Gigs

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THE YELLOW BOX is an acclaimed album by Peter Gordon & David Cunningham recorded in the early 1980s and released on CD in 1996. On November 7th, 2025 Week-End Records will release The Yellow Box on vinyl for the first time. To mark the release, Peter Gordon (saxophone, keyboards) will perform a series of concerts with Blake Leyh (electric cello, synthesizer) in Glasgow, London, Cologne, and Brussells. The shows will include video art and films of Gordon’s longtime collaborator Kit Fitzgerald.

Sunday November 23rd, 2025 – STEREO, Glasgow (Tickets & Info)

Monday November 24th, 2025 – Café Oto, London (Tickets & Info)

Wednesday November 26th – JAKI at Stadtgarten, Cologne (Tickets & Info)

Thursday November 27th – les ateliers claus, Brussels (Tickets & Info)

The vinyl re-release will be accompanied by a digital release available on Bandcamp and other streaming platforms.

…Like a sparser, less groove-oriented version of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, or a more radical take on the experimental work of Can’s Holger Czukay, The Yellow Box stands at the crossroads of time and technology… (Week-End Records)

Week-End Records writes about the album:

Embarking on a collaborative exercise in the structural repurposing of music as untethered puzzle pieces in need of rearrangement with no predetermined outcomes, the (Gordon & Cunningham) gave birth to a project that would see them move through both time and recording studios across Europe, taking nearly two years from 1981-1983 to complete. Enlisting the great Anton Fier on drums from The Feelies/Lounge Lizards nexus and John Greaves on bass from Henry Cow/Soft Heaplore to round out their dueling creative counterparts, the album would be something of a lost treasure until its eventual release on Cunningham’s Piano imprint in 1996. 

Cinematic in scope, and filled with drifting drones, beautiful counter-melodies, eery minimalism, Kraftwerkian synthesizers, looped voices, skronky interludes, and other shifting undercurrents of sound, it was an album that utilized both a diverse array of expressive languages, as well as early sampling techniques and prepared instruments, well before most people were thinking in such expansive, integrated terms at the dawn of the 80’s. But such is life at the vanguard of new music.

Read more and order the vinyl at Week-End Records website.

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I will be appearing live at Pianos Bar & Grill in NYC on March 22nd as a special guest with Peter Gordon, as part of the UNCENSORED NEW YORK evening hosted by CLUB DELLA MORTE. I will play electric cello and synth along with Peter on Baritone sax and Kit Fitzgerald doing live video manipulation. Come by!

Update: Rare bookseller and Uptown Maestro Kurt Thometz attended the concert and afterwards said: “Expressionist, transgressive cabaret theater of the highest caliber… we found it profound, we thought it swellegant, your virtuosic evening. NuWeimar New York, in bowler hats, a supergroup in a master work, Downtown hasn’t felt this familiar in decades; a beer hall full of cruising youth, reactionary spoken word, nervous rock, a newer, perverser wave rave, on Ludlow no less. Congratulations on the best executed ensemble of urges, sexual, poetic and political, we’ve experienced in some time.”

“NuWeimar New York, in bowler hats, a supergroup in a master work”

Blake plays cello at Club Della Morte

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I will be giving two talks at Big Ears in Knoxville on March 30th:

1) A panel with Randall Poster (music supervisor: Killers of the Flower Moon, The Irishman, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Pat Irwin (musician, composer: SUSS, the B-52s, Dexter: Original Sin, Dexter: New Blood, Nurse Jackie, Rocko’s Modern Life) for a conversation about Music for Film & TV.

2) A lecture “How Avant Garde Music Consumed Hollywood,” looking at the ways in which experimental music has been used in mainstream cinema. From The Rite of Spring in Fantasia, through the cartoon music of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott, to Laurie Spiegel’s music in The Hunger Games and beyond, we will screen excerpts and discuss this unique history.

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