The Strangeness of Drumming

As a companion to his TOPOS presentation The Strangeness of Jazz, Edward George, on turntables, joins UK-based drummer, composer, and writer Paul Abbott for The Strangeness of Drumming, an improvised duo performance to expand upon Abbott’s 2025 experimental album, Slip.

At the center of Slip is Abbott’s long-developing acoustic-digital hybrid drum system, which combines live percussion with synthetic and processed sound in a relationship that is both intimate and unstable. Integrating Abbott’s research into rhythm and his own engagement with the music of D’Angelo, George stretches the continuum of inquiry around drumming across jazz, improvised music, hip-hop, and R&B.

Through turntables, voice, drums, electronics, samples, and sonic fragments, George and Abbott explore overlapping temporalities, rhythms, and ways of feeling groove. Mining archives, not to preserve them, but to recombine and recontextualize them, the duo points toward new sonic futurities. What happens when rhythm becomes a method of historical inquiry? What new forms of listening emerge when groove is treated as both memory and speculation?

The result is a dense and exhilarating dialogue in which intellectual rigor is continually reshaped through improvisation, pressure, repetition, and the liberatory possibilities of sound and rhythm.

Join us after the performance for a reception in Evelyn's café.