Lawrence Casserley (born UK, 1941) has devoted his professional career, as composer, conductor and performer, to real time electroacoustic music. He is best known for his work in free improvised music, particularly real-time processing of other musicians’ sound, and he has devised a special computer processing instrument for this work. He has worked with many of the finest improvisers, particularly Evan Parker, with whom he works frequently as a duo partner, in various larger groupings and in the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. He also works as a soloist, processing sounds from voice, percussion and home-made instruments. CDs have been released by ECM, Konnex, Leo Records, Psi, Sargasso and Touch. Casserley’s “instrumental” approach to live computer sound processing is the hallmark of his work; the Signal Processing Instrument allows him to use physical gestures to control the processing and to direct the morphology of the sounds. This is the culmination of forty years of experience in the performance of live electronic work; his earliest live electronic pieces were performed in 1969, and he has performed many of the live electronic “classics” of the 20th century; he has also collaborated with other composers to realise their electronic performance ideas. He is noted for the breadth and variety of his collaborations, which cross styles and generations.
Adam Linson is a double bassist, improvisor, and composer, who also designs, develops, and peforms with real-time interactive computer music systems. He performs regularly on the double bass, acoustically and with live electronics, as a soloist and in a wide variety of ensembles. Born in Los Angeles, he has been active on the double bass and with information technology since age 11. He studied music under George Lewis and Bertram Turetzky at the University of California, San Diego, where he performed jazz, improvised, and twentieth-century orchestral music, and completed a BA in philosophy. From 1999-2009 he was based in Berlin, Germany, where he began working in diverse improvising ensembles in Europe and North America, and also began his sustained involvement with interactive computer music. He has composed music for international contemporary dance productions, and had two residencies at STEIM, Amsterdam. Since 2010 he divides his time between Canada and the UK. Notable guest performances include concerts in Paris and Brussels as part of the Evan Parker Trio with Paul Lytton, and in Berlin with the Alexander von Schlippenbach Trio featuring Parker and Paul Lovens. He can be heard on solo, duet, and (forthcoming) quartet albums on psi, with the John Butcher Group on Weight of Wax, and with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble on ECM.
Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a small timber and fishing community near the mouth of the Columbia River. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father at the age of 13. After schooling at the University of Oregon and University of Denver and informal studies with Ron Miles, Art Lande and Jack Wright, he moved to Jersey City, New Jersey in the spring of 2001. Since his arrival in New York, Nate has become a much sought after sideman in jazz, experimental music, new music, dance and rock circles, working regularly with artists as diverse as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Paul Lytton, Evan Parker, Akron Family, David Grubbs, C. Spencer Yeh, Chris Corsano, Mary Halvorson, and Taylor Ho Bynum. He has also become one of the small handful of American trumpet players, along with Greg Kelley and Peter Evans present on the international music scene pushing beyond the physical boundaries of the instrument through deconstruction of the instrument itself and its historical context. His solo work stands side by side with both Evans and Kelley (as well as European’s Axel Dorner and Franz Hautzinger among others) in a growing canon of early 21st century experimental trumpet music.
Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist/improviser/composer/singer/guitarist/electronic-musician. An active and versatile performer, she has been performing and composing since the mid-90’s using her custom Max/MSP programming for sound processing of voice and other instruments. She co-leads the digital chamber punk ensemble, What is it Like to be a Bat with Kitty Brazelton (
http://www.whatbat.org) and has collaborated / performed with many experimental musicians and video artists, such as Lukas Ligeti, David First, Chuck Bettis, Joshua Fried, Ras Moshe, Alexander Waterman, Kathleen Supové and Hans Tammen, Benton-C Bainbridge and Angie Eng among others, and is a member of Magic Names vocal ensemble championing the vocal work of Stockhausen.
Hans Tammen creates music that has been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating sounds, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions, but also quiet pulses and barely audible noises – through means of his ENDANGERED GUITAR and interactive software programming, by working with the room itself, and, as a critic observed, with his “…fingers stuck in a high voltage outlet”. Signal To Noise called his works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, All Music Guide recommended him: “…clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s.”