Sunday 1 March 2026, 7.30pm
- Phil Durrant / amplified objects, prepared dulcimer stick, & electronics
- Steve Beresford / amplified objects, electronics, piano
- Marjolaine Charbin / piano, contact mics, objects, voice
- Ian Stonehouse / Shozyg & electronics
- James Bulley / Shozyg & electronics
- Tansy Spinks / electric violin, amplified objects & electronics
- Khabat Abas / cello and Hugh Davies string instrument
- Mark Wastell / small percussion, spring reverb, contact mics, double bass
Gentle Fire were a 6 then 5 member group of composers / improvisers / performers based in London and Yorkshire. They were active between the years of 1968-1975 and at the time, were one of a handful of groups using electronics, self-built instruments, as well as acoustic instruments in live performance settings.
The core members were Richard Bernas - piano, percussion, Hugh Davies - self-built instruments & electronics, Graham Hearn - VCS-3 synthesiser, recorder, keyboards, Stuart Jones - trumpet, ‘cello, and Michael Robinson - ‘cello, electronics. Richard Orton - tenor voice, live electronics and Patrick Harrex - violin, percussion, were also members in the early years.
The group played concerts, festivals, radio broadcasts all over Europe and were involved in premiers and early performances of important pieces by Stockhausen, Cage, Wolff, Brown, Grosskopf, Ichiyanagi, Lucier, a.o. In addition, they performed Group Compositions and nearly all the members created individual works that were included in their repertoire.
The chosen pieces offered considerable freedom for the performers and were often notated verbally, occasionally graphically and frequently without precise instrumentation.
Core member High Davies analysed live electronic music ‘as the simultaneous live electronic transformation of sounds whose sources fall into one or more of four categories’ and stated the group explored all four categories which were, sounds played on:
For this concert entitled Gentle Fire Reimagined, we will acknowledge the importance of the group and respect their legacy. We do however recognise that we have different backgrounds, experiences and history. We also recognise that technology has moved on since the 1970s. So this concert will not be an authentic reproduction of their performances / recordings but will be influenced / inspired by the group’s aesthetics and range of instruments used. Having said that, we will performing some of their repertoire including Stockhausen’s text pieces and utilising graphic scores and playing some of our ‘group compositions’. We will also expand the repertoire to include text and graphic scores by Pauline Oliveros and Tansy Spinks a.o. In addition, Ian Stonehouse and James Bulley have rebuilt Hugh Davies’ Shozyg instrument and Khabat Abas will be repairing and using a Hugh Davies cello-like instrument.
My interest and inspiration came from research but was sparked by the release of the triple album ‘Explorations (1970-1973)’ https:// gentlefire.bandcamp.com/album/explorations-1970-1973 and an online article in The Wire, ‘Flame on_ Gentle Fire revisited’.
The concert will feature small group performances but will end with the entire group performing a text piece. Professor Simon Emmerson will be on hand to introduce the concert.
– Phil Durrant
Born near London in 1957, Phil Durrant is a multi-instrumentalist improviser/composer/sound artist who currently performs solo and group concerts. As a violinist (and member of the Butcher/Russell/ Durrant trio), he was one of the key exponents of the "group voice approach" style of improvised music. In the late 90s, his trio with Radu Malfatti and Thomas Lehn represented a shift to a more “reductionist” approach. Recently, he has been performing solo and duo concerts with Bill Thompson and Gaudenz Badrutt using a semi-modular synth system. He has also recently recorded and performed with Dominic Lash’s quartet which includes Rachel Musson and Steve Noble. As an acoustic or electric mandolinist, he has been performing duos with guitarists Daniel Thompson and Martin Vishnick. He also performs regularly in a trio with Mark Wastell and John Butcher and has many ongoing projects with drummer Emil Karlsen including a trio with Maggie Nicols. Durrant still performs regularly with the acoustic/electronic group Trio Sowari (with Bertrand Denzler and Burkhard Beins) and Mark Wastell’s The SEEN, as well as the international electronic ensemble MIMEO with Keith Rowe, Kaffe Matthews, Thomas Lehn, Rafael Toral a.o.
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over fifty years, freely improvising on piano, objects, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn. Long-standing groups have included Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack), The Melody Four (with Lol Coxhill and Tony Coe, both RIP) and London Improvisers Orchestra.
He has written songs, composed for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of ‘Musics’ and ‘Collusion’ magazines, writes about music in various contexts, and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on various Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Faradena Afifi, Blanca Regina, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg, Valentina Magaletti and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography - around 500 releases - as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer, conductor and producer. He was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.
In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.
In 2022, Siglio published the book ‘Call and Response’, which partnered photographs by Christian Marclay with notated improvisations by Beresford.
Marjolaine Charbin plays piano with an ever mutating mix of keyboard technique and various inside-piano techniques using hands, objects, voice and contact microphones. Her sound sometimes evokes electronic music. Recent collaborations include Eddie Prevost, Jennifer Allum, Ute Kanngiesser, Angharad Davies, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Dominic Lash, Ed Lucas and Ken Ikeda.
https://www.marjolainecharbin.com
https://www.instagram.com/marjolainecharbin/
https://marjolainecharbin.bandcamp.com
Khabat Abas is an experimental cellist, improviser, and composer from Iraqi Kurdistan. She moves freely between artistic discipline and possibilities. Her works are inspired by a broad collection of methods, including noise, improvisation, and narrative storytelling as individual approaches. Therefore, she searches for unheard sounds or undiscovered spaces. Khabat is probably best known for her adapted cello and improvisational work exploring extended techniques, through which she started developing pieces that respond to the objects that are surrounding her or to her childhood memories. In her practice, she raises questions about what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that cannot be controlled – in contrast to traditional musical values.
Mark Wastell is a versatile improvising musician who has played a central role in the British improvised music scene for thirty years. He has performed and recorded extensively and his varied resume includes projects with Derek Bailey, Phil Durrant, John Butcher, Lasse Marhaug, Rhodri Davies, Simon H. Fell, Burkhard Beins, John Tilbury, Mattin, Tony Conrad, Evan Parker, Tim Barnes, Bernhard Günter, Keith Rowe, John Zorn, Peter Kowald, Joachim Nordwall, Otomo Yoshihide, David Toop, Max Eastley, Hugh Davies, Julie Tippetts, Alan Skidmore, Mike Cooper, Chris Abrahams, Stewart Lee, Clive Bell, Arild Andersen, Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, Maggie Nicols, Will Gaines, Charlotte Keeffe, Thomas Lehn, Thurston Moore and David Sylvian.
Multi-disciplinary artist and performer, Tansy Spinks’ practice includes photography, sound, video, drawing, painting, text based and written works.
She received her PhD researching site-specific sound as a performative practice from LCC, (CRiSAP), University of the Arts London, with David Toop, Angus Carlyle and Cathy Lane. She studied Fine Art in Leeds, has an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art and is a Licentiate of the Guildhall School of Music, London (violin teaching).
She has also exhibited widely both at home and abroad. Photographic images have been purchased for several collections including the National Media Museum, Bradford and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Major publishers of book and CD covers have used her visual work commercially.
More recently, she has been a regular member of The London Improvisers Orchestra, the weekly London Improvisation Workshop (with Eddie Prevost) and has performed in many alternative venues such as Café Oto, Iklectik, South London Gallery, Beaconsfield, Hundred Years Gallery, Whitstable Biennale fringe and for many promoters such as Ad Lib, Konsztrukting Soundz, Avant Garden, Cozy Nook, Jazz Rumours, Luft, Flim Flam, Babble & Squeak, The Instant Orchestra (Latitude) and The Sound Bureau, playing alongside many notable performers of live improvisation, on violin, objects and with voice.
Recent music was devised for artist film-makers Anne Robinson shown at APT and Keith Piper shown at Tate Britain.
website: tansyspinks.com
Ian Stonehouse is currently a researcher and archivist of experimental & electronic music at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has lectured in Sonic Art for the past 20 years and was Head of the Electronic Music Studios at Goldsmiths from 2004-2019.
He originally trained as a visual artist with experimental filmmaker Guy Sherwin and painter Paresh Chakraborty, and worked freelance for many years in sound, film, video and animation. In the late 1990s he was employed at the Lux Centre for Film, Video and New Media in London, working with artists such as Tacita Dean, Susan Hiller, John Maybury, Thomson & Craighead, Gillian Wearing, and Jane & Louise Wilson.
In recent years he’s performed as a member of noise-improv group Rutger Hauser (their eponymous debut album was released on the ADAADAT label in 2016), and as part of trio zerøspace (with Lucia H. Chung and Bill Thompson). Ian’s solo album, Voyage en Kaléidoscope (originally recorded on tape in 1995) was issued in 2016 thanks to the folks at Lumen Lake label. He was part of the ensemble who performed Bill Thompson’s Gates 2017at Goldsmiths and contributed tape loops to saxophonist Colin Webster’s release vs. Tape Loops on the Fractal Meat label in 2017. Ian’s albums Synthesizer Experiments Volumes 1-3 were self released on Bandcamp in 2019, alongside several others. He’s currently writing a biography of artist, performer, composer & sound poet Lily Greenham (1924-2001), whose first major retrospective – Lily Greenham: An Art of Living – ran from March to May this year at the Badischer Kunstverein gallery in Karlsruhe, Germany, for which he was a consultant researcher and tape archivist.
Since 2024 he has been involved in making four new copies of composer Hugh Davies’ pioneering ‘Shozyg’ experimental instruments using original materials for the concert series in February 2025 at the Science Museum in London & Bradford, with composers Gavin Bryars, Shiva Feshareki, Sarah Angliss, and the group Icebreaker.
https://ianstonehouse.bandcamp.com
James Bulley (b.1984) is an artist and composer whose work explores sound, space and the more-than-human world. Selected compositions include: Dawns, a work for five players created in collaboration with the artist group non zero one and the National Trust (premiered at dawn, 16 May 2020); Daphne Oram’s Still Point with Shiva Feshareki and the London Contemporary Orchestra (world premiere performance at the BBC Proms, July 2018); Tactus, a touch–sound landscape for the blind and visually impaired (Kaunas Biennial 2015); Living Symphonies (2014–2023), an ecologically composed forest sound installation by Jones/Bulley; Variable 4 (2014–2019), an outdoor spatial sound installation driven by real-time atmospheric conditions.
Bulley has an ongoing collaboration with the experiential art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, including: Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest (Barbican Curve Gallery, 2022), We Live in an Ocean of Air (Onassis, Athens, 2022), The Tides Within Us (The Reel Store, Coventry, 2022), The Heal Institute (Museum of the Future, Dubai, 2022), Observations on Being (Coventry City of Culture, 2021); and Distortions in Spacetime (NXT Museum, Amsterdam, 2022). In 2017 Bulley was commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces and design studio Chomko and Rosier to compose the soundscape of Hampton Court Palace, a project whose first stages are already open to the public. Other collaborative works with Chomko and Rosier include the spatial film-sound works City of Trees (City of London, 2021) and Pontefract Giants (Pontefract Castle, 2021).
Other projects include: Longplayer Day (across London, 2017, 2019), 12-hour events on the Summer Solstice exploring ecological and long-durational thinking (curated with Helen Frosi), and the recent digitisation and open-access publication of Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music 1971–1990. Bulley is a trustee of Longplayer, a thousand-year long musical composition by Jem Finer.
In 2021, Bulley published two reports (with Dr Özden Şahin) What is practice research? and How can practice research be
shared? following a three-year post-doctorate with PRAG-UK and Research England. In 2018 he co-edited a special issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac on curation in sound art, which followed from the Sound Art Curating conference he co-directed at Goldsmiths, University of London (2014). In 2018 Bulley completed a doctorate in Music at Goldsmiths, and following this was a Research Associate and member of the Unit for Sound Practice Research in the Department of Music (2018-2021).
He currently is a visiting research fellow at the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, where he has established the Lily Greenham Archive, the Hugh Davies Collection, and the Longplayer Archive. Is based in London.
soundcloud.com/jjbulley
www.jamesbulley.com
