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1 | 1.3.16 | 33:32 |
| 2 | 6:52 | 6:52 | |
| 3 | 7:42 | 7:42 | |
| 4 | 23:48 | 23:48 |
Two duos - one new and one perhaps having always existed - each at opposite ends of contemporary improvisation.
On the first night, Wright’s alto weaves through Parker’s dizzying melodies, unravelling the lyrical with textural shadow play. Wright maps Parker's circular breathing, triple-tonguing, false fingering with physicality - gasps, dry-lipped blasts.
Recorded just a week later, amidst the seabed of Nakajima’s ticking and clicking objects, Wright uses motors too, scrapes the windows, sucks a single reed, spits down steel tubing, and pushes feedback to awkward thresholds. In the mp3 version of a very visual show, individual sounds lose their identity to fill and measure the dimensions of OTO.
Somewhere between chance, the inanimate and extraordinary technical ability, Wright's approach prods at the limits of control and command, and physicality and presence. Fresh and radical - a double whammy.
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23.2.16
Seymour Wright / alto saxophone
Evan Parker / tenor saxophone
Recorded on Tuesday 23rd February 2016 by James Dunn. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn.
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1.3.16
Seymour Wright / alto saxophone
Rie Nakajima / objects
Recorded on Monday 1st March 2016 by Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn.
Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential.
Seymour's solo music is documented on three widely-acclaimed collections - Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) and Is This Right? (2017).
Current projects include: @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; [Ahmed] with Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Pat Thomas; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; XT with Paul Abbott; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne.
@xcrswx
Rie Nakajima is a sculptor living in London. She creates sounds using a combination of motorised devices and everyday objects in the context of installations and performances.
Her art exists on the borderline of sculpture and music, open to chance and the influence of others. Improvisation is at the heart of her work.
The first major solo exhibition was held at IKON Gallery in Birmingham in 2018. She has also worked with Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Annely Juda Gallery (London), Association de Le Cyclop (Milly la Forêt), ShugoArts (Tokyo), Donaueschinger Music Festival (Donaueschinger), Festival Météo (Mulhouse), Music for the Eyes Festival (Varmlands), Deep Time Festival (Edinburgh), Punkt Festival (Kristiansand), All Ears Festival (Oslo), Festival Archipel (Geneva), Cafe OTO (London) and many others. Collaboration is an essential part of her practice with frequent collaborators, Pierre Berthet, Angharad Davies, David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Max Eastley, Miki Yui, hans.w.koch, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop and Akira Sakata.
"If you've ever been tempted by free improvisation, Parker is your gateway drug." - Stewart Lee
Evan Parker has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s. Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens (A trio that continues to this day), Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).
Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time.
