Max Eastley – aeolian arc
Mandhira de Saram – violin
Rory Salter – amplified instruments / objects
Douglas Benford – recorders / objects
Max Eastley is a sound installation artist and a musician. He has been an AHRC Senior Researcher at Oxford Brookes University investigating Aeolian phenomena through practice-lead research; City Sound Artist for Bonn, Germany; a guest of the DAAD, Berlin, exhibiting installations as well as working as musician and performer, and he is an artist with the Cape Farewell Climate Change Project. His most recent Aeolian installation was at Perrotts Folly for the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. He has played many solo concerts as well as in combinations with musicians such as David Toop, Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, John Butcher, Ute Wasserman, Phil Minton, Axel Dorner and Al Doyle. He has worked extensively with music and performance including works with dancers and choreographers such as Anna Huber and the Siobhan Davies Company. His film, “Clocks of the Midnight Hours”, made with director Simon Reynell, was re-released by the BFI in their compilation “Great Noises That Fill the Air”.
Mandhira de Saram is happiest bringing her playful energy and creativity to a breadth of projects across the less trodden paths of contemporary music, working with the likes of Anna Meredith, Elaine Mitchener, Elliot Galvin, Laura Jurd and Shabaka Hutchings, and now increasingly as a solo artist. Having left the Ligeti Quartet (Songbooks Vol. 1, 2021 and Nuc, 2023), Mandhira’s recent creative ventures include commissions by the Ligeti Quartet, a collaboration with the cross-cultural Australian Art Orchestra (debuting in Melbourne and HCMF) and working with Jasmin Kent Rodgman on the soundtrack to the feature film Bawa’s Garden. She has also been commissioned by the Barbican’s Sound Unbound Festival and Musicity. Equally at home leading orchestras in the world’s most prestigious concert venues, recording film soundtracks at Abbey Road and improvising at Café Oto, her other projects include improvising duos with Steve Beresford and Benoit Delbecq (Spinneret, 2019) and regular appearances with Riot Ensemble and London Contemporary Orchestra.
https://confrontrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/spinneret
Rory Salter is based in London, working mostly with sound and performance, as a musician and sound technician. Recordings are available via Index Clean, TEETH, Research Laboratories, Zoomin’ Night & others. A new album ‘a sky cold as clay’ is out now on Infant Tree.
https://malvernbrume.bandcamp.com/
Douglas Benford, composer and sound artist, has been involved in various audio genres and monikers since the late 1980s, performing at institutions in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA), festivals worldwide (Mutek, Synch, Transmediale) and has had installation work in numerous UK galleries (London, Swansea, Stroud and Essex). His pieces and performances have been aired on the radio internationally, and regularly on BBC Radio 3’s Freeness programme and the Ambrosia Rasputin show on Resonance FM. After numerous electronica releases and activity in the 90s and 2000s, he nowadays employs acoustic sources (eg tenor recorder, harmonium, toys, objects) with the London Improvisers Orchestra and Confront Recordings / Mark Wastell’s The Seen collective, as well as being a contributor to the Lonely Impulse Collective a member of the trio Small Print Drama with Tom Ward and Iris Colomb, and the Multiple Melodicas group. His collaborators include Alan Wilkinson, Dominic Lash, Blanca Regina, poets Tamar Yoseloff & Iris Colomb, Angharad Davies, Verity Lane, Clive Bell, sculptor Rob Olins, Matt Atkins, Lina Lapelyte, Marjolaine Charbin, Tilly Coulton, Sylvia Hallett, Steve Beresford, Hannah Marshall, Adam Bohman, John Edwards, Jennifer Allum and Sue Lynch.
dbenford.bandcamp.com/music
