Leon String Quartet join chamber folk band Arlet on 7th May in a collaboration for Free Range as part of this year’s Sounds New festival which champions contemporary and experimental music making. Composers Aiden Shepherd, the main creative force behind Arlet and our very own Matthew Brown have written new works especially for Arlet musicians and the Leon String Quartet.

Aidan has composed a new work for string quartet and clarinet titled Fade to Green, to be performed by the Leon String Quartet and Owen Hewson. Matt has composed Concord of Sounds for Arlet and the Leon String Quartet.

Click here for an interview with Matt on this exciting collaboration.

About Arlet  www.arlet.co.uk

Arlet are a diverse group of Kent-based musicians, whose music is found somewhere between the folk club and the chamber music hall.

Propelled by the restless creativity of accordionist and composer Aidan Shepherd, their sound brings together all the primary colours of the orchestra – strings, woodwind and brass. A founding musical inspiration is a love of the joyful melodicism and rhythmic intensity of British Folk, but rather than viewing folk traditions as artefacts to be revered, Arlet have drawn on folk idioms as a route to their own brand of carefully sculpted, richly harmonic and lusciously textured music.

Sounding sometimes like a chamber quintet letting its hair down and finding a curious groove circa 1973, sometimes like a session band in the corner of a rural pub suddenly slipping through a vortex into another musical dimension…

“Gorgeousness in the Spiro/Penguins zone” – fRoots Magazine

“Just once in a while an album comes along that takes you to places you hadn’t realise existed. Arlet’s Clearing did this, and much more, for me.”
– Folk Radio UK (Johnny Whalley)

“organic talent and feeling that bursts through with each track…they make the kind of wonderful, stirring, instrumental, orchestral music that not just folk music, but music in general, is founded.” – Thank Folk For That (Josh King)