The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing brings together Jim Denley, Alex Tucker and Samuel Dobson on saxophone, flute, percussion, double bass and found objects. Their music unfolds through spontaneous acts of collective listening and creation, revealing ephemeral sonic worlds at the intersection of gesture, sound, object and place.

The group's name draws on Edinburgh-born percussionist Jamie Muir's proposition that “the way to discover the undiscovered in performing terms is to immediately reject all situations as you identify them (the cloud of unknowing) ... which is to give music a future.”

The Cloud of Unknowing also refers to an anonymous fourteenth-century text within the English Christian mystical tradition, often associated with the via negativa or “way of negation”. The text describes unknowing not as emptiness but as a state of openness beyond certainty:

“When I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing: as all things that thou knowest not, or hast forgotten, is dark to thee... And for this reason it is called, not a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing...”

Embracing uncertainty, openness and discovery, the ensemble explores music as a space where the unknown is not resolved but inhabited, allowing new possibilities to emerge through collective improvisation.