A new electro-acoustic trio of master sound processing improvisor Lawrence Casserley with Pat Thomas on piano, keyboards and electronics and double bass player Dominic Lash + a solo set from Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga.

LAWRENCE CASSERLEY / electronics

Lawrence Casserley (born UK, 1941) has devoted his professional career, as composer, conductor and performer, to real time electroacoustic music. In 1967 he became one of the first students of Electronic Music at the Royal College of Music, London, UK, on the new course taught by Tristram Cary. Later he became Professor-in-Charge of Studios and Adviser for Electroacoustic Music at the RCM, before taking early retirement in 1995.

He is best known for his work in free improvised music, particularly real-time processing of other musicians' sound, and he has devised a special computer processing instrument for this work (picture above). He has worked with many of the finest improvisers, particularly Evan Parker, with whom he works frequently as a duo partner, in various larger groupings and in the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. He also works as a soloist, processing sounds from voice, percussion and home-made instruments. CDs have been released by ECM, Konnex, Leo Records, Psi, Sargasso and Touch.

Much of Casserley's work has involved collaboration with other art forms, including poets, eg Bob Cobbing, and visual artists, including Colourscape artist Peter Jones. He is a Director of the Colourscape Music Festivals, presenting contemporary music in the unique environment of the Colourscape walk-in sculpture. He also collaborates with Peter Jones on sound/light installations.

Casserley's "instrumental" approach to live computer sound processing is the hallmark of his work; the Signal Processing Instrument allows him to use physical gestures to control the processing and to direct the morphology of the sounds. This is the culmination of forty years of experience in the performance of live electronic work; his earliest live electronic pieces were performed in 1969, and he has performed many of the live electronic "classics" of the 20th century; he has also collaborated with other composers to realise their electronic performance ideas. He is noted for the breadth and variety of his collaborations, which cross styles and generations.

"Lawrence has also been doing all this wonderful work with Evan [Parker] as well, and I've been listening to it for a long time. One thing that's important about this kind of work is that it doesn't obscure who the individual is, like a lot of work around right now. Lawrence likes the idea of these virtual personalities that emerge and get placed in conflict and contestation. I think it's very exciting." George E Lewis - Interviewed in The Wire - Issue 288.

"With Casserley's arrival, the internal dynamics of the band changed completely. Lawrence redesigned the electronic rig for the Parker band, and on 'Drawn Inward', it was possible for any of the processing musicians - up to four of them at a given moment - to take sound from any other player at any time. The whole 'machine of the group', as Wachsmann called it, accelerated. Everything was more manoeuverable, and also more complicated. And no one was faster than Casserley, drumming on the pads of his Signal Processing Workstation like a scientific congalero, on his way to becoming a bona fide soloist inside the ensemble.". Steve Lake discussing the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble

Lawrence Casserley website

Lawrence Casserley & Friends: Live Sound Processing Evening from harvestworks on Vimeo.

PAT THOMAS / piano, electronics

Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill.

"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." The Jazzmann

DOMINIC LASH / double bass

Dominic Lash has performed with Tony Conrad and Evan Parker; other currently active ensembles include a duo with Alex Ward, a trio with John Butcher and John Russell and The Convergence Quartet (with Taylor Ho Bynum, Harris Eisenstadt and Alexander Hawkins). He also leads The Set Ensemble (an experimental music group mainly devoted to the work of composers from the Wandelweiser collective). Recent CD publications include work on the Another Timbre, Cathnor, Clean Feed and Psi labels. He was resident in New York for much of 2011, where he performed with musicians including Michael Pisaro, Fay Victor and Nate Wooley.

Dominic Lash website

DIMITRA LAZARIDOU-CHATZIGOGA / zither

Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (Thessaloniki, Greece 1981) is currently based in London. She has previously lived in Athens for a couple of years and before that in Barcelona for several years, where she acquired a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics investigating the notion of (in)definiteness. During her stay in Barcelona she gradually got involved in experimental non-academic music. She was influenced and attracted by free and electro-acoustic improvisation, its multiple historical situations and its concurrences with modern composition strategies and jazz.

She is active in the field of experimental, electro-acoustic and improvised music since 2006. She plays the zither, an old folk instrument, since 2006, and remaps its territory. She treats it as the interior of a piano and a resonance box, extending its sonic possibilities by preparing its strings making use of various objects detached from their typical usage.



Her first recording was the piece Paraula clau in Ferran Fages’ guitar cd Cançons per a un lent retard, which is based on the detuning(s) of the guitar. She has a stable formation as ap’strophe with Ferran Fages, under which they have released two albums, objects sence objectes (2009) in the Catalan label Etude Records and corgroc (2010) in the English label Another Timbre. A more impromptu approach gave rise to Paisatges with Felipe Araya-Muñozon Kukuruku Recordings (2009). Collaboration with Berlin-based Chris Heenan (contrabass clarinet) gave rise to Der schlaue Fuchs, which was released in the Greek label More Mars (2011). Her first solo album stroke by stroke was released in 2011 by the Greek label Organized Music from Thessaloniki. ‘Outwash’, a trio with Tisha Mukarji (piano) and Angharad Davies (violin), has just been released in June 2012 on another timbre.

Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga