Saturday 21 January 2017, 7.30pm
Alterations are Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack, Terry Day & David Toop. Tonight they present a new album, Void Transactions, recorded at Cafe Oto at Alterations Festival 2016 and produced with Unpredictable Series. Supporting will be a duo of Mandhira de Saram and Blanca Regina with visuals by Pierre Bouvier Patron.
About Alterations
Alterations – David Toop, Peter Cusack, Terry Day and Steve Beresford – is a quartet of key thinkers and pioneers in music and visual arts.
They played many concerts in the years 1977 to 1986 and came back together last year for one very successful concert 2015. In 2016 they got together to collaborate in new contexts at Alterations Festival with an exhibition, talks, workshops and performances at Cafe Oto, Oto Projects and University of Westminster, London.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ALTERATIONS
The group existed from 1977 to 1986 and played often in festivals and clubs throughout the UK and Europe.
The great discovery of Alterations was that musical styles and idioms are there to be played with.
(Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen)
They made three LPs in that time:
Alterations on Bead in 1978
Up Your Sleeve on !Quartz in 1980
My Favourite Animals on nato (France) in 1984
Their work presented new ways of making and understanding music and art.
In addition there were CDs of various live performances – in 2000, Intuitive Records in Denmark issued Alterations
Live and in 2002 Atavistic in the US published Voila Enough!
In 2015, Alterations was put back together for London performances at Cafe Oto (with Max Eastley) and Iklectik.
These events were very succesfull and attracted new audiences.
Alterations Festival is unique opportunity to further enjoy this infuential and highly experienced group.
VOID TRANSACTIONS by David Toop
Improvisation is always close to nothing: no work, no object, no product, no closure, no trace. In contemporary terms, as a monetary transaction within a functioning market, there is nothing much to speak of. No sale, as they say. No sail either, nor following wind; only the need to pull oars together, albeit with the option of pulling (in this case) in four different directions at once. The boat is torn apart in order to be rebuilt. Every event in an improvisation and its setting has potential as agency but the possibility of collapse into nothingness is a real and present danger from moment to moment. The listeners, that part of them known as an audience, play a significant role in this. Without them, whether they are present physically at the time of making or in futurity (as with a recording) there would be little at stake. Their listening forages for the music, just as the music calls up their listening. This is not a binary. There is no clear distinction between a listener and an improviser. The listener improvises a sense of form as it emerges. This is true for player and audience simultaneously. Even though one may appear to be physically active, the other physically passive, both are at work in making sense, laterally and in depth, following through memory, agility and imagining, of the unfolding. If there is failure in any part then this audience may become a separate thing, a void into which all potentiality falls. In the conventional way of thinking about transaction, there is a pay-off, one or more winners. Improvisation withholds this, offering only ambiguity and a shared sensation of complex disturbances coming to a point of temporary rest, leaving satisfaction, disappointment, perhaps a mixture of both. But every incident, gesture, implication, provocation, false step or flash of inspiration of an improvisation brings with it some degree of risk, the knowledge that there is no solid footing, only an intensification of the void. Sounds are exotic creatures. They may pose as humans, making a convincing show of living within human society, on the telephone, taking tea and whatever, though their plausibility leads to some other place of thin air, this place where we choose to dwell.
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over fifty years, freely improvising on piano, objects, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn. Long-standing groups have included Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack), The Melody Four (with Lol Coxhill and Tony Coe, both RIP) and London Improvisers Orchestra.
He has written songs, composed for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of ‘Musics’ and ‘Collusion’ magazines, writes about music in various contexts, and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on various Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Faradena Afifi, Blanca Regina, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg, Valentina Magaletti and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography - around 500 releases - as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer, conductor and producer. He was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.
In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.
In 2022, Siglio published the book ‘Call and Response’, which partnered photographs by Christian Marclay with notated improvisations by Beresford.
Terry Day is a first generation pioneer improviser from the 1960s: an improviser, multi-instrumentalist, lyricist, songwriter, visual artist and poet.
A self-taught musician in a family of musicians, he began improvising on the drums with his brother in 1955. In the early ‘60s he formed the Hardy Holman Day trio, focusing on free improvisation. Later he became part of the band Kilburn & the Highroads, with Ian Dury. Sharing their interest in visual art and painting they both studied at Walthamstow School of Art and later at the Royal College of Art, London. As an art student in the ‘60s he was also a pioneer of free improvisation, free jazz & experimental music.
He formed a duo with guitarist Derek Bailey in the late ´60s and was a regular member of The Continuous Music Ensemble,The People Band and, later on, Alterations with David Toop, Steve Beresford & Peter Cusack.
Terry has collaborated with many musical luminaries, groups, dancers, painters, poets and performed in theatre. He now plays bamboo reed flutes, drums, recorders, balloons & improvises with his lyrics, prose and verse. Since 2000 he has been part of London Improvisers Orchestra. In recent years he has toured twice in both Japan and Brazil, and has performed with improvising orchestras in Malaga, Tokyo and Madrid.
Peter Cusack is a field recordist, sound artist, and musician with a long interest in the environment. He initiated the Favourite Sounds Project to discover what people find positive about soundscapes where they live and Sounds From Dangerous Places (sonic journalism) to investigate major environmental damage in areas such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Azerbaijan oil fields, brown coal mining in Germany and the Czech Republic and the Bialowieza Forest in Poland.
He produced Vermilion Sounds - the environmental sound programme - for ResonanceFM Radio, and was DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin 2011/12, starting Berlin Sonic Places that explores relationships between soundscape and urban development.
He is currently working on Aral Sea Stories, about the destruction and subsequent partial restoration of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan - a much-needed positive example in today’s climate change debate.
Musically he plays guitar and field recordings, improvises, writes tunes, and has worked with Alterations, Kahondo Style, Clive Bell, Nic Collins, Ute Wassermann, Viv Corringham, Michael Thieke, Blanca Regina, and others.
http://favouritesounds.org
http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/
David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed in 2012.
Mandhira is happiest bringing her playful energy and creativity to a breadth of projects across the less trodden paths of contemporary music, working with the likes of Anna Meredith, Elaine Mitchener, Elliot Galvin, Laura Jurd and Shabaka Hutchings, and now increasingly as a solo artist.
Having left the Ligeti Quartet (Songbooks Vol. 1, 2021 and Nuc, 2023) - the plucky band of musical buccaneers who explore the outer reaches of chamber repertoire - Mandhira’s recent creative ventures include commissions by the Ligeti Quartet, a collaboration with the cross-cultural Australian Art Orchestra (debuting in Melbourne and HCMF) and working with Jasmin Kent Rodgman on the soundtrack to the feature film Bawa’s Garden. She has also been commissioned by the Barbican’s Sound Unbound Festival and Musicity.
Equally at home leading orchestras in the world’s most prestigious concert venues, recording film soundtracks at Abbey Road and improvising at Café Oto, her other projects include improvising duos with Steve Beresford and Benoit Delbecq (Spinneret, 2019) and regular appearances with Riot Ensemble and London Contemporary Orchestra.
She currently plays a 1735 Sanctus Seraphin violin kindly loaned to her by Derek Clements-Croome.
Blanca Regina is an interdisciplinary artist, tutor, and independent curator who works with spontaneous composition systems creating multimedia landscapes using voice, objects, electronics, and visuals. She is also looking at book arts, immersive media, and design. She has produced three albums with Beresford, mixed and mastered by Dave Hunt in London, ‘What Blue’ (2020) Duets with Steve Beresford; ‘Duets with Blanca Regina, Spontaneous Music’ featuring duets with Leafcutter John, Jack Goldstein, John Butcher, Benedict Taylor, Matthias Kispert, Aneek Thapar, Steve Beresford, Sharon Gal, and Hyelim Kim; ‘Art of Improvisers’ (2017) a collection album with several artists concentrating in women improvisers. With longtime collaborator and artist Leafcutter John capturing their live performances in 2017 they created ‘Miga’ a limited edition Pendrive and digital release. Other collaborations include performances with Laetitia Sadier & Marie Merlet ( ISIDORA) Matthias Kispert, DFuse, Peter Cusack, Matt Black, Wade Matthews, Terry Day, Adriana Camacho, and David Toop.
Pierre Bouvier Patron is a visual artist based in London. He is currently working with different media, such as digital video and film, exploring the boundaries between them and creating moving image works, performances and installations. He has developed various practices and skills in experimental film, documentary films, music videos, etc.
He is involved in video screenings and video performances, solo or in collaboration. His work has been shown in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, etc.
