197x - Singing in a refugee chilean band, with appearances at various amnesty fundraisers, on Radio 3, Glasgow city chambers -where they gave us these little penguin bars we'd never seen before.
Learnt guitar on an old guitar we'd had since we passed through Spain en-route to Scotland. It's name is Angelica and she likes really low open tunings. Classical guitar, performing in churches and old people's homes. Jazz guitar once...
1993-5 - Band leader of Skunk - funk/metal band based at UWCAD, Duino, Italy doing led zeppelin/rhcp covers, nepali love instrumentals, songs about chickens, that kind of thing.
1996-8 - Various guitar duos in Scotland: Twang, Alijoe, Interaccion. Recorded a first demo, played in many places around Glasgow, sometimes with Angela Alucema on percussion. I would write backing tunes which were my songs, but played as instrumentals, and someone would solo to them. We started adding improvisation to stretch them out. 3 song demo Rainy Sunday (1996) and Box of Felt Tip Pens , unfinished recordings now available at the internet archive (1998)
1999-2001 - Wildstrings Quartet , 3 guitars and a violin doing John Mc Laughlin Covers and some originals, very improvised. Played Ashton Court. Starting to see a trend emerging?
- Bristol, Glasgow, London, Barcelona, Bristol. Played with Meritxell Naranjo in BCN and KarynX in Glasgow
2003-4 After doing an improvisation workshop, became an experimental monster, doing live performance and improvisation with various collectives at the Arc Bar, Bristol, Random Function and many other places, with live video and performance art elements. Released Derrumbe Gangoso at the Internet Archive.
Collaboration with artist Fleur Barnfather creating a semi-improvised musical accompaniment to her series of paintings, The Rise of Authentic Power .
Performance at Arc Bar and at the Watershed Arts Centre of structured improv/film piece "Collectors of Curious Objects with visual artist Viva Cazeaux, and musicians Mel Mc Cree and Eleanor Murphy.
Collaboration with Luna Montenegro from arts collective Mmmm playing improvised music to her poetry, at St Stephens Church in London.
2005- Took up Tabla, training with Tapan Roy. Joined Orchestra Cube , 1/3rd of improv band and Jamendo sensation , Meleliale .
2006 saw a meeting of many sides of my life, when I brought the Orchestra Cube to the University of Bristol to perform in an Access Grid node, to dancer Kyra Norman in a second node in another department. The score was in powerpoint and the performance was tagged in real time, and subsequently turned into a visual representation in RDF (the language of the semantic web) on Parip Explorer . By the third episode of this series of workshop this had become a mass distributed improvisation involving many access grid nodes around the UK and in the US, involving many artists, performers and academics in our experiments.
Around then, with the orchestra, we played various gigs at the Sunrise Festival , and played Ashton Court very successfully to dance videos curated by Kyra Norman.
During August of 2006 I made some demos for a new recording, which I gave to lots of friends, but wasn't satisfied. Some of it is here . Tell me what you think!
After participating in a week's distributed self-Big Brother-ing in a documentation experiment at the Live Archives Workshops I held my first exhibition: a distributed media gathering event for Refugee Week 2007 and the Easton Arts Trail , held at the Pierian Centre and Kebele Community Co-op respectively. Section 4 is about the condition of failed asylum seekers in any one local area.
My next projects are a 3 piece band and an academic workshop studying the ways game engines such as Crystalspace or Unreal Engine can be used for live performance.
I'm always trying to take improvised music to new places - a freedom in music that I hope we can achieve in all aspects of life.
