Counterflows 2017 Ashley Paul - Intimate & Solo

Ashley Paul, Counterflows 2017's featured artist, will perform two intimate and solo sets in the CCA Cinema, with audiences limited to twenty per show.

Since 2014, Counterflows’ featured artists have introduced our audiences to new projects and curious collaborations, spanning a wide range of their work and highlighting aspects of their practices in new contexts.

Ashley Paul is an American performer/ composer currently based in London. We were first attracted to Ashley’s work by her striking take on song form; a delicate but utterly focussed tip-toeing between melodic free-form structures and scratching, scraping, clattering sound, bridging the liminal gap between intimate bedroom folk styling and the unpredictable dynamics of early British improvisation. Despite being schooled in jazz and improvisation, Ashley subverts and re-configures learned practice in a way that feel oddly singular, allowing her to craft an unvarnished and deeply personal form of music.

“Is it arranged? Is it made up on the spot?… sometimes sounds as if she’s got nothing to do with any tradition at all - rather, a songwriter with a diaristic, private and flexible sense of what a song is.” – New York Times"