Susan Alcorn is an American composer, improvisor, and pedal steel guitarist active in contemporary music and free improvisation.

Alcorn started out playing guitar at the age of twelve, quickly immersing herself in folk music, blues, and the pop music of the 1960s. A chance encounter with blues musician Muddy Waters steered her towards playing slide guitar. By the time she was twenty-one, she had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar, playing in country and western swing bands in Texas.

Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style influenced by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world. By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist “deep listening” philosophies of Pauline Oliveros.

Though mostly a solo performer, Alcorn has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Kowald, Chris Cutler, Joe Giardullo, Caroline Kraabel, Le Quan Ninh, Sean Meehan, Joe McPhee, LaDonna Smith, Mike Cooper, Walter Daniels, Jandek, and Johanna Varner.

She has written on the subject of music for the UK magazine Resonance and CounterPunch. Her article “The Road the Radio, and the Full Moon” was included in “The Best Music Writing of 2006” published by Da Capo Press.

Recordings include Uma (Loveletter 2000), Curandera (Uma Sounds 2005),Concentration (Recorded 2005), and "And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar" (Olde English Spelling Bee 2007)

She lives in Baltimore. USA

LINK

http://www.myspace.com/susanalcorn

Caroline Kraabel is a London-based American saxophonist, improviser and composer. She has written texts and compositions about the interactions of electricity and music: recording, reproduction, synthesis, acoustics and amplification.

A native of Seattle, Kraabel moved to London while in her teenage years, at the end of the punk era.There she took up the saxophone and became active in London's improvised music scene, developing a style based on the physicality of the instrument, extended techniques and exploration of acoustics. She has performed solo and collaborated with Susan Alcorn, Annie Lewandowski, John Edwards, Veryan Weston, Charlotte Hug, Maggie Nicols and the London Improvisers Orchestra among others. She composes for and directs Mass Producers, a 20-piece, all-female saxophone/voice orchestra, and created Saxophone Experiments in Space for a 55-piece group of young saxophonists, as well as doing radio work, including Taking a Life for a Walk (through the streets of London with her saxophone and children), which was broadcast live on Resonance FM each week for five years.

Recordings include In The Garden City with Annie Lewandowski, Giving Out with Susan Alcorn, Playtime with Veryan Weston and Mark Sanders, Transitions with Maggie Nichols and Charlotte Hug, Five Shadows with Veryan Weston, Performances for Large Saxophone Ensemble 1 and 2 and Performances for Large Saxophone Ensemble 3 and 4 with Mass Producers, and a solo work Now We Are One Two.

LINK
http://www.masskraabel.com/

John Butcher ’s music ranges through free improvisation, composition, multi-tracked saxophone pieces and work with live electronics, amplification and feedback. He is well known as a solo performer and has recently released Resonant Spaces which explores extreme acoustics. He has composed pieces for Polwechsel, Elision, the Rova Saxophone Quartet and "somethingtobesaid" for his own Octet. He started playing the saxophone while studying physics, but, after finishing a doctorate on quantum chromodynamics, he left academia and focused on music - working in the '80s with Chris Burn, John Russell, Phil Durrant, Paul Lovens and Radu Malfatti. In the early 90s he joined what became the final version of John Stevens’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble and also began playing with Derek Bailey and Phil Minton. Recent projects include Thermal with EX guitarist Andy Moor & Thomas Lehn, The Contest of Pleasures with Axel Doerner and Xavier Charles, and duos with Steve Beresford, Fred Frith, Akio Suzuki and many more.

LINK

http://www.johnbutcher.org.uk/

John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, John Wall, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, and many others.

A solo double bass cd ‘VOLUME’ was released in 2008 on the PSI label.

LINKS

http://www.myspace.com/wilkinsonedwardsnoble

http://www.myspace.com/nobleedwardsward

Annie Lewandowski: prepared piano
Another American, Annie Lewandowski writes and performs acoustic songs with Powerdove, and is also a sensitive and gifted improviser.

LINK
http://www.myspace.com/powerdove