In Residence:
Joe Snape and Northumberland Radical Fun Group
- Jump to →
- Multi buy Offer
Click here to see everything you need to know ahead of your visit, including arrival times
? If you have purchased a streaming pass, please log into your account and click ‘My Live Streams’ to watch.
Please note that Sage Gateshead will have social distancing in place for the duration of June 2021. Tickets booked together will be sat together, with a socially distanced space between separate bookings.
When booking your tickets please observe current regulations and only book tickets as one party if all members are within one household or one bubble.
Joe Snape mixes conventional and homemade electronic 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), Wonder Site (Tokyo), and also the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg) and Aldeburgh Music.
Joe grew up playing classical percussion in Birmingham Music Service in the Noughties, recording songs on the family computer and flogging hand-painted CD-Rs to other kids at school. He studied music at Cambridge, Oxford, and held a PhD fellowship at New York University. The Quietus calls Joe’s music ‘goofy, melancholy, irreverent fun – very, very singularly itself’, and one time in The Guardian, Nico Muhly called it ‘organized, disorganized fun’.
In this concert he presents a brand new work called Action Vibration Volume 1, written during his Sage Gateshead residency, for a new 12-piece ensemble.
Beginning with the four-to-the-floor thump of Riviera House tracks played to patients in a Greek intensive care unit and ending up with a south Birmingham birthday bacchanal at an oversized Chinese restaurant, Action Vibration Volume One is an hour-long paean to the music and people that make us who we are, in all our gory, complicated glory. Comprised of lavish chamber ensemble orchestrations, proper floor-fillers, tongue-in-cheek musicological analyses and pop psychology mini-lectures interwoven with intimate, live-typed text fragments that chronicle months of amnesia following a music lover’s catastrophic brain injury, the work walks a tightrope between a full-blown breakdown and a string of darkly dry one-liners. Come for the superficial weirdness, stay for the world-weary fun. This is catharsis at its oddest.
The performance of Action Vibration will follow the world premiere of a new film written, directed and produced by secondary pupils from three schools in North Tyneside. Students from Marden, Norham and John Spence High Schools have spent much of the last year working with artist mentors from arts education charity Hand Of, exploring strange stories from the region in surprising ways all on the theme of ‘Home Adventures.’ (And you thought lockdown was boring).
Northumberland Radical Fun Group is a twelve-piece contemporary music big band founded in 2020 by Sage Gateshead artist-in-residence Joe Snape and friends. NRFG is dedicated to commissioning, performing and promoting ambitious, large-scale works of new music with adventurous approaches to crossing genres and scenes, actively fostering opportunities for sonic exploration and artist community building in the North East. Our players are a vibrant mix of professionals, passionate amateurs and promising students from musical traditions that include folk, hardcore, post-rock, jazz and classical, and they are of various ages from 14 to over 70. We are optimistic about our work together, musically omnivorous, and committed to making art we love with people we like. Want to join? Get in touch! Email j.f.snape@gmail.com or visit http://joesna.pe to find out more.
Can’t make the live gig? Streaming passes are available!
Join us from the comfort of your own sofa for the live stream of the performance, which will be streamed as a live experience from our iconic Sage One hall. The live stream will be also be available to watch on demand for 48 hours from midnight on Sunday 20 June until midnight on Sunday 27 June.
Streaming FAQs
To get the best possible experience, please read our Streaming FAQs, which includes information on how to view the stream on your TV.
If you would like more information about attending one of our concerts please see Your Visit and our FAQs.
Other In Residence Performances:
Save with our multi buy offer!
Buy 1 concert/stream and get another half price. Use the links below to book and save!
Buy 2 Concerts Buy 3 Concerts Buy 2 Streams Buy 3 Streams Buy 4 Streams
To purchase all 4 concerts, please call Box Office on 0191 443 4661