Wednesday 22 June 2016, 6pm, OTO Project Space
An early evening celebrating improvised music. Julie Kjær has gathered a strong team of some of the most inventive and fearless improvisers from the London and UK improv scene. At this concert the duo constellation will be explored.
Cath Roberts / baritone sax
Tullis Rennie / trombone
Sylvia Hallett / violin, bicycle wheel and electronics.
Julie Kjær / altosax, flute & bass clarinet
Julie Kjær's edgy and thoughtful playing and ‘dark, otherworldly imagery’ (Jazzwise) has become increasingly evident around Europe, inhabiting ground between composition and free improv. Experimenting with extended techniques, sound and rhythm she pushes her instruments to their limits. She tours internationally with Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and his Large Unit and she has toured internationally and recorded with Django Bates and StoRMChaser. Currently her main focus is on her trio, Julie Kjær 3, with bass player John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble. They’ve just released their debut album on 14th March '16 on Clean Feed. Julie also plays with London Improvisers Orchestra and is a leader and side woman of several other English and Danish ensembles. In 2014 she was chosen to be a Sound and Music “New Voice” Artist and was chosen as a featured composer by the British Music Collection.
Sylvia Hallett is a composer and improviser, working with instruments (violin, hurdy-gurdy, saw,) and objects (bowed bicycle wheel, bowed branches etc) alongside simple live sound processing. She has worked extensively with dancers and in theatre, most recently with choreographer Miranda Tufnell on a tour of outdoor site specific venues in Northumberland. Recent albums: Tree Time and Bolt and Latch.
http://www.sylviahallett.co.uk/
Cath Roberts is a musician, artist and organiser whose work explores free improvisation, composition and the music at their meeting point. The primary outlet for this is the band Sloth Racket, formed in 2015 by Cath on baritone saxophone and compositions, which has toured widely and released several albums. More recently, improvisation using live electronics and objects has led to a solo release plus the beginning of several new collaborations.
Cath has a long-standing duo with guitarist Anton Hunter (Ripsaw Catfish), as well as regular collaborations with Tullis Rennie, Benedict Taylor, Graham Dunning, Bill Thompson and others, and bandmate duties in several groups including Alex Ward’s Items 10 and 7, Madwort Sax Quartet and Article XI.
As an organiser, Cath has co-run LUME with Dee Byrne since 2013, producing concerts, tours and festivals and releasing music on their offshoot label Luminous. Tom Ward, Colin Webster and Cath organise BRÅK, an improvised music series taking place in Brockley, South East London. Cath’s visual work can be seen on many Luminous releases, Sloth Racket tour flyers and LUME publicity materials, and appeared in 2021 in the form of a giant, fragmented graphic score created for a hcmf// commission, And then the next thing you know.
Tullis Rennie is a composer, electronic musician, improvising trombonist, and field recordist. He has appeared in collaboration through performance and recording with an array of artists including Claudia Molitor, John Butcher, Cath Roberts, Olie Brice, Kate Carr and many others. Tullis’s varied career to date has touched upon many different conceptual approaches, examining the impact of listening with jazz musicians Matthew Bourne and Graham South on vinyl-only release Muscle Memory ("...Rennie foregrounds the act of listening as an active component in the creation of musical experience” -– The Wire Magazine), and investigating the hidden process of performance preparation with Manchester-based Vonnegut Collective on 48 Hours (Moving Furniture Records). His recent studio work Fixed Freedoms, released on Matthew Herbert's Accidental Jnr label, is "a mutated set of electronic experiments that bends recognizable formulae (trance, dub techno, electro) into abstract landscapes" — Boomkat. He is co-founder of Walls On Walls with visual artist Laurie Nouchka, and a member of the Insectotròpics audio-visual collective, based in Barcelona.
