Ten Years Alive opens in silence with a screening of 'Declarative Mode' — an hallucinatory late 1970s work by Paul Sharits for two overlapping 16mm film projectors.
This will be followed by composer Daniel Blumberg performing together in a trio with saxophonists Seymour Wright and John Butcher to footage from Gianfranco Rosi's Venice award winning documentary Pompei — Below The Clouds, in a special montage edited by the director.
Presented in collaboration with Moderna Museet.
nb: this programme features flashing / stroboscopic lights !
Daniel Blumberg is a London based composer and artist whose practice operates across songwriting, improvisation, drawing and sound.
He has released four solo albums on Mute - Liv (2014), Minus (2018), On&On (2020) and Gut (2023) - and composed scores for films including The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet, 2024), Sotto le Nuvole/Pompei: Below The Clouds (dir. Gianfranco Rosi, 2025) and The Testament of Ann Lee (dir. Mona Fastvold, 2025). In 2025 he was awarded an Academy Award and BAFTA for his score for The Brutalist.
Blumberg is also a visual artist who draws with silverpoint. His work has been exhibited at Balice Hertling Paris, Triennale di Milano, ICA London, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin.
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 four widely-acclaimed collections - Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) , Is This Right? (2017) and RITES (2023).
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
Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) in quantum chromodynamics, Butcher left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades. To name a few: Derek Bailey, Akio Suzuki, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Sophie Agnel, Rhodri Davies, Matthew Shipp, Gerry Hemingway, Chris Burn, Polwechsel, Magda Mayas, Gino Robair, Thermal (Andy Moor & Thomas Lehn), Christian Marclay, Eddie Prévost, Okkyung Lee, John Russell, and Phil Minton.
Butcher values both permanent groups and occasional encounters and operates within a network of artists also interested in the dynamics of spontaneity and shared history.
Paul Jeffrey Sharits (1943–1993) was an American visual artist and avant-garde filmmaker widely regarded as one of the most radical and influential figures in post-World War II experimental cinema.
Sharits spent his life pushing the boundaries of film as a medium, stripping cinema down to its rawest elements—light, color, duration, perception, and materiality—and rebuilding it into something elemental, visceral, and deeply physical.
"With colors, therefore, in reciprocal relationships with each other within space and over time, Sharits creates new hues not actually present upon the film through their co-temporal blending and through after-image retention. It's a a complex phenomenon that yields sublime transitions across a spectral range, while the inner frame pulses with illusionistic movement as the hues change from warm to cool." – Anthony Bannon on 'Declarative Mode' (Buffalo Evening News)
