Space is the Place: John Butcher lecture and solo + Moor & Kyriakides

Tuesday, June 30, masterclass at 16h, concerts at 20:30, lecture € 12, concerts € 12, both € 18

A masterclass and solo set by the great John Butcher and a concert by Andy Moor & Yannis Kyriakides. John Pastinaak provides the food.

JOHN BUTCHER lecture The Geometry of Sentiment
An illustrated talk drawing on a lifetime pursuing the possibilities of the saxophone within collaborations and solo works.
About sticking to one instrument and staying yourself whilst seeking the flexibility to improvise with others.
About keeping solo playing fresh and engaging with a sense of place.
About working in extreme acoustics and unusual locations.
About making “new” sound part of a language, not a demonstration.

Send an e-mail to jazz@cafederuimte.nl to make a reservation if you’d like to join.

JOHN BUTCHER solo
John Butcher – reeds

John Butcher’s work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics.

Originally a physicist, he left academia in ’82, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians – inc. Derek Bailey, John Tilbury, John Stevens, The EX, Gerry Hemingway, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, John Edwards, Toshi Nakamura, Paul Lovens, Eddie Prevost, Mark Sanders, Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide, Phil Minton, and Andy Moor.

He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of place. Resonant Spaces (’06) is a collection of site-specific performances collected during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands. His first solo CD, Thirteen Friendly Numbers (’91), includes compositions for multitracked saxophones, whilst later releases focus on live performance, composition, amplification and saxophone-controlled feedback.

In 2011 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists. HCMF has twice commissioned him to compose for his own large ensembles. Other commissions include Elision (Australia), the Rova (USA) & Quasar (Canada) Saxophone Quartets, reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori (USA), and, most recently “Tarab Cuts” (based on pre-WWII Arabic recordings).

Recent collaborative projects include The Apophonics with Gino Robair and John Edwards and Anemone with trumpeter Peter Evans.
Butcher values playing in occasional encounters – ranging from large groups such as Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper and The Ex Orchestra, to duo concerts with David Toop, Kevin Drumm, Thomas Lehn, Fred Frith, Okkyung Lee, Matthew Shipp and Akio Suzuki.

ANDY MOOR & YANNIS KYRIAKIDES
Andy Moor – guitar
Yannis Kyriakides – electronics

Coming from very different backgrounds, Moor and Kyriakides each take their own distinctive take on music to the genre of Rebetiko, Greek folk music.

Andy Moor (born 1962) began his musical life in Edinburgh, Scotland playing guitar with Dog Faced Hermans, a eclectic group that mixed post-punk energy with traditional tunes and improvisations. In 1990 he moved to the Netherlands after an invitation to join Dutch band The Ex. In 1995 he began another group, Kletka Red with Tony Buck Joe Williamson and Leonid Soybelman, fusing traditional klezmer, Greek and Russian songs with their own styles of playing.

Moor’s own background is rooted in the post-punk Britain of the 1980s, but in more recent years he has collaborated with many musicians from varied backgrounds and disciplines. Many of these collaborations are duos, with amongst others Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides with whom he performs a set of rebetika songs (urban Greek tunes from the 1920s and 1930s), French sound poet Anne James Chaton, ex bass player from Dog Faced Hermans Colin Mclean, who now works with electronic music and live sampling, Brooklyn-based DJ, producer and writer DJ /rupture, and Lebanese Paris-based saxophonist Christine Abdelnour. He has also begun composing soundtracks for films working with Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi and US experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen. His latest projects include a quartet with Ken Vandermark, Terrie Ex and Paal Nilssen-Love called Lean Left, a trio with Berlin based artists and musician Alva Noto and Anne James Chaton called Decade, and a trio project with Anne James Chaton and Thurston Moore called Heretics. In 2013 he began a duo project with John Butcher. Moor lives in Amsterdam at present and continues to be a full-time member of The Ex.

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 and in 1975 emigrated with his family to Britain. After travelling for a year with his violin in the near east, learning traditional music, he returned to England to study musicology at York University, later being drawn by the music of Louis Andriessen to move to The Netherlands, with whom he studied under at the Hague Conservatory. At that time he also had the inspiring opportunity to collaborate as composer on three projects with the maverick conceptual sound artist Dick Raaijmaakers.

As a composer and sound artist he strives to create new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and exploring spatial and temporal experience. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media. The sensory space where music happens is a particular preoccupation, and for this end a way of bypassing the conventional structures of how music is presented is sought. The question as to what music is actually communicating is also a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between music and language. This has resulted in many pieces that utilize video text with music.