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.

Mats Gustafsson

Hailing from Umeå in Northern Sweden, Gustafsson is a saxophonist/composer/improviser working across noise, electronics, contemporary rock and free jazz as well as contemporary dance, theater and art projects. He has performed both as a solo artist and toured internationally with Peter Brötzmann, Sonic Youth, Merzbow, Jim O´Rourke, Barry Guy, Otomo Yoshihide, Yoshimi, Ken Vandermark and in working groups The Thing, Sonore, FIRE!, Gush, Boots Brown, Swedish Azz and Nash Kontroll. He also participates in the large ensembles Barry Guy New Orchestra, Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet and the NU – ensemble. 

Johan Berthling

Johan was born in Botkyrka, Stockholm, Sweden in 1973. He started playing the double and electric bass and underwent musicial studies in Jönköping, Skurup and at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Stockholm. After ending studies in 1998 he’s been working as a freelance musician with jazz, rock, improvised music and music for theatre.

He has worked with many notable musicians, including: Mats Gustafsson, Sten Sandell, Raymond Strid, Paal Nilssen-Love, Akira Sakata, Fredrik Ljungkvist, El Perro del Mar, Jonas Kullhammar, Mette Rasmussen, Goran Kajfes, Oren Ambarchi, Martin Küchen, Steve Noble, Andreas Werliin, Tenniscoats, Bill Wells, Jim O’Rourke, Stina Nordenstam, Anna Ternheim and Titiyo and he has featured on more than 100 recordings.

He’s active in the groups Fire!, Fire! Orchestra, Tape, Angles 9, Nacka Forum, LSB, Arashi and Goran Kajfes Subtropic Arkestra.

Berthling has also worked as a composer for film together with Andreas Söderström, working with swedish directors such as Anders Weidemann, Lisa Langseth, Amanda Adolfsson, Jonas Selberg Augustsén, Thomas Jackson and Axel Petersen and has been hired as a music producer by artists like Weeping Willows, Taxi Taxi, Idiot Kid, Little Children, Santa Maria, ASS, Tenniscoats and the Thing.

He has been running the Häpna record label (together with Klas Augustsson) since 1999.

Eiko Ishibashi

Eiko Ishibashi is a Japanese improvisor, producer, and singer-songwriter. As her albums demonstrate, she is equally comfortable composing and performing everything from quirky pop, modern classical music, and prog to the extremes of improvisational jazz and noise. She has performed and toured with Jim ORourke, Keiji Haino, Akira Sakata, Charlemagne Palestine, Oren Ambarchi, and Glenn Kotche, to name a few. Her 2014 offering, Car and Freezer, offered evidence of the seam where her quirky brand of pop met complex jazz composition, while Kouen Kyoudai, her 2016 album-length collaboration with Masami Akita (Merzbow) offered an exercise in industrial improvisation.

Ishibashi's main instrument is piano, though she is adept at drums, flute, and vibraphone. Her first "solo" recording was Slip Beneath the Distant Tree in 2007, a double-length duo offering with Ruins bassist Tatsuya Yoshida. She followed it a year later with the innovative Drifting Devil. The album captured the critical imagination of Japanese journalists -- many of whom selected it as one of the year's best recordings -- as well as the admiration of fellow musicians, and her reputation grew.

In 2010 she met O'Rourke when they were both invited to play on Phew's Five Finger Discount. He asked her to perform on his All Kinds of People: Love Burt Bacharach tribute set and they joined one another's bands. He produced Ishibashi's 2011 album Carapace, and recorded and mixed her solo piano follow-up, I'm Armed. In 2013, she played on Gaspar Claus' Jo Ha Kyū alongside Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haino, and Kazutoki Umezu. She also signed to Drag City, which released Imitation of Life and followed it with Car and Freezer in 2014. Ishibashi and O'Rourke were also members of Kafka's Ibiki, who cut three albums between 2013 and 2014. She played on O'Rourke's Simple Songs in 2015 and kept up a rigorous touring regimen that included playing her own shows and with O'Rourke and their band. She also found time to form RNA with Fumio Kosakai (Incapacitants) and Kimihide Kusafuka (K2), and cut the double-cassette release No New Tokyo.

In early 2016, Ishibashi released another duo recording, this one in collaboration with Masami Akita (aka Merzbow); entitled Kouen Kyoudaireleased on Editions Mego. That same year she also worked with experimental sound artist and composer John Duncan on his full-length Bitter Earth, and privately released the digital-only piano trio full-length Six Feet Under with bassist Toshiaki Sudoh and drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. After time off and touring with O'Rourke, Ishibashi returned to the studio in 2018 and released the experimental Ichida in collaboration with composer and multi-instrumentalist Darin Gray on Black Truffle, and her own mutant pop collection, The Dream My Bones Dream on Drag City.

James Rushford

James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer, whose work draws from concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been described as ‘electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart’ (Boomkat) and ‘haunted Jacobean ASMR’ (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to new age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm and timbre.

In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorisation of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (See the Welter, for solo piano, 2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, 2020). Rushford has longstanding performance practices on piano, synthesizers and electroacoustic devices, and portative organ, bringing to all of these a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the 20th century avant-garde, and many strains of popular music.

James has created original work for BBC Scottish Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, Ensemble Neon (Oslo), Speak Percussion (Melbourne), Ensemble Vortex (Geneva), MONA FOMA, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Ultima Festival (Norway), Unsound Festival (New York), Tectonics Festival (Tel Aviv), Send and Receive Festival (Winnipeg), Adelaide Festival and Liquid Architecture (Melbourne). As well as previous projects with Klaus Lang, Annea Lockwood, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, Haroon Mirza and Dennis Cooper, he works regularly with Golden Fur (his trio with Sam Dunscombe & Judith Hamann), Joe Talia, Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, Anthony Pateras, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Francis Plagne.

His music has been published by a variety of international labels including Unseen Worlds (US), Pogus (US), Penultimate Press (UK), Another Timbre (UK), Holidays (IT), Black Truffle (AUS), KYE (US) and Shelter Press (Fr).

In 2017, James completed a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.

www.james-rushford.com

Jules Reidy

Jules Reidy makes music for processed and acoustic instruments (mostly guitars). Their recent recorded work—brace, brace (Slip 2019,) In Real Life (Black Truffle 2019), and Vanish (Editions Mego 2020)—can be described as a series of non-traditional song forms which combine unstable harmonic territories, rhythmic elasticity and abstract narrative over stretched, episodic forms. They have performed at Tectonics Festival (SCT), Send/Receive Festival (CA), Mona Foma (AUS), Berlin Jazz Festival (DE), Angelica Festival (ITA) and Borderline Festival (GR).

http://julia-reidy.com/

Joe Talia

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Joe Talia is an improviser and composer who works with percussion, tape and electronics. Focusing on the use of Revox tape machine and analogue synthesizers in combination with instruments and field recordings, Talia’s electronic works patiently build up sparkling, detail-rich sound worlds of gliding tones, skittering percussion and burbling location atmospherics. In live situations, Talia often uses tape and effects to process and warp his own and others’ playing into uncanny chains of echoes and spectral smears of sound.

A virtuoso drummer, as a percussionist Talia emerges from the traditions of jazz and free improvisation and has developed a unique personal language of shifting accents, subtle virtuosity and discreet extended technique that he welds equally ably in jazz, rock, new music and improvisational contexts. Like his electronic works, his drumming often demonstrates a keen attention to long-form structures, dynamic development and group interactions.

An important member of Tokyo’s vibrant improvised music scene and internationally active as a performer, Talia performs and records regularly with Oren Ambarchi, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, James Rushford and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. In addition to these regular collaborations, he has also been involved in projects with Keiji Haino, Chris Abrahams, Tetuzi Akiyama, Akira Sakata, John Duncan, Richard Pinhas and many others. His work has been published by international labels such as Black Truffle, Bocian, Kye and Touch.

Will Guthrie

Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He plays solo using different combinations of drums, percussion, amplification and electronics, and leads the contemporary hybrid percussion / gamelan group ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH. His music has been released on labels such as Black Truffle, Editions Mego, Erstwhile, Clean Feed, Gaffer Records, Hasana Editions, 23five, iDEAL and his own label Antboy Music.

Regular collaborators past and present include Oren Ambarchi, Container, Sarah Hennies, Mark Fell, Roscoe Mitchell, Ahmed Ag Kaedy, James Rushford, Ghassen Chiba, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Erell Latimier, Chulki Hong, Mark Simmonds, Jérôme Noetinger, Keith Rowe, Ava Mendoza, the film maker Hangjun Lee and choreographer/dancer Mette Ingvartsen.

https://www.will-guthrie.com/

Andreas Werliin

Andreas Werliin was born 1982 in the vast snow of northern Sweden and later on raised on the west coast village Strömstad, Andreas is now one of the most interesting and well-acclaimed new generation percussionists and record producers in the creative music scene of Scandinavia. He has received a Bachelor in Fine Art from the Program of Improvisational Performance at Gothenburg University. Andreas has developed an exceptionally personal way of playing and is known for his strength, creativity and sensitive listening. Today also working as a record producer and mixing with credits on over hundred albums. With improvisational music at hart he’s today a part of many different groups and projects such as Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Fire!, Fire! Orchestra, Tonbruket, Time Is A Mountain and Angles 9.

Arnold Dreyblatt

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, Dreyblatt was elected to lifetime membership in the visual arts section at the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He is currently Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany. Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka.

Arnold Dreyblatt has charted his own unique course in composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music with his "Orchestra of Excited Strings". His music has been performed by the Bang On A Can All- Stars in New York, Jim O'Rourke, The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, Pellegrini String Quartet and the Crash Ensemble Dublin. He has recorded for such labels as Tzaddik, Hat Hut, Table of the Elements, Cantaloupe, Choose and Black Truffel. Dreyblatt has taught music workshops resulting in performed compositions with musicians at "The Music Gallery", Toronto; MIT Boston, Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal and many others. He has performed with and without his ensemble at the Whitney Museum, New York; the Maerz Music Festival, Berlin; the Angelika Festival, Bologna; The Lab in San Francisco , Jazz House, Copenhagen and countless other festivals and concert venues in Europe and in North America.

Konrad Sprenger

Konrad Sprenger is a Berlin-based artist, composer, and music producer.
Influenced by the insistent rhythms of minimalism, krautrock, and techno, Sprenger focusses on the transcendent power of propulsive, full-spectrum sound. He plays a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar that he developed himself. With this setup he creates complex rhythmic patterns, automatically retunes the strings during performance, and radically expands the possibilities of the guitar - sounding like anything from an electronic instrument, to various traditional string instruments, to a full orchestra.

Hiller has long-term collaborations with Arnold Dreyblatt and Ellen Fullman, and has recently started working with Oren Ambarchi - including on his recent Editions Mego release Hubris along with an astonishing cast of players including Ricardo Villalobos, Arto Lindsay, Jim O'Rourke, Mark Fell, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman. Sprenger and Ambarchi have teamed up with Phillip Sollmann on a soon to be released disc „Suez/Panama“ on A-Ton.

www.konradsprenger.com
http://p-a-n.org/release/pan-78-konrad-sprenger-stack-music/
konradsprenger.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/choose-records
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/19133-konrad-sprenger-largo/

Kassel Jaeger

Kassel Jaeger is the project name of Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician François J. Bonnet. Based in Paris, he is the director of Ina GRM. He is also a writer and theoretician (The Order of Sounds, a sonorous Archipelago and The Infra- World have been published in english by Urbanomic). As a musician, Bonnet has been collaborating with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Jim O’Rourke, Akira Rabelais and James Rushford.

Kassel Jaeger’s works are a complex balance between concrète experimentalism, ambient noise, and electroacoustic improv. He has released several albums on various labels such as Editions Mego, Shelter Press, Senufo Editions, Unfathomless. His music has been played in renown venues and festivals all over the world such as Whitney Museum (USA), Super Deluxe (Japan), Harvard Museum of Natural History (USA), CTM (Germany), El Nicho (Mexico), Ultima (Norway), Madeiradig (Portugal), Donau Festival (Austria)…

Photo by Eleonore Huisse

Francis Plagne

Francis Plagne is a musician from Melbourne whose work integrates idiosyncratic forms of songwriting with a variety of other approaches, including group improvisation, instrumental miniatures and domestic musique concrète. He has been performing live regularly since 2005 and has released recordings on labels such as Horn of Plenty, Black Truffle, Kye Records, Penultimate Press and his own Mould/Mouse Museum micro-label.

In addition to performing his own work, either solo or with a band, he has performed and recorded in improvised and other arrangements with Tetuzi Akiyama, Oren Ambarchi, Andrew Chalk, Crys Cole, James Rushford, and Joe Talia, among others.

Massimo Toniutti

Massimo Toniutti is an experimental musician whose main sources are concrete sounds. Lately he's investigating the nature of vibrating strings especially associated with a constellation of punctual sounds. His compositional principle is connected to the depth perception of space, also thanks to the use of treated environmental recordings, with il Museo Selvatico from 1991 (reissued in 2018 by Black Truffle) likely representing its most archetypal and influential example. During 1990's and 2000's he dealt also with the language of radio, subsequently collaborating with visual artists and film makers on installations, documentaries etc. From 2016 he's newly publishing his musical works and very recently he started to perform live. His music catalogue, from the 80's, is currently to be reissued on some dedicated European labels.