prepared guitar, de-composition objects, elektronics, speakers

annette krebs was born in saarland in germany. during her years at school, she was already intensively engaged in music, composition, improvisation and the visual arts. she studied concert guitar at the "hochschule für musik und darstellende kunst" in frankfurt/main, and finished her studies with a diploma. during her studies, she also worked in the development of her own visual-abstract language, and participated in exhibitions in frankfurt.

after her studies, she moved to berlin. there, she concentrated on the development of an independent musical language on her instrument, the guitar. this language was also strongly influenced by her previous work in painting and visual arts. she explored the instrument, concentrating on extended techniques to explore possible sounds, noises and sound-noises, and played with the instrument traditionally.

in berlin, she met other musicians and artists who were interested in similar musical approaches. alone, and in various projects, pieces and performances were developed, exploring the aesthetics and tension between sounds and noises, action and silence, and the possibility of a dramaturgically free and abstract musical language.

since 2003, she has worked to combine composed musical sounds with layers of concrete meanings, including word and visual materials. in her pieces, all materials are composed in a very equal and abstract way; the possible decorative function of sound is averted.

similar to an acoustic collage, fragments of language, words and field recordings are integrated as musical materials together with tonal and rhythmical abstract composed sounds, noises and silences. concrete meanings, fragments of memory are sometimes softly suggested, and then reintegrated immediately, as reminders of short fragments of thought in the abstract soundlanguage.

musical hierarchical structures, foreground and background, exist in her pieces in a mostly fluid form; they can appear for a short moment, however, immediately disappear again into each other, framed together like images in a kaleidoscope. seconds later, they reveal themselves in other combinations, in new, surprising ways.

Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder

Both individually and in collaboration, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder are creating some of the most innovative and engaging light works of the present time. I hesitate to say “films”, since their work, though it is grounded in an understanding and application of celluloid, goes beyond a general understanding of what film is, taking into consideration the architecture and circumstances of the performance / viewing situation and the physical and emotional presence of light itself. From the inventive ways that they create images on the film strip to the use of multiple projection that often incorporates live performance, Luis and Sandra are two of the most vital young artists working in the field of ‘expanded cinema’. – Mark Webber, The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival

In their collaborative film performances, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder employ simple mechanical means to hypnotically elaborate ends. 16mm loops, spray bottles, colored gels, unfocused lenses and hand-shadows combine, through rehearsed recipes, into slowly mutating light-sculptures: morphing color-fields, angel-white auras, fusing penumbrae, pulsing vertical lines. Built upon occulted rhythms of film projection, their work retains a personal, human scale, even as the viewer succumbs to its transportive powers. Their performances melt the projector’s machine materialism into ethereal experiences. – Ed Halter, Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader (forthcoming)

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have exhibited their solo and collaborative performances and installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), P.S.1 MoMA (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Diapason Gallery (NY), Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (Houston), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa), Robischon Gallery (Denver), ICA (London), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Peter Kilchmann Gallery (Zurich), Viennale (Vienna), KW (Berlin), Hartware Medien Kunst Verein (Dortmund), TENT. (Rotterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Museu do Chiado (Portugal), RIXC (Latvia), Image Forum (Tokyo), Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee). Their work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Museum of Contemporary Cinema Foundation (Paris), as well as numerous private collections. Gibson and Recoder are based in New York City.

OLIVIA BLOCK is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. Her recorded work seeks to introduce and ultimately reconcile nature with artifice in the realms of music and sound. In the process, "organic" sound becomes subtly processed, digitized, and abstracted; "inorganic" sound becomes self-replicating and animate; and "musical" elements such as chamber instruments are defamiliarized from their traditional associations, freeing them to participate in the larger aesthetic possibilities of sound. Block works with recorded media, chamber ensembles, video, and site specific sound installations.

She has performed throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours and festivals including Dissonanze, Archipel, Angelica, Outer Ear, and many others. She has completed residencies at Mills College of Music and The Berklee College of Music and has taught master classes at several additional universities.

Block has created sound installations for public sites and exhibition spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the library at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the Lincoln Conservatory Fern Room in Chicago, and at the "Echoes Through the Mountains" exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.

She has also published recordings through Sedimental and Cut.

Sean Meehan became musically active in the late 80's at the Amica Bunker Series for improvised music which was then housed at ABC No Rio in New York City.

Current performances generally find Meehan playing only the snare drum in a manner that sheds conventional usage and reconstructs the conception and function of the instrument. Concert activities, both at home and away, are generally divided between playing in conventional settings for experimental music and in seeking out unique locations that are often in the unwatched and unconsidered corners of the city.

Meehan's recordings document some of his collaborations including work with Sachiko M; Mamoru Fujieda and Michihiro Sato; Edwin Torres and Muigel Algarin; and Tamio Shiraishi. Other contributions to the material world include the construction of performance objects that serve as "compositional things". Included in this are the pieces gift iii which musically activated a sink full of dishes; gift iv for woodblock; and audio, a boxed set of four cassettes to be played in the mind.

Sectors(for Constant) is a work for cymbals with snare drum. It is something of an homage to Constant Nieuwenhuys, one of the founders of the Situationist International and the creator of New Babylon, an ambitious architectural model for a new city and a new life. As this recording was being mastered Meehan came across a current interview with Constant where he claimed that everyday, at the age of 85, to go to the studio and paint and play the cymbals....

Michel Doneda is a rare and, through his far-flung travels, an atypical musician. Since the eighties, that is, after twenty years of European improvised music had already past, Doneda began to open a new path without precedent on the soprano saxophone. Throughout these years he has been his search has been evolving, multiplying his experiences with musicians, dancers, poets, and artists of all continents. From his travels in Africa, South America, during his trips to Japan, Asia and throughout Europe, he developed a nomadic approach, outside the common path of improvisation. Traversing the continents, all the while open to the diversity of musical experience, has made his voice unique and thoroughly contemporary.

Doneda is well-known in Europe for his performances, often at open-air and unusual interior sites. He is a frequent collaborator with Le Quan Ninh, percussionist, who lives not far from him in Toulouse, and organizes concerts with dancers and actors. He has also recorded extensively, thirty cd's and records, the latest one with Boston soprano sax player Bhob Rainey. He has toured in the US with Jack Wright, with whom he played in Toulouse in fall, 2002, on the East Coast in spring 2003, and again fall 2003, where they both performed at the High Zero Festival in Baltimore.

Michel Doneda has been involved with music since he was 15 years old in the Harmonie Municipale and through playing in several dance bands; his first instrument was the alto saxophone. In 1980, in Toulouse, he created the reeds trio 'Hic et Nunc' with Steve Robbins and Didier Masmalet and, in collaboration with Théâtre de l'Acte, began l'lnstitut de Recherches et d'Echanges Artistiques (I.R.E.A.) comprising actors, poets, and musicians all interested in the possibilities of improvisation. At the same time, he played with the musicians of the collective G.R.I.M. in Marseille as well as the 'Tour de France' organised by Louis Sclavis. There, he met the singer Beñat Achiary with whom he has continued his musical relationship to the present day. Exchanges and meetings increased via the festival of Chantenay-Villedieu and the nato label: meetings with Fred Van Hove, Raymond Boni, Steve Beresford, Tony Hymas, Lol Coxhill, Joêlle Léandre, Phil Wachsman, John Zorn and Ravi Prasad, among others.

In 1986, Michel Doneda worked with the 'Compagnie du Hasard' and toured Poland, Spain, South America and Hungary; it was from the tour of Poland that the trio of Daunik Lazro / Lê Quan Ninh / Michel Doneda was formed and they have since given concerts in Europe and Canada. Between 1986 and 1990, Doneda formed a trio with the violinist Alexander Balanescu and Beñat Achiary, and a quartet 'Terra' with Achiary, Lê Quan Ninh and Dominique Regef (hurdy-gurdy). Also in this period, he set up 'Le Grand Huit', improvisation music-theatre with the actor Michel Mathieu and Lê Quan Ninh, and the 'Diseurs de Musique' with the poet Serge Pey, Daunik Lazro and Lê Quan (premiered at Radio-France). Doneda's work with Lê Quan Ninh continues with the trio 'Soc' (Lê Quan, Regef, Michel Doneda) and Open Paper Tree (with Paul Rogers, doublebass).

In 1990, Doneda created the label Sonographica with percussionist and composer Alain Joule to investigate the possibilities of mixed media such as music, painting and literature; the first release on the label was Le Chameau d'Ispahan. The association with Joule has continued until the present, incorporating a radiophonic creation 'Voyage Sonore' in Provence-Côte d'Azur with the Groupe de Musique Electroacoustique d'Albi (G.M.E.A.), Barre Philipps, and the movie-director Robert Kramer; and in 1995 Doneda and Joule worked in a trio completed by Tetsu Saitoh (double bass). His work with Barre Philipps is similarly long-standing, incorporating a trio at the beginning of the 1990s; 'Voyage Sonore'; a 1994 European tour with Fifth Season: Barre Philipps's trio plus Kazue Sawai (kotos), Tetsu Saitoh, Martin Schütz (cello) and Hans Burgener (violin); and 1995 concerts in Calabra (Italy) in a trio completed by Sebi Tramontana (tb).

Other invovlements have included: a 1993 itinerant trip in Gabon to meet local musicians; the premiere of the trio Elliott Sharp/Jin Hi Kim/Michel Doneda at the festival 'Musique Action' in Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy; Dirty Leaves, a trio with Robert Dick (flutes) and Steve Robbins (saxes); Idiome 1238 with Dominique Répécaud (el. g), Olivier Paquotte (el. b), Daniel Koskowitz (dr), Jacques Debout (recycled records), Fabrice Charles (tb), Jean Pallandre (loud speakers) and Lê Quan Ninh; and Quanta with Mari Kimura (violin, computer), Jean Pallandre (tapes), Vincent Geais (mélissons), Marc Pichelin (analog synthesizer) and Lê Quan Ninh (percussion & computer).

Michel Doneda is a member of the Association La Flibuste engaged in the organisation and presentation of improvisation in relation to others art forms. The members of the Association La Flibuste are Lê Quan Ninh, Emmanuel Petit (g), Fabrice Charles (tb), Ly Thanh Tiên (actor/dancer), Isabelle Folliot (plastic artist), Vincent Geais, Marc Pichelin and Jean Pallandre (electroacoustic musicians), Frédérique Baritaud (painter), Béatrice Slasak (experimental cinema), Pascal Delhay (dancer), Ronald Curchod (graphic artist, painter), Philippe Besse (mathematician, violin) and Christian Monsarrat (video). Numerous mixed media performances have been organised since 1994. Association La Flibuste runs its own CD label - Poil - whose first release was Eclipses by Michel Doneda and Jean Pallandre.

"Doneda has spent the last two decades charting out an approach to the soprano sax that melds the elemental components of breath, microtonality, and extended techniques, with an acute attention to the interaction of sound, silence, and performance space. He distills his instrument down to the base parts; breath against reed, air vibrating along a metallic bore, keypads clattering against brass. He eschews linear arcs and emphatic conversational interactions. Instead he gradually choreographs a collective sound from microscopic gestures and the sonic extremes of skirling overtones and barely audible whispers... Every subtle shading and nuance is captured effectively, drawing the listener in to the fluidly evolving improvisation." -Michael Rosenstein, Signal to Noise, Fall 2003

Born in Kobe Japan 1970, raised in Osaka. He has resided in the USA since 1995 and now bases himself in New York where he is recognized as a key player in the improvised music scene. His elements of percussion instrument are Drum set based Orchestration percussion kit, Bowed Gong, Cymbal, Singing Bowls, Various sticks and Drum set. He stands between the MUSIC categories, genre and cultures, Experimental, Jazz, FreeJazz, Rock. Many voices come from his approach of creation. Besides live performances, he also provides sound and sound design for Television, Film, and collaborations with Dancers and visual artists.

Work in 2003 included: USA tour with Billy Bang Quintet featuring Frank Lowe. Sabir Mateen Ensemble, Solo tour in Europe and USA, Solo percussion performance at Bronx Museum in New York, Tour in Japan with Assif Tsahar, Performance at NY Butoh Festival, NY Vision Festival and AFUK festival in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Recipient of a New York, Bronx Art council individual artist grant.Also he has established the music and dance studio "H&H PRODUCTION" in South Bronx where he dispatches his music creations to the world.

"Discussing all that beauty would take more roses than would fill this space."
Current Ensemble Stu Vandermark, Cadence

"focused and resourceful" Cadence

"infallible intuition" and as "a brilliant percussion improvisor - he is capable of a wide range of sounds and qualities, and is always fully present, neither lagging behind nor rushing ahead. His work dances full of thought with an overall easy clarity and earthy groundedness." Maria Klein

"Nakatani's sparse punctuation suggests observance of esoteric ritual"
Julian Cowley, The Wire

"All this hits me like a vibrating temple of metal - a sense of vastness in a small room"
Eric Zinman

"Tatsuya is a creator of great sonic spaces-including silences that are overwhelmingly loud, silences that have a granite-like strength and weight" - Bob Falesch

Born Pittsburgh PA in 1942 and grew up around Philadelphia and Chicago. He began playing saxophone in 1952, with private instruction; meanwhile also singing in groups large and small through 1964. Attended Lafayette College in Easton PA, where he studied European History and literature and graduated 1964; Johns Hopkins University, MA, 1966; taught history at Temple U. 1968-72, after which he left the academic world. In this latter period he was involved in revolutionary politics, organizing on a community level.

In the late seventies he returned to music in earnest, and began playing free improvised music on the saxophone, and piano. He sought out partners in NY and the East Coast, then in 1983 began extensive tours in Europe, which continued until 1986. In the US his partners were Toshi Makihara, Jim Meneses, William Parker, Todd Whitman; in Europe he performed with Hannes Bauer, Joe Sachse, Wigald Boning, Lars Rudolph, Wittwulf Malik, Peter Hollinger, Bernhard Arndt, and Andreas Stehle, touring Germany, England, Switzerland and Italy. In 1984 he began touring the US, either as soloist or with his European partners, Roger Turner and Lars Rudolph, and an American dancer from Chicago, Bob Eisen. In this period of the eighties his music would be considered free jazz, very full and expressive. He was known for playing in places that had never been exposed to free improvisation, and encouraging young players everywhere, such that he was generally considered the "Johnny Appleseed" of N. American free improvisation.

In 1988 he moved to Boulder CO and got involved in painting and writing, yet continued to tour the US regularly. In the late nineties there was a resurgence of interest in non-idiomatic free improvisation in the US, especially coming from Boston, but increasingly throughout the country. In 2000 Wright did an extensive tour of the West Coast with Boston soprano saxophonist Bhob Rainey, and recorded with him in three different groups. His music became largely sound-oriented, using space, texture, and sustained tones, but always with a characteristic energy and musicality. He moved back to the East Coast in 2003 to be closer to his playing partners and now lives in Easton PA.

He has presented his music at most of the new improv festivals in the US: four years at High Zero in Baltimore, The Seattle Improv Festival, the SFALT Festival in the Bay Area, California, the Autumn Uprising in Boston, and the Improvised and Otherwise Festival in Brooklyn. In recent years he has renewed his label, Spring Garden Music, which presents his own music and that of his partners. He continues to seek out new partners, and recently returned to Europe to that end, performing with John Butcher, Tony Wren, John Russell, Birgit Uhler, Axel Doerner, Carl-Ludwig Huebsch, Thomas Lehn, LeQuan Ninh, and Michel Doneda. He also played privately with Tim Hodgkinson, Uli Phillipp, Wolfgang Schliemann, Martin Theurer, Andrea Neumann, Michael Griener, Sabine Vogel, and Phil Durrant, among others. He toured the U.S. with Michel Doneda in May and Sept. 2003, with Phil Durrant in Nov. 2003, and will tour with Griener and Vogel in May 2004.

A recent review in a German publication, Bad Alchemy, had this to say: "Wright does not make music, he embodies it, he transforms it with a naiveté of another order. It grows into a sound river, he is part of the diaphragm through which the heterogeneous whispers."