Eroteme presents an evening of contrasting contemporary improvised and composed music : Biliana Voutchkova & Isidora Edwardsin a new duo (violin, voice & cello).
Alongside a special performance of Morton Feldman's 'Patterns In a Chromatic Field' by Lucy Railton & Joseph Housten.
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"Written in 1981, Patterns in a Chromatic Field is one of US composer Morton Feldman’s lengthy ‘late’ works in which, as he famously explained, ideas of form give way to a sense of scale. Running to more than 90 minutes, it’s a succession of seemingly disconnected patterns, with cello and piano mulling over a few chosen pitches, chords and articulations, maybe moving in and out of sync with each other, before simply moving on to something else. The cumulative effect is almost like experiencing the compositional process unfold before your very ears; and despite the apparent objectivity and detachment of the music, there’s intense subjectivity, too, in Feldman’s minute alterations to his patterns, and his often witty, telling choices as to how they succeed each other." – The Strad
Berlin/London based musician Lucy Railton has been an active performer, programmer and music maker since 2008, releasing albums on Modern Love, Editions Mego - GRM Portraits, PAN, ECM, SN Variations, Shelter Press and Takuroku. Having emerged from a long-term engagement with classical and contemporary music, she now makes her own work alone or in collaboration with artists and musicians from varied disciplines, including Rebecca Salvadori, Peter Zinovieff, Catherine Lamb, Khyam Allami, Kit Downes, Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley, and in recent years has worked with Beatrice Dillon, Philippe Parreno, Rhodri Davies, Laura Grace Ford, Alex Hills, choreographers Akram Khan and Sasha Milavic Davies, Yair Elazar Glotman and the film director John Lee. As an organiser she has been involved in presentations of work by Maryanne Amacher and Henning Christiansen amongst many other productions during her time as co-director at London Contemporary Music Festival and Kammer Klang, and has performed in focus concerts lead by Pauline Oliveros, Iancu Dumitrescu, Mary Jane Leach, Cally Spooner, Matmos and many more. Lucy has performed at festivals and venues including Dark Mofo (Tasmania), Blank Forms (New York), Cafe Oto, Borealis Festival, Atonal, Koln Philharmonie, Barbican, Berlin Jazz, Donaueschingen, Sydney Opera House, Rewire, AKOUSMA (GRM), Norbergfestival, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía and CTM.
Thomas Simaku’s chamber music with Quatuor Diotima, available on BIS.
In 2019, together with American violinistSarah Saviet, he formed the Saviet/Houston Duo with whom he has since performed widely throughout Europe. Following their first performance together at Berlin’s Radialsystem, the duo’s recent activity includes the world premiere of a new work by Rebecca Saunders and Enno Poppe at Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik 2022, an appearance at London’s Wigmore Hall, and a concert of new violin and retuned piano works by composer Catherine Lamb at KM28 in Berlin. They released their debut album a clearing, featuring five co-composed pieces, on Marginal Frequency in September 2024, and their next album will be released in 2025.
He is a member of theOctandre Ensemble, a new music group based in London, and the Phonetic Orchestra: a collective of musicians based in Melbourne, Perth, and Berlin dedicated to exploring durational performance and the fluid borders between composition and improvisation. Further collaborations include work with Rolf Hind (piano), Lore Lixenberg (voice), and Lucy Railton (cello), as well as performances with the Boulez Ensemble, Ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion and Ensemble KNM Berlin.
Houston has collaborated with numerous composers on new and recent music including, among others: Rebecca Saunders, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Christian Mason, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, Enno Poppe, Zeynep Toraman, Bryn Harrison, and Christian Wolff. Recordings of his performances have been released on labels such as WERGO, Another Timbre, Naxos, BIS, Sacred Realism, and Winter & Winter.Biliana Voutchkova is a dynamic and thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, composer-performer, violinist, improvisor and curator with a truly personal, unconventional artistic language. Through the prism of listening, her early training as a classical violinist and the years of development as contemporary artist-performer, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities. Her work includes regular concert performances of original/site specific work, new music by contemporary composers often written for her, long durational and multidisciplinary performances, improvisations, compositions and installations with focus on the interconnection between inner world and sound space.Based between Berlin and her rural residency on the black sea coast of Bulgaria, Biliana works internationally as a soloist and with renowned ensembles such as the Splitter and Trickster Orchestras, United Berlin, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Voutchkova/Thieke duo, Jane in Ether etc. Among her recent/current activities are concerts at Cafe Oto London, Ausland Berlin, Mixtur, Skanu Mežs, Meakusma and Ad Libitum festivals, her first institutional solo exhibition-performance at One Gallery Sofia, her curated duo series of live concerts and digital albums DUOS2022, the releases of her last solo album “Seeds of Songs” and “An den Mond” in collaboration with Peter Ablinger. Biliana is the founder and curator of the DARA String Festival, SHAPE+ platform artist for 2022/2023 and a recent recipient of the German Residency Stipend at Cité des Arts/Paris.
Born in the family of musicians, Biliana began playing violin at the age of 4, made her orchestra debut at the age of 9, and recorded her first CD for the Japanese label Crown Record Ltd. at the age of 16. By the age of 18, she started realizing classical music wasn’t her path. In search for artistic growth, Biliana moved to Los Angeles to further study and discover music. This was followed by a period on the East Coast of the US, where she engaged with contemporary/experimental music and improvisation, broke from standard classical convention and began to understand something of her calling. In 2008 Biliana moved to Berlin where she pursued further the development of her artistic vocabulary, incorporating the voice and performance/movement, creating a unique quality as a composer-performer. Most recently, Biliana has been drawn into the visual world as a different medium for creative input. She continuously followsher intuitive path that organically reveals itself.
Isidora’s work is based on the investigation of sound, starting with the acoustic cello, and developing through amplification, and more recently into analogue synthesizers, vocals and texts. This may be thought of as a geography full of fissures and hidden retreats. The friction, the pressure, the harmonics, the blows, the intervention with objects in the strings, a search for melodies and tones, transform the cello into a poetic body that looks for a story in sound. Her interests are focused on searching in the spectrum of improvised music, in the fields of dance, movement, human voice and its philosophical relations with space, text, time and audience.
She has been part of ensembles such as Ensamble Taller de Música Contemporánea U.C and the Goethe Institut Project “Ensemble Nuevo” and participated in festivals worldwide such as Ars Nova Festival, Ravensburg; Ende Tymes Festival of Noise, New York; Mopomoso Concert Series, Iklectik Ballistik, London; Dara String Festival, Suture Soven, Berlin, and collaborated with improvisers and ensembles in Chile and overseas, such as London Experimental Ensemble.
She has composed music for the dance and theater works “Paisajes” by choreographer Paula Sacur, “Un uno de a dos”, by choreographer Teresa Prieto. At present, she is working on experimental songs, combining the use of the cello with the voice, text, and analogue electronics.
Isidora is currently a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She holds a MMus in Creative Practice from Goldsmiths, and is a graduate in Music Performance from the P. Universidad Católica de Chile.
Eroteme is a Manchester based concert series championing experimental music from the hinterlands. Home of the Uncategorizable. Foraging new sonic territories in electronics, improvisation and beyond.