Free improvisation from three highly individual musicians with backgrounds spanning a wide variety of musical experiences, the trio’s music both captures and enthralls with its immediacy and a shared, almost telepathic intimacy.
Every performance is a unique event, specific to time and place, relying on a shared trust between the musicians, a common knowledge and respect of each other’s music and a desire to share the surprise and delight of the moment. From a stylistic canvas that moves between the smallest sounds to grand gesture the energy is palpable. This attention to all aspects of sound production being treated as possible musical material adds to the multidimensionality of the music and is used to clarify and elucidate and never to over simplify or over complicate. Aiming to be as clear and truthful to the musical imperative as it unfolds, the trio present the audience with a direct and uncompromising involvement in the music they create.
After an initial London performance in December 2009 the trio has since performed in the UK, Austria and Italy.
MIA ZABELKA
Mia Zabelka, composer, electric violinist and vocalist from Vienna, lives in the Austrian region of southern Styria.
Amongst Jon Rose and Laurie Anderson she has the international reputation of one of the most innovative freestyle Violin Players of the World. As a composer and performer of improvised, experimental and electro-acoustic music she has developed a unique language based on the de- and reconstruction of the violin’s sonic possibilities, expanding the instrument using live electronic effects and innovative performance techniques.
She studied music and composition with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Dieter Kaufmann, Kurt Schwertsik and Alexander Arenkov in Vienna, creating a foundation on the basis of which she continues to construct and explore the limits of sound and music in a language entirely her own. The violin, voice and her own body transform into sound bodies which are at once organic and primal, screaming, lyrical, composed and explosive.
As a pioneer of electro-acoustic performance and composition in Austria, Mia Zabelka developed the process she describes as automatic playing, continuously exploring sound and music as physical phenomena, always pushing back the boundaries in radical and provocative performances and compositions that question established notions and given structures. Her work has been described as "A dark delirium of sounds, a disintegrated vision on a complex world – an acoustic version of William Blake's poetry".
She has given concerts and performances throughout Europe, America and the former USSR. Recipient of numerous prizes and awards, she is a three time winner of the prix ars electronica and was a guest of the DAAD's (German Academic Exchange Service's) international artists' programme in Berlin.
Vocalist Maggie Nicols has been an active participant in the European improvisational community since joining the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the late '60s. As a co-founder of the Feminist Improvising Group, she has also worked to further women in improvised music, dancing and other creative arts not only by example, but through workshops and extensive collaborating.
“for Russell the fingerboard is apparently multiple. He finds new tones in the same place, new relationships in the same gesture. A second trip across the fingerboard is always a different excursion. The harmonic is a transparent sound: silence and ambient sound pass through it. It accounts for Russell’s unhurried pace and his sense of order, even when he’s playing fast: there’s simply so much going on.” - Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure
