Wednesday 22 June 2016, 6pm, OTO Project Space
An early evening celebrating improvised music. Julie Kjær has gathered a strong team of some of the most inventive and fearless improvisers from the London and UK improv scene. At this concert the duo constellation will be explored.
Cath Roberts / baritone sax
Tullis Rennie / trombone
Sylvia Hallett / violin, bicycle wheel and electronics.
Julie Kjær / altosax, flute & bass clarinet
Julie Kjær's edgy and thoughtful playing and ‘dark, otherworldly imagery’ (Jazzwise) has become increasingly evident around Europe, inhabiting ground between composition and free improv. Experimenting with extended techniques, sound and rhythm she pushes her instruments to their limits. She tours internationally with Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and his Large Unit and she has toured internationally and recorded with Django Bates and StoRMChaser. Currently her main focus is on her trio, Julie Kjær 3, with bass player John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble. They’ve just released their debut album on 14th March '16 on Clean Feed. Julie also plays with London Improvisers Orchestra and is a leader and side woman of several other English and Danish ensembles. In 2014 she was chosen to be a Sound and Music “New Voice” Artist and was chosen as a featured composer by the British Music Collection.
Sylvia Hallett is a multi-instrumentalist and composer moving between violin, bowed bicycle wheel, saw, hurdy-gurdy, electronics and found objects. She currently plays solo, with the walk-in interactive installation, Colourscape. Recent collaborators have included Chris Dowding, Tansy Spinks, Ansuman Biswas, Michael Ormiston, Mike Adcock, Anthony Haddon, Mike Cooper, David Toop, Anna Homler, The Heliocentrics, Clive Bell, LaXula, Opera North, h2dance, Miranda Tufnell, Eva Karczag, Wonderful Beast, BBC Radio Drama, The Royal Shakespeare Company. She performs internationally as a solo improviser, having released six solo albums. She enjoys performing in unusual spaces, such as an Italian vineyard. She is currently working on the score for a new short film by Takako Nakasu, which draws on the theme of the Kuroko (a stage-hand clad in black).
http://sylviahallett.co.uk/index.htm
https://www.facebook.com/sylvia.hallett
Cath Roberts (they/them) is an improviser, composer and artist based in Hastings, UK, whose work combines acoustic and electronic improvised music, experimental composition, and DIY publishing practices.
On saxophones Cath has collaborated with a wide range of artists and ensembles internationally for over a decade. Their band Sloth Racket has released five studio albums, touring widely and ‘lurching between riff and abstraction’ (The Wire) since forming in 2015. Other recent exploits include playing with Chris Corsano as part of his 2022 Cafe Oto residency, and being one of two UK artists (with Mandhira De Saram) commissioned by Australian Art Orchestra to co-create and perform Fresh Water – Salt Water in Melbourne and Huddersfield (a hcmf// and AAO co-commission, also in 2022).
Cath works with live electronics (SOMA Lyra-8 synthesiser, samplers, and small tabletop machines) in ongoing collaborations with Kate Carr (as Quartz Sand), Graham Dunning (as Grid & Robots) and Tullis Rennie (as Composite Mashworks). Be unafraid to open things up, a solo improvisation on tabletop electronics, was released on Fractal Meat Cuts in 2022. Cath’s sampler-based solo collage set appeared at hcmf// 2024, Sonics Hastings 2025 and Sacrum Profanum (Kraków) 2025.
In 2021 Cath was commissioned by hcmf// to create And then the next thing you know, a cross-artform installation/performance piece involving a giant, hanging, fragmented graphic score, elements of which are being integrated into a new audio-visual collaboration with Tullis Rennie. In 2024 Cath established the DIY small press Ink-Paper-Sound, and they co-run the Luminous label and the BRÅK concert series.
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.
