Jude Cowan Montague

MUSIC/PERFORMANCE

Jude creates unique, experimental pop.

Her grandfather Sydney Wright, long-serving 'cellist with the Hallé Orchestra was her first musical influence. On leaving college she learned to sing saluang music of the Minangkabau in Sumatra Barat, Indonesia. Returning to London she developed her interest in new contemporary at Community Music with jazz tutors including the drummer John Stephens.

She is known for her improvised song stories inspired by working as an archivist for Reuters television news. Selected pieces have been soundscaped by psychedelic seventies TV star Wim Oudijk and our co-composed tracks are released on Disco Fair and Folkwit as 'Barbie and Ken' (EP 2012) and 'The Leidenfrost Effect' (LP 2015).

Her folk and early music interests have influenced certain experimental vocal pieces such as her album 'Winter Hill Sings', a fusion of tradition song and hill walking, and her occasional series reimagining journalism broadcast live on Resonance FM and also performed at selected events. This ongoing project has revisited texts by Daniel Defoe, Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens together with a tiny fragment of the anonymous printed newspaper reports published in the 19th and 20th centuries. This work is permeated with a sense of place, often the dark urban metropolis of London.

She works in conjunction with visual arts, creating site specific performance pieces for private views. In 2015 she is performing a new text-based city-work for the Venice Biennale, 'Return to Venice: The Casanova Complex'.

Since 2015 she has become a guest member of the Bermuda Triangle Test Engineers, introducing new technical processes into her methodology.

Other collaborators past and present include Steve Layton, Iris Garrelfs, Richard Sanderson, Steve Moyes, Mark Braby and Matt Armstrong.

Selected Discography

2018: Hammond Hits Montague Armstrong (Linear Obsessional)

2016: Cairo Compression with Steve Layton (Linear Obsessional)

2015: The Leidenfrost Effect with Wim Oudijk (Folkwit / Disco Fair)

2013: Winter Hill Sings (Linear Obsessional)

2013: Barbie and Ken EP with Wim Oudijk (Folkwit / Disco Fair)

2012: Bukittinggi Tales (Linear Obsessional)

2012: Waving from Very Far Away with Steve Layton (NiwoSound)

2011: Lamb & Tyger (William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience set for voice and Hammond Organ) (JCM)

2011: World News Vision May 2011(Three Legs Duck)