Some types of space for (experimental) music in London

I’ve been in staying London for a few months and there have been almost too many chances to go to sound and performances events here – I just checked my photo library and counted that already this year I’ve been to around 62 events (and that’s counting multi-day events as a single event, like artist Xu Shaoyang’s under45db micro-fest that took place in January)! It’s been pretty intense.

Given my ongoing research into the spaces for experimental music in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, I thought now would be a good moment to expand that research geographically, and review the kinds of spaces I’ve been going to in London, as well as think about similarities and differences between spaces used by such artists in the two areas.

In terms of the events I have been attending, initially I was predictably concentrating on events by or including East and South East Asian (ESEA) artists, whether those artists visiting London or the diaspora living here, but this is not always the case. I should say that even though I have been to many venues, the list here is not encyclopaedic but based on the overlapping networks that artists exist within and my own choices reflecting my broader interests and work.

Given that proviso, here are the categories of spaces I’ve noticed, the venues, and examples of events in them:

1. (Primarily) music venues
   • Café OTO
   • Downstairs at The Vortex Jazz Club
   • The Horse Hospital
   • Temple of Art and Music
   • iklectik
   • Ormside Projects
2. (Primarily) rt/design gallery spaces
   • filet Space
   • Hundred Years Gallery (basement)
     • Example: knot series curated by Zheng Hao
   • Project DIVFUSE
   • Tower Theatre (basement), Stoke Newington
     • Example: pool
   • V&A, South Kensington
     • Example: 26/02/27 Friday Late: To Ebb is To Flow
   • YDP
     • Example: Living, Rehearsing… (curated by Zhuo Mengting, Erin Lee, and Billy Tang).
3. (Primarily) churches
   • Either inside the church itself, or in one of the church’s halls.
     • Christ Church, Southwark
       • Example: The Horse Improvised Music Club
     • St Mary’s, Stoke Newington
       • Example: London Improvisers Orchestra
4. (Primarily) food and drink spaces
   • Avalon Café
     • Example: SAOM
   • Eat the Sunshine . Down the Sun café, Kennington
   • The Hamlet Bar, Streatham
     • Example: Sound Bureau curated by Phil Durrant
   • The Hill Community Café
     • Example: Mercury Over Maps curated by Bill Thompson
5. Railway arches
   • A very typical and cheap space for small music venues, resulting from the development of rail routes around London in the mid-19th Century.
     • Spanners
     • Piehouse Coop
     • Club Silly, Brixton
6. Odd spaces
   • Café OTO’s bunker space
   • Swiss Cottage Library

Photos of the spaces

I don’t have representative photos of all the spaces, but I’ll update this as I collect them.

Some thoughts

All space are hybrid spaces. My categories inevitably include spaces where there are dominant and subordinate uses – music venues can also provide food and drink, and food and drink venues can also provide space for performances, and these may occupy the same physical space, or a different space within the same building). But my categories also include specific forms of space in which many different things can happen (the railway arches, for instance). I should also note that I tend not to go to live houses (dedicated venues for music events with audience capacities of over c.200 people) or clubs (dedicated venues for dance music). That being said, some of the venues listed below also host traditional forms of live performance and club events. So these categories need to be developed a bit better, I think.

A notable difference between my experience in London and the places I have studied in China is that there are simply many more venues available to artists here in London. I believe this is combination of the cultural norms and expectations here, as well as the basic availability (and affordability) of spaces that can be rented by artists. In the latter case, I am sure there has been research done on the way that music culture in the UK was able to develop due to pubs traditionally having extra rooms available for social events, something which is not common in China where pub culture does not really exist in this way (people go to restaurants to drink with food, and karaoke bars are private spaces) and social spaces are regulated in China much more than in the UK, I feel.

That said, people (not just artists) in China still have the urge to perform, and I think that a consequence of the limitations and restrictions I mentioned above has been the use of non-traditional spaces for performances. When I included Café OTO’s bunker above I realised that this is a exception from my experience in the UK; there seems to be a notable lack of events taking place outside of regular venues and/or in public spaces. However, I have heard of a few other informal events which have taken place outdoors this year, including some field recording forays organised by School of the Damned, but I believe they were really for the artists themselves to go recording rather than as a public performance. Of course, my relative inexperience following events here in London may play a part in my not hearing about such events, so we’ll see if that changes over time.

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