Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and musical polymath who has been releasing records with the frequency of someone who prefers studio time to sleep. His remarkably prolific and diverse oeuvre since the 90's has included releases such as “Suspension” (2002), “Grapes From The Estate” (2004), “Audience Of One” & “Sagittarian Domain” (both 2012), “Quixotism” (2014) & “Hubris” (2016).

Ambarchi continues to collaborate with artists the world over and in the last few years his longform compositions have featured many friends and collaborators constituting some of his most adventurous work to date and demonstrating his slippery capacity for stylistic shapeshifting whilst retaining his singular musical language.

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. 

Johan Berthling

Bassist Johan Berthling has been very active during the last 25 years on the international scenes for jazz, rock, and improvised music, and have also frequently been working with music for film and theatre. Together with Mats Gustafsson and Andreas Werliin, he’s running the free jazz/rock/noise-bethemoth Fire! Orchestra, who recently released the massive triple-LP box ECHOES, on Rune Grammofon. Among other current projects are trios with Paul NIlssen-Love and Akira Sakata, Steve Noble and Martin Küchen, and Oren Ambarchi and Andreas Werliin, respectively. His stunning album BJÖRNHORN (2022) – the first solo album of his – sold out quickly but have been repressed several times. On the album, Ken Waxman of Jazzword wrote: ”His clenched hand-on-bass-neck techniques concentrate most billowing buzzes into a solid mass, yet on 'Björnhorn V' he spackles high-pitched colors to lighten the narrative. While the presto and staccato friction projected by his bow work sometimes suggests the strings are a millisecond away from literally bursting into flames, his one turn to pizzicato thumps out wide spatial suggestions. Furthermore when he assays Charlie Haden’s balladic 'For Turiya', his buoyant vibrations show he’s also capable of melodic story telling.”

Eiko Ishibashi

Eiko Ishibashi is a Japanese improvisor, producer, and singer-songwriter. As her albums demonstrate, she is equally comfortable composing and performing everything from quirky pop, modern classical music, and prog to the extremes of improvisational jazz and noise. She has performed and toured with Jim ORourke, Keiji Haino, Akira Sakata, Charlemagne Palestine, Oren Ambarchi, and Glenn Kotche, to name a few. Her 2014 offering, Car and Freezer, offered evidence of the seam where her quirky brand of pop met complex jazz composition, while Kouen Kyoudai, her 2016 album-length collaboration with Masami Akita (Merzbow) offered an exercise in industrial improvisation.

Ishibashi's main instrument is piano, though she is adept at drums, flute, and vibraphone. Her first "solo" recording was Slip Beneath the Distant Tree in 2007, a double-length duo offering with Ruins bassist Tatsuya Yoshida. She followed it a year later with the innovative Drifting Devil. The album captured the critical imagination of Japanese journalists -- many of whom selected it as one of the year's best recordings -- as well as the admiration of fellow musicians, and her reputation grew.

In 2010 she met O'Rourke when they were both invited to play on Phew's Five Finger Discount. He asked her to perform on his All Kinds of People: Love Burt Bacharach tribute set and they joined one another's bands. He produced Ishibashi's 2011 album Carapace, and recorded and mixed her solo piano follow-up, I'm Armed. In 2013, she played on Gaspar Claus' Jo Ha Kyū alongside Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haino, and Kazutoki Umezu. She also signed to Drag City, which released Imitation of Life and followed it with Car and Freezer in 2014. Ishibashi and O'Rourke were also members of Kafka's Ibiki, who cut three albums between 2013 and 2014. She played on O'Rourke's Simple Songs in 2015 and kept up a rigorous touring regimen that included playing her own shows and with O'Rourke and their band. She also found time to form RNA with Fumio Kosakai (Incapacitants) and Kimihide Kusafuka (K2), and cut the double-cassette release No New Tokyo.

In early 2016, Ishibashi released another duo recording, this one in collaboration with Masami Akita (aka Merzbow); entitled Kouen Kyoudaireleased on Editions Mego. That same year she also worked with experimental sound artist and composer John Duncan on his full-length Bitter Earth, and privately released the digital-only piano trio full-length Six Feet Under with bassist Toshiaki Sudoh and drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. After time off and touring with O'Rourke, Ishibashi returned to the studio in 2018 and released the experimental Ichida in collaboration with composer and multi-instrumentalist Darin Gray on Black Truffle, and her own mutant pop collection, The Dream My Bones Dream on Drag City.

James Rushford

James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer, whose work draws from concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been described as ‘electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart’ (Boomkat) and ‘haunted Jacobean ASMR’ (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to new age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm and timbre.

In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorisation of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (See the Welter, for solo piano, 2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, 2020). Rushford has longstanding performance practices on piano, synthesizers and electroacoustic devices, and portative organ, bringing to all of these a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the 20th century avant-garde, and many strains of popular music.

James has created original work for BBC Scottish Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, Ensemble Neon (Oslo), Speak Percussion (Melbourne), Ensemble Vortex (Geneva), MONA FOMA, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Ultima Festival (Norway), Unsound Festival (New York), Tectonics Festival (Tel Aviv), Send and Receive Festival (Winnipeg), Adelaide Festival and Liquid Architecture (Melbourne). As well as previous projects with Klaus Lang, Annea Lockwood, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, Haroon Mirza and Dennis Cooper, he works regularly with Golden Fur (his trio with Sam Dunscombe & Judith Hamann), Joe Talia, Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, Anthony Pateras, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Francis Plagne.

His music has been published by a variety of international labels including Unseen Worlds (US), Pogus (US), Penultimate Press (UK), Another Timbre (UK), Holidays (IT), Black Truffle (AUS), KYE (US) and Shelter Press (Fr).

In 2017, James completed a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.

www.james-rushford.com

Jules Reidy

Jules Reidy makes music for processed and acoustic instruments (mostly guitars). Their recent recorded work—brace, brace (Slip 2019,) In Real Life (Black Truffle 2019), and Vanish (Editions Mego 2020)—can be described as a series of non-traditional song forms which combine unstable harmonic territories, rhythmic elasticity and abstract narrative over stretched, episodic forms. They have performed at Tectonics Festival (SCT), Send/Receive Festival (CA), Mona Foma (AUS), Berlin Jazz Festival (DE), Angelica Festival (ITA) and Borderline Festival (GR).

http://julia-reidy.com/

Joe Talia

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Joe Talia is an improviser and composer who works with percussion, tape and electronics. Focusing on the use of Revox tape machine and analogue synthesizers in combination with instruments and field recordings, Talia’s electronic works patiently build up sparkling, detail-rich sound worlds of gliding tones, skittering percussion and burbling location atmospherics. In live situations, Talia often uses tape and effects to process and warp his own and others’ playing into uncanny chains of echoes and spectral smears of sound.

A virtuoso drummer, as a percussionist Talia emerges from the traditions of jazz and free improvisation and has developed a unique personal language of shifting accents, subtle virtuosity and discreet extended technique that he welds equally ably in jazz, rock, new music and improvisational contexts. Like his electronic works, his drumming often demonstrates a keen attention to long-form structures, dynamic development and group interactions.

An important member of Tokyo’s vibrant improvised music scene and internationally active as a performer, Talia performs and records regularly with Oren Ambarchi, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, James Rushford and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. In addition to these regular collaborations, he has also been involved in projects with Keiji Haino, Chris Abrahams, Tetuzi Akiyama, Akira Sakata, John Duncan, Richard Pinhas and many others. His work has been published by international labels such as Black Truffle, Bocian, Kye and Touch.

Will Guthrie

Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He works in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation and studio composition using various combinations of drums, percussion, objects, junk, amplification and electronics.

He plays solo and in various projects such as THE AMES ROOM, ELWOOD & GUTHRIE & THE SOMMES ENSEMBLE. His music has been released on labels such as Gaffer Records, Erstwhile, Clean Feed, 23five, Editions Mego, Ipecac and his own label Antboy Music.

Regular collaborators past and present include Oren Ambarchi, James Rushford, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Mark Fell, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Pateras, Chulki Hong, Jérôme Noetinger, Keith Rowe, David Maranha, Ava Mendoza, the film maker Hangjun Lee and choreographer/dancer Mette Ingvartsen.

Andreas Werliin

Born in 1982 in the vast snow of northern Sweden and raised in the small west coast village Strömstad. With improvised music at heart and drums as main instrument he is currently part of some well acclaimed and award-winning bands like Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Dan Berglund's Tonbruket and Loney Dear. He has also written music for theater and film.

Arnold Dreyblatt

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, Dreyblatt was elected to lifetime membership in the visual arts section at the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He is currently Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany. Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka.

Arnold Dreyblatt has charted his own unique course in composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music with his "Orchestra of Excited Strings". His music has been performed by the Bang On A Can All- Stars in New York, Jim O'Rourke, The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, Pellegrini String Quartet and the Crash Ensemble Dublin. He has recorded for such labels as Tzaddik, Hat Hut, Table of the Elements, Cantaloupe, Choose and Black Truffel. Dreyblatt has taught music workshops resulting in performed compositions with musicians at "The Music Gallery", Toronto; MIT Boston, Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal and many others. He has performed with and without his ensemble at the Whitney Museum, New York; the Maerz Music Festival, Berlin; the Angelika Festival, Bologna; The Lab in San Francisco , Jazz House, Copenhagen and countless other festivals and concert venues in Europe and in North America.

Konrad Sprenger

Konrad Sprenger is a Berlin-based artist, composer, and music producer.
Influenced by the insistent rhythms of minimalism, krautrock, and techno, Sprenger focusses on the transcendent power of propulsive, full-spectrum sound. He plays a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar that he developed himself. With this setup he creates complex rhythmic patterns, automatically retunes the strings during performance, and radically expands the possibilities of the guitar - sounding like anything from an electronic instrument, to various traditional string instruments, to a full orchestra.

Hiller has long-term collaborations with Arnold Dreyblatt and Ellen Fullman, and has recently started working with Oren Ambarchi - including on his recent Editions Mego release Hubris along with an astonishing cast of players including Ricardo Villalobos, Arto Lindsay, Jim O'Rourke, Mark Fell, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman. Sprenger and Ambarchi have teamed up with Phillip Sollmann on a soon to be released disc „Suez/Panama“ on A-Ton.

www.konradsprenger.com
http://p-a-n.org/release/pan-78-konrad-sprenger-stack-music/
konradsprenger.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/choose-records
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/19133-konrad-sprenger-largo/

Kassel Jaeger

Kassel Jaeger is the project name of Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician François J. Bonnet. Based in Paris, he is the director of Ina GRM. He is also a writer and theoretician (The Order of Sounds, a sonorous Archipelago and The Infra- World have been published in english by Urbanomic). As a musician, Bonnet has been collaborating with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Jim O’Rourke, Akira Rabelais and James Rushford.

Kassel Jaeger’s works are a complex balance between concrète experimentalism, ambient noise, and electroacoustic improv. He has released several albums on various labels such as Editions Mego, Shelter Press, Senufo Editions, Unfathomless. His music has been played in renown venues and festivals all over the world such as Whitney Museum (USA), Super Deluxe (Japan), Harvard Museum of Natural History (USA), CTM (Germany), El Nicho (Mexico), Ultima (Norway), Madeiradig (Portugal), Donau Festival (Austria)…

Photo by Eleonore Huisse

Francis Plagne

Francis Plagne is a musician from Melbourne whose work integrates idiosyncratic forms of songwriting with a variety of other approaches, including group improvisation, instrumental miniatures and domestic musique concrète. He has been performing live regularly since 2005 and has released recordings on labels such as Horn of Plenty, Black Truffle, Kye Records, Penultimate Press and his own Mould/Mouse Museum micro-label.

In addition to performing his own work, either solo or with a band, he has performed and recorded in improvised and other arrangements with Tetuzi Akiyama, Oren Ambarchi, Andrew Chalk, Crys Cole, James Rushford, and Joe Talia, among others.

Massimo Toniutti

Massimo Toniutti is an experimental musician whose main sources are concrete sounds. Lately he's investigating the nature of vibrating strings especially associated with a constellation of punctual sounds. His compositional principle is connected to the depth perception of space, also thanks to the use of treated environmental recordings, with il Museo Selvatico from 1991 (reissued in 2018 by Black Truffle) likely representing its most archetypal and influential example. During 1990's and 2000's he dealt also with the language of radio, subsequently collaborating with visual artists and film makers on installations, documentaries etc. From 2016 he's newly publishing his musical works and very recently he started to perform live. His music catalogue, from the 80's, is currently to be reissued on some dedicated European labels.