The Cut

‘The Cut’ is a modular film made up of a series of daily entries that reflect a journey undertaken in the summer of 2014. In late July, the avant-folk collective Dead Rat Orchestra embarked from London Canal Museum, with filmmaker Ian Nesbitt in tow, bound for Bristol on the canals and waterways on Southern England.

They set out to chart these inland waters, gathering an informal history of England’s once thriving industrial arteries, exploring social, historical and musical roots, and to share their findings through performances along the way.

The films serve as a parallel odyssey, each day’s experiences relentlessly accumulating, as band members become less autonomous masters of their destiny and more as intractable elements of the history that they and their gloriously inappropriate vessel the ‘Gemini II’ set out to tame.

The band’s own voices and instruments become immersed and entangled in the sonic environments they pass through to create new and unexpected music of the waterways.

The films went public daily exactly one year on from the journey itself between 28th July and 17th August 2015. There was a gap from 6-13th when Ian was not with the band.