Thursday 4 July 2024, 7.30pm
Anthony Moore's Obtrama3 – Olie Brice (dbl bass), Anthony Moore (noise), Tullis Rennie (trombone & electronics) – are joined by John Butcher (saxophones), and Matthias Muche (trombone) for a 90 minute set in two parts. Expect improvised music, noise, text and more.
A veteran of the European avant-garde scene since the late 60’s, Anthony Moore has blazed a trail through more genres than a lot of composers have even heard of.
From the baroque pop works of Slapp Happy and the Rock-in-Opposition of Henry Cow to writing lyrics for Pink Floyd and producing records with Kevin Ayers, This Heat and others, Moore is a musical journeyman who carved a musical path entirely his own.
From 1995 until 2015 he was professor at the Academy of Arts Cologne working on the history of sound, noise and music. Along with Slapp Happy he was commissioned to create a TV opera for Channel 4 and has exhibited a number of multi--channel, sound installations.
This performance will see Moore opening another new chapter alongside fellow musicians in the recently formed group, OBTRAM3.
Olie Brice is a double bassist, improviser and composer. Raised in London and Jerusalem, he now lives by the sea in Hastings.Olie Brice leads a Quartet featuring Rachel Musson, Alexander Hawkins and Will Glaser, (their debut album “All It Was” will be released in 2025) and an improvising trio with Rachel Musson and Mark Sanders (“Immense Blue”, 2024). He has also led a trio, quintet and octet which can be heard on albums including “Fire Hills” and “Day After Day”.
Brice performs with a wide range of creative improvising musicians, including both legends of the music and his peers. Frequent collaborators include Mark Sanders, Paul Dunmall, Rachel Musson, Tobias Delius, Cath Roberts and Luis Vicente, and he has also appeared with the likes of Evan Parker, Tony Malaby, John Butcher, Trevor Watts, Ingrid Laubrock, Ken Vandermark, Eddie Prevost and Louis Moholo. He is part of several ongoing improvising ensembles including Somersaults (with Tobias Delius & Mark Sanders), a Trio with Ziv Taubenfeld & Kresten Osgood, and the Flame (with Robert Mitchell & Andrew Lisle).
Tullis Rennie is a composer, electronic musician, improvising trombonist, and field recordist. He has appeared in collaboration through performance and recording with an array of artists including Claudia Molitor, John Butcher, Cath Roberts, Olie Brice, Kate Carr and many others. Tullis’s varied career to date has touched upon many different conceptual approaches, examining the impact of listening with jazz musicians Matthew Bourne and Graham South on vinyl-only release Muscle Memory ("...Rennie foregrounds the act of listening as an active component in the creation of musical experience” -– The Wire Magazine), and investigating the hidden process of performance preparation with Manchester-based Vonnegut Collective on 48 Hours (Moving Furniture Records). His recent studio work Fixed Freedoms, released on Matthew Herbert's Accidental Jnr label, is "a mutated set of electronic experiments that bends recognizable formulae (trance, dub techno, electro) into abstract landscapes" — Boomkat. He is co-founder of Walls On Walls with visual artist Laurie Nouchka, and a member of the Insectotròpics audio-visual collective, based in Barcelona.
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
Matthias Muche is a Cologne-based trombone player and composer. He stands for a generation of composer-performers for whom the distinction between jazz, improvised music and contemporary music no longer applies. He confidently draws on the diverse heritage of the avantgardes of the 20th and 21st centuries as a composer as well as a virtuoso improviser and interpreter.
The focus of his work includes interdisciplinary projects in music, theatre, dance and video art with which he has performed in over 50 countries.
After studying music at the Conservatorium Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Cologne, he completed a postgraduate degree at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and initiated the Frischzelle Festival for Intermedia Performance and Zeitkunst e.V.
In his Performance he uses a wide variety of playing setups: feeds of speech and soundscapes into the trombone, spatial expansion using external bells, interactive computer graphics as synaesthetic perception, or simply the pure, naked trombone.
https://linktr.ee/matthiasmuche
