KEELY FORSYTH – “Hand To Mouth To”
HAND TO MOUTH TO is a newly reimagined live performance commissioned by Outlands Network and Full of Noises. The starting point for this new production is the EP HAND TO MOUTH (FatCat Records/130701). Released In May 2025, Keeley Forsyth accompanied by long time collaborator Matthew Bourne, crafted a subtly contemplative collection of stripped back songs, focusing primarily on the minimal ingredients of the voice and piano. What manifested between the two friends is a beautifully considered investigation of restraint and space.
Forsyth has taken this opportunity to invite new collaborators into the process of recontextualising the songs into an alternate live form. Acclaimed French author Jean Baptiste Del Amo (Son Of Man, Animalia, Fitzcaraldo Press) has provided a specially commissioned short story titled The No-End House, in response to the 2025 EP. We now find the song suite interspersed among Del Amo’s commis sioned story. A piece charged with distressing memories, human failings, regret and longing. What results is an experiment between song and theatre monologue, between gig and play, where new causalities and associations are made between Del Amo’s narrative and the song cycle.
Additional musical accompaniment for these shows is provided by Polish cellist/ composer Resina who has developed elements of Matthew Bourne’s original compositions as well as adding her own ideas, sounds and sensibility to the piec es. The story sections themselves, read by a voice modulated Forsyth, are cloaked in a dark ambience of drone and field recordings provided by Forsyth’s collabora tor and producer Ross Downes (Limbs / The Hollow).
What results is a compelling and tense performance, where memory floods and plagues the present. As with Forsyth’s previous works, the objective is to build a concise sound world that seems to oscillates between challenging and comforting its audience.
KEELEY FORSYTH HTMT 4
Keeley has released three critically acclaimed LP’s, beginning with Debris in 2020 and Limbs in 2022. In Spring 2024, Keeley released The Hollow, her third studio album. The Hollow contains her most ambitious collection to date. Inspired by the rugged and often bleak expanses of her native North Yorkshire landscape, she talked of a long-abandoned mining shaft she happened upon during a walk. The strings, organ drones and dull thudding drums backed a Forsyth making full use of her instrument, now straying into experimenting with Opera and choral preoccupations.
Keeley’s live shows are renowned for her compelling voice and the phys icality of her movement and gesture upon austere crepuscular stages. She has left an indelible mark on audiences around the world, including major festivals such as Unsound, Dark Mofo, Le Guess Who?, CTM, Re wire and Donau. Keeley forges connections that are simultaneously fierce and tender, invoking primal, elemental energy with moments of ethereal softness. She defies easy categorisation deftly manifesting sound worlds that refuse to be confined by genre, conventional artistic boundaries or expectations.
In recent years Keeley has worked with esteemed collaborators including Ben Frost, Colin Stetson,Teho Teardo, Gazelle Twin, Evelyn Glennie, Louis Carnell, Yann Tiersen among others.
https://www.keeleyforsyth.com