Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. Niblock constructs big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones. Changes are almost imperceptible, and his music has a tendency of creeping up on you. He says: "What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly." Niblock's performances are almost always accompanied by his films - painstaking studies of manual labour, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O'Rourke.

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

Matthew Shlomowitz

Matthew Shlomowitz (b. 1975) is a composer of concert music and performance pieces. Raised in Adelaide, Australia, he now lives in London. He is Associate Professor in Composition at University of Southampton, and co-directs the new music ensemble Plus Minus with Joanna Bailie.

He has composed works for groups such asasamisimasa, bESIdES, Calefax, Ensemble Offspring, EXAUDI, Ives Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble, Quatuor Diotima, Ricciotti Ensemble, Speak Percussion, Wespoke New Music Company and soloists Claire Edwardes, Juliet Fraser, Mark Knoop and Håkon Stene and Stephane Ginsburgh.

He has three ongoing projects: Popular Contexts, a series combining recordings of recognisable real world sound with instrumental music; Letter Pieces, which combine physical actions, music and text; and Public Lectures about Music, a series of lecture-pieces addressing ideas such as aesthetic judgement and emotional responses to music.

Antoine Françoise

Born in 1987, Antoine Françoise studied piano in Switzerland with Paul Coker, and at the Royal College of Music, London with Andrew Ball, Yonty Solomon and Ashley Wass. He also studied saxophone with Laurent Estoppey and composition with Michael Oliva.

Very active in the fields of contemporary and chamber music, Antoine has played internationally with conductors such as Diego Masson, Clement Power and Pierre-Alain Monot. He has been a member of Switzerland’s Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain since 2008, is a core member of Ensemble Nikel, and plays regularly with the London Contemporary Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Contrechamps.

Antoine has given over a hundred premieres, and worked closely with composers such as Julian Anderson, Rebecca Saunders, Hans-Peter Kyburz (giving the UK premiere of his concerto) and Eric Gaudibert (who dedicated his last concerto GONG to him).

In the classical field, he has performed widely in Switzerland, France and the United Kingdom, including concerti by Grieg, Hindemith or Poulenc and is hugely in demand as an orchestral pianist and chamber musician.

Patrick Stadler

The Saxophonist Patrick Stadler, born in Donaueschingen (Germany) in 1985, began his studies in 2005 at the Conservatory for Music in Basel with Marcus Weiss. He then studied with Pierre-Stéphane Meugé in Lausanne and Jean-Michel Goury in Paris, receiving his Master with honors from the Conservatory of Music in Basel in 2012.

He has appeared as soloist with various orchestras, such as the Philharmonie Zentralschweiz, L’Orchestre Tibor Varga, Kammerorchester Basel and Sinfonieorchester Basel, and has played at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, Impuls Academy and Lucerne Festival Academy. He has also won numerous prizes and awards, including those from the Da Ponte Foundation, Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music, and Deutscher Musikrat Competition.

Patrick is a core member of the ensembles Inverspace and Nikel, and the duo Organised Sax. He has collaborated with young and well-known composers, such as Georges Aperghis, Giorgio Netti, Beat Furrer, Peter Eötvös, Malin Bång, Germán Alonso, Teresa Carrasco and Yair Klartag.

Jessica Aszodi

Jessica Aszodi‘s career could best be described as genre-bounding and label-defying. The Australian-born, London-based vocalist has premiered dozens of new pieces, performed work that has lain dormant for centuries, devised pieces, projects and festivals, sung roles from the standard operatic repertoire and collaborated with a constellation of artists from the far reaches of the musical palette. Her performances have been described as “..thrilling..” (LA Times) and “..intense..” (NY Times). Her voice has been praised for its “utmost security and power” (Chicago Tribune) while the media in her native Australia have dubbed her “one of the finest actress-singers in the country” (The Age).

Her voice has an unusual range, both in terms of colour and pitch, making it possible for her to perform repertoire across genres (from experimental to baroque, folk to opera) and voice types (from contralto works like Boulez’ Le Marteau sans maître to soprano gems like Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil ).

She has been a soloist with ensembles as diverse as ICE, the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, Pinchgut Opera, the Tirolean Symphony Orchestra, Victorian Opera, Sydney Chamber Opera, and in the chamber series of the San Diego and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. Her operatic roles include Eve (Stockhausen’s Dienstag aus Licht), Socrates (Satie’s Socrates), Aminta (Mozart’s Il re pastore), Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni), Sesto (Guilio Cesare), Popova (Walton’s The Bear), Rose (Elliot Carter’s What Next?) and Echo (Ariadne auf Naxos).

Jessica can be heard on recording for Chandos, Ars Publica and Hospital Hill and has sung in festivals around the world, including Klangspuren, Beethoven Festival Bonn, Vivid Sydney, BIFEM, the Melbourne and Adelaide Festivals, Aldeburgh, Tectonics and Tanglewood. Aszodi has twice been nominated for the Australian Greenroom Awards as ‘best female operatic performer’ – in both the leading and supporting categories. She is co-director of the Resonant Bodies Festival (Australia), artistic associate of BIFEM, and a 2017 artist in residence at ‘High Concept Labs’ (Chicago). She holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Queensland Conservatorium, a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, teaches voice, and has written scholarly articles for several books and journals.

Ryoko Akama

A Japanese-Korean working with installation, performance and composition, residing in Huddersfield, UK.

Her works sculpt domestic appliances and scrap wastes with invisible energy, especially interested in heat, magnetism and gravity, into kinetic contraptions. her works are site-specific, infusing both aural / visual occurrence as one entity, creating ephemeral situations that magnify silence, time and space. Interested in nature of relativity, culture and ecosystem, her artistic practice examines environment, architecture, immigration, conflict and fluidity of being.

She also composes and performs alternative scores and text works in collaboration with other artists and musicians worldwide. She is a member of the lappetites, electronic musician collective since 2000 and a member of the 9-piece band a.hop.

She is an artistic director for ame c.i.c., supporting DIY culture and underground art/music scene. She also co-runs the independent publisher mumei publishing and melange edition.

Evie Hilyer-Ziegler

Evie Hilyer-Ziegler has just finished her time studying music at Goldsmiths. There, she developed a deeper interest in contemporary music and improvisation, and studied violin under Mira Benjamin in her final year. She directed most of her academic research toward female practitioners in contemporary opera and performance art, and female composers who have written for the violin. Evie enjoys exploring many different styles of music – from Baroque to experimental pop – and performs in a variety of ensembles. She is currently developing new material with her piano trio, Fen, who mix together jazz, minimalism, spoken word, electronics, and improvisation. Evie is kindly supported by the Michael Badminton Young Musicians Trust.