Red Square's Tinderbox Festival is an eclectic mini-micro festival of challenging music set in unchallenging, positively embracing surroundings, at a fantastic canal-side location in Cropredy, Oxfordshire. We dial up a bit of sunshine, and then we invite some bands and musicians that we like to come along and play. In June 2010 we ran a trial one-day mini-festival-cum-birthday-party. The event pro
ved such a success, with both bands and audience, that, by the next day, we had agreed to repeat the format annually. One thing we found very interesting was the way that people who had never been exposed to this kind of music enjoyed both the music and the day itself. It seems that the setting of a small, outdoor festival creates a user-friendly context for improv and helps to overcome some of the suspicion that often greets experimental musics. After all, if you're lying in a field in the sunshine with a glass of wine and a nice bun, whilst some crazee cats are busy circuit bending on stage, it's somehow all seems a little less threatening. We want Tinderbox to be a place where musicians can meet, hear what one another are up to and exchange ideas (and gigs), and where the audience can dip their toes in some pretty cutting-edge sounds whilst relaxing in a sylvan idyll populated by bouncing bunnies and frolicksome badgers.
