[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

Pär Thörn (född 1977) är författare, ljudkonstnär och fanzineredaktör, bosatt i Göteborg. Sedan debuten 2002 har han givit ut närmare tjugo böcker och blivit översatt till bland annat danska och franska. Thörn har även framträtt med uppläsningar och elektronisk musik på scener i Sverige, Europa, Mexiko och Vietnam.

Just nu är han aktuell med prosaboken ”Era anklagelser är meningslösa”. Förra året utkom två CD-skivor i samarbete med Ian Douglas-Moore och Tobias Kirstein på skivbolagen Firework Edition Records, respektive Topos Media. Under ett flertal år i början av 2010-talet var Thörn verksam i Berlin och spelade regelbundet improvisationsmusik med bland andra Axel Dörner, Anaïs Tuerlinckx och Ignaz Schick.

Hans primära projekt, för tillfället, är industrimusikduon Unaussprechlichen Kulten tillsammans med Jean Fatal.

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.

www.seymourwright.com

@xcrswx

Pat Thomas is a composer and pianist, widely recognised as a leading figure in contemporary improvised music.

He is renowned for his distinctive, percussive style of playing, and for weaving a wide range of influences like reggae, jungle, and Sufi philosophy into compositions and performances.

Of the course of his career he has collaborated with a wide range of jazz and improv luminaries, from Mike Cooper, Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, and Evan Parker, to more recent avant-figureheads like Moor Mother and Matana Roberts.

As well as an ongoing solo practice, current group projects include أحمد [ahmed] (with Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal, and Joel Grip), Black Top (with Orphy Robinson), and duos with Mariam Rezaei, Mark Fell, and Tyshawn Sorey.

Improvising bassist, Joel Grip, makes music at the countenance of the other.

Anchored to a spontaneously fermented musical approach, his music reverberates and transforms within a collective body of timing and sound.

Joel Grip practice improvising, as a way to learn and develop a forthright sound, and embrace its reactiveness, rapidity, and startling character with the aim of pushing music to intense, ecstatic and transformative levels.

joelgrip.com

Antonin Gerbal is a percussion player, improviser and composer, active in the field of contemporary musics – from jazz to non-idiomatic languages.

He has studied music at Paris Conservatory and philosophy at EHESS. In 2009 he co-founded Umlaut France, an organization which runs the eponymous label and organizes concerts and festivals in Paris and Berlin. Antonin Gerbal is mainly using percussion elements to develop multiple accesses to musical languages in jazz, improvised or written music. He has collaborated with many international artists and played in United States, Japan, Russia and Europe.

www.umlautrecords.com/people/antonin-gerbal

Nate Wooley grew up in Clatskanie, Oregon. He began his professional music career at age 13 performing in big bands with his father, and studied jazz and classical trumpet at the University of Oregon and University of Denver. He settled in New York in 2001, and maintains an active schedule working in contemporary classical, jazz, noise, and electronic music as an interpreter, improviser, and composer. While a large part of his work has consisted of solo improvisation and composition, he has collaborated with Anthony Braxton, Éliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood, Yoshi Wada, Christian Wolff, Wadada Leo Smith, and others.

He is the founder of the For / With Festival, which commissions and premieres works created through collaboration between composer and performer, all with an emphasis on radical timbral techniques and improvisation within composition.

Wooley is also the editor of Sound American, an online journal intended to demystify contemporary experimental music with the intention of expanding and perpetuating a base audience for the radical and avant-garde. He is currently the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM) and teaches at The New School for Social Research.

www.natewooley.com

Deborah Walker is a new music performer and improviser based in Paris. She was born in Reggio Emilia (Italy) in 1981 and studied cello in her hometown. After graduating she moved to Paris to continue her cello studies with Agnès Vesterman and Anssi Karttunen.

Since 2007 she has been a member of Dedalus, a variable experimental and contemporary music ensemble, which has collaborated, among others, with Tom Johnson, Pascale Criton, Christian Wolff, Antoine Beuger and Jurg Frey. Deborah Walker has worked with artists like Joëlle Leandre, Markus Stockhausen, Garrett List and Philip Corner. She’s currently working with the composers Pascale Criton and Eliane Radigue on pieces for solo cello.

She has played in many festivals such as I Suoni delle Dolomiti, Italia Wave, ZKN in Karlsruhe, Festival d’Avignon, Festival Nomad in M’Hamid (Morocco), Switch ON (Malaysia) and tours regularly in Europe.

Julia Eckhardt is a musician and organiser in the field of the sonic arts. She is a founding member and artistic co-director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualized various thematic research projects.

As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists, and extensively with Éliane Radigue. She has performed internationally, and released a number of recordings.

She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and public space, and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, conversation on gender and music, Grounds for Possible Music, The Middle Matter – sound as interstice, and Éliane Radigue – Intermediary Spaces/Espaces intermédiaires.

www.juliaeckhardt.net

Silvia is a violinist, composer and improviser. The oral transmission of music and the form created through a deep immersion into the sound are traits of her musical research and find expression in several collaborations with composers as Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Pascale Criton, Cassandra Miller, Martin Arnold, Pierre-Yves Macé, Philip Corner.

Her projects are released by I dischi di Angelica, Unseen Worlds, New World Records, Potlatch. Her concerts have been recorded and broadcasted by BBC Radio and France Musique.
She performs regularly in festivals and venues in Europe, North America, Canada, Mexico.

www.silviatarozzi.it

Enrico Malatesta is an Italian percussionist, sound researcher and curator active in the field of experimental music, sound intervention and performance; his practice explores the relations between sound, space and body, the vitality of materials and the morphology of surfaces, with particular attention to the percussive acts and the modes of listenings.

Since 2007 Enrico Malatesta has been presenting his works with tours all over Europe, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, UK, North America and Russia, participating in festivals and special events in venues such as Pirelli Hangar Bicocca – Milano, Berghain – Berlin, MAM – Rio de Janeiro.

enricomalatesta.com