Tuesday 11 May 2010, 8pm
Tony Buck and Magda Mayas will be playing duo tonight.
„....Improvised duos have lots of pitfalls to avoid: levels of alertness and/or talent can be too disparate, the speed of interaction may never sync, one person can try too hard to push the music in a certain direction, etc. But from the very first sounds they made and all the way to the final tones of the encore, these two were in perfect balance throughout. Tightly intertwined at the level of both the sonic material they pursued and the rhythmic pointillism with which they went about their journey, they stunned me into wide-eyed, open-mouthed attention.“
-Konfrontationen 2007 By Andrew Choate
“There’s just 36 minutes of music here, but every second of it is interesting. Pianist Mayas plays chunky, bell-like clusters that seem to observe a slowly evolving musical logic, neither obviously melodic nor conventionally harmonic. Drummer Buck for the most part works a parallel path, working busily but delicately round his kit. The opening minutes of “mercury machine” are full of light, skittering figures on the metal parts and big, damped clusters on the piano, some of them hand-damped inside the sound box, I suspect. It opens out thereafter, but there’s no attempt here to emulate the iconic piano and drum duos of the past – Coltrane and Ali, Taylor and Roach. Mayas and Buck create their own intimate languages and in the process deliver something very special and exactly the right length.” - THE WIRE Reviewed by Brian Morton April 09, Magda Mayas & Tony Buck / Gold
TONY BUCK (drums)
Tony is regarded as one of Australia's most creative and adventurous exports, with vast experience across the globe. He has been involved in a highly diverse array of projects but is probably best known around the world as a member of the trio The Necks.
Following studies and early experience in Australia he spent time in Japan, where he formed PERIL with Otomo Yoshihide and Kato Hideki before relocating to Europe in the mid-nineties.
Some of the more high profile projects he has been involved with include the band Kletka Red, and touring and recording with, among others, The EX, The Exiles, and Corchestra, and involvement with most of the international improvisation and new music community and festivals.
He also creates video works for use with live music performance and has had pieces shown in Tokyo, Belfast, Berlin, New York and Sydney.
Current projects include long standing duos with Axel Doerner and Magda Mayas; New York based trios "Glacial" (with David Watson and Lee renaldo); "The Fell Clutch" (with Ned Rothenberg, Stomu Takeshi and Davd Tronzo); Berlin based "Heaven And" and "Asiplusband (with Asi Foecker and Andy Moor) and "project/TRANSMIT" (a guitar driven post-rock project based in Sydney and Berlin)
www.myspace.com/projectTransmit
MAGDA MAYAS (piano)
Magda Mayas is a pianist and curator currently based in Berlin, Germany.
Mayas studied jazz and improvisation at Universität der Künste, Conservatorium van Amsterdam in 2001 under Misha Mengelberg and completed a diploma at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler under Georg
Graewe in 2005.
During this time she began developing a specific set of techniques for inside- piano performance. Mayas has concentrated her musical investigations on the piano and its sonic possibilities, utilizing extended techniques, amplification and preparations as a process of abstraction, whilst focusing on the physicality of both internal and external parts of the piano. As a continuation of this research Mayas founded the festival Tasten-Berliner Klaviertage featuring contemporary and innovative approaches for the piano. (www.tasten.org)
Mayas performs internationally in a variety of roles as interpreter, solo and in collaboration with a large number of musicians and composers: in a duo with Tony Buck, in a Duo with Christine Sehnaoui, the Quartet Mayas/ Nutters/ Olsen/Galvez and as part of the Amsterdam based N-Collective.
Over the years Mayas has performed and toured in Europe, the USA, Australia and Lebanon with many leading figures in improvisation such as Andy Moore, Annette Krebs, Andrea Neumann, Axel Dörner, Michael Zerang, Johannes Bauer, Christoph Kurzmann, Thomas Lehn,Tristan Honsinger and Frank Gratkowski.
www.myspace.com/tonybuckandmagdamayas
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.
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