Margate Radio announces the launch of multi-instrumentalist/composer Robert Stillman’s new project, ‘Margate Radio Strings + Drummers’, a suite of hypnotic chamber music stemming from the archive of his solo improvisation broadcasts; featuring Raven Bush, Francesca Ter-Berg, Kareem Dayes, Tom Herbert, Tom Skinner, and Sean Carpio. 

Sunday at 9am wouldn’t normally be considered a time for experimental improvisation, but for Robert Stillman, it was ideal. “My overriding sense when I recorded my shows every month was really one of ‘nobody’s listening’, which was perfect because it made me feel I could work very unselfconsciously and freely, but with a sense of purpose- just in case someone tuned in”.

Stillman’s started making his one-hour studio improvisations for broadcast on Margate Radio when the first COVID lockdown forced the community radio station to shift its format to pre-recorded shows. During the pandemic, these shows provided Stillman with a much-needed deadline every month to create something new at a time when music work had effectively ground to a halt. Every month, he filled a 60-minute cassette with an improvisation which was, by and large, unedited and uninterrupted (save for a pause to flip the tape halfway through). The content of the shows varied greatly- depending on how Stillman was feeling, or what instruments he used, the unsuspecting Sunday morning listener might tune in to an ethereal DX-7 atmosphere, a surreal, spontaneous song, or punishing mixer feedback. “More than anything, it was important for me to try to focus on the feeling going into these recordings, and in most cases, the process of playing for that hour would draw the feeling out into an idea or concept that was often quite specific to me, which I’d describe in the show title.”

The shows continued post-pandemic, resulting in the accumulation of an archive spanning nearly five years that formed the basis of Margate Radio Strings + Drummers, as Stillman explains: “ I wanted to do something with these shows, and thought that rather than releasing a compilation,  it would be more interesting to get the material out of my own hands, to hear it in a different way”. Hence the idea of arranging excerpts from the shows for string quartet and percussion. “I listened through to all the improvisations in the show archives, and selected the moments where things seemed to coalesce”. Once selected, Stillman arranged these excerpts  as literally as possible for a ‘low string quartet’ (violin, two cellos, and bass). The two drummers were introduced as ‘free elements’ responding more or less spontaneously to the written material.

The ensemble performing the music is comprised of some of the brightest lights in the international contemporary music scene: Raven Bush, violin (Speaker’s Corner Quartet); Kareem Dayes, cello (Vibrations United; Yusseff Kamaal) Francesca Ter-Berg, cello (Fran & Flora); Tom Herbert, bass (The Invisible; Beth Gibbons); Tom Skinner, drums (the Smile, Sons of Kemmet); Sean Carpio, drums (Mark Turner; Mikkel Ploug). The players are also some of Stillman’s closest musical associates, and this was no coincidence, as Stillman explains: “the material in this recording is really secondary to what the musicians bring to it: it was such a thrill to hear these really simple ideas brought to life by their musical sensibilities and spirits”.

What results is an intense work characterised by interaction-between composition and improvisation, density and sparsity, past and present-an album as diverse as its influences (Stillman cites Béla Bartok, Bill Lee, and Ornette Coleman) which will add another dimension to Stillman’s already eclectic music catalogue.

Margate Radio Strings + Drummers is released 26 June 2026 by Margate Radio CIC, available as a limited-edition double-LP and digital stream/downloads.