The third London International Festival of Exploratory Music will run from 29 October to 7 November this year, and is branching out from its previous setting, King’s Place, adding to this venue four more, including Café Oto and the Lost Theatre. The size and scope of the festival have likewise expanded. Whilst last year’s programme included only seven concerts, this year’s has twenty-six, many of which will occur simultaneously across separate venues.

The remit of the festival is broad; it is described as ‘a festival of inspiring and boundary-expanding music explorations committed to the exciting world of life and music of all sorts of genres and origins’. This being the case, the festival has favoured eclecticism over thematic unity in its previous two incarnations.

The 2011 programme is no different, although if anything the depth and richness of that eclecticism have deepened. Amongst a wide-variety of concerts, Joe McPhee and Decoy on 29 and 30 October, Mu on 1 November, Huong Thanh on 3 November, Eugene Chadbourne on 3 November, Mari Boine on 4 November, the Warsaw Village Band on 5 November, Aki Onda, Alan Licht and Michael Snow on 6 November and Onda and Licht on 7 November in the final concert of the festival, all figure prominently.

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