Juxtavoices’ first album Juxtanother antichoir from Sheffield (Discus 44) is now available from

http://www.discus-music.co.uk/menu.htm

& from West House Books, a.halsey@westhousebooks.co.uk

80 minutes. £10 incl. post.

Suppose you invited thirty people to meet one Saturday morning to try out their voices and hear how they might sound together. That’s what Martin Archer did in 2010 and out of that and subsequent meetings came Juxtavoices. Only a few of the thirty were experienced singers. They found themselves performing alongside musicians from the improvising scene, a few poets, visual artists and some less rarefied souls who also happened to find it an exciting prospect.

Juxtanother antichoir from Sheffield presents a repertoire developed over three years and performed in venues as diverse as a bear pit, a library stairwell, a disused steelworks, churches and more conventional concert settings. It includes arrangements of poems by singers Christine Kennedy and Geraldine Monk and others by Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and the grandmaster of sound poetry Bob Cobbing, with solo and collaborative compositions by Martin Archer and co-director Alan Halsey.

Juxtavoices is no ordinary choir. It’s not an ordinary antichoir either. You’ve probably heard nothing quite like them before. Nor, they’ll assure you, have they. ‘Precisely what art should be: challenging, reflective and dislocating. Voices struggling to articulate thought and emotion, whispered and screamed and seduced and accosted from nowhere’ (Norman Paul Warwick).

West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN