Shelley Hirsch

Born and raised in East New York Brooklyn, Vocal Artist, Performer, Composer, Storyteller, Interdisciplinary Artist Shelley Hirsch has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory, her vivid imagination for decades.

The New York Times called her “A woman of a thousand voices… She offered an enthralling demonstration of the way songs, vocal styles and language might have evolved out of more primal musical impulses”.

Russell Greenberg

New York-based percussionist Russell Greenberg enjoys exploring the creative and unclassifiable music of our time. Internationally sought-after for his singular approach and interpretation, he strives to share his passion for the musical experience with a wide variety of audiences.

As a founding member of the piano and percussion quartet, Yarn/Wire, Russell has collaborated with many of today’s leading composers to craft a body of new, wide-reaching and vital repertoire. At the vanguard of contemporary music, Russell frequently tours the world, having appeared at the Ultima (Oslo), Tectonics (Glasgow), Lincoln Center (NY), Barbican (UK), and Rainy Days (Luxembourg) festivals among others, and is a regular visiting artist at universities including Columbia, Brown, and Stanford.

Roscoe Mitchell

Roscoe Mitchell (born August 3, 1940) is an American composer, jazz instrumentalist, and educator, known for being “a technically superb – if idiosyncratic – saxophonist”. The Penguin Guide to Jazz described him as “one of the key figures” in avant-garde jazz; All About Jazz states that he has been “at the forefront of modern music” for the past 35 years. Critic Jon Pareles in The New York Times has mentioned that Mitchell “qualifies as an iconoclast”. In addition to his own work as a bandleader, Mitchell is known for cofounding the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).

Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs (b. 1966, Cambridge, England) is a singer-composer based in Glasgow, Scotland, whose work is an ongoing experiment in song form straddling the traditional and the avant-garde. He is primarily a writer of extended song, but is also active in experimental music, improvisation, folk and disco.

He has collaborated with numerous musicians including AMOR (Scotland/Norway), Tony Bevan (England/Scotland), Neil Campbell (England), Chris Corsano (US), Alastair Galbraith (New Zealand), Jandek (US), Makoto Kawabata (Japan), Damon Krukowski (US), Donald WG Lindsay (Scotland/Ascension Island), David Maranha (Portugal), Chie Mukai (Japan), Frans de Waard (Netherlands).

Páll Ivan frá Eiðum

Páll Ivan frá Eiðum is an active composer, musician and artist.  He is not going to die before everything has been tried and a total understanding of everything has been achieved.

Páll Ivan’s works have been performed in Europe and the United states, festivals such as the Reykjavík Arts festival, Nordic music days, Dark music days, Tectonics, Sláturtíð, Raflost, Icelandic music days in the Netherlands and Ung Nordisk Musik. Páll Ivan is a founding member of the SLÁTUR composers collective.

Mark Vernon & Barry Burns

Vernon & Burns are a duo of sound makers who create radio plays, records and performances through an innovative mix of samples, field recordings, voice and music. They have produced programmes for radio stations including VPRO, Resonance FM, WFMU and The Audible Picture Show and have had records released on Felix Kubin’s Gagarin Records, Akashic Records, Staalplaat’s Mort Aux Vaches series and two LP’s with Lied Music released on Ultra Eczema and Shadazz. Together, they also manage Glasgow based art radio station, Radiophrenia.

Linda Caitlin Smith

Linda Catlin Smith grew up in New York and lives in Toronto. She studied music in NY, and at the University of Victoria (Canada). Her music has been performed and/or recorded by: BBC Scottish Orchestra, Exaudi, Tafelmusik, Other Minds Festival, California Ear Unit, Kitchener-Waterloo, Victoria and Vancouver Symphonies, Arraymusic, Tapestry New Opera, Gryphon Trio, Via Salzburg, Evergreen Club Gamelan, Turning Point Ensemble, Vancouver New Music, and the Del Sol, Penderecki, and Bozzini quartets, among many others; she has been performed by many notable soloists, including Eve Egoyan, Elinor Frey, Philip Thomas, Colin Tilney, Vivienne Spiteri, and Jamie Parker. She has been supported in her work by the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Chalmers Foundation, K.M. Hunter Award, Banff Centre, SOCAN Foundation and Toronto Arts Council; in 2005 her work Garland (for Tafelmusik) was awarded Canada’s prestigious Jules Léger Prize. In addition to her work as an independent composer, she was Artistic Director of the Toronto ensemble Arraymusic from 1988 to 1993, and she was a member of the ground-breaking multidisciplinary performance collective, URGE, from 1992-2006. Linda teaches composition privately and at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada.

Iain Findlay Walsh

Iain Findlay-Walsh / Klaysstarr is a sound artist, composer and researcher who combines field recording and studio production with autoethnographic methods. He is interested in exploring and making connections between listening, space and self, and in recasting his own everyday listening experiences as first-person encounters. Work ranges across installation, performance, fixed-media and multichannel composition and includes presentations across the UK and Europe, at Glasgow International, Experimentica and Counterflows festivals, as well as commissions from Arika and Radiophrenia. His releases are available across numerous labels and formats, most recently on Entr’acte, Antwerp (2019). His research on sound and listening has been presented widely, and his writing on soundscapes and auditory perception is published through the Organised Sound journal. He is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Glasgow, teaching sound art, composition andexperimental practice, while co-directing the Immersive Experiences lab on Virtual Reality in Arts and Humanities Research, and curating the spatial audio event series, INTER-. In addition to his activities as a sound artist, Iain performs as an improviser and multi-instrumentalist, most recently with experimental improvisers Zoming Flakes (with Fritz Welch). He was previously an instigator and agitator in improvising noise-pop group In Posterface and with prog-punk maximalists Lapsus Linguae.

Geneveive Murphy

Genevieve (1988, Scotland) studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow, Junior School followed by Birmingham Conservatoire for Bachelor of Music. She received a Masters in Composition at The Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2013 and currently lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Her compositions have been performed internationally in a variety of concert halls and art galleries, to name a few, Concertgebouw, Muziekgebouw,  W139, Stedelijk (Amsterdam), La Fenice (Venice), Old Fruitmarket (Glasgow), Theatre Spektakel (Zurich) with, Ensemble Offspring (Sydney), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), Camerata Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and herself performing her compositions.

Evan Johnson

Evan Johnson (b. 1980) is an American composer whose music focuses on extremes of density and of reticence, of difficulty and of sparsity, and on hiding itself. Described as “conjuring a Beckett-like eloquence from stammers and silences” (Ivan Hewitt, The Telegraph), and as “creating genuine magic … music [which] will be with us for a very long time” (Tim Rutherford-Johnson, The Rambler), his work has been performed throughout North America, Europe and beyond by ensembles such as Musikfabrik, ELISION, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Trio Accanto, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Riot Ensemble, the MIVOS Quartet, ensemble mosaik, Wet Ink, Dal Niente, Ensemble SurPlus, EXAUDI, loadbang, ekmeles, the Quatuor Bozzini, and the New London Chamber Choir; pianists Ian Pace, Michael Finnissy, Mark Knoop, Frederik Croene, and Sebastian Berweck; flutists Richard Craig and Claire Chase; clarinetists Carl Rosman and Gareth Davis; and soloists from the National Symphony Orchestra, among others.

Bill Wells

Bill Wells (born c. 1963) is a Scottish bassist, pianist, guitarist and composer.

He is best known for his group the Bill Wells Octet, since the early 1990s, but he has performed and recorded in a wide range of settings, including collaborations with The Pastels, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Future Pilot A.K.A., Lol Coxhill, Isobel Campbell, Barbara Morgenstern and recently Aidan Moffat. He has also played on tracks by Kevin Ayers, V Twin and Duglas T. Stewart.

Alasdair Roberts

Alasdair Roberts is a musician (primarily a guitarist and singer) who is based in Glasgow Scotland. He has worked with Drag City Records since 1997, firstly releasing three albums of self-written material under the name Appendix Out and then several albums under his own name, the most recent being A Wonder Working Stone by Alasdair Roberts & Friends (Drag City, 2013). He has also released music on labels such as Secretly Canadian, Galaxia and Stone Tape Recordings.

Parkinson Saunders

Parkinson Saunders have worked together since 2003. They have played at Tate Modern, Kings Place, Q-02, St Marks NY, Cut & Splice, Cutting Edge, //hcmf, Tectonics and The Wellcome Collection. Saunders lives in Portishead, Parkinson lives in London.

Tim Parkinson

Tim Parkinson is a composer lives in London, organises concert series Music We’d Like To Hear.

James Saunders

James Saunders is a composer with an interest in group behaviours and decision making. He performs in the duo Parkinson Saunders. He runs the Open Scores Lab at Bath Spa University.