Will Guthrie / Sam Weaver
This Autumn we team up with the Islington Mill in their newly refurbished 5th floor attic space for an intimate evening of food & music!
Doors & Food at 6pm / Music 7:30 – 10
Wheelchair accessible toilet and venue space via the lift at the ground floor entrance!
Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He plays solo using different combinations of drums, percussion, amplification and electronics, and leads the contemporary hybrid percussion / gamelan group ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH. His music has been released on labels such as Black Truffle, Editions Mego, Erstwhile, Clean Feed, Gaffer Records, Hasana Editions, 23five, iDEAL and his own label Antboy Music.
Guthrie first made a name for himself within the Australian jazz scene, establishing himself at a young age as a major presence by winning the Wangaratta National Jazz Awards for drums in 1997 and going on to perform with many of Australia’s most celebrated jazz musicians such as Mark Simmonds, Julien Wilson and Ren Walters. In the new millennium, his work took a long detour away from the drum kit through junk electronics, extreme amplification and electro-acoustic techniques, documented on a series of solo and collaborative recordings from these years.
Alongside continuing his electro-acoustic work, in the last decade, Guthrie has returned to the drums with a vengeance, developing a series of solo works marked by a radical single-mindedness, from relentless rhythmic workouts to earth-quaking explorations of the bass frequencies of gongs and other metal percussion instruments. In the crowded world of free jazz/improv percussion, Guthrie’s work is distinguished from the delicately pointillist approach of much European improvisation by its rhythmic sophistication, unashamed virtuosity and undeniable physicality, touching on aspects of world musics from Javanese gamelan to South Indian Carnatic music.
Sam Weaver is a sound artist working the studio into a laboratory of sonic investigation. Instruments are re-routed and misused to deliberate abstraction – mostly a custom built Hordijk analogue modular synthesizer. Live performances exist somewhere between acousmatic music, free improvisation and experimental electronics – seeking to explore the dynamics between harmony and chaos.
One half of London outfit Hungryghost, Sam has recorded and performed with Charles Hayward, Miki Yui, Clive Bell, Otto Wilberg, Rachel Goodyear, Konstrukt & Kevin Drumm.
He runs the electroacoustic imprint Cuspeditions, is the co-curator of a bi-monthly concert series Eroteme and one of three directors facilitating ‘Sine’s & Squares’ festival in association with NOVARS Research Center, (University of Manchester).
