Mette Rasmussen

Mette Rasmussen is a Danish saxophone player based in Trondheim, Norway. She works in the field of improvised music, drawing from a wide range of influences, spanning free jazz to textural soundwork. Rasmussen works on exploring the natural rawness of her instrument - experimenting on what the saxophone is capable of in sound and expression, with and without preparations. Much in demand, she has performed with the likes of Alan Silva, Chris Corsano, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and with her Trio Riot group with Sam Andreae and David Meier.

"Mette Rasmussen has a remarkably fluid and expressive tone on the alto saxophone. Her playing at times evokes the rich, heavenward clarity of Albert Ayler, at others the throaty roar of Mats Gustafsson. Equally, though, she’s able to sidestep these influences and assert her own individual sound in piercingly high tones and controlled outbursts of free playing." - Viennese Waltz

Sofia Jernberg

Singer and composer, born in Ethiopia in 1983 and currently based in two cities: Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden. As a singer she is developing the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Sofia’s singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a natural singing style. She has dug deep into split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.

“...it is the singing that is most impressive. Jernberg's vocal agility is sweeping, analogous, conceivably, to the range of sounds that Wadada Leo Smith can generate with the trumpet. She is a phenomenon that merits attention.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz 

Mary Jane Leach

Mary Jane Leach is a composer/performer whose work reveals a fascination with the acoustic properties and how they interact with space. In many of her works Leach creates an other-worldly sound environment using difference, combination, and interference tones; these are tones not actually sounded by the performers, but acoustic phenomena arising from Leach’s deft manipulation of intonation and timbral qualities. The result is striking music which has a powerful effect on listeners. Critics have commented on her ability to “offer a spiritual recharge without the banalities of the new mysticism” (Detroit Free Press), evoking “a visionary quest for inner peace” (Vice Versa Magazine), and “an irridescent lingering sense of suspended time.” (Musicworks Magazine) Leach’s music has been performed throughout the world in a variety of settings, from the concert stage to experimental music forums, and in collaboration with dance and theatre artists. Recordings of her work are on the die Schachtel, Lovely Music, New World, XI, Starkland, Innova, and Aerial compact disc labels.

Ashley Paul

Ashley Paul is an American performer and composer based in London. She uses an array of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, guitar, bells and percussion, mixing disparate elements to create a colorful palate of sound that works its way into her intuitive songs; free forming, introverted melodies. This blend manifests beautiful and simple musical forms against acoustic experimentation.

Ashley has performed or recorded with Phill Niblock, Rashad Becker, Nik Colk Void, Loren Connors, Heatsick, Aki Onda, C. Spencer Yeh, Anthony Coleman, Bass Clef, Joe Maneri, Joe Morris, Seijiro Murayama, Greg Kelley, Bill Nace and Eli Keszler appearing on such labels as Important, PAN, ESP-DISK’ and Tzadik. She received a Masters of Music from New England Conservatory in 2007.

Tom James Scott

Tom James Scott is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser who currently lives on the North-West coast of England. Since 2007 he has published music through a number of labels including Students of Decay, Where To Now?, Bo'Weavil Recordings, Carnivals, and his own Skire imprint (established in 2013).

Scott's early interest in music was informed as much by a fascination with sound and improvisation as it was by traditional musical training, and his work continues to explore both lyrical and abstract means of sound making and composition. Since 2007's 'Red Deer', Scott's solo releases to date have seen a switch between guitar, piano and keyboard as their focal point (often with the addition of bowed objects and strings, field recording and electronics). United by a preoccupation with modern composition, traditional music, improvisation and song, Scott's recorded work also draws inspiration from visual and literary sources, with certain titles often citing a now largely archaic form of dialect particular to Scott's home county of Cumbria.

Scott is currently working on a collaboration with the filmmaker Laurence Campbell and continues to perform and record with Ashley Paul, Andrew Chalk, Ecka Mordecai, Timo van Luijk and Russell Walker (primarily as Charcoal Owls).

Yoni Silver

Bass-clarinetist and multi-instrumentalist Yoni Silver’s activities include hyper-spectral adventures with Iancu Dumitrescu's Hyperion Ensemble; a bass clarinet and percussion duo with Steve Noble; a bass clarinet/violin and possessed vocals duo with Sharon Gal; Denis D’or with Grundik Kasyansky and Tom Wheatley; bass clarinet and drums duo with Crystabel Riley, and solo performances on amplified bass clarinet.
He has appeared on labels such as Creative Sources, Confront Recordings, Wasted Capital, Chocolate Monk and Edition Modern.

Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore started Sonic Youth in 1980 and has been at the forefront of the alternative rock scene since that particular sobriquet was first used to signify any music that challenged and defied the mainstream standard. With Sonic Youth, Moore turned on an entire generation to the value of experimentation in rock n roll – from its inspiration on a nascent Nirvana, to Sonic Youth’s own Daydream Nation album being chosen by the US Library of Congress for historical preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2006. Thurston records and performs in a cavalcade of disciplines ranging from free improvisation to acoustic composition to black/white metal/noise disruption. He has worked with Yoko Ono, John Zorn, David Toop, Cecil Taylor, Faust, Glenn Branca and many others. His residency at the Louvre in Paris included collaborations with Irmin Schmidt of CAN. Alongside his various activities in the musical world, he is involved with publishing and poetry, and teaches writing at Naropa University, Boulder CO, a school founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. Thurston also teaches music at The Rhythmic Music Conservatory (Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium) in Copenhagen. Presently he performs and records solo, with various ensembles and in his own band, The Thurston Moore Group.

Lucy Railton

LUCY RAILTON is a cellist based in Berlin who works in composition, improvisation and electronic music, releasing her own work on Modern Love, Editions Mego - GRM Portraits, PAN (with Peter Zinovieff), Takuroku and SN Variations (with Kit Downes). She has recently performed with Rebecca Salvadori, Farida Amadou, Catherine Lamb, Kali Malone, Khyam Allami and Stephen O’Malley and Max Eilbacher. She is also involved in the presentation of works by Maryanne Amacher, Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman and music using Just Intonation; her engagement with this repertoire has occasioned extensive explorations of resonance, rational intonation and psychoacoustics, preoccupations that are ever present in her own work. Lucy established the Kammer Klang series at Cafe OTO, which ran for 10 years, and co-founded and co-directed the London Contemporary Music Festival from 2013-2016.

www.lucyrailton.com

Dawn Scarfe

Dawn Scarfe is an artist based in London working with field recording, sound installation and performance. Her work explores things that seem to sound themselves such as resonating glasses, aeolian wires and self-opening swell boxes.

Dawn has collaborated with Ryoko Akama, Jem Finer, Jiyeon Kim and Volkhardt Müller. She works with soundCamp to organise Reveil: an annual crowd sourced live broadcast which tracks the sound of the sunrise around the world for 24hrs. Her work has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. She has exhibited at ZKM Karlsruhe, Q-02 Brussels and New Mart, Seoul. Residencies include Sound and Music’s Embedded programme with Forestry Commission England, MoKS Centre for Art and Social Practice, Estonia, TOPOS Exeter and Octopus Collective with Cumbria Wildlife Trust at South Walney, Cumbria. Commissions include Organ Reframed, Union Chapel, Continuous Drift, Dublin and Tonspur MuseumsQuartier Vienna.

Photo credit: Kammer Klang