Biliana Voutchkova / Marjolaine Charbin / Dominic Lash / Phil Durrant / Luigi Marino
Doors 7:30 | music 8pm | entry £8 cash
Biliana Voutchkova is a dynamic and thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, violinist, performer, composer, improviser and curator with a truly personal musical language. Her work spans the widest possible range of music, sound and movement and her interests lead into various multi disciplinary collaborations. Based between Berlin and her rural residency on the black sea coast of Bulgaria, she works as a soloist and with renowned ensembles such as United Berlin, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, the Splitter Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, Voutchkova/Thieke duo etc. Recent/current projects include her new solo release Seeds of Songs on Cafe Oto’s label Takuroku, her first solo exhibition-performance at One Gallery / Sofia, solo tours in France, USA, Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Colombia, and Chile.
“…Voutchkova, as she does on several occasions, speaks as she’s playing, in a low tone that’s indecipherable to me and all the more mysterious and beautiful for that. It’s a very simple idea, I suppose, but one that I find very strong and oddly moving.”
– Brian Olewnick/Just Outside, UK
Luigi Marino is a musician based in Bristol. 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 holds an MFA in electronic music from Mills College where he worked as teaching assistant for John Bischoff and Chris Brown, and a joint PhD in composition from University of Birmingham and De Montfort University funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His teachers include Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, James Fei, William Winant. He studied zarb with Mohssen Kasirossafar.
Marjolaine Charbin is a pianist working both inside the piano with objects and with the keyboard. Originally from France, she lived for many years in Brussels and is now based in London. Since studying sound engineering and then jazz piano at the conservatoire in Brussels, she has focussed on improvised music as both a solo and collaborative performer. She has worked with a wide range of musicians and dancers, in London and across Europe, including Olivier Toulemonde, Jennifer Allum, Eddie Prevost, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Julyen Hamilton, David Toop, Rhodri Davies, Theodossia Stathi, Grundik Kassiansky, Ute Kangiesser, Frans van Isacker, Lawrence Casserley and many others, and has developped film scores and worked in devised theatre.
Dominic Lash is an improviser and composer. A partial list of musicians he has worked with includes Antoine Beuger, Tony Conrad, Angharad Davies, Jürg Frey, Elizabeth Harnik, James Ilgenfritz, Charlotte Keeffe, Paul Lytton, Joe Morris, Evan Parker, Éliane Radigue, Mark Sanders, Roger Turner, Fay Victor, and Philipp Wachsmann. Best known as a double bass player, he’s emerged as a guitarist since the 2020 lockdown, during which he “spent his time developing a very interesting and personal approach to electric guitar… Lash uses the Telecaster’s basic yet unique design super-effectively; the biting, percussive nature of the instrument highlighted by the sheer power in his contrabass-trained hands” (Paul Khimasia Morgan).
Phil Durrant : 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 Bill Thompson, Mark Wastell, as well as his seven-piece group ‘If Herbie Went West Coast’, using a modular synthesizer system. As a mandolinist, he has been performing with guitarist Martin Vishnick, mandolinist Richard Scott and drummer Emil Karlsen.
Durrant still performs regularly with the acoustic/electronic group Trio Sowari (with Bertrand Denzler and Burkhard Beins) and Mark Wastell’s The SEEN.
Biliana Voutchkova photo © Photomusix C. Marx
