Taking in four shows over three nights, in three venues, Match&Fuse festival 2014 features extreme jazz, brute rock, hip hop, beat boxers, doom jazz, happy jazz hard core, ambient soundscapes, electronica and acoustic free jazz, with a deliberate mixing of genres and styles on each night, specifically designed to bring a diversity of music to the audience. The festival features bands from Italy, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Scotland and England. Originally set up by Dave Morecroft of WorldService Project in 2011, Match&Fuse is a touring exchange network and annual festival with the primary aim of connecting creative scenes across Europe. With an emphasis on local culture and its transmission across borders M&F facilitates shared platforms for like-minded artists and the creation of new artistic material through international collaboration and works within underground scenes that comprise distinctive audiences built through cutting-edge artistry.




THE EIRIK TOFTE MATCH&FUSE ORCHESTRA

The Eirik Tofte Match&Fuse Orchestra was officially formed in 2014, in memory of the late Eirik Tofte, Norwegian Match&Fuse co-producer (1988 – 2013). In the spirit of M&F the ensemble calls upon various improvisation techniques and soundpainting gestures to create a spontaneous and thrilling life experience. Contemporary sounds blend with electronic and acoustic soundscapes and dirty grooves that propel this underground orchestra into undiscovered sonic adventures. A head-on-collision of free improvisation, contemporary classical sounds and electronic dub grooves, the Eirik Tofte Match&Fuse Orchestra showcases everything that is fresh and original about European music today. Lineup – ca. 15 members from many different nationalities. The Match&Fuse Festival culminates with a procession featuring the The Eirik Tofte Match&Fuse Orchestra as they go directly from their headlining set at Café Oto on a midnight march to The Vortex where they will perform a brief set before Snorkel close the festival bringing two of London’s best venues together for the night: Just as Match & Fuse bring musicians and audiences together.




MONKEY PLOT

Monkey Plot is a Norwegian band that plays acoustic improvised music on their own terms. The members met and studied together at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and have today, together and in other constellations (Karokh, Ich Bin N!ntendo and PGA), distinguished themselves as strong newcomers on the Norwegian creative music scene. Løv og lette vimpler (meaning leaves and small flags) is the title of their debut album. It was recorded in the living room of Norwegian free jazz pioneer Frode Gjerstad. With its simplicity, organic sound and structure, their music can be seen as a contrast to the consumer society. It breaks the barriers of genre definitions, but draws inspiration from different kinds of folk music, acoustic icons as Neil Young and Nick Drake, and the experimental noise, improvisation and jazz scene. Monkey Plot is: Christian Winther: Guitar, Magnus Nergaard: Bass and Jan Martin Gismervik: Drums. Frode Gjerstad was born in Stavanger, Norway, in 1948. He started trying to play improvised music as a trumpeter in 1968. When he moved to Lund in Sweden (1971 to 1975) he got a chance to meet, talk and play with musicians interested in this music. He had at that time started playing tenor saxophone (1969).




FREE NELSON MANDOOMJAZZ

Free Nelson Mandoom Jazz hail from Edinburgh, Scotland. Rebecca Sneddon on Sax, Colin Stewart on bass and Paul Archibald on drums offer us their wonderous and breathtaking take on doom jazz, one where extreme clarity and heaviness coexist with delicious melodic invention.




LANA TRIO

Lana Trio is an experimental ensemble for the exploration of historic, non-ideomatic improvisation. Andreas, Henrik and Kjetil started playing together quickly after meeting at Sund Folk College in 2007, and extensively explored how musical parametres like density, speed, duration and volume could be stretched in order to create different possibilities for musical interplay. The trio have worked both with graphical notation and so called free improvisation, and play music that draws inspiration from a wide variety of genres. They are joined by British improv legend John Butcher. Lana Trio is: Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø: Trombone Kjetil Jerve: Piano and Andreas Wildhagen: Drums.

www.lanatrio.com




JOHN BUTCHER

John Butcher's work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. Originally a physicist, he left academia in '82, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians - inc. Derek Bailey, John Tilbury, John Stevens, The EX, Gerry Hemingway, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, John Edwards, Toshi Nakamura, Paul Lovens, Eddie Prevost, Mark Sanders, Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide, Phil Minton, and Andy Moor. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of place. Resonant Spaces ('06) is a collection of site-specific performances collected during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.

His first solo CD, Thirteen Friendly Numbers ('91), includes compositions for multitracked saxophones, whilst later releases focus on live performance, composition, amplification and saxophone-controlled feedback. In 2011 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists. HCMF has twice commissioned him to compose for his own large ensembles. Other commissions include Elision (Australia), theRova (USA) & Quasar (Canada) Saxophone Quartets, reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori (USA), and, most recently "Tarab Cuts" (based on pre-WWII Arabic recordings).



Recent collaborative projects include The Apophonics with Gino Robair and John Edwards and Anemone with trumpeter Peter Evans. Butcher values playing in occasional encounters - ranging from large groups such as Butch Morris' London Skyscraper and theEX Orkestra, to duo concerts with David Toop, Kevin Drumm, Thomas Lehn, Fred Frith, Okkyung Lee, Matthew Shipp and Akio Suzuki.


FRODE GJERSTAD

Frode Gjerstad was born in Stavanger, Norway, 24-03-1948. He started trying to play improvised music as a trumpeter in 1968. When he moved to Lund in Sweden (1971 to 1975) he got a chance to meet, talk and play with musicians interested in this music. He had at that time started playing tenor saxophone (1969).

After he came back to Stavanger in 1975 he started collaborating with keyboardist Eivin One Pedersen and went on to further successful collaborations with British drummer, John Stevens, Johnny Dyani, Kent Carter and most famously in his named trio with Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Øyvind Storesund, touring Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Austria, Portugal, England, Canada and the United States in this format.



Frode also ran a larger group of mostly Norwegian musicians, the Circulasione Totale Orchestra. He started the group using electric instruments and modern rock-oriented rhythms. He has used the band to present his own compositions as well as a workshop and a place for young people to get to know free music. The band presented a commissioned work at the Molde Festival in -89 with a 13 man band combining free improvisations, compositions as well as rapping and scratching.(Three horns, three bassists, three drummers, accordeon, guitar a rapper and a DJ). The Circulasione Totale Orchestra is a powerful ever-changing band.

Collorations followed with Peter Brøtzmann, Borah Bergman, Evan Parker, Nicholas Stephens, Hasse Poulsen, Tony Marsh and Louis Moholo leading to Frode Gjerstad being widely regarded as one of the most significant figures in the Norwegian free-music scene.