[Ahmed] – the quartet of Pat Thomas, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright – make music of heavy rhythm, repetition and syncopation set deep into an understanding of jazz and the obscure depths of its history. The group work and rework the music of the late musician Ahmed Abdul-Malik to create a stamping, swinging, relentlessly propulsive music where profundity and physicality root right back to ecstatic feeling.

Pat Thomas — Piano
Seymour Wright — Alto Saxophone
Joel Grip — Double Bass
Antonin Gerbal — Drums

Éliane Radigue is one of the most important living composers. Having produced an extraordinary and extraordinarily influential body of electronic music between the 1960s up until 2002 (despite very little public acclaim or recognition during most of this period), she then turned to composing for and with musicians and acoustic instruments. In doing so, she has created a further body of music that draws on the sonority of her earlier work whilst extending it into new realms using a very particular methodology of oral transmission that allows for exchange ‘heart-to-heart’.

Magnus Granberg is a composer and performer working at an intersection between contemporary chamber music and improvisation. He is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Born in Umeå in 1974, he studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenburg and in New York in his late teens and early twenties. Self-taught as a composer, he formed his own ensemble Skogen in 2005 trying to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi.

His music has been performed in Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, England, Austria, Hungary and Slovenia, broadcast by public radio channels in England (BBC Radio 3 and 6), Germany (SWR 2), Sweden (SR P2), Estonia, Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary and the United States, and has been published by the renowned British record label Another Timbre.

https://magnusgranberg.se/

Josefin Runsteen — Violin
My Hellgren — Cello
Anna Christensson — Piano
Ryan Packard — Percussion
Finn Loxbo — Guitar
John Eriksson — Vibraphone

“In early 2021 pianist and producer Alex Zethson asked me if I would be interested in writing some music for a hand-picked ensemble of his choosing, consisting of musicians active within various strands of contemporary musics. I was of course as honored as I was excited to get such a wonderful opportunity to get to know and work with musicians I for the most part did not know personally or had had the opportunity to work with before. So I suggested this old idea of mine to write a large piece for chamber ensemble with a variable and flexible structure where the different parts also could be performed as solo pieces as well as be combined in different ways so as to form smaller ensemble pieces of varying durations.

The piece, which is called Night Will Fade and Fall Apart, takes as its points of departure two different songs by French, late medieval composer Solage (Tres gentil cuer and En l’amoureux vergier) as well as from the popular song and jazz standard My Foolish Heart by Victor Young and Ned Washington, from whose lyrics the piece also borrows its title, albeit in a slightly transformed manner.

— Magnus Granberg

“A very radical saxophonist” – Evan Parker

Seymour Wright of Derby, his first solo album is widely considered to be a defining document of 21st-century, ‘inter-textual’ saxophone and now with his saxophone (mostly) no longer in pieces he has played in several often surprising and increasingly peculiar settings – from the on-going extreme twistings of lll人 (joined on one occasion by Otomo Yoshihide) and lll人lll (with Yuki Yamamoto, Howard Slater and Ute Kanngiesser), the lava flow of xomlatesc tbobnhi’s four-day London Jazz Festival residency and the robop-debut of CYNTHIA, to duets with Ute Kanngiesser (a rare public, many-year hebdomadal), Daniel Blumberg (Hebronix) and saxophonist John Butcher.

Increasingly he has been performing and recording music in more jazz-like settings too, exploring aspects of the early NYAQ and a certain jazz tradition in Steve Noble’s current group and performing the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik in أحمد‎ a newly convened quartet with Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal. This on-going trajectory, through the weird, is making the range of his music making and collaborative creativity increasingly public.

Finn Loxbo is a guitarist with a focus on free improvisation. His music is usually on either side of two dynamic extremes: quiet acoustic or very loud. On the quiet side we find him in his own ensemble Kommun, as a solo act and in collaborations with, for example, Skogen. Examples from the louder side are Kyosaku, Anna Högberg Extended Attack, and previously in bands such as Doglife, Strändernas svall and Fire! Orchestra.

www.finnloxbo.com

Ryan Packard  is a percussionist, composer and sound artist currently based in Stockholm, SE.  His compositional language is concerned with intimacy, interdependence and sympathetic relationships.

His sound installations have been featured at the MCA Chicago, Lumen Project Stockholm, Fuji Textile Week Japan, Graham Foundation, Defibrillator, Hyde Park Arts Center, Galeria Labirynt, High Concept Labs, Constellation Chicago, Norberg Festival and Experimental Sound Studio. He has collaborated with artists like Nelly Agassi, Dave Rempis, Ben LaMar Gay, Brandon Lopez, Okkyung Lee, Will Guthrie, Nate Wooley, Peter Ablinger, Julio Estrada, Annea Lockwood, Magnus Granberg, John McCowen, Seth Parker Woods among many others.

He’s a member of the new music ensemble, Fonema Consort and has performed with Ensemble Dal Niente, Norrlandsoperan, Ensemble Nist Nah, Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society, tya ensemble, MOCREP, a.pe.ri.od.ic ensemble, NYC experimental rock group Skeleton$ and Architek Percussion Quartet.

Some of his current projects are Kommun, Kyosaku, ZRL and the Chicago minimal free jazz quartet, RedGreenBlue. He has released on American Dreams Records, Astral Spirits, Dinzu Artefacts, Thanatosis, Insub, Fönstret Edition Festival Records, Shinkoyo, Amalgam and No Index. Ryan has a masters of music from McGill University and bachelor of music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

My Hellgren lives in Göteborg, Sweden, and works as a cellist in many different contexts. She is mostly active in the scene of contemporary music and is a member of GAHLMM, Curious chamber players and Mimitabu.

My likes to work close with composers and has premiered solo and chamber music pieces.

My is educated at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen and at the Academy of music and drama at the university of Gothenburg.