Kantine Musik is a community-centered music event created by British percussionist, instrument maker, and composer Bex Burch to bring people together through music-making and food in a relaxed, family-friendly and non-commercial environment. Conceived as a kind of public living room, people are invited to come and go over the course of the afternoon, with snacking, socializing, and live music happening in tandem. First begun by Burch in her adopted city of Berlin in 2024, this will be the first edition of Kantine Musik in the US. The event will be held at Sunview Acropolis, a collectively run community space housed in a decommissioned Greek diner in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 

Burch has described Kantine Muzik’s musical guiding principles as “a more domestic style of music: the simplicity of life and sound-making. The word I’m shy to use is ‘feminine’ but it’s true, and I reclaim it in all its power.” In collaboration with FourOneOne, Burch has assembled a new band of (mostly local) musicians especially for the occasion, including woodwind player Aakash Mittal, cellist rocío sánchez, violinist Eylem Basaldi, Burch and FourOneOne’s own Che Chen on percussion, double bass and homemade instruments. They will perform four completely acoustic sets intermittently throughout the afternoon. In between, community members are invited to socialize and enjoy refreshments and home cooked food. This event is free and all ages; families are welcome. 

A deeply embodied performer with a palpable, physical presence on her homemade xylophone, drums, bells, shakers, voice and various other instruments, Burch balances a disarming openness with focused intention. Originally from Yorkshire, Burch’s early passions included groove-based music: rock, punk and later minimalism, especially Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. “This in turn led me to the Ghanaian roots of his rhythmic patterns,” she has said, and in 2008 she moved to Ghana and commenced three years of study with the acclaimed player, teacher, and instrument maker Thomas Sekgura. “In [his] playing and the Dagaare tradition, I found one music I could never understand fully, but one I could surrender to and be part of.” 

Since then, Burch has synthesized the lessons learned during her apprenticeship, first through the irrepressible grooves and post-punk reframings of Dagaare music in her band, Vula Viel, and gradually finding a voice less specifically tied to the tradition, as heard on her much lauded first solo album, There Is Only Love and Fear (International Anthem, 2023). Burch has often referred to her music as “messy minimalism,” an intuitive, rhythm-forward approach that could be read as a step towards restoring the communal, improvisational spirit that the first generation of American minimalist composers frequently disregarded from their African and Asian sources of inspiration. Meanwhile her collaborative working methods and statements like, “The music is already there, and I have to let go and allow myself to be in it,” challenge the assumptions of authorship embedded in Western composition. 

On July 31 at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, in collaboration with Judson Commons and The Kitchen, FourOneOne will present a free performance Bex Burch’s as yet untitled, a composition-in-collaboration that weaves together threads from the major movements of Burch’s life, from her formative study of the Dagaare gyil (a type of xylophone central to the music of the Dagaare people of northwest Ghana and southern Burkina Faso) to communing with musicians and audiences in London, Chicago, New York and Berlin.