Mike Adcock

Photo by Seán Kelly

Mike Adcock’s music embraces both composition and improvisation. He has made numerous solo, duet and band recordings including three with Accordions Go Crazy, ‘Lost for words’, ‘Moment of discovery’, ‘Sleep it off’ (with Clive Bell), ‘In the case of darkness’, ‘Reduced’ (with Sylvia Hallett), ‘Accord’, ‘Wanderlust’ and ‘Risky furniture’ (with Paul Jolly).

Faradena Afifi

Photo by Seán Kelly

Faradena Afifi: Founder of The Noisy Women Present, and The Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra, Fara is also an Initiator, Connector and Performer. Faradena is a person with neurodiversity who has mixed Afghan/British heritage. She is a T’ai Chi Chuan practitioner/instructor, folk singer and improvising community musician who plays bowed string instruments, piano and percussion. She also specialises in healing music and T’ai Chi-based exercises for people with learning differences and brain injuries/conditions.

Steve Beresford

Photo by Seán Kelly

Steve is a British musician who graduated from the University of York. He has played a variety of instruments, including piano, electronics, trumpet, euphonium, bass guitar and a wide variety of toy instruments, such as the toy piano. He has also played a wide range of music. He is probably best known for free improvisation, but has also written music for film and television and has been involved with a number of pop music groups.

John Bisset

Photo by Seán Kelly

Guitarist, vocalist, improviser and composer, organiser of structures for improvising within (Relay), and film maker.

Adam Bohman

Photo by Seán Kelly

Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of underground music for decades. Working with home-built instruments, found objects, tape cut-ups, collages, ink drawings and graphic scores. Favouring acoustic sounds over electronics, he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments and objects. He is a member of British experimental groups, Morphogenesis, The Bohman Brothers, Secluded Bronte, and The London Improvisers Orchestra. Adam’s music is unique and experimental, incorporating Fluxus japery, musique concrete, sound poetry and free improvisation.

Sarah Gail Brand

Photo by Seán Kelly

Described by The Wire magazine as “the most exciting trombone player for years” Sarah Gail Brand has recorded and performed on the international Improvised Music and Jazz scene since the early 1990s with Mark Sanders, John Edwards, Elton Dean, Evan Parker, Phil Minton, Veryan Weston, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nicols, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Beresford, Georg Graewe, writer and comedian Stewart Lee and countless others.

Mark Browne

Mark Browne is a saxophonic symbolic system of soprano and sopranino. His metaphor exists in the terrible deaths of dog-toys, cockpit, Cockshill, Coxhill music Bohman, Bohman, Crow. In the fetishisation of vibrations on copper. His instruments are coerced in a sault-somer of malapert systems. He works within a fine power-mesh that destroys the puritanicaldynamics of accepted sound. A fanatic of disaster. A fastidious amateur of grief. He destabilises both the physical and psychological through his art.

John Butcher

Photo by Seán Kelly

Born in Brighton and living in London, 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.

Lawrence Casserley

Photo by Seán Kelly

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.

Viv Corringham

Viv Corringham (voice) is a US based British vocalist and sound artist, who has been described as “a vital force in improvised music since the late 1970s” (Corey Mwamba, BBC Radio 3).

She has been cutting her own distinctive path ranging across free improvisation, Greek Rembetika, soundscapes and spontaneously created songs. Work includes concerts, soundwalks, workshops and installations. She is a certified teacher of Deep Listening, having studied with composer Pauline Oliveros, and holds an MA in Sonic Art from Middlesex University, London.