John Butcher / saxophones
John Edwards / double bass
Gino Robair / energised surfaces, drum kit, and synthesiser

This will be the launch night for the debut Apophonics CD 'On Air'.

John Butcher has played, separately, and mainly in duo, with Gino Robair and John Edwards since 1997. In 2008 the three first played together in the seven piece John Butcher Group - and the idea of forming a trio - The Apophonics - came to fruition in 2011 with some concerts in France and Belgium. In Spring 2012 they performed in Germany and Austria - and recorded a special session for BBC Radio 3's Jazz on 3.

"If Butcher's playing was sympathetically creative with the previous trio, his improvising was equally spectacular with The Apophonics. Built around extrasensory sonic perception their strategy advanced amoeba-like, continuously melding and breaking apart timbres in different configurations and with varied possibilities. Edwards' super-speedy wood and string smacking was sometimes appropriately violent; Butcher's output jumped from sonorous glissandi to staccato reed bites and Robair's holistic approach sometimes seemed child-like as he smacked his mallets on the stage floor, rubbed a violin bow on drum rims and literally blew on the drum skin. The saxophonist's lines could be sonorously wispy or could consist of reed finger-tapping or using foot-pedal-controlled electronics to pick up the feedback generated as he moved his tenor in different arcs without blowing into it." Ken Waxman, New York City Jazz Record

JOHN BUTCHER / saxophones

John Butcher is a saxophonist of rare grace and power, who has expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone far beyond the conventions of jazz and other musics, to encompass a staggering range of harmonics, multiphonics, overtones, percussive sounds, and electronic feedback. But his playing is far more than merely an array of special effects: it's characterised by an intensity that propels it into strange new places that are both incredibly beautiful and deeply exhilarating.





JOHN EDWARDS / double bass

John Edwards' 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. Equally at home with fragile acoustic improvisation or driving free jazz, Edwards is quite deservedly one of the most in demand players of today, and has propelled encounters with Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Matthew Shipp, Wadada Leo Smith and many more.

"There are those round these parts who posit that free improvisation is a cerebral, sexless art, arguments that are annihilated by the rough structural and timbral shag of this music." - Philip Clark, The Wire

GINO ROBAIR / drums, percussion

Gino Robair is a San Francisco Bay Area-based percussionist and composer who has performed and recorded with Anthony Braxton, Tom Waits, John Butcher, LaDonna Smith, Otomo Yoshihide, Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, Nina Hagen, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Myra Melford, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and the Club Foot Orchestra. He is a founding member of the Splatter Trio and Pink Mountain.

"[Gino Robair] holds the listener captive as he oscillates between the accidental and the intentional; between the tiniest, most delicate noise and a torrential outpouring of sound." - San Francisco Bay Guardian