Benedict Taylor/Chris Cundy/Ross Lambert/Mark Browne. Saturday 31st March 19:00

                                                      

Guerrilla – in this instance the uninvited combination of musical conflict and artistic skirmish. An exhibition just for this evening and the concert: two duos and a quartet.

Benedict Taylor – viola
Chris Cundy – bass clarinet
Ross Lambert – guitar
Mark Browne – saxophones and collected objects

Benedict Taylor is an award winning composer & solo violist. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music & Goldsmiths College, and is a leading figure within the area of contemporary composition & string performance, at the forefront of the British & European new and improvised music scene. He composes, performs & records internationally, in many leading venues and festivals including: Royal Court Theatre, Rambert Dance Company, BBC Arts Online, Berlinale, Venice International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, Cantiere D’Arte di Montepulciano, Edinburgh Festival, CRAM Festival, Cafe Oto, The Barbican, Royal Albert Hall, Southbank Centre, The Vortex, Ronnie Scott’s, ICA, BBC Radio 3 & 2, Radio Libertaire Paris, Resonance FM London. He is involved with a number of higher education institutions, giving composition, improvisation & performance lectures at the Royal College of Music and Goldsmiths College, amongst others. He is the founder / artistic director of CRAM, a music collective and independent label.

Chris Cundy – Playing bass clarinet, saxophones, and other unusual woodwind instruments Chris explores an experimental practice while also working in popular music. He has toured internationally with Cold Specks, Timber Timbre, Guillemots, and Fyfe Dangerfield and has accompanied songwriters such as Little Annie, Baby Dee, Devon Sproule, and Edd Donovan. Appearing on over sixty commercial recordings, Chris has recently started to release a series of projects under his own name.

Chris grew up in Medway, Kent and was drawn into the local music scene at a young age where he become friends with Billy Childish – artist, musician, and founder of Hangman Records. During visits to Childish’s kitchen Chris was exposed to the exploits of homemade music-making. These formative years instilled a strong DIY approach, and by the time he was 14 Chris had already started out as a street busker. After hearing the Eric Dolphy Memorial Album he took up the bass clarinet. He is self-taught.

Also a visual artist, Chris went on to study painting at Cheltenham art college. During this period he began to establish improvised projects such as Grace & Delete – a duo with fellow painter and electronics musician James Dunn. He also started to explore self-developed playing techniques such as multi-phonics, circular breathing, micro tonality and generally speaking a more tactile approach to the instrument. This has led him to working with composers including Thanos Chrysakis, and Pete M Wyer. At Cheltenham he also met songwriter Fyfe Dangerfield who he has continued to collaborate with on a number of occasions since – most notably as an additional saxophonist for the Mercury Prize nominated pop band Guillemots.

Ross Lambert – Northern Irish (and London-based) guitarist and ‘magnetic and vibrating sources’ player Ross Lambert, has in his own words, the following fundamental and simultaneous approaches to live performance: to play as though it was both the first time and also the last; and to able to differentiate between what is good and worth conserving and what is not. Ross has been involved in, initiated and been a connector between a very wide variety of improvisatory music since his first exposure and (immediate) commitment to it, in Sheffield via Derek Bailey during the mid-1980s. Although under-recorded (he claims ‘by choice’), Ross has worked with a huge number of musicians from around the world, including Tetuzi Akiyama, Ami Yoshida, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Paul Hession, Rhodri Davies, John Butcher and Evan Parker, as well as his close friends Eddie Prevost, Seymour Wright, and Sebastian Lexer.

Mark Browne is a saxophonic symbolic system of soprano and sopranino. His metaphor exists in the terrible deaths of dog-toys, cockpit, Cockshill, Coxhill music Bohman, Bohman, Crow. In the fetishisation of vibrations on copper. His instruments are coerced in a sault-somer of malapert systems. He works within a fine power-mesh that destroys the puritanicaldynamics of accepted sound. A fanatic of disaster. A fastidious amateur of grief. He destabilises both the physical and psychological through his art. Foryour entertainment, the hermit emerges from his grotto, cheap suited, to bite the helpless hand of his benefactor. Prevost points of intersection are made to challenge the regimes of noise orthodoxy, through rutting antlers and Porphyria’s asphyxiation. Music is not privileged here; it is the interaction of hand on duck-call, copper drum, flowers of saxophone and breath-beats that underlie his rejection of homogenised sound ideologies and the alpha male collection of objects. Pluralism is encouraged and embraced in Mark’s work – it is not clock-work it is duree. A pulsing bricolage of bark-rips and gusset-faced machinations. Crush!!! Crush!!! He is a beautiful, liberating anti-Enlightenment machine. A gentleman of genial decay in the pit of sartorial inelegance. The visual and aural challenging of the legitimate is foregrounded here. You will find the development of your critical learning consciousness aflame as such ruined finery. As with all defiance, soprano and sopranino destroy the blowing syntax and all is readily free as the folding of the 53rd noisy little cloud. Defy stasis and rigidity! Lust rolling, Mark is a riff-hope-shy, bed singing with a clear now-self. Consume him imaginatively and break down your structural causality once and for all, adjusting the windows in the loneliness of your car so that the wind whistles through at an ill-defined pitch.

      

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