October 20th marks the release of composer, producer, percussionist, and instrument maker Bex Burch‘s highly anticipated solo album There is only love and fear on International Anthem and her appearance at London’s Cafe Oto as part of a short string of dates.
Based in Berlin and originally from Leeds, UK, Burch’s restless creativity and desire to embrace new musical challenges has seen her collaborate with many artists. We saw this with Trestle Records’ The One Day Band sessions (that included a Cafe Oto performance in 2018). The sessions were essentially a way to facilitate an environment for musicians to meet and collaborate with one another on a record made in a day. This saw Burch teaming up with Kuljit Bhamra & Magnus Mehta on one session and George Bird, Leon Brichard & Peter Zummo on the other.
She has also collaborated with Peter Zummo, Tamar Osborn, Leafcutter John, Mariá Portugal, Tony Buck and Evelyn Glennie. Her recorded music with Boing!, Flock and her celebrated band Vula Viel has seen her straddle the divergent worlds of minimalism, post-punk, and improvisation with equal success.
We recently shared her video for “Don’t go back to sleep”, featuring Dan Bitney (Tortoise), in which they merge the organic qualities of synthesis with the synthetic qualities of the organic to create an intuitive tone poem that takes the rhythms and melodies of birdsong as its natural cue.
Calling her music ‘messy minimalism’, she also seems to derive an incredible sense of fun and happiness from playing while also welcoming chaos and challenge, something that this wonderfully insightful mini-documentary captures.
Burch was invited to spend a month in the US by International Anthem in the Summer of 2022 and brought her hand-made xylophone and immersed herself in the label’s creative community – listening to what it gave her, making field recordings, and allowing There is only love and fear to emerge from the collaborations and environments she encountered.
Sessions for the album spanned multiple non-traditional recording spaces, including a storefront in Bridgeport, Chicago and a canyon in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, with an eminent cast of creative musicians including Ben LaMar Gay, Macie Stewart, Anna Butterss, Mikel Patrick Avery, Ben Lumsdaine, and Dan Bitney of Tortoise, all of whom Burch met for the first time in the moments before they played. A load of footage and photographs were taken by Burch’s collaborators and hosts between Chicago and Los Angeles and have been beautifully edited together into an illuminating There is only love and fear mini-documentary by David Burkart, with interview footage shot in Berlin in 2023 by Fabian Brennecke.
THERE IS ONLY LOVE AND FEAR TOUR
October 13th – RIAA, Hamburg, Germany (Listening session w/ Bex Burch)
October 20th – Cafe Oto, London, UK
October 27th – King Georg, Cologne, Germany
October 30th – Rhinoçéros, Berlin, Germany (Listening session w/ Bex Burch)
November 03rd – ÜBERJAZZ Festival, Hamburg, Germany
November 17th – Jazz Brugge, Belgium
Pre-Order: There is only love and fear