Eroteme team up with Curious Ear to start the year off with National Treasure Phil Minton who having turned 80 in 2020 shows no signs of slowing down. Performing with him is regular sparring partner and fellow explorer of the human voice Audrey Chen.
"Singing with Audrey is like working with all the possible noises of the universe and beyond, earthquakes,
colliding galaxies and slugs sliding down a wet window, very quiet."
— Phil Minton, Minton at 80, The Wire Magazine December 2020
For your safety we ask you to wear a mask and you'll need to bring with you proof of a negative lateral flow test taken within 24 hours of arrival. A picture of one as proof is fine.
Phil Minton comes from Torquay in the UK. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s- then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s.
For most of the last forty years, Phil has been working as a improvising singer in groups, orchestras and situations, in various locations worldwide. Some composers have written pieces that especially employ his extended vocal techniques and improvisations. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher and ongoing duos with all the above.
Phil also sings with many other musicians including Audrey Chen, with whom in the last ten years, he has performed worldwide.
Since the eighties, his Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.
More recently, Phil has on going Duos with Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Guylaine Cosseron, Hugh Medcalfe and Szilard Mezei.
AUDREY CHEN is a 2nd generation Chinese/Taiwanese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.
Since then, using the cello, voice and occasional analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised, is completely un-processed and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of an analog synthesizer, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.
For nearly two decades, her predominant focus has been her solo work with the cello, voice and electronics, but she has more recently, in the last four years, begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument. Aside from her solo concerts, Chen performs currently in duo with Phil Minton; as BEAM SPLITTER with trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø; as MOPCUT with Lukas Koenig and Julien Desprez; as HISS & VISCERA with modular synth player Richard Scott; as trio in SEN RYO NO with modular synth players Tara Transitory and Nguyen Baly; in duo with electronic music artist Kaffe Matthews; as AFTERBURNER for voice/live electronics/light with Doron Sadja; and as VOICE/PROCESS for voice/live digital process with Mexican sound artist Hugo Esquinca. Notable past collaborators include German conceptual artist John Bock and abstract turntablist Maria Chavez.
Among her more recent album releases include, "By the Stream" with Phil Minton - Subrosa (Brussels), "Hiss & Viscera" with Richard Scott - Sound Anatomy (Berlin), "Rough Tongue", BEAM SPLITTER'S debut LP - Corvo Records (Berlin) and her solo album "Runt Vigor" - Karl Records (Berlin).
Chen has performed across Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada and the USA.
"Audrey Chen has created an uncompromising and idiosyncratic music, tightly disciplined yet acoustically wild and heavy with implication. Her ultra-verbal vocalising, often reminiscent of the visceral and emotionally charged sound poetry of François Dufréne or Henri Chopin, exposes physiological aspects of utterance that are concealed within standardised articulation and day to day speech. Fleshy, breath-driven and flecked with spittle, Chen's voice emanates not just from her mouth but from an ensemble of upper body surfaces, channels, passages, and cavities." - Julien Cowley THE WIRE
Richard Scott is a composer and performer of electronic and improvised music. For much of the last decade he has been dedicated to the compositional and performance possibilities of analogue modular synthesizers. He also works with a variety of digital technologies such as Ambisonics, multichannel diffusion and with instruments such as the Buchla Lightning and Thunder and his self-designed WiGi system developed as an Artistic Resident at STIEM.
Manchesters Minimum Wage Immanence Unit comprises Adam Fairhall on accordion/harmonium, David Birchall on guitar/banjo and Michael Perrett on bass clarinet.
They improvise music that draws as much on English folk song as it does the timbral integrations of European spectralism and the free drone excursions of Pelt.
Writing in The Wire, Daniel Spicer described their debut CD as "sounding as if Terry Riley had gently commandeered the Bitches Brew sessions before nodding off in the corner”.
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.
Curious Ear organise concerts and workshops of improvised music in Manchester.
It was founded in 2017 by David Birchall & Andrew Cheetham.