Tuesday 15 September 2026, 7.30pm
GRAIN is a concert series and residency for experimental and improvised music, operating mainly out of Avalon Cafe, South Bermondsey.
GRAIN is curated and produced by Caius Williams and Theodora Laird. The series is focussed on programming new and adventurous music and nurturing a growing community with cross-scene and cross-generational collaboration. The residency also documents music made in and around South Bermondsey, and gives occasional workshops aiming to widen access, interest, and explore processes for improvising and collective music-making.
For a long time now Phil Minton has been working as a improvising singer, solo and in groups and situations at various locations all over the place, deserts, quarries, concert halls, pubs, holes, dodgy clubs, containers, up trees, in prisons, on mountains, in churches, under bridges and cafe oto etc.
Phil Minton comes from Torquay. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s - Then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later of part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s.
For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as an improvising singer in lots of groups, orchestras, and situations. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians, including tours with American singer Audrey Chen - with whom he has sang far and wide in the last ten years.
Since the eighties, His Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.
Nick Neuburg is a drummer/percussionist, originally from the greater Ft. Lauderdale, Florida area and now lives in Brooklyn, NY by way of Boston, Massachusetts. Nick devotes a significant amount of focus to solo percussion performance, practice, and recording and has two solo records out “Cryptic Exaltations” (1039 Records, 2023) and “For 1 and 2 Surfaces” (Empty Stage Records, 2025). Nick is an active participant in the improvised music community in NYC and collaborates regularly with many local improvisers such as Brittany Karlson, Eli Wallace, Drew Wesely, Sam Newsome, and Evan Palmer among many others.
Theo Guttenplan is a drummer and percussionist from London, playing improvised and other musics. He is also interested in woodworking, crosswords, computers, and football.
Theodora Laird is a vocalist and multidisciplinary artist. Releases under her solo project ‘feeo’ have received critical acclaim. Theodora's practice has involved in tandem with an interest in situating narratives within freely improvised music, specifically through frequent involvement in the GRAIN residency.
