Concert + Talk in English
John Butcher: saxophones
Mark Wastell: percussion
Luigi Marino: percussion, electronics
Moderation: Mathias Maschat
To open the Symposium: Musicians’ Perspectives on Improvisation, the trio John Butcher/ Mark Wastell/ Luigi Marino will be guest in exploratorium’s Sound & Lecture series. Coming from a practical background, all three have made notable contributions to thinking about improvisation, be it through articles, book publications, record production or doctoral theses. They will perform as a trio and discuss their specific ideas about improvisation with Denkraum host Mathias Maschat.
John Butcher, Mark Wastell and Luigi Marino first met as a trio in the chapel of St. Margaret House in Bethnal Green, London. Mark Wastell and Luigi Marino had begun a prolific collaboration in 2018, first in Mark Wastell’s large ensemble The Seen and later as a parallel duo, focusing on the resonances of metal instruments and a shared sense of time. After the pandemic, the duo began a series of concerts, each featuring a special guest. The first guest was world-renowned saxophonist John Butcher. In the small chapel, surrounded by the metal instruments, he began to explore the resonant frequencies of the metals, stimulating the surfaces of the objects with the sound waves produced by the saxophone, creating a link between his long-standing interest in resonant spaces and the sound of the percussion duo. The meeting became a trio, and since then they have adopted open forms that allow the objects and their resonances to participate in the improvisation.
John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands. After publishing a PH.D (1982) in quantum chromodynamics, Butcher left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades. He has received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers.
Mark Wastell is a versatile improvising musician who has played a central role in the British improvised music scene for over a quarter of a century. He has performed and recorded extensively with countless musicians from the improvised music scene and has performed at many international festivals and toured extensively throughout the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, Scandinavia, America and the Far East. His recording output to date exceeds forty-five published releases on a variety of labels. Mark Wastell also curates Confront Recordings.
Luigi Marino is a musician based in Bristol. His work focuses on networks able to display relationships between human and nonhuman actors, and especially on how intuitive decisions can derail a pre-existing order. He is an active improvisor performing on both electronic media and percussion, in particular zarb and bowed custom cymbals extended with DIY portable circuits. 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.
John Butcher / Mark Wastell / Luigi Marino @ The Cube, Bristol
Admission: 15/12/6 € (normal price/reduced/Berlin-Pass)
19.00 soundwalk with Thomas Gerwin
Recording: https://youtube.com/live/9eP5ylHy6vg
© top left: Ariele Monti, top right: Tara Darby, bottom: Monica Pittaluga
