Live quartet improvisation:
Iris Colomb – voice/megaphone
Alan Newcombe – saxophone
Tom Mills – theremin
Douglas Benford – harmonium/objects
Doors 3.30 | music 4pm | £10 cash
Iris Colomb
Iris Colomb is an artist, poet, improviser, curator, editor, and translator based in London. Her practice merges poetry and other art forms to explore various relationships between visual and verbal forms of text through projects involving performance, poetic book-objects, experimental translation, and improvisation. She has been resident artist and poet at the Centre For Recent Drawing, she is now the Co-Editor of HVTN Press, the founder and curator of the investigative poetry & performance platform SLANT, as well as a member of the interdisciplinary collective No Such Thing, half of the performance duo Soft Play with poet and artist Paul Ingram, and half of the sound and text duo [something’s happening] with composer Daryl Worthington (Beachers). She is currently working as a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton. Her poems have also appeared in a number of UK magazines and anthologies, as well as Russian, Austrian, Spanish, German, Brazilian and US publications. Iris’ visual works have been showcased in collective exhibitions in the UK, France, Austria, and Ukraine. Her artist books have been collected by the National Poetry Library as well as Chelsea College of Art’s Special Collection since 2016. She has been curating exhibitions and events seeking possibilities beyond the traditional format of poetry readings since 2015. Each of her events is a unique live experiment, merging poetry and other art forms including film, visual art, sound, and movement.
https://skronkimprov.bandcamp.
Alan Newcombe
Alan was a member of the London Musicians Collective in the mid 80’s. But he mainly was part of a fluid grouping of musicians over a ten-year period playing a range of uncategorisable genres – the music was always spontaneous. Performances included definitely the last free improv gig in Railton Road before the Brixton riots. In the past few years, he returned to live playing and has been involved in MOWO, the Skronk sessions, the London Improvisation Workshop, Babble and Squeak, No Computers and the 50/50 project. Recent gigs in the past year include a quartet with Eddie Prevost, Dominic Lash and NO Moore, a nonet curated by James O’Sullivan, and duos with Chris Hill and Keisuke Matsui and a recent trio with Jordan Muscatello and Dave Fowler. A new release ‘Luft’with James O’Sullivan and Chris Hill should be out in the next few months. He has also recently been sighted playing a version of bluesy hard bop at several jam sessions at the County Arms.
https://skronkimprov.bandcamp.
Tom Mills
Tom Mills is an electronic musician based in London. In addition to his solo work he plays Theremin in the group Bobhowler with Alicia Gardener-Trejo and Andrew Woodhead and also played on the album ‘Improvisers Inside Electronics’ alongside Antonio Acunzo, Tony Hardie-Bick and N.O Moore.
https://earshots.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, as well as being a regular contributor to the Lonely Impulse Collective. His collaborators include Alan Wilkinson, Dominic Lash, Blanca Regina, poet Tamar Yoseloff, artist Calum Storrie, Angharad Davies, sculptor Rob Olins, Matt Atkins, Lina Lapelyte, Marjolaine Charbin, Sylvia Hallett, Steve Beresford, Hannah Marshall, Adam Bohman, John Edwards, Jennifer Allum, and Sue Lynch.
