W0B

2007 to present
Sketches and notes from Paul Burwell's notebooks

After the death of Paul Burwell in 2007, Anne Bean and Richard Wilson organised both his funeral, in Hull and his wake in London, for which they invited about 40 artists/musicians to individually or collaboratively do works, each of approximately 5 minutes duration.

Paul liked to think of the Bow Gamelan performances as starting from ‘a canvas of darkness and silence’ through huge dynamic ranges and then back again to darkness and silence, as shown in sketches from his notebooks. Anne and Richard worked on that idea for their work at the wake.

They continued doing occasional performances together, sometimes with others, but often with a sense of Paul lurking somewhere in the mix. This later led them to call themselves W0B, which was both BOW backwards and also Wilson zero Bean, with zero taking on the eastern sense of boundless.