Mats Gustafsson

Hailing from Umeå in Northern Sweden, Gustafsson is a saxophonist/composer/improviser working across noise, electronics, contemporary rock and free jazz as well as contemporary dance, theater and art projects. He has performed both as a solo artist and toured internationally with Peter Brötzmann, Sonic Youth, Merzbow, Jim O´Rourke, Barry Guy, Otomo Yoshihide, Yoshimi, Ken Vandermark and in working groups The Thing, Sonore, FIRE!, Gush, Boots Brown, Swedish Azz and Nash Kontroll. He also participates in the large ensembles Barry Guy New Orchestra, Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet and the NU – ensemble.

Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore started Sonic Youth in 1980 and has been at the forefront of the alternative rock scene since that particular sobriquet was first used to signify any music that challenged and defied the mainstream standard. With Sonic Youth, Moore turned on an entire generation to the value of experimentation in rock n roll – from its inspiration on a nascent Nirvana, to Sonic Youth’s own Daydream Nation album being chosen by the US Library of Congress for historical preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2006. Thurston records and performs in a cavalcade of disciplines ranging from free improvisation to acoustic composition to black/white metal/noise disruption. He has worked with Yoko Ono, John Zorn, David Toop, Cecil Taylor, Faust, Glenn Branca and many others. His residency at the Louvre in Paris included collaborations with Irmin Schmidt of CAN. Alongside his various activities in the musical world, he is involved with publishing and poetry, and teaches writing at Naropa University, Boulder CO, a school founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. Thurston also teaches music at The Rhythmic Music Conservatory (Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium) in Copenhagen. Presently he performs and records solo, with various ensembles and in his own band, The Thurston Moore Group.

Sofia Jernberg

Singer and composer, born in Ethiopia in 1983 and currently based in two cities: Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden. As a singer she is developing the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Sofia’s singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a natural singing style. She has dug deep into split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.

“...it is the singing that is most impressive. Jernberg's vocal agility is sweeping, analogous, conceivably, to the range of sounds that Wadada Leo Smith can generate with the trumpet. She is a phenomenon that merits attention.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz 

Kit Downes

Kit Downes is a BBC Jazz Award winning, Mercury Music Award nominated solo recording artist for ECM Records. He has toured the world playing piano, church organ and harmonium with his own bands (‘ENEMY’, ‘Troyka’ and ‘Elt’) as well as with artists such as Squarepusher, Bill Frisell, ‘Empirical‘, Andrew Cyrille, Sofia Jernberg, Benny Greb, Mica Levi and Sam Amidon.

Kit performs solo pipe organ and solo piano concerts – as well as playing in collaborations with saxophonist Tom Challenger, cellist Lucy Railton, composer Shiva Feshareki, saxophonist Ben van Gelder and with the band ‘ENEMY’ (with Petter Eldh and James Maddren).

He is also currently working with violinist Aidan O’Rourke, drummer Seb Rochford, composer Max de Wardener and in the organ trio ‘Deadeye’ with Reinier Baas and Jonas Burgwinkel.

He has written commissions for Cheltenham Music Festival, London Contemporary Orchestra, Biel Organ Festival, Ensemble Klang at ReWire Festival, the Scottish Ensemble, Cologne Philharmonie and the Wellcome Trust. He also performed as part of the National Theatre production of ‘Network’ from 2017-2018, featuring actor Bryan Cranston.

He has performed solo organ concerts at the Elb Philharmonie in Hamburg, Lausanne Cathedral, Flagey in Brussels, the Royal Albert Hall in London as well as the Southbank Royal Festival Hall, Rochester Jazz Festival (US), St Olafs Minneapolis (US), Stavanger Konserthus, Aarhus Philharmonic Musikhuset, Darmstadt Organ Festival, Stuttgart Organ Festival, Laurenskerke in Rotterdam, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Berlin Jazz Festival, and the BBC Proms amongst many others.

He holds a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he himself studied and now teaches. He has twice been awarded 1st place in Downbeat’s Critics Poll Rising Star for Organ and Keyboard categories respectively, and his ECM records ‘Obsidian‘, ‘Dreamlife of Debris‘ and ‘Vermillion‘ have been released to much critical acclaim.

Mark Wastell

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.

Roger Turner

Born 1946, ROGER TURNER grew up amongst the Canterbury musical life of the 1960s with a  strong foundation in jazz. Since 1974 his work has been focused on exploring a more  personal percussion language through the processes of improvisation. Solo performances, connections with experimental rock music & open-form song, extensive collaborations with  dance, film and visual art, and involvements in numerous jazz-based ensembles and workshop residencies have all formed part of that development.

http://www.roger-turner.com/ 

Mariam Rezaei

Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument,” Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer. Working at the nexus of experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club musics and hip-hop, Rezaei uses a digital vinyl system, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time. Her work has been described as “genuinely ground-breaking” (London Jazz News 2022) and “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian 2022). Praised by The Wire, Uncut and Bandcamp Daily, her latest release FRACTURED (Heat Crimes) is one of The Quietus’s cassette releases of 2024.In November 2022, she 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, and is writing a book on turntablism for Repeater. 

In addition to her solo work, Rezaei’s projects include a Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez (making their US premiere at Big Ears 2025), supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (with saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, trumpeter/electronics Gabriele Mitelli and drummer Lukas Koenig), and orchestral compositions with Matthew Shlomowitz (6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra). She recently performed Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music with guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe. Other collaborations include duos with Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Valentina Magaletti, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Lukas Koenig, Mette Rasmussen, Gabriele Mitelli, Okkyung Lee and Ali Robertson, Black Top with Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, Cleveland Watkiss and Leon Foster Thomas, and a quartet with DJ Sniff, Rex Chen and DJ SlowPitchSound at Taipei Biennial 2023.

Joachim Nordwall

Joachim Nordwall (b. 1975) is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a long background in the Swedish experimental music scene, starting out with recordings with the psych-drone duo Alvars Orkester as a teenager in 1988. His early interest in psychic tension created by sound is now as ever present in his music. His ”Soul Music” albums for Entr’acte shows his deep interest in circular rhythms, analogue synth loops and mind expanding experiments. Nordwall has also released his music on labels like Ash International and Hospital Productions. From 1999-2005 he was sweating with the avant punk rock trio Kid Commando and when that stopped he created the ritual drone rock group The Skull Defekts. Nordwall also runs iDEAL Recordings since 1998 and has been collaborating with artists like Aaron Dilloway, Mika Vainio, Mats Gustafsson, Leif Elggren, Gabi Losoncy, Mark Wastell and Christine Abdelour, and he is a busy organizer of festivals and concert nights in Sweden and abroad.

https://soundcloud.com/joachim-nordwall

Liudas Mockūnas

Liudas Mockūnas is a multi-reeds player and composer, whose name stands for masterly performance and intriguing compositions. His 'natural' idiom is an explosive mixture of free jazz, lyricism and expressionism combined with highly unconventional performance techniques. His in-depth exploration of the properties of sound lead to an innovative and personal approach to wind playing techniques. This allowed him to escape from stylistic conventions and form an entirely original style, distinguished for multiphonics, expressive discharges of sound, overbends and unusual sound effects. Trained as a jazz and classical musician, Liudas Mockūnas has a deep understanding and practical knowledge of both fields, the boundaries of which he traverses back and forth in his own compositions solo and in his numerous international collaborations. During the years he‘s been collaborating with leading European, Japanese and American artists such as Marc Ducret, Agusti Fernandez, Mats Gustafsson Barry Guy, Andrew Hill, Otomo Yoshihide,, Mikko Innanen and others.

Mockūnas is one of the founders of Lithuanian Jazz Federation, highly acclaimed record label „NoBusiness Records“ and improvised music program at Lithuanian Music Academy. For several years has been been curating a concert series and independent record label in Vilnius dedicated to improvised music „Improdimensija“ and “Improdimensija orchestra”.

Besides improvised and avantgarde music Mockunas performs new academic music as a soloist and chamber ensemble musician.

https://www.mic.lt/en/database/jazz/composers-artists/mockunas/

Pat Thomas

Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill. 

"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." - The Jazzmann