Miles Cooper Seaton

For over a decade Miles Cooper Seaton’s work has defied genre and discipline, spanning immersive ambient installations, intimate sets in sacred spaces and festival stages from Los Angeles to Tokyo – as a solo artist, with his own band Akron/Family and as a member of Michael Gira’s Angels of Light. Their common thread is the raw emotional charge that infuses every performance with incendiary energy, leaving listeners hyper-sensitised to their own feelings and bodies, to each other and to the world around them.

Distractfold Ensemble

Manchester-based Distractfold Ensemble is a collective of performers, composers and curators all acting out of shared love, passion and interest in the music and culture of our times. Coming from different continents, backgrounds and having received a diverse education, together they create a nexus of ideas and influences which all contribute towards the ensemble’s unique voice and identity.
They perform acoustic, mixed and electroacoustic music of their peers, alongside music of the more established composers with whom they have formed close collaborations and friendships.
In the seven years they have been together, they have toured internationally and hosted many exciting international artists in Manchester whose work reflects their aims of going deep into the details of all music they play, as well as embracing unusual and innovative concert situations.
Last season they performed, among others, at Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg, hcmf, Kalv Festival and travelled to California for a residence at Stanford University.
In 2017 they curated, produced & performed Cut & Splice Festival which took place in Manchester in March, in collaboration with Sound and Music and BBC Radio 3.
Besides playing new music members of Distractfold can be found dancing salsa, working at the helpline of the Samaritans, collecting anything with cat imagery, stroking cats, watching cat youtube videos, folding origami, obsessively worrying about bubble wrap not being recyclable and researching natural medicine.

http://www.distractfold.co.uk

Liza Lim

Liza Lim is one of Australia’s leading composers. She has received commissions and performances from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras (Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, BBC, WDR, SWR), festivals (Festival d’Automne Paris, Salzburg, Lucerne, Holland, Venice Biennale and major Australian festivals) and ensembles (Musikfabrik, Ensemble Intercontemporain, ELISION, Ensemble Modern, Arditti String Quartet and others). Since 2008, she has been Professor of Composition and Director of the Centre for Research in New Music, CeReNeM, at the University of Huddersfield. Her compositional practice is connected to Australian Indigenous aesthetics; Asian ritual forms and performance practices; a Sufi poetics of bewilderment, loss, communion and ecstasy; and the textilic arts of weaving and knot-making as a cross-modal technology for thinking.

Sam Salem

Sam Salem’s work is focussed upon the sounds of urban environments: each of his pieces focuses upon a specific geographical location. His music aspires to illuminate and explore the hidden musicality and beauty of his geographical subjects, as well as his own relationship to his environment as both a source of inspiration and musical material.

Sam (b. 1982) currently resides in Manchester (UK), where he completed a MUSM in Electroacoustic Music Composition in 2007 and a PhD in Composition in 2011 at the University of Manchester.

He has undertaken a number of creation residencies at institutions around the world, including Ems (Stockholm, 2013-14), La Muse En Circuit (Paris, 2012-2013), Technische Universität (Berlin, 2012), STEIM (Amsterdam, 2011-12) and Musique et Recherches (Ohain, 2011). He has also been nominated and awarded in a number of international composition competitions, including: Concours Luc Ferrari (2012, Winner), Luigi Russolo Competition (2012, Audience Award), Metamorphoses (2012, Nomination), Competition Destellos (2012, Nomination), Joensuu Soundscape Composition Contest (2011, Third Prize), 11th Musica Viva Composition Competition (2010, First Prize ex-aequo) and Musica Nova (2010, Honorary Mention).

Sam is co-director of the Distractfold Ensemble, and currently teaches at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Mauricio Pauly

Mauricio Pauly writes music for mixed ensembles, often integrating amplification, performative electronics & prefabricated sounds. He is the artistic co-director of Distractfold & one half of the improvising duo, Inner Helmet. In 2014-15 he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His home is in Ancoats, Manchester.

Teaching:
Royal Northern College of Music – Manchester, UK
Senior Lecturer and MMus Pop Music Coordinator
//Electric Experimental Ensemble (MMus), Aural Analysis & Critique (MMus), Songwriting Workshop (BMus Y3), Original Ensemble Project (BMus Y3)//

Architectural Association Interprofessional Studio – London, UK
Studio Tutor

Martyna Poznańska

Martyna Poznańska is a cross-disciplinary artist based in Berlin. Her artistic research focuses on listening and hearing as a transformative act within the urban sonic environment. Through her installations and live performances she investigates the transience of the affect between different modes of perception, where the listener’s experience becomes the focal point. Her practice involves field recording, writing, video and photography. Poznańska has showed works at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Spor Festival, Deutsche Oper Berlin, The Place in London, ORF Graz and others. In 2013 she was the recipient of a grant from the Polish Ministry of Culture for the project Listening East. She studied Spanish literature and linguistics at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, voice at the Laboratory of Olga Szwajgier and sound art at the University of the Arts London. In 2016 she obtained an MfA in sound studies from the Universität der Künste Berlin.

Monocreo

Monocreo is a Milton Keynes-based sound art and outer limits label pairing forever-available digital music with a limited-edition physical form. Initially born to document the work of its founder, the sound artist Jonny Hill, the label’s inaugural release was a collaborative graphic score between Hill and Edward Simpson, performed and recorded live in response to Stephane Cauchy’s Cascade at Fabrica Gallery, Brighton, in August 2011. The label has also released work by the drums and electronics trio Black Spring and post-punk multi-instrumentalist the Engineer. Its latest release is a split cassette featuring new material from Miles Cooper Seaton and Black Spring.