Joe Snape & Ian Sankey
Joe Snape mixes conventional and homemade instruments with light, text and video to make unusual and emotive performances.
His work has been presented at places like The Kitchen (New York), Café Oto (London), and Wonder Site (Tokyo), and also at places like the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg) and Aldeburgh Music. The Quietus calls Joe’s music “goofy, melancholy, irreverent fun – very, very singularly itself.” Fluid Radio thinks it’s “joyous and beautiful”, and once, in front of a small audience, the AACM’s George Lewis described Joe’s work as “some seriously unartful sh*t,” and everybody agreed.
Joe is a former UK Young Artist, has been nominated for the Arts Foundation’s Creative Producer fellowship, and has helped commission new work from some twenty young composers on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a recipient of a 2021-22 Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Award for Artists in Composition and was a 2020-21 Artist in Residence at The Glasshouse.
As part of Foundry 2023, he will be working with award-winning trombonist Ian Sankey on an concert-length set of pieces that reimagines Italian composer Luciano Berio’s classic Sequenza V for trombone as an absurdist dialogue between Berio and his longtime hero Grock, the Swiss ‘king of clowns’.