Friday 25 October 2019, 7.30pm
Resofest is a three day fundraising festival for Resonance FM, "the best radio station in London" (The Guardian). The mind-boggling, anti-algorithmic, international all-star line-up includes the multiple award-winning Eliza Carthy MBE, Professor Nicolas Collins (Handmade Electronic Music), a spanking new collaboration by Atsuko Kamura (Polka Dot Fire Brigade) and Yumi Hara (Lindsay Cooper Songbook), universally acclaimed string duo Fran & Flora, and the first UK solo performance by the legendary Anthony Moore (Slapp Happy/Henry Cow). Plus a host of other world class performers offering a smorgasbord of radical sound and performance. Full details tbc. All proceeds go to support Resonance (London Musicians' Collective, registered charity 290236).
Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi tracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Sophie Agnel, Christian Marclay, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, John Russell, Chris Corsano, Steve Beresford, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and Matthew Shipp.
Additionally he values occasional encounters - with large groups ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester (as soloist), and the 20+ piece EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, Isabelle Duthois, David Toop, Mariam Rezaei, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee.
Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission), “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award).
"Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose-to-tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld." WIRE - October 2024. The Primer by Seymour Wright
Max Eastley is a sound installation artist and a musician. He has been an AHRC Senior Researcher at Oxford Brookes University investigating Aeolian phenomena through practice-lead research; City Sound Artist for Bonn, Germany; a guest of the DAAD, Berlin, exhibiting installations as well as working as musician and performer, and he is an artist with the Cape Farewell Climate Change Project. His most recent Aeolian installation was at Perrotts Folly for the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
He has played many solo concerts as well as in combinations with musicians such as David Toop, Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, John Butcher, Ute Wasserman, Phil Minton, Axel Dorner and Al Doyle. He has worked extensively with music and performance including works with dancers and choreographers such as Anna Huber and the Siobhan Davies Company.
His film, “Clocks of the Midnight Hours”, made with director Simon Reynell, has just been re-released by the BFI in their new compilation “Great Noises That Fill the Air”.
Terry Day is a first generation pioneer improviser from the 1960s: an improviser, multi-instrumentalist, lyricist, songwriter, visual artist and poet.
A self-taught musician in a family of musicians, he began improvising on the drums with his brother in 1955. In the early ‘60s he formed the Hardy Holman Day trio, focusing on free improvisation. Later he became part of the band Kilburn & the Highroads, with Ian Dury. Sharing their interest in visual art and painting they both studied at Walthamstow School of Art and later at the Royal College of Art, London. As an art student in the ‘60s he was also a pioneer of free improvisation, free jazz & experimental music.
He formed a duo with guitarist Derek Bailey in the late ´60s and was a regular member of The Continuous Music Ensemble,The People Band and, later on, Alterations with David Toop, Steve Beresford & Peter Cusack.
Terry has collaborated with many musical luminaries, groups, dancers, painters, poets and performed in theatre. He now plays bamboo reed flutes, drums, recorders, balloons & improvises with his lyrics, prose and verse. Since 2000 he has been part of London Improvisers Orchestra. In recent years he has toured twice in both Japan and Brazil, and has performed with improvising orchestras in Malaga, Tokyo and Madrid.
A veteran of the European avant-garde scene since the late 60’s, Anthony Moore has blazed a trail through more genres than a lot of composers have even heard of.
From the baroque pop works of Slapp Happy and the Rock-in-Opposition of Henry Cow to writing lyrics for Pink Floyd and producing records with Kevin Ayers, This Heat and others, Moore is a musical journeyman who carved a musical path entirely his own.
From 1995 until 2015 he was professor at the Academy of Arts Cologne working on the history of sound, noise and music. Along with Slapp Happy he was commissioned to create a TV opera for Channel 4 and has exhibited a number of multi--channel, sound installations.
This performance will see Moore opening another new chapter alongside fellow musicians in the recently formed group, OBTRAM3.
Twenty five years after the release of their debut album, Kenny Process Team have once again reignited and regrouped, with a new line-up and a new vinyl release. Influenced by everything from ragtime to Beefheart to Congolese soukous, this most uplifting of instrumental ensembles has been a sporadic and enigmatic presence on the London gig circuit since the early 1990s, assisted by an ever-shifting cast of supporting characters including Eugene Chadbourne, Mother Earth’s Matt Deighton, guitarist Simon King and performance artist Roney FM. The core of the group, drummer Dave Ross, bassist Matt Armstrong and guitarist Kev Plummer, are a unique trio with a mutual musical understanding that borders on magical; together they create vivid rhythmic, melodic and harmonic colours, ranging from the downright muddy to the completely dazzling. Theirs has been a long and undulating musical journey involving festivals in Warsaw, concerts broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and accidents on canals in Amsterdam. The sudden passing of former member Simon King in 2018 prompted the band to reform, performing at a memorial concert in his honour with King’s parts played by Scritti Politti’s Rhodri Marsden (at whose wedding the band had played back in 1995.) This prompted a new surge of activity, with the vinyl re-release of a 1995 live performance on the Vacilando ’68 label (Travlin’ Light With…) and the assembling of new and old tunes for a series of performances around the UK.
Atsuko Kamura, singer of Kamura Obscura, started her career as vocalist and bassist ofMizutama Shobodan (Polka Dot Fire Brigade), Japanese agit-prop feminist punk pioneerswhose second album was produced by Fred Frith in the 1980s. Her arrival in the UK led to herinvolvement with Frank Chickens. She has long been exploring the field of vocal improvisation,first in Honeymoons (with Tenko) in Japan, then playing with many musicians in UK such asEddie Prevost, Charles Hayward and Sharon Gal. At the same time, as a vocalist, her songsrange from traditional Japanese folk to eco-surrealist chansons. Her recent work is exploringexperimental composition, combining avant-garde vocal electronic and improvisation.
Itako Sisters are Yumi Hara (Lindsay Cooper Songbook, THE WATTS, etc) and Atsuko Kamura (Kamura Obscura, Mizutama Shobodan, etc). Both were members of UK based Japanese conceptual pop group Frank Chickens, but never performed together at the same time until 2019 when Kamura stepped in as a substitute singer for Dagmer Krause when Lindsay Cooper Songbook performed at Cafe OTO to celebrate International Women’s Day. Itako Sisters were booked for Resonance FM fundraising event at Cafe OTO in October 2019. They interweave acoustic and electronic sounds together with treated and untreated voices creating mesmerising rituals.
Yumi Hara studied the piano from 3 years old but stopped at the age of 12 when she felt the classical material she was practising was boring compared to British rock she found then. She subsequently studied North Indian music and dance, and went on to study medicine and became psychiatrist, but at the age of 33, she decided to go back to music and settled in London. She studied West African percussion, Korean percussion, North Indian vocal music, Javanese Gamelan at SOAS as occasional student, then continued to study 20th Century piano music, ethnomusicology, instrumental and electroacoustic composition and recording at City University and gained BMus and PhD. She performed as a member of Frank Chickens, run a concert series Bonobo’s Ark, did some drum’n’bass production and DJ, and her compositions have been performed by contemporary classical ensembles such as PianoCircus and the BBC Singers, but she has become increasingly well-known as an improvisor and performer in the avant-rock, Canterbury and RIO scene since she performed with David Cross (ex-violinist of King Crimson), and released a CD album DUNE with Hugh Hopper (ex-Soft Machine bassist) as HUMI in 2008. Since then, she has been collaborating with ex-Henry Cow musicians Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson, Geoff Leigh, John Greaves and Dagmar Krause, faUSt musicians Jean-Herve Peron and Zappi, ex-GONG Daevid Allen as The Artaud Beats, THE WATTS, Half the Sky/Lindsay Cooper Songbook, you me & us, and Jump for Joy! She has also performed and/or collaborated with Tatsuya Yoshida, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, David Jackson, Guy Evans, Asaf Sirkis, Charles Hayward, Fred Frith, Akira Sakata, Chloe Herington, Pierre Chevalier, Guy Harries, David Toop and Kiku Day, among others.
