The sun shone, the rain pored down and we had quite a few eavesdroppers listening when they thought no one was watching…

It was a special one for us, as good old Stroud is our home town. There were Lots of wonderful audience members and performers, including Stroud’s very own Ben Kritikos from local folk-rock heroes Herons.We also had some knee-stomping  one-on-one violin from Misha Law and  a bunch of beautiful songs from her unbelievably talented 10 year old Son Max, the youngest (and one of the best!) singer/songwriters in town.

We’ll be posting information on upcoming festivals and shows in the coming weeks. And if any of you Stroudies missed us on Saturday, we’ll be folking the hell out  out at Art Flee in the SVA Goods Shed from 10 in the morning this saturday too.

Bring on the summer!

The box will be set up on the 11th and 18th of May. For more information, please head to the festival website below.

The Site Festival is a contemporary arts festival, now in its 17th year, which brings a full and dynamic programme of visual arts, performance, music, screenings, open studios, artist talks and workshops to the Stroud Valleys for the whole month of May.

http://www.sitefestival.org.uk

A great way to kick off our 2013!!

It´s a temporary project and a design experiment that aims to celebrate the place. The project has public access, and it establishes experiences of spatial and social character.

http://www.archdaily.com/322484/fire-shelter-01-shj-works/

Why do Folk in a Box like this? Well for a number of reasons. But specifically in that it shares a synergy of being a temporary inhabitant in the landscape without leaving a trace, that it evokes a memory of a remnant place, and that fleetingly it provides a place for reflection.

We can’t wait to get Folk in a Box up and about for the year!!

An important perspective of Folk in a Box is about setting, or juxtaposition against its surroundings. We want to explore the notion of the box as an entity in landscapes, urban or otherwise.

Here are some amazing photos from Akos Major. Who wants to see Folk in a Box in these kinds of settings?

http://www.landezine.com/index.php/2013/01/photography-akos-major/

The Biennale, which has been curated this year by British architect David Chipperfield, invited the box’s architects DK-CM to bring the project to Venice, so we set off in time for the vernissage days at the end of August just after wrapping up our performances at the Beautiful Days festival in Devon.

For the first few days, the box was fully programmed with performances from Folk in a Box stalwarts and invited Italian musicians: Emily Barker, Dom Coyote, Sam Lee, Mark Ritsema, Stefano Scutari and Sofia Taliani.

The box arrived at the Arsenale exhibition galleries by water, and a video of its arrival accompanied the first few days of the exhibition. During these first few days, the box also travelled (again by canal!) to other Biennale venues to perform, and now a specially commissioned video by Sakiko Kohashi plays alongside the box in the gallery.

The box was reviewed by Rowan Moore, architecture critic of The Observer, as part of his review of the Biennale: ‘The woman ahead of me in the queue came out weeping with emotion, and while my heart was a little harder it was still an intense experience.’ Read more here!

The box was also mentioned in Kieran Long’s article on the Biennale in the Evening Standard, and in the Portuguese newspaper Público, The Architects’ Journal, Building Design, d’Architectures and all over the Italian media.

More news about the Biennale, including our videos, will be posted soon, and the exhibition continues until 25th November.
All photos by Sakiko Kohashi, with the exception of the Box on its travels which is by David Knight.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we will be showing our beautiful new folk in a box to the public for the first time at Night Of festivals in Nottingham in July 21st and 22nd. We’ve been invited to be part of an incredible event that will happen in Old Market Square and present music, performance, art and film from around the world, including the world premiere of a new short film by Michael Nyman, as well as our very own Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo on the main stage.  Needless to say, we are hugely excited about it! Here’s a link to the website! http://www.nightoffestivals.com/

Here’s the article:

How a folk concert in a box almost brought me to tears

I’ve never entered a flotation tank or “enjoyed” a lap dance, but I guess that my five minutes in Folk in a Box was an experience that had something in common with both of them.

Imagine the Tardis, redesigned in the manner of Strawberry Hill Gothick. Or a white wooden windowless Wendy House, constructed out of a flat pack that two people can slat together without nails or hammers in 20 minutes.

This is the work of architects David Knight and Cristina Monteiro, following specifications of the mastermind musician Dom Coyote, and the result is a delightful but also faintly unnerving curiosity.

You enter the box by crouching through a small, arched Alice-in-Wonderland door and then grope your way to a chair. Apart from one tiny pinpoint of intense light, the cabin’s interior, lined with serge curtain, is pitch-black. Opposite, only a foot or so away, sits an invisible unknown somebody with a guitar – in my case, the delightful chanteuse Emily Barker, who composed the haunting theme tune to BBC4’s Wallander.

Through the darkness, this somebody’s disembodied voice will ask you what sort of song you would like to hear: upbeat or downbeat? And then he or she will sing to you, and you alone. Free.

By the end of the song, you can just about make out the singer’s silhouette and you might feel impelled to offer a few words of comments or thanks. Or you might want to sit for a minute more in refreshing silence.

Without the tricky negotiation of eye contact and with nothing to distract you from the music, my visit to the box felt nakedly exposed and yet distantly impersonal, both disconcerting and comforting at the same time. A delicately intimate act of trust was in operation. “People do find it very intense,” Dom Coyote told me. “It’s not unusual for them to come out in tears.” I was pretty close to them myself.

Such one-on-one artistic enterprises are in vogue. The Edinburgh Fringe has presented several plays and recitations for a single audience member, and that fascinating maverick Pablo Bronstein has even created an opera house with only one seat in Switzerland. But I know of nothing like this.

Although Folk in a Box has existed in vestigial form for several years, appearing at outdoor festivals, until now it’s been hobbled by makeshift premises knocked up out of flotsam and jetsam. Its beautiful new cabin will change all that, and Dom Coyote plans to take it on a grand tour from Land’s End to John O’Groats this year, stopping in 24 odd or unexpected places, with the aim of singing a total of 1,500 gratis songs over a month.

If it comes down your way, don’t be scared: be brave and enter.

We can’t wait to show off the new box in person. But in the meantime we’ll be showing off the talents and latest news of the project’s real stars – the musicians. Look out for the post in the next few days.

The video features photography by Sakiko Kohashi and the DIY skills of Dom Coyote, David Knight and Cristina Monteiro.