Sunday 31 May 2015, 6pm, OTO Project Space
Duo
Seymour Wright / saxophone
Joel Grip / double bass
Solo
Antonin Gerbal / drums
Solo
Daichi Yoshikawa / feedback
Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential.
Seymour's solo music is documented on three widely-acclaimed collections - Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) and Is This Right? (2017).
Current projects include: @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; [Ahmed] with Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Pat Thomas; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; XT with Paul Abbott; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne.
@xcrswx
For a number of years now, energetic double bassist, filmmaker and producer Grip has played an important role for the new scenes of improvised music in Europe. As founder of Umlaut Records, he opened up for creative forms of organizing collectives of musicians and promoting their music internationally. Since 2003 he has been one of the main organizers of Hagenfesten in Dala-Floda, Sweden, a stand-alone festival, and quite frankly possibly the most pleasant venue for free improvised music not only in Sweden but in the whole of Europe. Few other places offer quite the same endearing combination of sophisticated musical risk-taking, and up-beat, social get-together. Grip’s musicianship is informed by a similar knack for welding musical sophistication with social communication, often with an analog film camera at hand. With a handful of short films Joel Grip met mexican filmmaker Mauricio Hernández and shortly the film production company Umlicht was established. They are right now working on their second feature film together.
www.joelgrip.com / www.umlicht.com
Antonin Gerbal is a percussion player, improviser and composer, active in the field of contemporary musics – from jazz to non-idiomatic languages. He has studied music at Paris Conservatory and philosophy at EHESS. In 2009 he co-founded Umlaut France, an organization which runs the eponymous label and organizes concerts and festivals in Paris and Berlin. Antonin Gerbal is mainly using percussion elements to develop multiple accesses to musical languages in jazz, improvised or written music. He has collaborated with many international artists and played in United States, Japan, Russia and Europe.
Daichi Yoshikawa is a Japanese sound artist based in London and Berlin. A former participant of workshops organised by AMM co-founder Eddie Prevost and sound artist David Toop, Yoshikawa's distinct sound comes from feedback systems generated between homemade assemblages of speakers, contact microphones, and various found objects. Developing his ability as an improviser through years of attendance at Prevost’s weekly workshops, Yoshikawa is singularly unique in his facility to wield electronic feedback as an instrument capable of both dialogic potential and genuine musicality in a group setting. Combining the collaborative sensitivity of a player like Toshimaru Nakamura with a techno and noise-derived penchant for enamel-peeling feedback tones and lurching metallic rhythms, Yoshikawa’s electroacoustic practice creates brutalist landscapes of sound from the space between noise and silence. Yoshikawa is also part of the ensemble lll人, a London-based group with Seymour Wright and Paul Abbott, and has collaborated with Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal, Samo Kutin, Lee Patterson and Rie Nakajima.
