December 2022 sees the launch of the debut album of my solo project, Pop-Up Kings. The album is called The Start Of It All, and you can read more about it here.
I have played guitar in a variety of musical projects.
My most recent performances have been with Improvizone. In 2019 we played concerts at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Durham Castle. One extended improvised piece from the Emmanuel performance was released in June 2021 as Improvizone’s album The Old Library (available here on Bandcamp; pay what you can). You can hear me talk about the album on this podcast.
Improvizone also recently released a compilation of their performances from 2007 to 2010. The album is available on Bandcamp. I play synth guitar on track 4, ‘The Moon Had This to Say‘.
I collaborated with the ambient improvisational duo Darkroom on a project relating to the Hubbub project at Wellcome Collection. One recording, ‘Down in the Clouds‘, comes from a concert we played at the ‘Rest and its Discontents‘ exhibition in Mile End, London (October 2016). I appear on another recording from the same performance, ‘Always Remembering To Look Up‘.
Earlier in 2016 we played a concert for intensive care patients at University College Hospital, London, which included this track, ‘The Mermaid of Marmara‘. I wrote about the experience of playing this unusual concert in this article for Aeon.
We performed at the Hubbub Late Spectacular at Wellcome Collection in September 2015; you can listen to some recordings here.
Previously I was a founding member of Aimless Mules, a five-piece rock band based in the south-east of England. Our members were Chris Wild (vocals), Andrew Booker (drums), Nic Regan (bass), Michael Bearpark (guitar) and me (guitar). A studio EP with live bonus tracks is forthcoming.
Aimless Mules share an ancestry with the Essex-based band The Rise, active in the latter half of the eighties, and with the avant-garde folk incarnation of Samuel Smiles, who played regularly in Cambridge and East Anglia in the early nineties.
Charles Fernyhough 