Sarah Gail Brand

Described by The Wire magazine as “the most exciting trombone player for years” Sarah Gail Brand has recorded and performed on the international Improvised Music and Jazz scene since the early 1990s with Mark Sanders, John Edwards, Elton Dean, Evan Parker, Phil Minton, Veryan Weston, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nicols, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Beresford, Georg Graewe, writer and comedian Stewart Lee and countless others. Sarah fronts her own tunes quartet (Sarah Gail Brand Sextet), has a long standing duo with drummer Mark Sanders, and a trio with John Edwards and Steve Beresford and continues to work as a soloist and in ad hoc ensembles. As well as being a composer, Sarah’s trombone work ranges from playing Improvised Music and Jazz, studio session work to arranging & playing in pop and rock music. Sarah is a music therapist and a professor of Improvisation at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London and leads workshops on improvisation around the world. Recordings of Sarah Gail’s work can be found on the Emanem and regardless record labels.

Jennifer Allum

Jennifer Allum is a violinist who improvises and plays experimental music.

While she was a post graduate student at Goldsmiths, London she began to attend Eddie Prevost's weekly improvisation workshops where she met musicians like Ross Lambert, Ute Kanngiesser, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and Daichi Yoshikawa. She also began working with composers such as Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Michael Pisaro and Michael Parsons around the same time too.

More recently she has played and recorded with The Seen, including performances of John Stevens 'For Sake Of Joy Of Study Of Oneself Together' featuring Stewart Lee as narrator.

She has a number of other recordings available, and her most recent is with John Butcher, Eddie Prevost and Ute Kanngiesser on Ftarri records. Other releases are available from Matchless Recordings.

Phil Durrant

Born near London in 1957, Phil Durrant is a multi-instrumentalist improviser/composer/sound artist who currently performs solo and group concerts. As a violinist (and member of the Butcher/Russell/ Durrant trio), he was one of the key exponents of the "group voice approach" style of improvised music. In the late 90s, his trio with Radu Malfatti and Thomas Lehn represented a shift to a more “reductionist” approach. Recently, he has been performing solo and duo concerts with Bill Thompson and Gaudenz Badrutt using a semi-modular synth system. He has also recently recorded and performed with Dominic Lash’s quartet which includes Rachel Musson and Steve Noble. As an acoustic or electric mandolinist, he has been performing duos with guitarists Daniel Thompson and Martin Vishnick. He also performs regularly in a trio with Mark Wastell and John Butcher and has many ongoing projects with drummer Emil Karlsen including a trio with Maggie Nicols. Durrant still performs regularly with the acoustic/electronic group Trio Sowari (with Bertrand Denzler and Burkhard Beins) and Mark Wastell’s The SEEN, as well as the international electronic ensemble MIMEO with Keith Rowe, Kaffe Matthews, Thomas Lehn, Rafael Toral a.o. 

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.

Cath Roberts

Cath Roberts is a musician, artist and organiser whose work explores free improvisation, composition and the music at their meeting point. The primary outlet for this is the band Sloth Racket, formed in 2015 by Cath on baritone saxophone and compositions, which has toured widely and released several albums. More recently, improvisation using live electronics and objects has led to a solo release plus the beginning of several new collaborations.

Cath has a long-standing duo with guitarist Anton Hunter (Ripsaw Catfish), as well as regular collaborations with Tullis Rennie, Benedict Taylor, Graham Dunning, Bill Thompson and others, and bandmate duties in several groups including Alex Ward’s Items 10 and 7, Madwort Sax Quartet and Article XI.

As an organiser, Cath has co-run LUME with Dee Byrne since 2013, producing concerts, tours and festivals and releasing music on their offshoot label Luminous. Tom Ward, Colin Webster and Cath organise BRÅK, an improvised music series taking place in Brockley, South East London. Cath’s visual work can be seen on many Luminous releases, Sloth Racket tour flyers and LUME publicity materials, and appeared in 2021 in the form of a giant, fragmented graphic score created for a hcmf// commission, And then the next thing you know.

https://cathrobots.co.uk/

Photo by Dawid Laskowski

John Macedo

John Macedo is an artist and performer from London. His work explores connections, relationships, interdependence and revealing the hidden potential in all sounds, environments and technologies, often in intimate, immersive and intuitive ways.

He performs live solo and has collaborated with a wide variety of musicians and artists including Phil Julian, Graham Dunning, Tom White, Yoni Silver, John Butcher, Cath Roberts, John Edwards, Michael Speers, Steve Noble, Sue Lynch, Lee Fraser and Adam Bohman, to name a few. He has had work released by The Tapeworm, Hideous Replica, Sound Holes, and Beartown Records as well as releasing small run and object editions on his own label, The Black Plume Editions. He has performed and presented work in the UK, Europe and US and has led workshops and produced collaborative, educational and community-based projects for Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery, Artsadmin and New Contemporaries.