A concert series to celebrate Lawrence Casserley’s 75th Birthday
Lawrence Casserley has been making music with live electronic processing for nearly fifty years! Since the 1990s he has built a reputation for his instrumental approach to live electronic music processing in improvised music, which is documented on a formidable series of recordings with Evan Parker, Barry Guy, Paul Rutherford, Simon Desorgher, Adam Linson, Rainer and Martin Bürck, Jeffrey Morgan, Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, Gianni Mimmo, Martin Mayes, Philipp Wachsmann and many others. The core of Lawrence’s music making is collaboration, and this special series of concerts represents just a few of the many collaborations he has developed over the years. Some of these relationships are long established, some are new combinations; all reflect the variety and depth of his music making. This concert series also celebrates a spate of new CDs released during 2016.
Trio with Noel Taylor and Guillaume Viltard
Noel Taylor’s main instruments belong to the clarinet family – soprano, alto and bass clarinet. He is a frequent performer, mainly in London and the UK, but also abroad in Poland, Germany, Italy and Portugal. He is a dedicated improviser, but his work also includes short compositions, conductions with large scale orchestras, and organising musical events. Some of his work involves other art forms, using music as a form of cultural intervention.
It is Guillaume Viltard’s eclectic appetite for collaboration across the whole spectrum of improvised music as well as his resolutely unamplified and powerfully physical playing that marks Viltard out as one of the most interesting musicians to emerge from London’s fertile improvised and experimental scene in the last few years.
‘We first worked as a trio in 2015 and were very pleased with the result – it is a great pleasure to continue to develop that relationship’.
Trio with Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg and Philipp Wachsmann
Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg has developed, as autodidact, vocal improvisation and voice extended techniques, while practically exploring improvised music and focusing on his voice, since 1996. He coined the word phonoetry (phonésie in French), which describes the poésie sonore (sonic poetry) particularly of his solo voice performance ORYNX, released in the CD Orynx – Phonésie (Inaudible 003). He and Lawrence have a duo CD “MouthWind” on the Hermes Discorbie label.
Phillip Wachsmann came to free improvisation from a predominantly classical background, particularly via the contemporary experiments of “indeterminacy, graphic and prose-based scores, conceptualism and electroacoustics, listening to Webern, Partch, Ives, Berio and Varèse, reading ‘Die Reihe’ and interrogating the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic preoccupations of Western art music. He has worked with most of the leading lights of European improvised music, and created a unique approach to violin music.
‘I have worked extensively with both these wonderful musicians, but only occasionally as a trio – I look forward to revisiting this collaboration’.
(Also celebrating the new duo CD “Garuda” with Philipp Wachsmann)
Doors 3:30 | music 4pm | entry £5