Back in May 2018, percussionist Steve Noble met bassist Farida Amadou, and have since developed their own high-energy and exploratory music together as a duo. Steve's rolling, detailed and pointillistic playing melds in symbiosis with Farida's smudged, deep, funked-up lyricism, creating a physical sound that tosses and tumbles across lightning-speed interplay.
As a unit they've welcomed into the fray ex-Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and recently free jazz pioneer Peter Brötzmann, but for this set of trio releases they invite saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos, clarinetist Alex Ward and bass clarnitest Yoni Silver for a series cooked up in our OTO Project Space.
For this session, Chris Pitsiokos shoots winding darts of needle-sharp saxophone through Steve and Farida's sound world, taking the language of the likes of Coltrane and Braxton and pushing it into whole new extremes.
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Steve Noble - percussion
Farida Amadou - electric bass
Chris Pitsiokos - saxophone
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Artwork & mastering by Oliver Barrett
Cover photo by Laurent Orseau
Steve Noble is London's leading drummer, a fearless and constantly inventive improviser whose super-precise, ultra-propulsive and hyper-detailed playing has galvanized encounters with Derek Bailey, Matthew Shipp, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Stephen O'Malley, Joe McPhee, Alex Ward, Rhodri Davies and many, many more.
In the early eighties, Noble played with the Nigerian master drummer Elkan Ogunde, Rip Rig and Panic, Brion Gysin and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, before going on to work with the pianist Alex Maguire and with Derek Bailey (including Company Weeks 1987, 89 and 90). He was featured in the Bailey's excellent TV series on Improvisation for Channel 4 based on his book ‘Improvisation; its nature and practise’. He has toured and performed throughout Europe, Africa and America and currently leads the groups N.E.W (with John Edwards and Alex Ward) and DECOY (with John Edwards and Alexander Hawkins).
FARIDA AMADOU is a self-taught bass player based in Brussels, Belgium. The electric bass has been her main instrument since 2011. In 2013, she has started to play a lot of different musical genres, including blues, jazz and hip-hop; soon she started to dive into improvised music, and was rapidly identified by local collectives and musicians. After a year (2017) as bass player in Belgian punk band Cocaine Piss, Farida decided to focus on her solo improvisation practice and collaborations with musicians such as Steve Noble, Thurston Moore, Peter Brötzmann, Terrie Ex, Lukas Koening, Pat Thomas and Julien Desprez, among others, occasionally also featuring with groups such as Jerusalem in My Heart and Moor Mother.
Chris Pitsiokos is a New York-born, Berlin-based world-renowned saxophonist, improviser, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. He has performed extensively in North and South America, Europe and Japan. Chris has been praised by Rolling Stone for his “startlingly original vision” and “astonishingly fleet sax work.” Downbeat has identified his band CP Unit as “A persuasive combination of harmolodic jazz and contemporary noise rock.” As a soloist he has developed a unique voice on the alto saxophone: his expansion of the instrument’s vocabulary has served to multiply its emotive and formal possibilities. He has performed at dozens of major festivals across the globe, including (but not limited to) Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, Sapporo International Arts Festival in Japan, Moers Festival in Germany, Tempo Reale Festival in Italy, Rewire Festival in the Netherlands, Jazz Jantar Festival in Poland and Festival de Jazz Lima in Peru. In New York he has presented his work at Roulette Intermedium, ISSUE Project Room, and during a residency at John Zorn’s club the Stone. Lately, he has developed interactive electro-acoustic systems for saxophone and computer. He also composes music for film. His list of collaborators represents a who’s who of the luminaries in 20th and 21st century improvised music, experimental music and jazz: he has worked with Jaimie Branch, Luke Stewart, Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Lea Bertucci, Weasel Walter, Otomo Yoshihide, Nate Wooley, Axel Dörner, Julien Desprez, Sachiko M, Mazen Kerbaj and Paul Lytton to name a small few.
