Sunday 4 June 2023, 2pm
Improvised music for multiple melodicas, played by Steve Beresford, Georgina Brett, Douglas Benford, David Grundy, and Martin Hackett, along with a solo piano set by Steve Beresford and a duo performance by Tansy Spinks (violin) and David Grundy (piano).
As a composer and sound artist, Douglas Benford has been involved in various audio genres since the late 1980s, performing at many institutions/venues in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA), festivals worldwide and had installation work in numerous UK art spaces. He is a regular contributor to the London Improvisers Orchestra, as well as playing with Confront Recordings’ The Seen collective. His collaborators in recent years have included Blanca Regina, Dominic Lash, Martin Vishnick, Crystabel Riley, poet Tamar Yoseloff, Olivia Moore, Matt Atkins, Lina Lapelyte, Jem Finer, Clive Bell, John Edwards, Jennifer Allum, Sue Lynch, sculptor Rob Olins and many more.
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over forty years, freely improvising on the piano, electronics, and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, John Zorn, and Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack).
He has written songs, written for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows, and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of Musics and Collusion magazines, writes about music in various contexts, and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster. With Blanca Regina, he is part of Unpredictable Series, which produces events and sound and video recordings of experimental music and art.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on numerous Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer and producer, and was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012. In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.
http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/mberes.html
David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London. He is the author of Present Continuous (Pamenar Press), and A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic) and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press). He co-runs the small press MATERIALS/MATERIALIEN.
Martin Hackett, a member of Oxford Improvisers and the Muzzix collective in Lille, France, has been playing improvised music of one sort or another for as long as he can remember.
Tansy Spinks is an artist, sound artist, and performer. A Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Middlesex University, she has exhibited widely both at home and abroad. She lives and works in London.
