Against Oblivion Part 2 is a music theatre work for three voices, piano, percussion and electric guitar. With a text by performance writer David Gale and using extracts from other contemporary writers, three singers from different vocal traditions look back on their lives and retell their stories trying to make sense of their personal legacy. What do they think about their lives? What are their private thoughts about the mark they have left, their place in the world, the effect they have made? Are they obsessed with fame and celebrity? Have their lives been empty or full? They are supported by three instrumentalists who with a mix of live and treated sound hammer out accompaniments or interjections interrupting the flow of their thoughts and providing a foil for their three way conversation.
Part of an ongoing series of short music theatre works by composer Jeremy Peyton Jones devised in collaboration with the performers, Against Oblivion Part 2 has a different, more personal take on memory than the themes explored in Part 1 which concerned the struggle with the memory of atrocity. The three vocalists, cathedral lay-clerk David Knight, contemporary vocalist Melanie Pappenheim and soul/gospel vocalist Brenda Rattray are accompanied by pianist Yeu-Meng Chan, electric guitarist Steve Smith and rock/improvising drummer Charles Hayward whose high-energy experimental drumming with electronics provides an “intoxicating mix of percussive attack, and swirling electronics.”

A Regular Music II production

Director/Music: Jeremy Peyton Jones
Words: David Gale

featuring:
David Knight (Voice)

Melanie Pappenheim (Voice)

Brenda Rattray (Voice)

Yeu-Meng Chan (Piano)

Charles Hayward (Drums/Percussion), Steve Smith (Electric Guitar)

Jeremy Cox (Sound)

Against Oblivion, Part 2

Jeremy Peyton Jones