Paul Abbott is a musician and drummer. He plays with the drum kit, synthetic sounds, performance and writing. He explores music as an ecology: in which the interaction of sounds, signs and the physical body grow real and imaginary music. His work is often concerned with creating practical and fictional structures to facilitate improvisation and experimental musical play. Projects include: XT with Seymour Wright; XT+Pat Thomas; Kavain Wayne Space (RP Boo) Trio with XT; XT+Anne Gillis; X Ray Hex Tet; yPLO with Micheal Speers; F.R.David, very good* & Rosmarie with Will Holder; film sound for Keira Greene and The Creaking Breeze Ensemble with Nathaniel Mackey. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics, and completed Creative Music Practice PhD research at Edinburgh University, titled “Playing no solo imagination: synthesising the rhythmic emergence of sound and sign through embodied drum kit performance and creative writing.”

What if play were set at the heart of reseach, to become its driving force?

With Play as its central theme, KASK & Conservatorium announces the first edition of the Research Days: a three-day festival for researchers, artists, students and visitors to explore playfulness in thought and action — through performances, lectures, panel discussions, exhibitions, workshops and interventions.

Playfulness as a radical gesture

Playing is a fundamental way to engage with the world. How we play both reflects and shapes our ways of being and knowing. Playing also introduces instability and imagination, placing us in a fluid, indeterminate field of experience.

In artistic research, playfulness can function as a mindset and as a research method. Here, playing becomes a critical tool for exploring ideas, testing assumptions, and generating knowledge. When researchers and artists fully embrace play, they tap into its disruptive potential, using uncertainty and improvisation to challenge norms.

Yet play is never neutral. It is situated, embodied, and negotiated: shaped by movement, territory, materials, social structures, media, and the technologies through which it unfolds.

When does art or research in the arts become a playful proposition? Who is allowed to play, and who is excluded? And how might playfulness be understood as an attitude that opens up possibilities and moves beyond normative constraints?

Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer, researcher and broadcaster. She has acquired a PhD at CRiSAP (UAL) on the social and cultural history of the foghorn, which became the foundation of her first book, The Foghorn’s Lament (White Rabbit Books, 2021). She is also a presenter of BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, and is a freelance music journalist specialising in underground and experimental music. Previously she was online editor for The Wire, and now freelances for The Wire, The Quietus, The Guardian and others. She co-runs the record labels Arc Light Editions and Good Energy, and is a member of Laura Cannell’s Modern Ritual Collective, and the Cafe OTO Experimental Choir. She has recently published her second book, Clay: A Human History (Pegasus Books, 2024), and has been working on an essay on the soundtracks in the films of Sogo Ishii (forthcoming).