Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi's works are hesitant and tense extended songforms located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal. From the late 90's his experiments in guitar abstraction and extended technique have led to a more personal and unique sound-world incorporating a broader palette of instruments and sensibilities. On releases such as Grapes From The Estate and In The Pendulum’s Embrace, Ambarchi employed glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, drums and percussion, creating fragile textures as light as air which tenuously coexist with the deep, wall-shaking bass tones derived from his guitar.

Ambarchi has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists such as Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), Thomas Brinkmann, crys cole, Keiji Haino, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Curran, Loren Connors, Manuel Gottsching/Ash Ra, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke, Keith Rowe, David Rosenboom, Julia Reidy, Akio Suzuki, Phill Niblock, John Tilbury, Richard Pinhas, Evan Parker, Fire! and many more.

Ambarchi has released numerous recordings for labels such as Touch, Editions Mego, Drag City, PAN, Southern Lord, Kranky and Tzadik. His acclaimed trio with Keiji Haino and Jim O'Rourke performs in Tokyo annually with many of their concerts documented on Ambarchi's Black Truffle label. Black Truffle has over 90 releases to date.

In 2003 his live release Triste received an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica digital music category. His release Quixotism was listed in The Wire magazine's top 50 releases of 2014 and that same year Pitchfork named him Experimental Artist Of The Year. His 2016 album Hubris and featured an astonishing cast of players including crys cole, Mark Fell, Arto Lindsay, Jim O'Rourke, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Ricardo Villalobos amongst others. Hubris was listed in numerous 'Best Albums Of 2016" listings in renowned magazine's such as The Wire, Rolling Stone, The Quietus and Tiny Mix Tapes. In 2019 Ambarchi was the cover feature for the August #426 issue of the Wire Magazine.

In May 2019 renowned London venue Cafe Oto celebrated Ambarchi's 50th birthday and the 10 year anniversary of his Black Truffle label with a 3-day festival featuring a packed international bill of special guests, projects and collaborations, all closely associated with Oren and his label. The Live Hubris release on Black Truffle documents the final performance from this event, featuring fifteen of Ambarchi's close collaborators.

Ora Clementi

Ora Clementi is the duo of Canadian sound artist crys cole and Australian composer/performer James Rushford. Distinct, disorienting and highly performative, their work examines voice and vocal mirroring through preconscious speech processes and the codified abstraction of found texts, supported by a vast battery of handmade instruments, electronics and hyper-colour processing. Their second full-length release Sylva Sylvarum (2021) draws its title and various textual elements from literary descriptions of utopias, while weaving together an eclectic selection of instruments and sounds that draw the listener into a magnificent, surreal and otherworldly space.

Previous performances include MONA FOMA Festival (Launceston), FOCUS GRM Festival (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), Sounds Like Festival (Saskatoon), M-hotel Festival (Bergamo), Q02 (Brussels), Café Oto (London) and Constellation (Chacago).

'Sylva Sylvanum feels imbued with an almost spiritual resonance. Folding real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams, this album holds your attention even when it confuses.' - Pitchfork

' ... an absolute triumph that reached toward the furthest possible heights of contemporary electroacoustic practice and vocal experimentalism.' - Soundohm

'Ora Clementi, the duo of crys cole and James Rushford, are architects, in a way, constructing a sonic Neverland from a synthetic mosaic of lucid digital ephemera and vocal hypnosis.' - Foxy Digitalis

Judith Hamann

Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Narrm/Melbourne. They have “long been recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary-music cellists” (RealTime Arts), and as a composer who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (WIRE). Their work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a process based creative practice.

In their recent research, Hamann examines the acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; interrogates ‘collapse’ as a generative imaginary surface; and considers the ‘de-mastering’ of bodies, both human and non-human, in settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy. Their process-driven and embodied practice, considers the ways sound operates as a subject, object, and actant. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they frequently challenge the boundaries of their instruments, whether the cello, voice, or body, considering how sonic thresholds offer generative sites of instability and movement.

Judith likes working with and thinking-with other artists which has sometimes included people like Marja Ahti, Oren Ambarchi, Joshua Bonnetta, Dennis Cooper, Charles Curtis, Lori Goldston, the Harmonic Space Orchestra, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, and La Monte Young. Judith’s work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, and Longform Editions. Judith is currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart 2021-22 and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego.