MeloTierratic Encounters (2017 Edition)
Mon 23 Oct 6PM – Workshop | 8:30PM – Concert – Buy Tickets
£12 workshop & concert; £10/7 concert only; £5 workshop only
MeloTierratic Encounters is a loose series of improvisation concerts organised by saxophonist Klaus Bru, involving a wide range of artists, often with uncommon, seldom heard instruments. The 2017 edition features musicians undaunted of trespassing the borders to outlandish musical territories: Theremin player, cyclist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist Ng Chor Guan from Malaysia, accordionist and film music composer Matt Scott, double bassist Tim Fairhall, and Klaus Bru, who performs exclusively on C-Melody and C-soprano saxophones, which he likes to electrify.
18:00 – 19:30 – Workshop
“Theremin and Beyond” with Ng Chor Guan
Acclaimed theremin player Ng Chor Guan from Malaysia will introduce the theremin to anyone who is interested. Topics will include: Brief history of the instrument, Technical specifications, Playing technique, Possibilities of the theremin in interdisciplinary art projects. Audience members will have a chance to try out the instrument themselves.
20:30 – Concert
Klaus Bru – C Saxophones, Flute, Electronics
Ng Chor Guan – Theremin
Matt Scott – Accordion
Tim Fairhall – Double Bass
This will be the music for a movie showing at your very own “Inner Cinema”: Shifting from anti-tonal to tonal, from euphony to noise, like viscous, unhurriedly moving lava. Sticking out of the amorphous mass are fringes of notes, recollections of melodies, and abstract sounds to be filed under “mellifluous”.
Was there a story line? Not sure… In any case, there is movement.
Ng Chor Guan from Malaysia is a composer, sound designer, thereminist, improviser, educator, cyclist, and, as the co-founder of Toccata Studio in Kuala Lumpur, an advocate of research and development in the arts. A familiar face in many international arts festivals across the continents, Guan is a prolific artist whose diverse body of work is rooted in the contemporary currents of technology and proves to transcend categories in performing arts.
As an internationally acclaimed composer and artist, Guan’s film music was awarded the Grand Prize in both the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France (2009) and the Art Film Fest in Slovakia (2010). In 2011, Guan was awarded a Goethe Institut Scholarship in Bonn, Germany. In early 2015, he was selected from 2000 participants from around the world to participate in the Berlinale Talents, a program conducted in conjunction with the Berlin International Film Festival. Later that year, Ng Chor Guan served as the musical director for DanceNorth Australia’s 30th anniversary production, Twilight, which one a prize in the Australian Dance Awards. While in Germany, he was invited to improvisation sessions with the Folkwang Dance Company and the Suzanna Linke Dance Company. In 2016, he was selected by Austrian Ministry of Culture for a residency programme, giving lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Ng Chor Guan is also a guest lecturer at University Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He has produced 11 albums of original music.
Matt Scott is a composer and musician commissioned for film, theatre, television, radio, dance, visual art, and live performance. Work includes soundtracks for feature films, dramas, and documentaries screened worldwide, BBC TV & Radio, Channel 4, ITV, and Channel 5, music for plays at the Royal National Theatre, campaigns for Greenpeace and Oxfam, music for choreography at the Thailand Cultural Centre in Bangkok and The Place in London, and events in the U.S. and Europe including a commission for the Apriticielo Festival in Italy, where he built instruments from discarded medical equipment from a mental hospital. He plays accordion, piano, and sings solo and in groups on the London experimental music scene and further afield. He is also a songwriter, arranger, orchestrator, and programmer and he leads music workshops, teaches, and promotes music and arts events. From London, he graduated at the National Film School with a Masters Degree in Composing for Film and Television (Distinction). He received a Music Fellowship from the Omi International Arts Center in New York. Photo by Peter Tainsh.
Tim Fairhall has performed on many of the most significant stages in Britain and internationally, including the Barbican, the Royal Festival Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Cologne Philharmonic, Gulbenkian Grande Auditorium Lisbon, and many others. In 2008 he graduated with distinction from the MMus in Jazz Performance at the Guildhall. Since then he has played widely on the UK jazz scene and worldwide, in a notable diversity of musical situations including (amongst many others); free jazz and improv with the London Improvisors’ Orchestra, Julie Kjaer, Ma/ti/om and The Markov Chain; songs in the Sephardic tradition with world music superstar Yasmin Levy; piano/laptop-led post-classical with Piano Interrupted; and contemporary jazz compositions with the John Martin Quartet and Madwort’s Menagerie. Photo by Jazz Tourist.
Klaus Bru, previously based in Vienna and Berlin and Taipei, now in London, has worked with an abundance of artists in dissimilar musical contexts, covering the full spectrum from Experimental Noise and Electronica to Mainstream Jazz and Pop Music. Bru is possibly the only saxophonist who specialises in the rare C-saxophones (i.e. C-Melody and C-Soprano saxophone), which he likes to electrify. He has performed and recorded with (to name only few names) with Marc Ribot, Sunny Murray, Franz Hautzinger, Peter Herbert, Michael Moser, Bilal Karaman, Li Jianhong, Sabu Toyozumi, Eddie Prevost, Orphy Robinson. He is a member of KaDaoYin, an award-winning world music improvisation ensemble based in Taipei, and the leader of the long-standing Jazz trio “I Have A New Band Now”. Under the header “Alone”, Klaus Bru performs solo concerts involving acoustic and electronically treated saxophones with feedbacks and loops.
