Thursday 21 December 2023, 7.30pm
"The Feral Choir project is a series of vocal workshops with non-professionals, leading up to performances. It originated in the late 1980’s when I was asked to do some workshops with ‘non-singers’ in the Musik Centrum Stockholm. The success of these led me to develop the idea further. The choir consists of a three day workshop and performance, not only for singers but for anyone who takes a delight in the freedom to experiment. I encourage participants to take a vocal leap and explore all vocal possibilities through exercises and improvisations, over the workshop period, leading to a concert.
Feral Choir workshops and performances have subsequently been held in many different places around the world including Berlin, Centre for Performance Research Cardiff, Musickzentrum Munich, Tokyo, Angelica Bologna, City Festival Lausanne, Institute for Living Voice Antwerp, Baltimore, Nante, Brest, Oxford, Paris, Oakland, Melbourne, St. Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bristol, Pau, Florence, Le Man, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Ghent, Zurich, Nancy Vandoeuvre, Poitiers, London, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Brugge, Strasbourg, and Aberystwyth.
Some of the choirs have been made up of professionals, sometimes actors and musicians, but many have been amateur groups with no previous musical interest or experience. These have been particularly rewarding, as has the work with teenagers in Belgium and Holland, and the responses from the participants have been overwhelmingly positive." – Phil Minton
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.
Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic. Now, using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of a homemade analog synthesizer, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language. Over the past decade, her predominant focus has been her solo work with the cello, voice and electronics, but she has more recently begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument. Among musicians, she has worked with Phil Minton, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Tomomi Adachi, Matana Roberts, Elliott Sharp, Aki Onda, Phill Niblock, Frederic Blondy, Jerome Noetinger, C. Spencer Yeh, Nate Wooley, Mats Gustafsson, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, Dylan Nyoukis, Id M Theft Able, plus many more. Recent projects, aside from performing solo, include her voice only duo with London based artist, Phil Minton and a collaborative project with German conceptual artist, John Bock. Two new album releases in 2013 include, a quartet LP with Nate Wooley, C. Spencer Yeh and Todd Carter on Monotype (Warsaw), and a duo record with Phil Minton on Subrosa (Brussels).
Luigi Marino is a musician based in Bristol. His work focuses on networks able to display relationships between human and nonhuman actors, with particular attention to how intuitive decisions can profoundly affect pre-existing conditions. He is an active improvisor performing on both electronic media and percussion, especially zarb and bowed custom cymbals.
He holds an MFA in electronic music from Mills College where he worked as teaching assistant for John Bischoff and Chris Brown, and a joint PhD in composition from University of Birmingham and De Montfort University funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His teachers include Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, James Fei, William Winant. He studied zarb with Mohssen Kasirossafar.
As a performer or composer his music has been presented at festivals and venues such as Rainforest World Music Festival (Kuching, Malaysia), San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Cafe Oto (London), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome), Intonal Festival (Malmö), Auditorium Parco Della Musica (Rome), IEM (Graz), Seoul International Computer Music Festival, BEAST FEaST (Birmingham), Acousmatic for the People (Malmö), Sacred Realism (Berlin), Interpenetration (Graz), Sowieso (Berlin), Rhiz (Vienna), Iklectik (London), Hundred Years Gallery (London), Km28 (Berlin), Offene Ohren (Munich), WIM (Zurich), ImprovvisaMente (Lodi), ICMC (Athens).
Matt Davis has been active in improvised music since the mid 90’s, playing throughout Europe and Japan in many different collaborations and small and large group ensembles including Zeitkratzer and La Sospechosa dance company.
From 2003 he has directed ‘Field’ - a live art/performance project, which investigates Space and has collaborated with geographer Doreen Massey, author of For Space.
His sound/music work continues to include acoustic improvisation (trumpet and preparations) which could be described as textural, sound based pieces. Along side this is an electromagnetic set up: performance based improvisations which use electromagnetic fields from custom-built cracked electrical devices and field recordings of electromagnetic residue and interference, as well as drawing on the immediate situation/space of the performance. These elements are explored as spatial, acoustic phenomena and for their potential as organic and/or feral musical elements.
