wed 24 Oct 2024, 8.00pm :: £10
Wed 9 Oct 2024, 8.00pm :: £10
Tue 10 Sep 2024, 8.00pm :: £10
Wed 11 Sep 2024, 8.00pm :: £10
Tue 9 July 2024, 7.00pm :: Pay What You Feel
Tue 2 July 2024, 7.00pm :: Pay What You Feel
A live and low key, zone in/zone out, composed-on-the-fly experience that you might go to in the way that you might go to a yoga class. Feel free to bring a notebook or sketch pad or a yoga mat if you’d like to.
Sarah Nicolls has been innovating as a pianist since winning the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 2000. Her current work centres around her Inside Out Piano.
Fidan Aghayeva-Edler Seven Sisters
Tue 17 Sep 2024, 7.00pm :: £10
Fidan Aghayeva-Edler (who has been learning and performing a new piece by a female composer every day for a year), showcases mythical and legendary music by Jobina Tinnemans, Mel Bonis, and Marti Epstein’s super meditative The Piano at the Palace Beautiful.
Exhibition :: Placed
Fri 6 Sep 2024, 6.00pm Opening
Sat 7 - Sun 8 Sep 2024, 10.00am-4.00pm
Curated by Nicola Organ and Callum Partridge.
Contemporary fine art and craft live side-by-side with antique furniture and textiles in an exhibition that evokes both the gallery and the home. Featuring works by Stroud and London based artists:
Milligan Beaumont, William Brickel, Rhian Harris-Mussi, Isobel Harper, Milo Kester, Polly Lyster, Oliver Offord, Nicola Organ, Callum Partridge, Simone Ten Hompel, Centre Half (Daisy Gray and Mila Harris-Mussi) and Thistle by Nature (Emma Thistlethwaite).
Pop Up Festival presents
Loss><Gain Immersive Audio
Jon Hopkin Music for Psychedelic Therapy
Sun 5 May 2024, 10.30am :: £5
The second Immersive Audio events features electronic artist, Jon Hopkins' immersive ambient album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy. Inspired by a transcendental expedition into Ecuador’s ancient caves, this promises to be a rich and hallucinatory listening experience.
A glacial, continuous ambient piece that draws on the epic beauty of nature… spacious, delicate, comforting, a pastel mural of sound. Pitchfork
Pop Up Festival presents
Loss><Gain Immersive Audio
Gazelle Twin
Sat 4 May 2024, 10.30am :: £5
An Immersive Audio experience showcasing two recent works by Gazelle Twin:
We Wax. We Shall Not Wane.
An incantation of grief and defiance in lament to women lost to violence through the centuries, with texts read by Maxine Peake.
Deep England
Created in collaboration with NYX, Deep England is a radical reworking and electronic-choral expansion of Gazelle Twin’s 2018 album Pastoral.
Pop Up Festival presents
Invocations
Thu 2 May 2024, 7.30pm :: £8
The opening event for Pop Up Festival's NeoAncients Weekend.
Poets Adam Horovitz and JLM Morton are joined by woodwind specialist Chris Cundy and electronic noisenik Sean Roe to present a heady night of poetry, music and sound drawn from the history and mystery of our neolithic Cotswolds landscapes.
Mara Simpson
Tue 14 & Wed 15 2023, 7.00pm :: £10
Mara Simpson invited Bethany Ley, Smasher_The Frogs (Imogen Mason) and drummer Jools Owen, to be in residence with her at Rattle and Brash, bringing their musicianship to her beautifully crafted songs and creating a performance that moved seamlessly between pieces by each artist.
Musical exploration, warm vibes, and even live poetry from JLM Morton for one track.
Sarah Smout Eyjar
Fri 20 Oct 2023, 7.00pm :: £10
Sarah Smout is a cellist-singer and environmental activist. Her performances are imbued with visceral story-telling, bristling with atmosphere created with live-looped cello, haunting melodies and lyrics that are deeply rooted in nature and place.
Eyjar (Old Norse for ‘islands’) is a collection of works inspired by a month-long odyssey to Iceland, travelling by boat via Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes. It
explores our connections to place, the different lenses through which we view the land, and what that means for our relationship with nature.
Deeply lovely Mark Radcliffe, BBC Radio 2
Lisa Fitzgibbon
Down in the Valley
Sat 21 May 2023, 7.00pm
Down in the Valley, Songs of Landscape & Legend is a new song cycle created by Stroud-based singer-songwriter, Lisa Fitzgibbon inspired by the legends and landscape of the Slad Valley and immortalised by author Laurie Lee.
Performed by Lisa Fitzgibbon and the PowerFolk Quartet with recitation from
Cider with Rosie by Robbie Humphries.
Timed to commemorate the 25th year of Laurie Lee's death, this is the first performance of the song cycle, with the arrangements finalised over a short residency at Rattle and Brash.
About
Rattle and Brash
Pianist Sarah Nicolls and arts producer Richard Kingdom are the husband and wife team behind Rattle and Brash, a residency space located a short walk from the centre of Stroud. Aimed at building a community of artists and audiences around the creation and sharing of new work.
The space itself is a converted farm building, providing an 11m x 5m space for audiences of up to 50 (depending on the format of the work). It is set within a 14acre farm, currently being managed for nature recovery and biodiversity, that incorporates pasture, woodland and a stream, all of which are accessible to resident artists.
The name comes from Yellow Rattle (a wildflower typically sewn to suppress grasses in order to encourage other wildflowers to grow) and Cotswold Brash (the stoney limestone soil you get round here).
Contact
Get in Touch
We are always excited to hear from people with ideas and proposals for Rattle and Brash but regrettably we are rarely quick to respond to them. Have a go though: art @ rattle and brash . co . uk (without the spaces).
Find Us
Rattle and Brash, 137a Summer Street, Stroud, GL5 1PH
what3words: ///pilots.reshaping.lemmings
For events, please park on Summer Street and walk down. If you do need to park on site for mobility reasons, please email and let us know (use the Subject line 'Access').
Please bear in mind that this is our home and only open to the public for specific events - so please don't 'swing by to have a quick look'!
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