I’ve been playing with the Hackney based improvising group Fear of Fluffing for near enough 6 years. Here is a biography written for a live event in November that took place at Trowbridge Gardens Arts cafe.
About FEAR OF FLUFFING:
The Fear of Fluffing have been playing around East London
(mostly) for over a decade. Their approach is communicating
through improvisation; using electronics, amplified objects,
home-made instruments, and the environment itself. A similar
approach in creating costume gives their strong visual
presence. Exploring and responding to disregarded urban
locations and community spaces in Hackney Wick has been
their core practice – part of the success of playing in such
spaces is the created opportunities for distinction between
performer and listener to soften. Predominantly the band are
more at home with the practice of creatively playing and
merging with its surroundings, than trying to uphold any
concept of who they are or what they should be doing.
Fear of Fluffing have played for many years working with the the Butoh dancer Mai Nguyen Tri (MAI BUTOH DANCE) a French Vietnamese dance artist from the East End of London specializing in Butoh dance and improvisations in collaboration with musicians, poets, costumes designers and multimedia and visual artists. Mai is a wild evocative presence, a magnetic performer that captures and sets free the possibilities of sound and emotion in the spaces of the body and its environs.
This is the first time Fear of Fluffing have made anything for release. Mastered by Dan Hayhurst of Sculpture the result is the album ‘Near to Nothing‘ which Justin Barton (Explorations of the Abstract) described as ‘…charged, and in a serene way there is a sense in which it is unsettled and unsettling (these are entirely positive terms in this context).’
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