Christopher Hill
I am an improvisor, sound, and visual artist who performs under my own name and also as DiscountGnostic, a loosely structured collaborative experimental vehicle. I have a specific interest in the use of ritual mannerism in the creation of sound, the idea of shifting sonic states – liminality – and the use of sound to reinscribe memory. My practice is an ongoing exploration of presence, absence and occulted information. A regular player at Eddie Prevost’s workshop and John Russell’s Mopomoso initiative, more recently I have contributed to the radio festival Radiophrenia 2019 and to the ongoing Institute for Alien Research compilation project. I am currently preparing material for a release on Mouth In Foot records early next year and continue to promote events under the Babble&Squeak and DiscountGnostic banners.
https://discountgnostic.bandcamp.com/
Matt Atkins
I consider myself a non-musician. I don’t approach my art from an academic standpoint, having had no formal training. Instead the terms arranger, collector or curator might better describe my practice in sonic and visual art. Using an old computer running cracked software and without a mixing desk or any outboard gear my sonic explorations use sounds from field recordings I’ve made as the building blocks of these ‘constructions’. In some of my work I also use stripped back electronics and vintage 808 and 909 drum sounds to experiment with the boundaries of rhythm and texture.
Under various guises (Platform, Seven Hour Germ, Shaded Monocle, Fertile Structure) I’ve produced all but two of the thirty two releases on my own label, Minimal Resource Manipulation. I am particularly interested in abstraction, loops, shifting textures and timbres and the element of chance. My recent work leans more toward the practice of sound art, with fewer traditionally ‘musical’ elements.
I’ve released music on other labels such as Midnight Circles (Germany), Falt (France), Invisible City (UK), Rusted Tone Recordings (UK), TQ (UK), Epicene (US), Cryoworks (Ukraine), Escala (Spain), Smallfish and Suburbs of Hell (UK) and The Unexplained Sounds Group (Italy). I’ve been played on Zoviet France’s ‘A Duck in a Tree’ show on Resonance FM a number of times and the British Library have also recently added the MRM back catalogue to their sound archive. I have recently begun organising a series of improv concerts called 3×3, which take place at the Arch 1 venue in West Ham, London.
I currently play drums in several London based bands; Crumbling Ghost, Newts, Smallgang, Slowgun, Splintered Man and Russell and the Wolf Choir and, in the 90’s, Huge Baby.
‘There is a feel about these tracks of the juxtaposition of discarded cans and milk bottle tops with the remote immensity of aluminium-plated corridors on deserted, imaginary space stations, especially on “Thoracic Drop”. There are reminders, too, of Autechre, of all the beat generators once used to entertain on dancefloors now operating for their own sake in a space in which humanity has been notionally dispensed with.’ – The Wire
mrmrecordings.bandcamp.com
Alec Kronacker
Alec Kronacker is a visual artist and musician based in south London. Over the years he has played in psych bands, hardcore bands, indie bands but his most persistent interest has been in the unpredictable freedom of improvised music which he has practiced in one form or other for 20 odd years.
Current projects include the duo PNAK with Paul Naudin, various DiscountGnostic iterations with Chris Hill and collaborations with Petero Kalulé and members of the Mopomoso workshop group.
Emmanuelle Waeckerle
Emmanuelle Waeckerle is a London based multidisciplinary artist, performer, and vocalist and a Reader at UCA Farnham. She is interested in the materiality and musicality of language. Her scores, publications, installations, performances and workshops seek and propose alternative ways of engaging with our interior of exterior landscape and each other. She is currently working on a new publication and cd project based on Henry David Thoreau’s lecture and essay Walking (1851) and co-curating here.here, a series of streaming concerts of experimental music at UCA Farnham and Iklektik in London.
She has been a longstanding attendee of Eddie Prevost improvisation workshop and MOPOMOSO workshop group. She is a member of the London Experimental Ensemble and founder member of Bouche Bée improvising trio, with Petri Huurinainen (guitar) and John Eyles (saxophone).
Emmanuelle exhibits and performs regularly nationally and internationally, recently to launch her Ode (owed) to O cd (Wandelweiser, 2017) at Klangraum in Düsseldorf (July 2017), “Speak//If You can: Text, Scores with Antoine Beuger at London’s Cafe Oto (February 2018), with a.pe.ri.od.ic ensemble at Constellation in Chicago (April 2018), by APTLensemble at A Place to Listen in Victoria (Canada, January 2019).
She is part of the Wandelweiser Composer meet Composer summer mentoring project in Neufelden (Austria) and hosts a house concert series Cosy Nook since 2016.
Other recent projects include – (the) sound (of) images workshop and performance for Writing photographs, Tate Modern, October 2018 – Atelier Cardew / Nature Study Notes, ENSA, Limoges (Octobre 2018) -Training the senses: walking, workshop performance, Marres, house for contemporary culture, Maastricht, Holland, 13th June 2018.
Recent publications include Reading (story of) O (uniformbooks, 2015), RISE WITH YOUR CLASS NOT FROM IT ( bookRoom press, 2016), Code X – paper, pixel, ink and screen (bookRoom press, 2015). Some of her scores and artists publications are in private and public collections including Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, V&A,Tate Britain and the Poetry Library in London.
Emmanuelle is a reader in photography and relational practices at University for the Creative Art in Farnham, and director of bookRoom research and publishing platform.
www.ewaeckerle.com www.lesbouchebee.com www.thebookroom.net
Martin Clarke
Martin Clarke is a composer, saxophonist and sound recordist working in improvisation, electroacoustic composition and field recording.
Martin studied music at the University of Edinburgh and composition at the University of Birmingham with Jonty Harrison where he performed regularly with Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) in the UK and abroad.
He has released music on his own label (oem) as well as Gruenrekorder, Standard Form, and Trestle Records. He has also appeared on compilations for Winds Measure, Framework Editions, Cronica, Engraved Glass, Audiobulb and Ambolthue Records.
James O’Sullivan
James O’Sullivan is an experimental guitar player, active on the fringes of London’s free improvisation scene over the past decade. He aims to exploit the full sonic potential of the guitar, relating it meaningfully and enduringly to both the immediate physical environment and the domain of recorded improvised music. His interest in improvisation, recording and performance has led him to record and perform across the UK and internationally, both solo and with numerous improvised music groups. More longstanding arrangements include Found Drowned, a trio with Pete Marsh and Paul May, Muster, a duo with Dan Powell, and his collaboration with Thanos Chrysakis on several releases on the Aural Terrains imprint. His debut solo album, feed back couple, was released in 2011. His second album, IL Y A, was released in 2017.
www.jamesosullivan.co.uk
Edward Shipsey
Edward Shipsey is an improvising musician and maker of more planned music. He makes sounds with his mouth and other things. Recently he has been trying to use more movement at the same time as making sound in order to…? https://soundcloud.com/edwardshipsey/sarahs-here-again-7
Ross Lambert
I am Irish, originally from rural Co Tyrone, but I’m also from industrial Sheffield and from London and I play electric and acoustic guitar. My dialogue with the guitar, its history, science, and the wider possibilities of its use as a sound source, has accompanied most of my life. My first exposure to free improvisation, aged 23, one Sunday evening in March 1986, changed my life forever. Derek Bailey and Han Bennink performing together. Whilst I’m better known these days for my association with Eddie Prevost and valued colleagues from his London improvisation workshop that March day some years earlier was actually the life-changer, the source of a decision to commit to playing this music solely. I have kept to that, not abandoning conventional techniques, but augmenting or replacing them with anything that might ‘supply the answers to the questions’. My interests [remain in] experimental modernism across the arts, perhaps particularly in architecture, landscape and poetry.
I must prepare to be open, an open book that absorbs and transmits as much as it speaks. In the same way that instrumental practice removes the lag of the circuit-board that is arms, hands and fingers, allowing the ear to connect directly to projection device and its receiver in that information-rich feedback loop. I am a process as much as a thing.
And how to create value? Integrity creates value, innovation too. An important thing for me is to find personal engagement, which sometimes happens immediately and sometimes takes time and patient effort to generate. Sometimes the focus is more on innovation in the present but it also can be on historical references, sometimes shared ones. Mostly, these things work together, parallel streams that feed off each other in repeating patterns of coalescence, separation, mistake, coincidence. Reflecting, shadowing; binaries of the design process, pre-building whilst building: innovating, testing, filtering, repeating; the small discards and reinforcements within self-editing whilst playing, within the macro of my long-term and selfish mantra: playing for the first time while also for the last; the created one about to die, playing like a baby while knowing I die when the sound ends. Which is a dilemma. I am Pincher Martin looking backwards and forwards unconsciously as fleeting moments expand in strange dimensions. The sense of doubt, of an ending, of form that coalesces and structures itself with little intervention from the conscious side, but nonetheless seeks structure.
Door 15:30 | music 16:00 | entry £5 / donation
