Ana Silvera + My Glass World

Event information

Ana Silvera
In February 2011, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Ana Silvera wrote and performed a seven part song cycle with the Roundhouse Experimental Choir for three successive, sold out nights in the Roundhouse Studios entitled 'Oracles'.

Ana repeated the performance of 'Oracles' in Feb 2012, this time selling out the main stage in a joint headline show with Imogen Heap. Ana brought the Estonian Television Girls Choir to sing with her and the event was streamed by the Guardian Newspaper website.

On top of these incredible performances, Ana's debut album 'The Aviary' is now released in the UK via Karamel Music Collective. Recorded in New York with Maxim Moston (Antony and the Johnsons, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed) and produced by Brad Albetta (Martha Wainwright, Teddy Thompson) in New York and Ray Singer (Peter Sarstedt, Joan Armatrading, Japan) in London.

My Brightest Diamond and Rufus Wainwright are clear references in the music of 'The Aviary' and drawing on a love of story-telling and for the classical music she grew up with, Ana sings of deeply personal experiences alongside mythical and historical tales of romance and tragedy.

Drama, complexity, exuberance, life, death – they're all here in the beautiful melodies and heart-warming, sometimes bone-chilling lyrics of this remarkable debut.

As a teenager, Ana regularly performed with the English National Opera before travelling the world, living for a stint in Ibiza under a fig tree, exploring the anti-folk movement in Berlin and most recently, forging exciting creative collaborations in Brooklyn with film makers, musicians and dancers. Constantly exploring various styles of music - singing in european jazz clubs, recording a brooding cover of the hit 'Rosanna' by 80's band 'Toto', and performing Britney Spears' Womanizer' in her live set, Ana's music is steeped in a whole variety of influences.

"Ana Silvera is a poet who wraps her words in a style of music that is as personalised as the stories she tells. Her songs reflect episodes in her life, influences and characters, full of historical imagery and dramatic fantasy" (Bearded Magazine).

My Glass World
My Glass World are virtuoso duo Jamie Telford and Dinah Beamish. Their work – haunting, joyous, wry, but always beautiful – is the first collaboration of its kind between them. Born in Border country, it’s a project that blurs boundaries, and marks the point where two wildly different musical animals meet.

Jamie’s songwriting is the culmination of a freewheeling career steeped in all forms of music-making. He has recorded with The Jam and a host of other bands. He has composed music for advertising, film and the theatre and turned his talents to contemporary classical music.

And he has written music for his hometown in the Scottish Borders, where he still performs every year with local flute and bagpipe bands – and where My Glass World go to think, drink, write, and rehearse.

Cellist Dinah, a regular performer with Jools Holland’s Hootenanny band, has played for everyone from small quartets to the Royal Philarmonic, from bands like Eternal to West End musicals and to the Moscow City Ballet.

She has been director of both the Electra Strings and Brilliant Strings groups – ensembles which feature in the work of everyone from Zero 7 to The Stereophonics, and from Nick Drake to film maker Derek Jarman. And she has travelled to India to learn Raga from Indian masters, which she has adapted for cello.

Now Jamie and Dinah are teaming up for the first time to create a sound that mixes exquisite melody, raw emotion and a cool, quirky wit that ranges freely over everything from Mad Men and Shakespeare to politics and (meta)physics.

The result is reassuringly wise and refreshingly weird: songs in the key of life and death, from a duo who have always ploughed their own distinctive furrow.