Mopomoso Live July 21st 2024 at the Vortex Jazz Club, London

Mopomoso LIVE at the Vortex Sunday 21st July 2024

International Free Improvised Music

Improvised Music and Spoken/Sung Words

Alati - Chris Dowding (trumpets), Brigitte Beraha (vocals), Dave O’ Brien (piano)

Matt Rogers (voice), Benedict Taylor (vla)

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson (voice, performance), Adam Bohman (amplified objects)

More info on the performers:

ALATI

Alati is a trio led by Norwich-based trumpeter Chris Dowding, and featuring the wonderful vocals of Brigitte Beraha and the versatile piano playing of Dave O’Brien. They have performed around the UK and released their debut album, ‘Ascending the Morning’ on the Luton-based 33Jazz label.

They will be performing settings of poems by Colin Simms about the hen harrier, and the tour promotes their debut release of this material, the EP ‘Wonderstruck’, which features three bucolic songs woven together with improvisation, alongside three-part harmony and more…

Individually, the three members are known nationally and internationally for their own projects as leaders, including Brigitte Beraha’s Lucid Dreamers, Dave O’Brien’s work with his band Porpoise Corpus, and Chris’ Moonrise Trio.

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is a Southend-on-Sea based writer, artist and performer.

Her ongoing investigations concern the magico-materialist temporality of place and the esoteric ground rock of comedy, in work distributed across text, cassette, sonic environments, lino prints and local newspapers.

She is currently working on a book about landscape as the mythic substrate of the sitcom, read at the intersection of the arcane and the post-industrial.

Her latest release is the cassette album Nuncio Ref! released by Crow Versus Crow.

Adam Bohman

Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of underground music for decades. Working with home-built instruments, found objects, tape cut-ups, collages, ink drawings and graphic scores. Favouring acoustic sounds over electronics, he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments and objects. He is a member of British experimental groups, Morphogenesis, The Bohman Brothers, Secluded Bronte, and The London Improvisers Orchestra. Adam’s music is unique and experimental, incorporating Fluxus japery, musique concrete, sound poetry and free improvisation.

Matt Rogers

Matt Rogers is a British composer who has written for and with a host of leading instrumentalists, ensembles and technologists, creating music and installations for concert halls, theatres and galleries.

He studied for his Masters Degree with Gordon McPherson at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), graduating in 2001, and continued his education with Oliver Knussen and Magnus Lindberg at the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Study.

Matt has received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers and has been Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre and Tokyo Wonder Site. He was also the first composer to be commissioned by Art on the Underground.

Other commissions include The Virtues of Things for Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music and Opera North, and La Celestina, an opera installation for Opera Erratica commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Benedict Taylor

is a leading figure within contemporary composition, modern string performance and improvised music in the British and European new music world. The central focus of his work is in new composition for live performance, film, theatre, contemporary dance, art installation and electro-acoustic composition. In performance, he predominantly works within improvisation, new composition and 20th/21st century music.

Described as a virtuoso violist, through his performance work there is a focus on solo performance as a creative and investigative process. In 2012 he initiated an ongoing commission series and solo label Subverten (For Viola Solo). The first works premiered in autumn 2013 and continue several times each year.

An award winning composer for film, theatre and television, he has composed for over 35 feature films, shorts and television/online series with his work showing at many leading international film festivals and theatre venues worldwide.

Established in1991, Mopomoso LIVE is the UK’s longest running concert series dedicated to freely improvised music! It takes place at the Vortex, Dalston, London. Come & join us, always on the 3rd Sunday of every month - for an afternoon full of captivating musical meetings.

Don’t forget - the best way to experience the world of free improvisation is to see/hear it LIVE!