Aaron Dilloway

Dilloway has been releasing and recording music since the age of 16, emerging from Michigan's free-music underground as a member of seminal noise bands Galen, Couch, and Universal Indians. From early on his label 'Hanson Records' has documented the scene, releasing a multitude of cassettes, lathe cut records, one sided vinyl and CD-R's that are subcultural art objects in themselves. Dilloway co-founded the original 'Wolf Eyes' line up in 1999, bringing to the mix distorted guitar, horns, tape manipulation and a contact mic firmly embedded in his mouth. He quit after six years, travelling to Nepal, roaming the streets and valleys recording sounds, street musicians, snake charmers, short wave signals, speeches. Recent releases include collaboration with Spencer Yeh and a looped refiguring of Bobby Beausoleil's 'Lucifer Rising' soundtrack.

Hanson Records

Skaters

Leslie Keffer

When Leslie Keffer lived in Athens, Ohio she was asked about the noise scene there. 'You're looking at it', she responded. Keffer may not come from one of the hotbeds of experimental sound but her musical creations have been creating a subtle but insistent word-of-mouth buzz. 'Keffer is an architect of static, sculpting waves that ebb and flow, buoying floating artefacts of her own voice and, live, sampling her immediate surrounds -  it's amazing how cozy such jagged music can be.' Adam Strohm / Fakejazz

Leslie Keffer

Adam Bohman / Dylan Nyoukis / Ali Robertson

For years Adam Bohman would be a (or 'the') regular at London Musician Collective events, usually in the front row with a cassette recorder in his lap. The recorder soon became part of Bohman's own creative process, producing extraordinary tapes, performances and poignant/strange/funny audio diaries, his voice often abstracted by the constant sound of the pause button being turned on and off. Today he is a pivotal figure on the London improv circuit, often seen meticulously coxing minute tendrils of sound out of an electrified flea market of devices. Bohman is half of the Bohman Brothers and founder member of Morphogenesis.

Early in the '90s Nyoukis and sister Dora Doll formed Prick Decay / Decaer Pinga self-releasing reams of tape junk and sound poetry that Dora described as 'shit no one likes or cares about'. After a move to Brighton Nyoukis and Karen Constance formed Blood Stereo and Ceylon Mange taking lo-fo exploratory sound to new levels of avant-wrongness. Nyoukis runs Chocolate Monk, an imprint that has released an almost unquantifiable number of cassettes, vinyl and CD-Rs from the outsider/primitivist spectrum. Recent live collaborations have spawned vinyl releases with Jaap Blonk and Ludo Mich

Ali Robertson is one half of Edinburghs miniscule improv duo Usurper, and runs the label Giant Tank. His live performances consists of an array of junk and broken instruments played via contact mics, with a heavy dose of free vocals thrown in for bad measure.

The Bohman Brothers

Blood Stereo

Usurper

Helhesten

A three-headed sonic blitz featuring the talents of Hannah Ellul, Ben Knight and Greg Thomas. Employing clarinet, beat-up guitar, effected-voice and a variety of percussion, Helhesten craft a flux of soaring and swamped-out sounds. Whether in the throes of a frenzied onslaught or an equally ravaged accumulating pastoral jam, they never escape the tranced-out web, which pulls them together as much as it holds them apart.

Helhesten

Core of the Coalman

The solo project of Jorge Boehringer, an electro-acoustic musician, composer, sound designer and installation artist based in San Francisco. 'Core...' consists of noise and music for viola, voice and circuitry. While experimental in nature, this project has have shared the stage with everything from rock bands (like Ovo and Deerhoof) to power electronics to contemporary composers and performers as diverse as Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Ikue Mori, and Ramon Sender.

Core of the Coalman

Helm

Helm is the solo project of Luke Younger of the London / Berlin feedback duo Birds of Delay and guitarist for Spin Spin The Dogs. Helm draws equally upon noise and ambient elements utilizing synths, feedback systems and effects.

Rat Bastard

Reines D'Angleterre
(Ghedalia Tazartes / Jo Tanz / él-g)

Tazartes' incredible recordings are finally being re-issued, though, to the English speaking world at least, he remains an enigma. Born in Paris in 1947, Tazartes started singing when he was 12 years old, soon after his grand-mother died. Singing alone, hidden in the forest of Bois de Vincennes, Tazartes developed a vocal style that can slip between different personas, ethnicities, even species - wailing like a child, howling like an animal, blurring the boundaries of Arabic and French language. Using disjunctive collages of sounds, primitive drum machines, droning keyboards, Tazartes recordings are true auteur creations cemented with logic of their own. Tonight 'Reines d'Angleterre' has more than one knife in his boot - there's also Jo Tanz one half of Placenta-Popeye and Tanzprocesz label boss, and on mandolin beats it's él-g - 'the lyrical pussy-man of multi-level moods, a rat-Hazzlewood of laboratory'.

Limpe Fuchs

Forming 'Anima' in the late '60s, Fuchs became a major influence on West Germany's burgeoning 'Krautrock' scene. Anima's anarchic recordings were radical, atonal improvisations using unconventional instrumentation and unstructured performances - most notorious of which was a six month tour by stage pulling tractor. Their 1972 release "Musik Fur Alle" is still a high landmark in Germanic freeform creativity. In her solo career Fuchs has continued exploring music as part of everyday life holding true to her approach of 'no formalisms, no explanations'. In Fuchs' unique performances she freely walks between her self-built instruments, evoking landscapes of sound with ballaststrings, tubedrums and kettledrum, four meters lithophon, wooden horn, metal sheets, violin and her own voice, which she uses like that of birds.

Limpe Fuchs

In Camera

In Camera formed in 2003 out of a twenty year dialogue between Christoph Heemann and Timo van Luijk. Heemann was a founding member of '80s noise-collage project Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa (HNAS), releasing a string of bizarre, dada-inspired recordings on their own label DOM Records. Heemann released his first solo work in the early '90s marking a move toward a subtler psychedelic minimalism. Within a decade he founded the Steamline label and embarked on collaborations with amongst others Chicago guitarist Jim O'Rourke, Current 93's David Tibet, Steven Stapleton, Merzbow, Tony Conrad, Organum and Andrew Chalk.

Vibracathedral Orchestra

Skullflower

Paul Hession / Biggi Vinkeloe / Sami Pekkola

Biggi Vinkeloe
Based in Sweden, Vinkeloe is an alto saxophone and flute player of immense energy and creativity. She studied in France throughout the '70s and '80s developing a strong idiosyncratic style of her own. Vinkeloe made her first impact in 1988 playing with legendary pianist Cecil Taylor and has since worked with a variety of the finest improv musicians in Europe and the U.S.

Sami Pekkola is a one of the most active free-jazz saxophonist on the Finnish underground scene - a member of Hetero Skeleton and Taco Bells and collaborator with, amongst many others Avarus and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Recently he has completed projects with stage-director Esa Kirkkopelto and painter Mikko Myöhänen.

Charlie Draheim

Mark Durgan

'In 2006 after 20 years of releases and tours under the auspices of Putrefier, Mark Durgan has emerged from the chaos bloodied but not unbowed.... From the debris of scrap metal and electronics, he decided to take a step back and dust himself off. Throw in some much needed silence, sit down to a table of automated chirping and fizzing sound devices and whip-up a dizzying array of re-wired environmental electro-acoustics, sub-sonic rumble and of course birdsong.

Datashock

German neo-hippie-spook-folk collective with no fixed line-up, a policy, which suits their without-portfolio sound down to the ground. Datashock strays away from the instrumental template towards a more shamanic (and shambolic) conjuring of ancestral voices from an array of junk electronics, effects pedals and DIY tape manipulation rigs.

Datashock

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Thurston Moore / Chris Corsano / Bill Nace

After a brief stint as part of Glenn Branca's massed, peak-volume guitars symphonies, Moore with Lee Ronaldo and Kim Gordon founded NY no-wave trailblazers Sonic Youth in 1981, their assimilation of dissonance, guitar detunings and song writing structure influencing a generation of bands to follow.

By the '90s Moore was embarked on solo projects and forging links with free-jazz musicians such as Tom Surgal, Nels Cline and Loren Mazzacane. Through his own labels Ecstatic Yod and Ecstatic Peace he began collaborating with an emergent home-spun network of musicians and artists operating on the fringes of improvisation, freely blurring genres like noise and free folk. To confound things further Moore's latest solo venture 'Trees Outside the Academy' goes acoustic giving his lyrical verve the latitude it deserves.

Equally at home with kinetic explosions of energy and concentrated near-silence Chris Corsano is one of the most talented and prolific drummers around. Moving from the USA to Edinburgh in 2005 Corsano focused on developing an expanded solo percussion music of his own, incorporating sax reeds, violin strings and bows, pot lids, adhesive tape and other household devices into his drumkit. Loose-limbed, intense, even melodic, he exposes the audience to sounds and rhythms that seem to defy physical boundaries.

Koichi Makigami

A master of every conceivable vocal technique, Makigami Koichi merges the avant-garde with Tuuvan throat singing, cartoon music, Japanese traditional music and more. His strong background in theatre extends from his early involvement in 'Tokyo Kid Brothers' - a visionary, acid tinged dance troupe of actors, musicians, strategists and self-proclaimed shamen. Along with performing and directing his own company, Ulysses, he is also leader/vocalist/theremin/mouth harp player for long running avant-rock band Hikahu. Koichi has performed with Derek Bairy, Phil Minton, David Moss, Lauren Newton, Haino Keiji and many others.

Makigami Vocal World

Lionel Marchetti / Yoko Higashi

Born in France in 1967, Marchetti is a self taught composer and one of the worlds most renowned contemporary purveyors of musique concrete. Working in the studios of CFMI (Lyon) and GRM (Paris), Marchetti has released a series of acclaimed compositions that combine documentary recordings, music and narrative, crafted to activate the imagination of the listener. In the mid '90s he began a series of live collaborations, taking electroacoustic music out of the studio and into the realm of free improvisation.

Yoko Higashi began her career as a dancer and choreographer in Tokyo before initiating a series of vocal based experimental projects in France. She is behind HamaYôko - an electro-pop-experimental solo venture whose recordings can leap from the sound of bouncing ping pong balls to adhesive tape to Kabuki like vocalising to Higashi singing, reciting and screaming. 

Albatre

Marchetti / Higashi Performance extract

Neil Campbell / Karl Bauer

Active in the UK exploratory/noise scene before anyone figured it existed, Campbell was among the first to initiate a post punk/DIY aesthetic that drew on free jazz, improvisation and Le Monte Young's 'eternal tone'. Member of the 'A Band', co-founder of 'Vibracathedral Orchestra' and collaborator on countless recordings, Campbell's latest solo project is Astral Social Club - according to Dusted magazine 'the purest expression of his art of the ecstatic'.  

Pigs In The Ground

Originally called Runny Dumplings, their first show was in Portland 2005 as a quartet with Ju Suk Reet Meate and Oblivia from Smegma. Inspired by the work of NecroSearch Society of Colorado, more commonly known as 'the Pig People' - forensic pathologists who bury swine corpses and study the results to discern the whereabouts of clandestine graves -their music gives aural life to the ideas behind a cavalcade of scientific formalities and morbid absurdities. Debut 'Serum Feast' is a collection of scorched electronics - ‘'an atmospheric feast of dark, distorted doom, wrapped in a cavernous cyst…the smoldering catacombs of dissolution.' This is there first UK appearance.

Dave Phillips & G*Park

The duo are both members of the loose constellation that is Switzerland's 'schimpfluch-gruppe' (or 'schimpfluch-commune int) a sound/performance art collective with roots in Viennese Actionism.

Dave Phillips co-founded short-lived, hardcore 'Fear of God' in the late '80s. His subsequent solo work led to experiments with voice, body and concrete sounds - a tour of South-East Asia's jungles prompting his current interests in the recording of nature, insects, amphibians and water.

Black to Comm

Once the solo project of Marc Richter, the Hamburg based head of the Dekorder label, BTC have morphed into a trio for live events. Taking the name from proto-punks MC5's most audaciously freakout track, Black To Comm's inhabit a vigorous deep drone space in the vein of Klaus Schultze at his minimal, minor-chord best. Their recent release "Fractal Hair Geometry" is their most refined and original work to date transforming spacious recordings of vintage chuch organs, mellotron, violin and voice into dense harmonic sound clusters.

Muscletusk

The Edinburgh Quartet have slowly disengaged from their original 'rock' set up to create something far more complex and compelling, utilising an array of electronics, vocals, tapes and other instrumentation to head on out. Heavily smoked out sounds played loud.

Weirding Vessel

Vole

First found in the english squat scene, vole, a varying ensemble of musicians have been described as 'lunar'.

Vole

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