Live quartet improvisation – on Douglas’s birthday!
Mandhira de Saram – violin
Cath Roberts – saxophone
John Edwards – double bass
Douglas Benford – tenor recorder/accordion/objects
Doors 3.30 | music 4pm | £10 cash on the door
Mandhira de Saram
Mandhira 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, Laura Jurd and Shabaka Hutchings, and now increasingly as a solo artist. Having left the Ligeti Quartet (Songbooks Vol. 1, 2021) – the plucky band of musical buccaneers she founded to explore the outer reaches of chamber repertoire – Mandhira’s recent creative ventures include a commission 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’. 2019 saw her commissioned to write a site-specific piece for the Barbican’s Sound Unbound. Equally at home leading orchestras in the world’s most prestigious concert venues, recording film soundtracks at Abbey Road and improvising at Cafe 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. She currently plays a 1735 Sanctus Seraphin violin kindly loaned to her by Derek Clements-Croome. emergentidioms.bandcamp.com/the-council-of-two
Cath Roberts
Cath Roberts is an improviser, composer and artist based in London, whose work combines acoustic and electronic improvised music, experimental composition, and DIY publishing/printmaking. They perform live on baritone and alto saxophones, or live electronics, and occasionally both together. Their band Sloth Racket has released five studio albums, touring widely and ‘lurching between riff and abstraction’ (The Wire) since forming in 2015. Other recent exploits include playing with Chris Corsano as part of his 2022 Cafe Oto residency, and being one of two UK artists (with Mandhira De Saram) commissioned by Australian Art Orchestra to co-create and perform Fresh Water – Salt Water in Melbourne and Huddersfield (a hcmf// and AAO co-commission, also in 2022). Cath was commissioned by hcmf// in 2021 to create And then the next thing you know, a cross-artform installation/performance piece involving a giant, hanging, fragmented graphic score for improvisers, which is now re-emerging as an exploratory puzzle piece in collaboration with Tullis Rennie. They also recently established the DIY small press Ink-Paper-Sound, dedicated to scores and other materials for and about improvised music/sounding, in risograph-printed zine form.
cathrobots.bandcamp.com
John Edwards
John Edwards grew up in London and started experimenting with the bass guitar before he switched in his twenties to play double bass. He is deeply rooted in the creative free jazz and improvisation genre. Since the 80ties he is as soloist and in many groups and ensembles in Europe active and became one of the most renowned bass players. He played/plays regular for example with Peter Brötzmann, Joe Mc Phee, Phil Minton, Maggie Nichols, Evan Parker, Roscoe Michtell, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Mark Sanders, Caroline Kraabel, John Butcher, Pat Thomas, Irène Schweizer, Hans Koch, Florian Stoffner, Gabriele Mitelli and John Dikeman.
johnedwards.bandcamp.com
Douglas Benford
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 now plays using acoustic sources (eg harmonium, toys, objects) with the London Improvisers Orchestra and Confront Recordings / Mark Wastell’s The Seen collective. His collaborators include Alan Wilkinson, Iris Colomb, Tom Ward, Dominic Lash, Mirei Ya, Georgina Brett, Steve Beresford, Sue Lynch, Blanca Regina, poet Tamar Yoseloff, Angharad Davies, Tom Ward, sculptor Rob Olins, Matt Atkins, Lina Lapelyte, Marjolaine Charbin, Sylvia Hallett, Steve Beresford, Hannah Marshall, Adam Bohman, Jennifer Allum, Clive Bell, Emily Shapiro, Verity Lane and many others.
dbenford.bandcamp.com/music
