Mandhira de Saram (violin) + Luigi Marino (laptop)
Shirley Smart (‘cello) + Steve Beresford (electronics)
Mark Wastell (tam-tam, gongs, cymbals, objects) + Phil Durrant (modular synth)
Doors 3:30 | music 4pm | entry £5
Mandhira de Saram and Luigi Marino team up for a brand-new duo for violin and laptop. Luigi Marino is a musician based in London. His work focuses on networks able to display relationships between human and nonhuman actors, with particular attention to how intuitive decisions can profoundly affect pre-existing conditions. He is an active improvisor performing on both electronic media and percussion, especially zarb and bowed custom cymbals.
He regularly performs solo, in duo with Mark Wastell, Michael Thieke, and Sabine Vogel, in trio with Giancarlo Schiaffini and Eugenio Colombo, and with both Mark Wastell and Phil Durrant in the former’s large ensemble THE SEEN.
www.luigimarino.net
Mandhira de Saram is a versatile violinist performing as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral violinist in the UK and abroad. She is a founding member and the leader of the Ligeti Quartet, a young string quartet which has established a reputation as a leading dynamic and imaginative force in contemporary and modern music. She graduated with 1st class honours from the University of Oxford achieving a high 1st in performance and winning the Worcester College Arts Prize for the highest result in an arts subject. International solo and chamber music tours have taken her around Europe as well as the USA, India, China and her country of origin, Sri Lanka. She has performed at prestigious festivals and venues such as the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre and St Johns Smith Square in London and the Carnegie Hall in New York. Her repertoire is varied consisting of standard classical works as well as free improvisation and original projects often involving collaborations with contemporary composers sound artists and musicians from a variety of genres outside classical music. With her quartet she has worked with Wadada Leo Smith, Meilyr Jones, Shabaka Hutchings, Laura Jurd, Kerry Andrew, Sean Noonan, and following a tour to China and Hong Kong, has collaborated with leading Hong Kong DJ Choi Sai Ho and Japanese sound artist mamoru.
Mandhira was born in London. After completing her primary education in Sri Lanka, she was awarded a music scholarship to North London Collegiate School where she completed her secondary education. She was also a Leverhulme Scholar at the Junior Royal Academy of Music where she performed both as a violinist and pianist, also taking classes in composition and conducting. Her violin teachers have included Igor Petrushevsky, Howard Davis and Levon Chilingirian.
www.mandhiradesaram.com
Phil Durrant and Mark Wastell have been close musical colleagues since first performing together in Chris Burn’s Ensemble in 1997. Their shared experiences over the following two decades have included the groups Assumed Possibilities, Open, Quatuor Accorde, Strings with Evan Parker and more recently a newly formed drone unit with Bill Thompson and Mark Wastell’s ongoing large formation THE SEEN.
Mark Wastell has been active as a musician since 1995, making his initial concerts with the trio IST featuring Rhodri Davies and Simon H. Fell. He has performed and recorded extensively and has collaborated with the likes of Derek Bailey, John Butcher, Evan Parker, Lasse Marhaug, John Tilbury, Mattin, Mark Sanders, Tony Conrad, Tim Barnes, Bernhard Günter, Keith Rowe, John Zorn, Peter Kowald, Joachim Nordwall, Otomo Yoshihide, Burkhard Beins, Paul Dunmall, David Toop, Alan Wilkinson, Max Eastley, Hugh Davies, Julie Tippetts, Alan Skidmore and David Sylvian. Mark also runs the Confront Recordings record label.
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 Phil Maguire, Bill Thompson, Mark Sanders, Lee Patterson and drone concerts with Mark Wastell, Phi Julian, Rhrodri Davies, Bill Thompson, using an analogue/digital modular synthesizer system. As a mandolinist, he has been performing with guitarist Martin Vishnick and a quartet with Sue Lynch, Hutch Demouilpied and Dave Fowler. Durrant still performs regularly with the acoustic/electronic group Trio Sowari (with Bertrand Denzler and Burkhard Beins) and Mark Wastell’s The SEEN.
www.facebook.com/philsowaridurrant
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over forty years, freely improvising on the piano, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, John Zorn and Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack).
He has written songs, written for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of Musics and Collusion magazines, writes about music in various contexts and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster. With Blanca Regina, he is part of Unpredictable Series, which produces events and sound and video recordings of experimental music and art.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on numerous Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, Satoko Fukuda, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Sarah Gail Brand, Lore Lixenberg and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer and producer, and was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.
Shirley Smart is one of the UK’s most versatile and creative cellists – being equally at home and well versed in jazz and Middle Eastern music, as well as classical music.
Originally trained in classical cello under Raphael Wallfisch at the Guildhall School of Music, and Janos Starker in Paris, she subsequently moved to Jerusalem. She remained for 10 years, studying and performing a wide variety of world music from the Mediterranean and Middle East, as well as jazz, and became being highly involved with the jazz and improvised music scene. Since returning to the UK, she has quickly become known as one of the most creative cellists on the music scene and has worked with many leading jazz and world music groups, including Antonio Forcione, Gilad Atzmon, Neil Cowley, Julian Ferraretto, Robert Mitchell, Maciek Pysz, Maurizio Minardi, and Alice Zawadski.
Recent performances have included the Vortex Jazz Club, Wilton’s Music Hall, Old Ford Jazz Club, Brunel Museum, Green Note, Crouch End festival and Harfensommer Festival, Wurzburg in Germany. Upcoming performances include City University Music Society, and Kings Place, London as part of the Beyond Cello Festival.
https://www.shirleysmart.com/
