Saturday 25 February 2023, 8pm
Tonight, we celebrate Maggie’s 75th birthday with a personally curated show featuring two trios and a duo.
In 1968 Maggie Nicols joined John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble with Trevor Watts. Since then, she has worked a host of historically important groups/orchestras including Centipede, Voice, Talisker amongst many others. Maggie was behind the formation of the Feminist Improvising Group and Contradictions as well as working with pianist Irene Schweizer and bassist Joelle Leandre in the legendary trio, Les Diaboliques.
Programme:
- Aniruddha Das / Ansuman Biswas / Maggie Nicols trio
- Phil Durrant / Emil Karlsen / Maggie Nicols trio
- Mariam Rezaei / Alya Al-Sultani duo, joined by Maggie
Maggie Nicols joined London's legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist. She then became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the group Centipede, led by Keith Tippets and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the remarkable Feminist Improvising Group. She continues performing and recording challenging and beautiful work, in music and theatre, either in collaborations with a range of artists (Irene Schweitzer, Joelle Leandre, Ken Hyder, Caroline Kraabel) as well as solo.
Aniruddha Das (the “Ani” of “Ani-Roy”) is an experimental electronic musician better known as “Dhangsha”. His collaboration in Ani-Roy showcases his lesser known talent as a programmer of melodic and syncopated TB acid lines - indeed it is he who is responsible for all of the acid bass parts in Ramjac Corporation’s live set. His low end and rhythmic sensibility is a consequence of his previous incarnation as dub bassist “Dr Das.”, from which he was a founder of Asian Dub Foundation. As Dhagsha he recently supported international political noise renegades Yao Bobby & Simon Grab on their UK tour, which kicked off at Cafe Oto.
Ansuman Biswas has an interdisciplinary practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre.
He has worked as a composer and musician in a wide range of contexts from jazz to Indian Classical music, pop songs to industrial noise. He has been commissioned by the Sonic Arts Network, the National Theatre, the Royal Ballet, the English National Opera and Guangdong Modern Dance Company in China.
He has worked with the BBC, Channel Four, MTV, Royal Opera House and The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He has shown visual art at Tate Modern, The South London Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA.
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.
UK-based, Norwegian-born drummer Emil Karlsen has, in recent years, emerged as an in-demand figure on the improvised music scene, collaborating with Philipp Wachsmann, John Butcher, Dominic Lash, Phil Durrant, John Edwards, and Maggie Nicols, among others. Described as “a real force on the UK improvised music scene,” his practice explores the timbral possibilities of the drum kit in both improvised and composed situations. His work is documented on labels including Relative Pitch, 577, and Confront Recordings, and he is also a key member of the historic Bead Records.
Mariam Rezaei (she/her) is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer whose work spans experimental new music, free improvisation, noise, mutant club music and hip-hop. The Anglo-Iranian virtuoso expands on classic turntablist skills by developing new techniques with vinyl, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time. Rezaei’s approach has been recognised by The Wire’s Peter Margasak as a “radical expansion of the artform.” Her innovations include free juggling, turntable sines, needle dripping, fractured loops and needle weaving. Across solo, duo, ensemble, orchestral and operatic works, Rezaei takes the philosophy and aesthetics of turntablism into new territory, creating wildly inventive, energetic and beautiful music.
Following on from the highly acclaimed Fractured (2024) and her ground-breaking Blud/Skeen/Bown trilogy (2019-2023), Rezaei will release Selected Adequate Works in early 2027. A major step forward in live turntablist composition, the double album captures the breadth of Rezaei’s vision from warped techno and mangled noise, to shimmering psychedelia and refracted chorales. Each track is recorded live in a single take, with Rezaei transforming her own samples alongside contributions from Elvin Brandhi, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, Julien Desprez, Lukas Koenig, Eleni Poulou, Lucy Railton and Stewart Smith.
Her major commissions include Scholar’s Record for Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025, a four turntable tour-de-force which drew on the legendary festival’s audio archives, and 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra, an orchestral collaboration with Matthew Shlomowitz for IMD Darmstadt/Tectonics Glasgow. This autumn, she premieres new projects with Ensemble Intercontemporain and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
In addition to her solo work, Rezaei is a member of the international free music supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the pioneering Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez, 1984 with Kobe Van Cauwenberghe and Sakina Abdou, and Fire! Orchestra. Other collaborators include Pat Thomas, Bill Orcutt, Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Mats Gustafsson, Valentina Magaletti, Robyn Rocket, Thurston Moore, Lasse Marhaug, Ensemble Contrechamps, Fritz Welch, Raymond MacDonald, Lukas König, Okkyung Lee, Dali de St Paul and Ali Robertson.
In November 2022, Rezaei received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation #AwardsForArtists in recognition of her contribution to music composition. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE and TUSK NORTH. She is currently based in Newcastle, United Kingdom.
Alya Al-Sultani is a dramatic soprano, improvising vocalist and opera-maker from Basrah, Iraq. Her work is focused on the themes of liberation and love. Her current work includes a trio with Pat Thomas and Khabat Abas (Manara) and with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols, a duo with Maggie Nicols and an underground electronic / opera duo with GRANDMIXXER. She is working on a new opera with Jennifer Farmer, In The Teeth of the Wind, due to be debuted in 2026. She continues to be a student in the life-long study of maqam and Arabic music and has released albums of Iraqi folk songs and interpretations of Arabic poetry by living and past poets.
Her most recent releases include improvised solo opera suites "Three Ages of Woman/Mother", "Self Lost / Self Found" and "Return/Exile" and a protest album with Maggie Nicols "Free, Free". Her most recent release is "Immersion" with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols and upcoming in September is Manara's debut album, both out on the UK label Discus.
