Ashley Higgs

SCALE is a flexible, changing unit of improvisers formed by poet-singer and sanba Ashley J. Higgs and pianist/composer Forbes Hawkins. We hope to create a hybrid of fado-styled, spontaneous song cycles and soundscapes; juxtaposing our own influences and those of guest artists into powerful allegories of sound.

SCALE are not just a 'spoken word band', or 'art band' but a continuation of its musicians/non-musicians search for an intuitive, heart-felt crossbreed of oral tradition with musical accompaniment. The poems of Ashley J. Higgs are sung, spoken, whispered, screamed; verses are twisted, changed, forgotten and transmogrified into sonic incantations.

'Poetpop' has been a description of what this kind of performance/transformance is; translating subjective personal experience of sometimes difficult poetry/listening into the universal language of sound and new music.

SCALE are a collective of musicians/non-musicians who love creating a mesmerising space of possibility, shifting parameters of what's known and what's been forgotten - dancing ballroom on floors of blood, to exposing memescapes of aching beauty in free improvisational, experimental decay.