Éliane Radigue —
Occam River II for violin and cello
Occam River XXV for viola and percussion
أحمد [ahmed] —
African Bossa Nova
Éliane Radigue is one of the most important composers of the last 100 years. 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’.
[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
Sofia Jernberg is a Swedish experimental singer, composer, improviser and performer, born in Ethiopia 1983. She grew up in Ethiopia, Vietnam and Sweden. One of her deepest interests as a singer is to explore the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Her singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a conventional singing style. She has dug deep into non verbal vocalizing, split tone singing, pitchless and distorted singing.
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
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.
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.
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.
