Friday 25 October 2024, 7.30pm
Join us to celebrate the 70th birthday of one of the greats of improvised music - John Butcher - featuring a line-up comprised of collaborators old and new alongside a solo performance. John Butcher is a saxophonist of rare grace and power, who has expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone far beyond the conventions of jazz and other musics, to encompass a staggering range of harmonics, multiphonics, overtones, percussive sounds, and electronic feedback. But his playing is far more than merely an array of special effects: it's characterised by an intensity that propels it into strange new places that are both incredibly beautiful and deeply exhilarating.
"It still feels quite mysterious to me. How strongly individual players bring their own music to real-time, collaborative performance; and then something new gets cooked, often quite beyond the seeming ingredients. It's in this spirit that I've invited these singular musicians, drawn from a web of connections to be stretched and explored anew. We'll have four duos, the “Fictional Souvenirs” trio, and two new quartets. I’ll also play solo, something I lost a taste for during/after the lockdowns but have recently felt ready to revisit.
Over 25 years my duo with constructive and destructive harp pioneer Rhodri Davies has developed through acoustic, electrical, and symbiotic materials. Now, elements from world-wide harp musics have begun to enter. Sophie Agnel has forged a new sonic space by dissolving the barrier between inside and outside piano. Our duo is relatively new and I find this fluidity inspiring to play with.
Sophie will also join a group with two musicians I’ve valued working with on many projects. Angharad Davies, whose violin can release both lines of mercury and knotty interjections, often at the same time, and Mark Sanders, who is remarkable at shaping endlessly malleable energy and colour. A late addition is West Coast percussionist Gino Robair, who I'll join in duo - a combination we've kept returning to throughout 25 years of experimentation.
A completely new situation for me will be to play in duo with Isabelle Duthois. Music that relies on the breath has a special quality and I look forward to interacting with her unique voice work and forensic clarinet. “Fictional Souvenirs” is me, Pat Thomas and Ståle Liavik Solberg, meeting for our third concert. Music formed from Pat’s deep knowledge of piano history and future electronics and Ståle’s sense of pitch, space and propulsion. The final set will be the us in quartet for the first time." – John Butcher
Butcher is well known as a saxophonist who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of time and place. His music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and unusual acoustics. Since the early 80s he has collaborated with hundreds of artists – including Derek Bailey, Rhodri Davies, Andy Moor, Phil Minton, Christian Marclay, Eddie Prévost, Magda Mayas, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Sophie Agnel, Gino Robair, Mark Sanders, John Tilbury, Okkyung Lee, John Edwards, Chris Corsano, Polwechsel and Steve Beresford.
Alongside long term projects he values occasional encounters; from large groups such as the WDR Sinfonieorchester & Butch Morris’ “London Skyscraper”, to duo concerts with Joe McPhee, Fred Frith, Akio Suzuki, Paal Nilssen-Love, Keiji Haino, David Toop, Angharad Davies, Otomo Yoshihide and Matthew Shipp.
Recent compositions include “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, three HCMF commissions for his own groups, “Good Liquor Caused my Heart for to Sing” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts”, a response to recordings of early Arabic classical music which was shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award.
“English saxophonist John Butcher may be among the world’s most influential musicians, operating at the cutting-edge of improvisatory practice since the ‘80s. Whenever an acoustic musician starts to sound like a bank of oscillators, a tropical forest, a brook or an insect factory, Butcher’s influence is likely nearby.” – New York City Jazz Record.
Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist based in London working with free-improvisation, compositions and performance.Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation.
Much of her work involves collaboration. She has long standing duos with Tisha Mukarji, Dominic Lash and Lina Lapelyte and plays with Common Objects, Cranc and Skogen. She has been involved in projects with Tarek Atui, Tony Conrad, Richard Dawson, Gwenno, Roberta Jean, Jack McNamara, Rie Nakajima, Tim Parkinson, Eliane Radigue, Georgia Ruth and J.G.Thirlwell.
Most of her records are released on Another Timbre but she also has releases on Absinth Records, Confrontrecords, Emanem, Potlatch and winds measure recordings.Her first orchestral piece was commissioned by LCMF in 2019.
If it’s in Paris that Sophie Agnel was born in 1964, it is towards other sounding islands in the heart of a reinvented temporality that she dwells today, at the stern of a grand piano, an instrument that she turns into a real living & vibrating organism.
Classically trained, escaped from jazz (drawn away by the too strict treatment of harmony), Sophie Agnel boards the piano from every sonic angle this musical vessel can offer : keys, strings & board are simultaneously apprehended, in a mixed procedure (as we say of painting techniques) that would be understated if it was reduced to the cagian definition of the prepared piano. Considering the instrument – that she extends with several accessories, paper cups, balls or strings – as a poetic supplier of anamorphic textures, the musician takes it to be an equal match to the wider diversity of musical systems, whatever the craft they where conceived in (from physiological to electro-acoustic) ...
We would then no longer be surprised to notice her understandings with Michel Doneda and to find her to the side of the wet saxophone of Alessandro Bosetti, of the acoustified electric guitar of Olivier Benoit, of the voices of Catherine Jauniaux and Phil Minton, or the keyboard of Christine Wodraska...
The same seal of esthetic evidence marks all of her musical companionships, with this same taste, beyond the narrative, for the delicate sonic quests and blossoming of dimensions to which the auditor takes part through an active listening : in the heart of Jean Pallandre’s phonographic worlds, of Jerôme Noetinger & Lionel Marchetti’s small scale cinema, John Butcher or Axel Dörner’s crimpy tissues, by the lovely machines of Erik M or Ikue Mori, the harmonico-stratospheric rustling of Stéphane Rives...
The originality of the research conducted by Sophie Agnel today leads her to develop, in solo or with significantly chosen companions, a most refined and highly poetic approach to sound that makes each of her concerts a moving construction filled with chiseled musical gestures, a soft and sumptuous irradiation.
Guillaume Tarche
Mark has worked with a host of renowned musicians including Derek Bailey, Henry Grimes, Mathew Shipp, Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, in duo and quartets with Wadada Leo Smith and trios with Charles Gayle with Sirone and William Parker.
In situations using composition Mark works in a number of projects including Christian Marclay’s Everyday for film and live music and John Butcher’s Tarab Cuts - both projects have performed major festivals throughout Europe and Brazil. He has performed works by guitarist John Coxon in Glasgow and Sydney playing with the Scottish and Sydney Symphony Orchestras. With New York’s ICE Ensemble he has performed John Zorn’s The Tempest in London and at Huddersfield New Music Festival.
Mark also works in the groups of Paul Dunmall including Deep Whole Trio with Paul Rogers, and the ensembles of Sarah Gail Brand, including a long-standing duo. He has a lengthy discography including a solo album, has performed internationally and played at major festivals including, Nickelsdorf, Ulrichsburg, Womad and notably at Glastonbury with legendary saxophonist John Tchicai.
"ubiquitous, diverse and constantly creative, drummer Mark Sanders always outdoes himself, whether playing with restraint or erupting like a dynamo." Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery. NY
Gino Robair’s artistic practice examines how systems of human interaction are influenced by perceptions of materiality. His PhD research at the University of California, Davis focuses on papermaking as a form of embodied choreography; a performative process that puts artists in conversation with their tools, materials (plant fiber, water), and ambient environment (air temperature and humidity). The results of this interaction are ephemeral memory objects carrying traces of their materialization that can be used as resources for interpretation within a performance context. As a composer and percussionist, Gino has recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Fred Frith, Otomo Yoshihide, and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. His opera, I, Norton, based on the life of the self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States, has been performed throughout North America and Europe.
https://www.ginorobair.com
