Category: Performances
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Ensemble 50:50 Octet – 13 April 2017
The Octet will follow Phil Morton’s score 50:50 that is – 50 % freeplay & 50% tacet, silence during the performance of a thirty minute piece.The content, the music, the musicians are driven by free improvisation in music. The improvisers are constrained by the score can the musicians brings a coherence, grace and power to…
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Richard Scott’s Lightning Ensemble – 9 March 2017
The Lighting Ensemble is Richard Scott’s UK-based hyper-interactive free improvising group with longtime collaborators and brilliant improvisers, Phillip Marks, drums and David Birchall, guitar, with Scott playing analogue modular synthesizer. Intricate, intimate, dynamic, molecular and often explosive music. Richard Scott and Phillip Marks first played together in Manchester’s Bark! in the 1990s (alongside Rex Casswell…
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Lee Allatson – 9 February 2017
Lee Allatson is a drum set player from Leicestershire, UK, specialising in free improvisation. His early percussive years included classical tuition and a keen interest in 1970’s film soundtracks – all fused within the cultural melting pot of Caribbean, Asian and Eastern European influences provided from a Leicester city education. Moving to vocals and electronics…
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NUStival – 28 January 2017
NUStival – a mini-festival of improvised music. Featuring selected groupings of: Mick Beck Cath Roberts Otto Willberg Ecka Mordecai Odie ji Ghast Rob Thorpe Geoff Bright Rodrigo Constanzo Anton Hunter and… A performance of John Zorn’s Cobra by the Noise Upstairs Workshop Group. Free entry. 7pm-11pm Sat 28 Jan Supported by Manchester Metropolitan University and…
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Hunter/Willberg/Ward – 12 January 2017
Acoustic post-post-truth improv trio featuring Manchester legend Johnny Hunter on drums, young experimentalist Otto Willberg on double bass and triple-doubler Tom Ward on reeds and winds. Inspired by the avant-garde, improvisation, jazz, rock, noise and more, the trio’s members have collaborated with many great improvisers including Steve Beresford, Adam Fairhall, Dave Birchall, Mark Hanslip, Hannah…
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Deemer – 8 December 2016
Deemer is a continuing conversation that is always inquisitive, searching and fresh. We are constantly shedding old skin, evolving and innovating. The brain-child of Merijn Royaards and Dee Byrne, Deemer started life in 2006 as a weekly improvisation/electronics session in a warehouse in Hackney Wick. The project has since evolved into an installation/performance based electro-acoustic…
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Instant Places – 10 November 2016
In their Instant Places projects Kavanaugh and Birse use hardware/software systems of their own design to present generative installations and performances.They began making performances and installations as a team in 1997, and from 1997 to 2002 traveled throughout Canada and Europe, making installation and performance works for festival venues and art galleries. Highlights from that…
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Barrington Brook – 13 October 2016
Barrington Brook and Gabriel Williams are a duo whose music occupies the boundaries between free improvisation, post-rock, folk and 20th century classical music. They met at university and started playing together after discovering a mutual appreciation of Derek Bailey, but move past his influence to explore further possibilities when improvising on the guitar. Who Barrington…
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Sound Quartet – 8 September 2016
SQ (aka Sound Quartet) is imaginary soundscapes, electronic experimentalism, composed impro art of electrified sounds and images. SQ often tour as a duo with multi-instrumentalists Paul Pignon and Thomas Bjelkeborn. SQ is currently involved in music projects with Nadia Ratsimandrecy(FR) and experimental research at SOPI Helsingfors with Koray Tahiroglu(T). www.sound quartet.se Thomas Bjelkeborn is a sound…
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Shelly Knotts & Anton Hunter – 11 August 2016
Monthly improvisation jam session with special guest set this month from Shelly Knotts (laptop) and Anton Hunter (guitar). Shelly Knotts produces live-coded and network music performances and projects which explore aspects of code, data and collaboration. Her experimental and collaborative tendencies have seen her engage with diverse musical practices and styles ranging from electroacoustic tape…
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Wolf Scarers – 14 July 2016
Wolfscarers are Simon Prince and Keith Jafrate. They’ve known each other for years but never played together until, after appearing on the same bill at Huddersfield’s Inclusive Improv in 2011, it occurred to Simon to suggest some duets, and Wolfscarers emerged. Since then they’ve experimented with various line-ups, the largest being a quintet, but for…
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Space Food – 9 June 2016
Noise Upstairs Is Nine Years Old! Come celebrate with Space Food! Space Food is a new group in which three fine Manchester improvisers take on the format of the traditional organ trio; Adam Fairhall on organ, Johnny Hunter on drums and Dave Birchall on guitar. The organ trio is still a rarity in free…
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Otto Willberg – 12 May 2016
Otto is a composer and improviser with an open attitude towards the possibilities of what music can and should be. Heregularly performs with the likes of THF Drenching, Odie Ji Ghast, Sam Andreae, Birchall/Cheetham/Webster/Willberg and Human Heads, amongst others. www.ottowillberg.com Who Otto Willberg – 12 May 2016 When Thursday, May 12, 2016 8:00pm – All Ages…
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Jorge Boehringer – 14 April 2016
Jorge Boehringer is an composer, artist, musician, and researcher exploring large scale landscapes, microscopic layers of process and form and how they interact with perceptual experience. Utilizing a protean platform for experimentation and presentation, Boehringer creates performances, recordings, music, installations, texts, three-dimensional objects, and visual phenomena. Inspired by, and at times modeled after observed environmental…
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Richard Craig – 10 March 2016
Richard Craig is a performer of contemporary music and improvisation, performing with groups such as ELISION, Musikfabrik, Klangforum Wien and Das Experimentalstudio ensemble, which has taken him to international festivals in Europe. Recent projects include Rodrigo Constanzo’s DFS score, performing in the Manchester Jazz Festival. In September 2015 he was appointed Head of Performance at…
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Coates/Hanslip/Hunter/Simpson – 11 February 2016
This month’s special guest act is a brand new quartet, bringing together familar Noise Upstairs faces with those from slightly further afield. Bruce Coates & Mark Hanslip – saxophones Anton Hunter & Ian Simpson – guitars Bruce is a saxophonist who has performed and recorded with some of the world’s top improvisers including Paul Dunmall,…
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L’Ocelle Mare + Kelly Jayne Jones/Jon Collin Duo + Katz Mulk – 12 February 2016
L’OCELLE MARE Visiting from France Thomas Bonvalent creates amazing musical structures using banjoguitar, feet (special shoes), objects (tuning forks, inside of harmonics, metronomes, others…) and close micing combined with intimate knowledge of the extremes of his amplification system. Its really a wonderful thing to hear. https://ocellemare.bandcamp.com/ KELLY JAYNE JONES/JON COLLIN St margos is going to…
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Space Food – 14 January 2016
Space Food is a new group in which three fine Manchester improvisers take on the format of the traditional organ trio; Adam Fairhall on organ, Johnny Hunter on drums and Dave Birchall on guitar. The organ trio is still a rarity in free improvisation, despite the rich timbral possibilties of the instrumentation. Space Food exploit…
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Rachel Margetts / Greta Buituke – 10 December 2015
Rachel Margetts and Greta Buitkute are “Body Marx”. Body Marx explores the absurd tensions of music making. Loosely structured songs and structured improvisation form the basis of experimentation with video and performance. Body Marx’s works often tackle forgotten or hidden contexts, in the process often loosing themselves in it’s own concerns.Listen on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bbodymarxDig deeper: Rachel Margetts Art https://soundcloud.com/reading-my-eyes Who Rachel…
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Some Some Unicorn – 12 November 2015
Some Some Unicorn Some Some Unicorn is an experiment in communal music making led by Shaun Blezard. Working on the border of composition and improvisation the collective draws together artists from the fields of improv, electronics, jazz, poetry and popular music. After a well received album, Some Some Unicorn and The Golden Periphery, it is…