Wednesday 1 February 2023, 8pm
Unpredictable Series presents an evening of three performances: free improvisation pioneer Terry Day playing with Billy Steiger, award-winning multi-instrumentalist Orphy Robinson in a duo with Blanca Regina and a special performance by Cathy Lucas & Arthur Sajas (from Vanishing Twin) with visuals by Pierre Bouvier Patron.
Terry Day & Billy Steiger
Orphy Robinson & Blanca Regina
Cathy Lucas & Arthur Sajas
Visuals by Pierre Bouvier Patron
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.
Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Orphy Robinson is an award-winning multi- Instrumentalist, One of the few UK musicians to have been signed to the legendary USA Jazz label “Blue Note”.
Robinson has performed on over 100 recordings with numerous internationally acclaimed artists across many genres of music.
These include artists as diverse as Lawrence Butch Morris, Hugh Masekela, Don Cherry, Robert Plant, Thurston Moore, Robert Wyatt, The Jazz Warriors, Cleveland Watkiss, Wadada Leo Smith, Lionel Loueke, Henry Grimes, William Parker, Hamid Drake, Jean-Paul Bourelly, Jean Luc Ponty, Marshall Allen, Sun Ra Arkestra to name a few.
Throughout his 40-year career, he has constantly been nominated or won numerous prestigious industry awards. These include 2022 Paul Hamlyn Award, 2 Jazz Fm awards 2017 Live Experience of the Year” & 2020 Gold Award. Nominated for the 2022 ‘Best Jazz Ensemble’ at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards.
2017 – 2019 Orphy held the position of Artist in residence at the Gibraltar World music Festival.
2018 Artistic director at the Gibraltar World music Festival.
Orphy sits on various industry Boards Such as the Ivor’s Academy where he is both Deputy Chair and the Chair of the Jazz + Genre Committee.
ECSA (European Composers & Songwriters Alliance) Trustee & Chair of the ECF - Art & Contemporary music Committee.
Vice Chair for the UK Promoters organization “Jazz Promotion Network”.
Orphy has also written articles for various industry music magazines such as Wire Magazine, Jazzwise & Online platform JAZZED.
Orphy has also presented Guest radio programmes on:
BBC Radio 3, Jazz Fm, Resonance Fm, Worldwide FM, Solar Radio.
Since 2016 Robinson has presented a weekly show on internet Radio station - Delite Radio. www.deliteradio.com
Spanish interdisciplinary artist, audiovisual designer and educator based in London, working across live performance, projection art, installation, sound and film. For over two decades she has developed spontaneous composition systems in which image, light and sound merge into a single field, drawing on traditions of free improvisation and expanded cinema. Her collaborators include Matt Black of Coldcut, Leafcutter John, Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack, Benedict Taylor, Mandhira de Saram and Laetitia Sadier. She is founder and Director of Unpredictable Series CIC and a member of LAC at Cruce Arte Contemporaneo in Madrid. She holds a PhD cum laude in Audiovisual Performance Art from URJC Madrid, and her work has been supported by Arts Council England, the British Council, Sound & Music and the Francis Chagrin Award.
Cathy Lucas is a Brussels-born artist, musician and researcher based in Hackney. She has spent more than a decade collaborating on London’s experimental scene, chiefly as band leader and singer of art pop group Vanishing Twin. Cathy is also a PhD researcher in the nineteenth-century science of sung and spoken sounds.
Arthur Sajas is a chair painter, a semi-chef and an instrumentalist living in Hackney. He is a conductor and musician of HAHA Sounds Collective and l'Ensemble des Jardins, as well as the semi-secret hand in the band Vanishing Twin. His practice is focused on the connection between scores and drawings and drawn lines and melodies.
Visual artist based in London, working between digital video and analogue film and exploring the boundaries between them through moving image works, performances and installations, with a background in experimental film, expanded cinema and documentary. He presents video screenings and performances both solo and in collaboration. His work has been shown at L'Atelier MTK in France, Cruce and Proyector Festival in Spain, Café OTO and Iklectik in London, Sowieso in Berlin, Zaal100 in Amsterdam, and in Mexico.
https://www.studiopierre.art
