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| Realising Antoine Beuger's Calme Etendue (percussion) at ChristChurch Meadows, Oxford. With Trevor Simmons. |
Patrick Farmer is an artist working with improvisation, poetry, field recording, and composition. He was born in Beckenham, Kent in 1983, and has moved all over the country since then. His mother bought him his first drum kit when he was twelve and eight years later he spent six months in India studying Hindustani Tabla with Pandit Nayan Ghosh. Still most often referred to as a percussionist, though he hasn’t performed on a drum kit for nearly three years, Farmer will commonly enlist the help of a drum or turntable to act as a resonator for natural materials or filtering field recordings.
He is a founding member of the Set Ensemble, a group based in the UK dedicated to the performance of experimental music, especially that of the Wandelweiser group, and co-founded the online record label, Compost and Height, with Sarah Hughes in 2008. As of October 2012 patrick began studying towards his Ph.D at Oxford Brookes.
Throughout 2011 he was fortunate enough to be artist in residence at a series of inspiring galleries and artist run project spaces throughout Europe, including MOKS in Estonia, Sound // Space in the UK and Q-O2 in Belgium. His first book, try I bark, was published by Compost and Height and Organized Music in Thessaloniki in September 2012 and has since sold out. The book is a collection of writings written around Europe looking towards myriad tacit reactions to being surrounded. During early summer 2012 Patrick walked half of the Welsh Coast gathering material for his second book, which is soon to be published by SARU, and is entitled, Wild horses think of nothing the sea!.
Patrick has performed with artists such as Angharad Davies, Lee Patterson, David Lacey, Matt Davis, Jason Kahn, Christian Munthe, Anders Dahl, Will Guthrie, and Rhodri Davies. He has a long-standing duo with double bassist Dominic Lash, with Sarah Hughes and Daniel Jones he is a member of the improvising trio ‘Loris’, and he is part of, along with Stephen Cornford and Sarah Hughes, ‘The Albion Players’, whom recently performed excerpts of Ben Owen's 'Geese' and George Brecht’s 'Water Yam' at the Lost and Found series in Oxford and London. In February 2012 Farmer was part of the exhibition, 'new works', with Manfred Werder and Ben Owen, curated by Sarah Hughes, at the Old Fire Station in Oxford.
He has performed in the UK, France, Sweden, Norway, North America, Mumbai, Belgium and Estonia. Festival appearances include Audiograft (Oxford), LMC (London), I & E (Dublin), Geiger (Gothenberg) and Blurred Edges (Hamburg). He has been released on labels such as Another Timbre, Cathnor, Compost and Height, Nadukeenumono, Organised Music from Thessaloniki and Winds Measure.
