The Universal Veil is a duo comprised of Sam McLoughlin (Twisted Nerve/Pre-Cert Home Entertainment) and Folklore Tapes head honcho David Chatton Barker. Their improvised live performances with their own handmade “ritual instruments” are by turns meditative, trancelike, joyous and surreal. Unusual sounds are spontaneously generated, recycled and transmuted into a deeply strange, magical and psychedelic soundscapes.…

This month for our first Tod birthday we welcome Pizdetz. Georgios Stenos Frantzios and Stephen Summers from Noisy Toys bring a collection of re-animated miscellany and a cello upstairs. Springs, strings and interesting things with fans and pans and something else that we haven’t found yet that would rhyme with them as well. The audience…

For the first Todmorden session of 2020 we’re delighted to welcome Lisa Lavery. She’ll be performing an improvisational piece of hers which was initially a sound collage commissioned by the Calderdale branch of Yorkshire Sound Women Network. Inspired by and called ‘The Valley’, it’s made up of ‘sounds of the salon’ – hairdryers, clippers, polystyrene…

  SOUND OF LEAM is HARRY DAWES ( trombone, theremin, electronics,) and SIMON PRINCE ( saxophone, flute.) Harry & Simon have made music together in theatre & dance, in processional & celebratory music, in Soca & improvised music bands, in large groups & in duet. They have performed together from Bangkok to Belgrade, from Aarhus…

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the pub, A creature was playing electric golf club. Or something like that (I’ve got things to do!) The long and short of it is that The Noise Upstairs Todmorden is having a Christmas party on Christmas Eve and you’re all invited. We’ll hopefully feel like celebrating…

Pollen Count is a new trio of Lou on vocals & loops, Richard Knight on no-input mixer and Keith Jafrate on saxophone, three very different musical personalities each with their own approach, and all active in the Calder Valley’s vibrant music community. Using a mixture of prepared material and improvisation, their music is not fixed…

This month in Todmorden we’re delighted to welcome Otis Jordan into the fold. Otis is an experimental guitarist who works with field recordings and constructed instruments to forge a sonic vision that is eerie, jauntily melodic and entirely his own. https://otisjordan.bandcamp.com http://www.otisjordan.com “Like watching The Faust Tapes live” – Graham Massey, 808 State Before and…

Hello all! This month’s Todmorden guest set comes from a brand new duo of Simon Prince and Johnny Hunter. Both are fabulous musicians and frequent visitors to the Manchester Noise Upstairs events. You may know Simon from his many appearances with Wolfscarers, and other groups. He’s a fiery tenor sax player who’s equally as fiery…

Hanslip / Karlsen is a new collaboration between the established British saxophonist Mark Hanslip and the young Norwegian drummer Emil Karlsen. The sax / drum format provides an open space for exploration of various soundscapes, ranging from abstract textures to free jazz. In September 2019, the duo released their debut album ‘Planish’ (on Karlsen’s Noumenon…

The Noise Upstairs returns to the Lion for an 8th month (and counting) on Tuesday 24 September. This month we’re delighted to welcome newly-formed Pollen Count as our guest act. Before and after their set we’ll pull names from the hat to jam. As ever the night is free, and we’ll start to gather from…

Hello all. Our next Todmorden event will be one day after the bank holiday and three days before Tor Fest 2019. Heather is in flower on the hills, and life is good in Tod.   This month we have not one but two special guests. Our musical guest this month is Gloomy Planets, playing their…

This month’s special guest Bill Thompson is a sound artist and composer. He performs as a soloist and with a number of groups including zerospace with Lucia H Chung and Ian Stonehouse, a duo with Phil Durrant, Airfield with choreographer Ian Spink, and in the past with Keith Rowe, Faust, EXAUDI and others. Although originally trained as a…

This month we’re delighted to welcome Hedge Fund Managers to The Noise Upstairs Todmorden: Room frequency jamming and detune protocols narrowcast with scramble emergency code relay evocation. Corrupted crosstalk chaos pacification. Ritual derangement within self-aware pathways and unsigned posts, establishment of mutiny in the order: schismatic schematics. Dishabited apparatus delivery quotients of mediated protean focus…

This month’s guests are Ripsaw Catfish, stopping in on their short tour of the North (and London). Ripsaw Catfish are: Cath Roberts (baritone saxophone) and Anton Hunter (guitar), they have been making improvised music together for several years, and there is nothing to suggest that this won’t happen again on the 25th June. Hopefully with you…

Emil Karlsen’s acoustic solo project is based around making the most out of the drum set in terms of extended techniques, timbre and textures, improvised. Inspired by his Norwegian background, this project is a portrait of many years thinking compositionally and texturally about the drums, especially when put in a solo context . His main…

The Noise Upstairs Todmorden will feature a collective from my favourite record, coffee, book and vintage clothing shop this side of the Mississippi – The Magic City. True to the spirit of night, they’re not totally sure about who’ll be playing, or what they’ll play. But the mood music in recent days suggests that we’ll…