Friday 18 October 2024, 7.30pm
One of the most inventive and eclectic figures in contemporary music, guitarist and composer FRED FRITH celebrates his 75th year with another three day residency at OTO featuring some of his longest standing colleagues alongside much more recent collaborators. As the matinee concert with Susana Santos Silva in January 2024 demonstrated, Fred has lost none of his curiosity and fire.
“Few contemporary musicians have explored as many different – and frequently overlapping – genres as Fred Frith: traditional folk, indie rock, free improv, chamber composition, po-mo retro, graphic scores, and several…that may not have a name yet.” – Art Lange, Point of Departure
Frith's work has ranged from ground-breaking avant-garde rock with Henry Cow and Art Bears to extended compositions for choirs, orchestras and saxophone quartets and collaborations with figures such as Mike Patton, John Zorn, Brian Eno, Ikue Mori and Derek Bailey. His highly individual approach to the guitar and use of extended and unorthodox techniques give his music a unique and at times disorienting sense of texture and space.
Frith's musicial journey started when he formed Henry Cow with Tim Hodgkinson in 1968, a legendary group that expanded the parameters of rock music to include complex compositional forms as well as improvised elements.
After moving to New York in 1979, Frith was a key figure in the downtown experimental music scene, his collaborations with Zorn, Laswell, Mori and others helping form an important new musical vernacular in which elements of rock, contempary composition, noise and improvisation overlapped and intertwined.
Since 1999 Frith has been Professor of Composition at Mills University, California. Recent projects have included duos with Anthony Braxton and Evelyn Glennie, collaborations with the Arte Quartett and choreographer Donna Uchizono, and numerous festival appearances in Europe and America.
“A masterful sound colorist, Frith is in no way subject to analyses of has artistic legitimacy - (he) redefines the possible uses of the guitar and makes traditional discourse irrelevant” – L.A. Herald Examiner (USA)
ISIDORA EDWARDS is a Chilean cellist, improviser and composer, currently a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is actively exploring the ways in which women shape their performative praxis in sound under patriarchal biases. As a soloist and in collaboration with artists from different disciplines and ensembles, she has been part of many international experimental music and contemporary dance festivals. Isidora holds a MMus in Creative Practice from Goldsmiths and graduated and as a music performer from the PUC Music Institute, Chile. She lives in London with her son Nicanor and is an ANID Becas Chile scholarship holder.
The Germany-based Brazilian drummer, singer, composer and producer MARIÁ PORTUGAL has been active in the São Paulo music scene for more than 20 years. She recorded, performed and toured throughout South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania with artists such as Elza Soares, Metá Metá, Arrigo Barnabé, Quartabê, Maggie Nicols, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Nick Dunston and Tomeka Reid. As a composer, she has been performing and composing original music for dance, theatre and cinema. Since 2021 she has been one of the curators of the Soundtrips-NRW free improvisation program.
With compositions featured at international festivals such as Tectonics, Huddersfield, Spectrum XXI, Nordlyd, and Ars Musica, and two sets of works for ensemble out on the Mode label, TIM HODGKINSON also has a powerful commitment to intense and highly energised performance practice. For over fifty years he has placed himself in a series of definitive projects, whether as cofounder of the seminal group Henry Cow, as saxophonist with influential avant-metal band God, or as bass clarinet soloist in the spectral compositions of Iancu Dumitrescu. His lap steel guitar playing remains completely uncategorisable, bringing subdued and not so subdued echoes of rock musics and other ethnicities.
http://www.timhodgkinson.co.uk/
gabby fluke-mogul is a New York-based violinist, improviser, composer, educator, organizer and doula. Weaving within the threads of avant and free jazz, with deep roots in improvised and experimental music, their music has been described as “embodied, visceral and virtuosic” and “the most striking sound in improvised music in years”. gabby is humbled to have collaborated with Nava Dunkelman, Joanna Mattrey, Ava Mendoza, Charles Burnham, Fred Frith, Luke Stewart, Zeena Parkins, Tcheser Holmes, Lester St. Louis, William Parker, and Pauline Oliveros among many other musicians, poets, dancers and visual artists. gfm facilitates improvisation workshops & curates programming for the Creative Music Studio, is adjunct faculty at the New School, and is a current Jerome Artist in Residence at Roulette.
For a long time now Phil Minton has been working as a improvising singer, solo and in groups and situations at various locations all over the place, deserts, quarries, concert halls, pubs, holes, dodgy clubs, containers, up trees, in prisons, on mountains, in churches, under bridges and cafe oto etc.
Phil Minton comes from Torquay. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s - Then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later of part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s.
For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as an improvising singer in lots of groups, orchestras, and situations. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians, including tours with American singer Audrey Chen - with whom he has sang far and wide in the last ten years.
Since the eighties, His Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.
