GIO
Festival 1: flinders : performers
Tatsuya
Nakatani / Michel Doneda Duo
mp3
Michel
Doneda
The
enormously influential French saxophonist Michel Doneda makes a rare
appearance in the UK for GIOs first festival. Having transformed the
saxophone vocabulary over the last twenty years his playing has come
to be marked by the exploration of sonority and the eschewal of any
sense of jazz phrasing for the sake of a strongly defined environmental
listening. The instrument has rarely sounded so metallic and in his
hands harks back to the most elementary of bell-like presences. In recent
years he played with musicians from Berlins reductionist scene and made
frequent trips to Japan. He plays regularly with Tatsuya Nakatani in
duo and in the trio From Between along with Jack Wright. Past collaborators
include Elvin Jones, John Zorn, Lê Quan Ninh, Tetsu Saitoh, Kazuo
Imai, Keith Rowe and Barre Phillips.
Tatsuya
Nakatani
Over
the last ten years Tatsuya Nakatani has been unfolding a beguiling signature
poetics of his instruments utilizing drums, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing
bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows to create an
intense, organic music that defies category or genre. His music displays
a muscular sensitivity, at times shamanic in its weight, coming from
improvised/ experimental musics, free jazz, rock, and noise, yet retaining
the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music.
In 2006 he performed in 80 cities in 7 countries and collaborated with
163 artists worldwide. In the past 10 years he has released nearly 50
recordings on CD.
Maggie
Nicols
Vocalist Maggie Nicols has been an active participant in the European
improvisational community since joining the Spontaneous Music Ensemble
in the late '60s. As a co-founder of the Feminist Improvising Group,
she has also worked to further women in improvised music, dancing and
other creative arts not only by example, but through workshops and extensive
collaborating.
She began performing as a dancer and singer at the Windmill Theatre,
the Mouline Rouge in Paris and then in Iran and Greece increasingly
working with jazz ensembles.
In 1968 with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble she performed at Berlin's
1st improvised music festival, Total Music Meeting. She became part
of Keith Tippett's magnificent fifty piece band "Centipede"
and around this time began collaborating with the Scottish percussionist
Ken Hyder incorporating elements of the traditional Scottish tunes into
improvisations.
Maggie has also collaborated regularly over the years with pianist Irene
Schweizer and formidable bassist Joelle Leandre, including three recordings
as the trio Les Diaboliques.
Aileen
Campbell - voice
AiIeen
Campbell makes voiceworks, she voice in performance both as process
and structure. Sometimes she turns to video to make the performance
exist beyond its presence. Campbell uses structures of music-making
to construct situations and relationships between objects, voices, audience
and different acoustic spaces. An intimate understanding of the singing
voice allows her access to the tools of music/the voice to distract
the viewer with feelings of empathy, sensation, ceremony, nostalgia
and illusion.
The recording and production of a performed event become events in themselves
with viewpoints only available to mounted cameras. The sounds that ensue
are often conflicting and disruptive sounds, but these can begin a series
of flawed relationships and associations between the performer and the
work itself.
Strange
Rainbow
Catriona
McKay - harp / Alistair MacDonald - electronics
Catriona
McKay
Catriona McKay is a fearless contemporary explorer on the Scottish harp,
having collaborated with folk, jazz, classical and experimental artists,
as well as co-designing the new Starfish McKay harp, featuring an alternative
tuning pattern. Catriona is a member of the leading Shetland band Fiddlers'
Bid and the Chris Stout Quintet. She has a harp and fiddle duo with
Stout and plays World/Jazz music with Phil Alexander(piano/box). Catriona
continues to be at the cutting edge of harp music in a clarsach and
live electronics combo playing experimental music and improvisation
with leading electroacoustic composer Alistair MacDonald.
In 2007 she was filmed for ‘Transatlantic Sessions 3’, BBC
2 ‘Scotland’s Music with Phil Cunningham’ and won
‘Instrumentalist of the Year’ at the Scots Trad Music Awards
07.
Alistair
MacDonald
Alistair MacDonald is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music.
His work draws on a wide range of influences reflecting a keen interest
in improvisation, transformation of sound, and space. Many of his works
are made in collaboration with other artists from a range of media,
and explore a range of contexts beyond the concert hall, often using
interactive technology.
His music has won a number of awards including a Creative Scotland Award,
and is performed and broadcast in the UK and abroad. Several works are
available on compact disc.
Age of
Wire & String
Peter
Nicholson -
cello
Neil
Davidson -
guitar
Jamie
Allen -
electronics
Age of Wire & String burnt a hole like a big black dog during 2003
leaving behind a warmly praised CD-R called ‘wolves on fire’
of which Edwin pouncy said: “…recalling Tony Conrad and
John Cale, Peter Nicholson's intense sawing weaves a fearsome shivering
of strings in and out of Neil Davidson's equally frantic guitar and
Jamie Allen's inventive, old school electronic splatter”. –
probably more disco than you’d expect.
Peter Nicholson – cello (GIO, One Ensemble, Ravi Shankar), Jamie
Allen – electronics (Culture Lab - Newcastle) and Neil Davidson
– guitar (Aporias Trio w. T Nakatani & R MacDonald, GIO, Iorram
Records).
Ali
Robertson (Usurper) and
Fritz
Welch (The Peeesseye)
Ali Robertson along with Malcy Duff is half of Usurper the foremost
neo Dadaist, desk drawer trawling, miniscule free-noise tantrum combo
around: unbuttoned mechano fiddling in the best contact mic tradition.
He also attempts to regularly release other sounds (such as: Blood Stereo,
Muscletusk and Hockyfrilla.) and comic books (by Malcy Duff and Active
Cell) on his Giant Tank label.
With his NYC trio The Peeesseye, Fritz Welch has plunged head-first
into uncharted avant-garde waters to resurface with what has been described
as "the most remarkable smorgasbord of back porch minimalism, sound
poetry and urban decay of recent memory” (Eric Weddle, Family
Vineyard.).
By dropping his anchor within the Bermuda Triangle situated between
heavy-thinking improv, low-brow noise and situationist goof-offs his
vocal/ percussion workouts have slipped through journo nets and pigeonholes.
This will be the first time he has performed in Glasgow since sailing
a trans-atlantic sea of his own slobber to become resident here.
Burt/MacDonald5
Writing
their own standards, reinventing song forms and improvising a familial
homeliness whose hospitality has been enjoyed by the likes of Ken Hyder,
Keith Tippett, Lol Coxhill and Harry Becket the Burt MacDonald quartet
are a refreshing paradox of a jazz band. On this occasion they perform
for the first time with Maggie Nicols.
Kate Burton
Kate Burton
graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s Environmental Fine Art
Department in 2002. Kate went on to produce a series of experimental
super 8 films, collaborating with musicians Neil Davidson, Peter Nicholson
and Jamie Allen. These micro works were sensitive to the unique qualities
of light and space and the emotional connotations of specific locations.
Kate began writing short screenplays in 2004 with an interest to create
unique and highly visual narrative short films. Kate completed her first
commissioned short drama ‘The Ice Plant’ in 2007, commissioned
by Scottish Screen and the UK Film Council. Kate documented a series
of workshops with GIO, the Glasgow improvisers orchestra in the winter
of 2007 which will screen this October at the GIO Festival flinders
in the CCA.