Friday 9 June 2023, 8pm
Special birthday show with the one and only Andy Moor! Best known as guitarist for The Ex and cult Scottish post-punk band, Dog Faced Hermans, Moor has an incredible, eclectic list of projects and collaborators; from Lean Left - alongside Ken Vandermark, Terrie Ex and Paal Nilssen-Love - to Alva Noto; DJ /rupture to Thurston Moore, to name just a handful.
For this show, to mark Andy's 60th year, he'll be performing in his duo alongside artist and composer, Genevieve Murphy, as well as in Thermal, his longstanding trio with John Butcher and Thomas Lehn.
Born in London England 1962 Andy began his musical life in Edinburgh, Scotland playing guitar with the band Dog Faced Hermans, In 1990 he moved to the Netherlands after an invitation to join Dutch band The Ex whuch he is still a full time member of.
In more recent years Andy has collaborated with amongst others Yannis Kyriakides (Cypriot composer)), Anne James Chaton (french sound poet), Christine Abdelnour (Lebanese Paris based saxaphonist). He has also worked composing soundtracks for films with Iranian filmaker Bani Khoshnoudi. His latest projects include a quartet with Ken Vandermark , Terrie Ex and Paal Nilssen Love called Lean Left. The Heretics project with Anne James Chaton more recently with the departure of Thurston Moore has become a duo project which they began touring n 2017. In November 2019 Andy began a new project with Marion Coutts from Dog Faced Hermans . In 2020 he began a duo with Scottish composer and performance artist Genevieve Murphy called “The One I feed “ with guitar text and reel to reel tape machine.. End of 2021 also saw Andy begin work as a live DJ and radio producer as DJ ANDY EX) and has been working with Amsterdam based Echobox Radio and does a live show every four weeks on a Friday. The shows are all archived on Mixcloud and is called Blueprints For A Blackout.
Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi tracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Sophie Agnel, Christian Marclay, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, John Russell, Chris Corsano, Steve Beresford, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and Matthew Shipp.
Additionally he values occasional encounters - with large groups ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester (as soloist), and the 20+ piece EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, Isabelle Duthois, David Toop, Mariam Rezaei, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee.
Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission), “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award).
"Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose-to-tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld." WIRE - October 2024. The Primer by Seymour Wright
Schooled both as a concert pianist playing contemporary repertoire and as a recording technician, Thomas Lehn deploys a huge musicality through his unique chosen outlet, the analogue synthesiser. This instrument allows him extremely close and immediate contact with all aspects of sound modification - a vast gamut of living electronic sound produced with unmatched speed and fluency. Thomas Lehn simply represents a coming-of-age of electronic sound production in the domain of concert performance that sets a standard for the entire medium. He is therefore unsurprisingly an essential member of many of the most active and significant projects in this international and dynamic scene.
Genevieve Murphy (1988, Scotland) studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow, Junior School followed by Birmingham Conservatoire for Bachelor of Music. She received a Masters in Composition at The Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2013 and currently lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Her compositions have been performed internationally in a variety of concert halls and art galleries, to name a few, Concertgebouw, Muziekgebouw, W139, Stedelijk (Amsterdam), La Fenice (Venice), Old Fruitmarket (Glasgow), Theatre Spektakel (Zurich) with, Ensemble Offspring (Sydney), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), Camerata Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and herself performing her compositions.
