Here's SANS at the Kaustinen Festival, Finland:

Tigran Aleksanyan: duduk

Sanna Kurki-Suonio: voice, kantele

Andrew Cronshaw: electric zither

Erika Hammarberg: voice, cornet

IB: bass clarinet, soprano sax

Luminous, Australia's scariest lullaby album, is now downloadable from Helen Rivero's Bandcamp site:

The album's doing well, with a win at Finland's EMMA awards and a number one spot in the Transglobal World Music chart. The Finnish press has excellent reviews in the Helsingen Sanomat, Karjalainen, and the Finnish Music Quarterly: elsewhere, you can read about it in Sweden's Lira Musikmagasin, Armenia's Golos Armenii and the Australian Rhythms magazine.

SANS will be playing at the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival on July 11th and 12th. This is where the band first came together in 2011, and these will be our first shows with Erika Hammarberg, whose voice you can hear on the Bandcamp player above.

The band reconvenes in Portugal for a concert on July 22nd at the Festival Músicas do Mundo, Sines.

Bassoonist and singer Zoey Pepper has been performing my multibassoony karaoke work The River Daughter recently - here's a taste:

There's a new SANS CD: it's called Kulku and we had a grand time recording it in rural Suffolk with producer Jim Sutherland and engineer Les Mommsen - and new, additional singer Erika Hammarberg, whose voice beautifully complements that of Sanna Kurki-Suonio.

Here's a review courtesy of Rootsworld, and you can hear and buy the album via Bandcamp or direct from Cloud Valley.

And here's Robin Denselow's review in The Guardian.

And the fRoots review by Chris Nickson.

I've been reading Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac in the Glyn Maxwell adaptation: I'll be doing the music for a production by Theatre in the Square which starts off in London in July, then goes to The Minack in Cornwall in September.

There'll be another piece for carillon and nonhuman performers coming up for a performance by Thomas Laue on July 2nd at the  World Carillon Federation Congress in Barcelona. This one, Multiplex of Wing and Eye, features the backyard bees. My previous carillon works, Blood Sugar Fairy and Matins, had their first outings on an instrument firmly planted in Lake Burley Griffin: the latest will be played on this roving carillon.

It's fifty years since the release of Sgt Pepper, so Shortis & Simpson are celebrating with a well-researched lecture recital in Queanbeyan on March 18th. I'm attempting those McCartney basslines and dusting off Ethel the wind synthesiser to do a piccolo trumpet impersonation (Penny Lane).

SANS reconvenes in May to play at the Seoul Music Week, followed by a gig at Cheongju's Jazztonic festival. When the farflung members of SANS can't get together, there's still the gathering of the trio of Cronshaw, Alexanyan and Blake. We did a video shoot at The Preservation Room recently - here's a specimen:

Someone pointed out that nineteenth century Australia was, per capita, the most piano-infested country on Earth. Having recorded and composed for a semi-feral Renardi and a rather relaxed Victorian Broadwood in Canberra I was pleased to discover another nicely backslid vintage Broadwood in Llanwrtyd, mid Wales. So I recorded lots of improvising on this one: it clangs and groans well, and I expect it'll emerge in a new soundwork...

At the end of March there's a Sound Heritage Sydney event celebrating the musicking that went on in historic houses: following on from the Performing the Past project, we'll be heading to Elizabeth Bay House for the day and I'll be playing How many  ships sail in the forest? on the resident Collard & Collard square piano and a historical laptop.