Tuesday 19 August 2025, 7.30pm
Project DIVFUSE is presenting its first off-site event at Café OTO in summer 2025. Bringing together a few artists and musicians who have exhibited or performed at DIVFUSE micro art exhibition space in Lower Clapton E5 since its doors first opened to public in July 2021, this evening is to celebrate different aspects of the making of experimental sound and multi-media art as well as the 4th anniversary of the project.
PROGRAMME:
- Steve Beresford + Cath Roberts – improvising to film scores by Livia Garcia
- Blanc Sceol – live sound streaming from Channelsea River + performance
- Jez riley French + Pheobe riley Law – field recordings, microphones and objects
- Mute Frequencies – sonic signatures of sewing machines and radios
Livia Garcia is the founder and director of Project DIVFUSE, a micro art/exhibition space in East London that has been supporting the development of multi-media, sound and experimental art with international artists since July 2021. Livia has curated and hosted numerous events in the form of exhibitions, performances, workshops and artists’ talks. Perhaps her best-known curatorial project amongst the sound community is DIVFUSE Sound Archive – Open Call for works that are based on field recordings.
Livia’s own art practice is mainly to create silent geometrical film scores for musicians to interpret. Over the years, she has worked with the London Improvisers Orchestra, ONe_Orchestra New, Sue Lynch, Adrian Northover, Steve Beresford, Caroline Kraabel, Dave Tucker, Douglas Benford, Emil Karlsen, Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton, Sylvia Hallett, Sue Ferrar, Julia Doyle, Hutch Demouilpied, Catherine Pluygers, the New Wind Festivals and so on. Livia is also a railway civil engineer who studied both art and engineering at degree levels. She received a full scholarship in 2008 to pursue her MA(Fine Art) at The University of Leeds, UK.
www.divfuse.com Instagram: @divfuse
www.liviagarcia.com Instagram: @garcialivia
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over fifty years, freely improvising on piano, objects, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn. Long-standing groups have included Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack), The Melody Four (with Lol Coxhill and Tony Coe, both RIP) and London Improvisers Orchestra.
He has written songs, composed 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.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on various Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Faradena Afifi, Blanca Regina, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg, Valentina Magaletti and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography - around 500 releases - as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer, conductor and producer. He 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’.
In 2022, Siglio published the book ‘Call and Response’, which partnered photographs by Christian Marclay with notated improvisations by Beresford.
Cath Roberts is a musician, artist and organiser whose work explores free improvisation, composition and the music at their meeting point. The primary outlet for this is the band Sloth Racket, formed in 2015 by Cath on baritone saxophone and compositions, which has toured widely and released several albums. More recently, improvisation using live electronics and objects has led to a solo release plus the beginning of several new collaborations.
Cath has a long-standing duo with guitarist Anton Hunter (Ripsaw Catfish), as well as regular collaborations with Tullis Rennie, Benedict Taylor, Graham Dunning, Bill Thompson and others, and bandmate duties in several groups including Alex Ward’s Items 10 and 7, Madwort Sax Quartet and Article XI.
As an organiser, Cath has co-run LUME with Dee Byrne since 2013, producing concerts, tours and festivals and releasing music on their offshoot label Luminous. Tom Ward, Colin Webster and Cath organise BRÅK, an improvised music series taking place in Brockley, South East London. Cath’s visual work can be seen on many Luminous releases, Sloth Racket tour flyers and LUME publicity materials, and appeared in 2021 in the form of a giant, fragmented graphic score created for a hcmf// commission, And then the next thing you know.
Pheobe riley Law is an installation artist working across sound, performance, sculpture, photography, and moving image. She creates dialogues between bodies, borders, and devices to reveal new forms of relation. She is particularly interested in non-human actors, inanimate objects, and how human activity is shaped by systems of boundary-creation. Through playful inversions, she highlights the object-hood of humanity and the agency of the “inanimate”. Her latest performance installation, Vegetal Empathy, is a speculative simulation of the garden, exploring our entanglement with more-than-human entities through data, micro-listening and acts of tending.
Ongoing and previous projects include Vegetal Empathy (supported by the Sound Generator award 2024-25); curator for Let Us Cook (Concertgebouw Brugge); vast, slender boundaries (Rainy Days Festival, Luxembourg); residency with Simultan/Semi-Silent/Sonic Narratives (Timișoara). The Sound of Food, Kupfer Project (London); cam.bi.um (flora) with Gaia Blandina, Hull Jazz Festival; dep.can.gre.sou with Abbas Zahedi at RCA, Moss Listening (Sonic Acts). Residency at Fabrica; installations at Humber Street Gallery; Spikersuppa Gallery (Oslo); and Cove Park (Scotland). She has shown work at The Baltic, Hatton Gallery, in Denmark, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Japan. Pheobe has performed on BBC Radio 3, sour bay at Matsudo Science Art Festival, Ftarri & Permian (Japan), Fort Process etc.
https://pheoberileylaw.yolasite.com
Instagram: @pheobelaw
“my work uses a variety of formats to explore place, sounds outside of our attention and our response to located elements and experience. Threads and traces, mapping fasination, self trust, community and sensory, intuitive response. Clearing the dust of bias and perceptions of place. I work extensively with micro and durational listening / traces of objects, spaces and situations, texts and photographic scores.”
Alongside performances and exhibitions Jez gives talks and runs workshops on listening / located sound as an art form and has developed a range of specialist microphones and techniques widely used across sound culture.
Work has included commissions and performances for Tate Modern & Tate Britain (UK), Paradise Air (Japan), MoT - Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Japan), Spikersuppa Lydgalleri, Oslo (Norway), Baltic (UK), Steklenik (Slovenia), Catalyst Arts (N. Ireland), The Whitworth Gallery (UK) , Artisphere (USA), Harpa (Iceland), Mengi (Iceland), The Wired Lab (Australia), Mullae Art Space (Korea), q-02 (Belgium), Matsudo Science Art Festival / Ftarri & Permian (Japan) etc.
https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk
Instagram: @jezrileyfrench
Mute Frequencies is the sound art project of Ilia Rogatchevski and Laura Rogatchevskaia, both former members of the London experimental rock band Sebastian Melmoth. The duo work within the intersections of sound, performance and visual media, often focusing on ideas relating to imperceptibility. Their name is a reference to the inaudible frequencies of the audio spectrum and the electromagnetic frequencies that transmit information, such as radio waves. They have installed work at the London galleries Dilston Grove and Project DIVFUSE, and performed at festivals including Supernormal, End of the Road and Open House. A recording of their performance using VLF field recordings and mini-FM transmitters at Halle’s Radio Revolten festival was released by MFZ Records in 2023. Their Radiophonic Workshop-inspired paean to the Arctic, Svalbard Soundtracks, followed several months later on Flaming Pines.
The duo is currently investigating the sonic signatures of sewing machines with Unthread (2023-25), a project that surfaces ideas about manufacture, fast fashion and our relationship to clothes by interweaving expanded cinema, field recordings and interviews with people involved in the garment industry.
https://mutefrequencies.wordpress.com
https://mutefrequencies.bandcamp.com/music
Instagram: @mutefrequencies
Blanc Sceol are an artist duo whose work has emerged and expanded, throughout their years of collaboration, to encompass performance, improvisation, composition, participatory actions, deep listening facilitation, somatic and ritual gatherings.
Since 2018 they have been working site-specifically with Channelsea River in London. Their regular practices with the river are invitations to themselves and others to gather, listen, observe and learn through a variety of containers, from workshops to walks, to reading groups, deep listening, live transmissions and collaborations. Through each of these actions their attempts to understand and support the river grow and change as they uncover more about the forces at work, both within and without.
www.blancsceol.co.uk
Instagram: @blancsceol
