Vassilis Chatzimakris

Vassilis Chatzimakris is a composer, sound artist, performer and improviser. His compositional practice combines Indeterminacy, Open Forms and Extended Notations, while his compositions encourage the interdisciplinary engagement of the participants. He is currently a PhD candidate in Composition at Bath Spa University, School of Music and Performing Arts, conducting practice-based research in indeterminate composition for interdisciplinary performances under the supervision of Prof. James Saunders. Before starting his PhD, he has completed his studies in Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and a Joint BA and MA in Music Composition at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He has taken composition lessons, workshops and seminars by James Saunders, Michalis Lapidakis, Dimitri Papageorgiou, Alexis Porfiriadis, Gerhard Staebler and Kunsu Shim.

The focus of Vassilis Chatzimakris’ compositional research is laid upon building structures and interfaces for people deriving from diverse (artistic or not) backgrounds to devise intermedial performances using scores as means to stimulate this process.

He has been awarded with the 2013 Bath Spa-Porthleven Prize, having the opportunity to collaborate with artists deriving from diverse backgrounds (fine art, performance art, installation art) in order to produce work for exhibitions in Porthleven, Bristol and Bath, following a ten-day residency in Porthleven, Cornwall.

His work Principia Actionum I  has been one of the winning compositions of AUT’s Open Call 2014: [Open Scores]. Exhibition of the score and premiere by Apartment House Ensemble in Aarhus and Copenhagen, Denmark in January 2015.

He has participated in Tony Conrad’s and Jennifer Walshe’s opera The Signing (Nuit Blanche, Canada) contributing three short films.

Vassilis Chatzimakris is the artistic director of the In(s)core, a group dedicated in the performance of open notation which can be interpreted using more than one performing means. He is also a founding member of the improvisation and performance group 6daEXIt and the open notation performance group Open Score Project. Working with these groups he has co-directed, curated and participated in several concerts and performances of historical and contemporary compositions, including his own. Highlights of this practice would include the first Musicircus (John Cage) ever realized in Greece, a one-hour Fluxus performance, a series of open notation performances and discussion with the audience, and many other cross-arts projects.

Vassilis is currently a contracted Music Lecturer at the Department of Folk and Traditional Music, Technological Educational Institute of Epirus.

His compositions have been performed in Greece, UK, Canada and the USA in several festivals, concerts, exhibitions and intermedia performances. He has been part of the “Next Generation” program of the Donaueschinger Musiktage Festival 2014.

Oliver Ginger

Oliver Ginger is a composer from Hampshire, UK.

His on-going work borders explores the nature of liminality, outsiderness and solitude.
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His instrumental pieces are very quiet, and are concerned with neutrality and silence.

He successfully completed a masters degree at Bath Spa University, studying under composers James Saunders and Joe Duddell. He is currently studying for a PhD.

He has had pieces performed by Darragh Morgan, the Kreutzer Quartet, and the Plus-Minus Ensemble.

Cameron Graham

Cameron Graham is a British artist and composer. He creates works for acoustic and hand-built instruments, film, video simulation and electronics. His work sits somewhere between the composed and the installed, grappling with kiltered analogue and digital pairings, woozy familiarities, staging dreamworlds, and intoxication. He is the brother of the Poet Mechanic, and founder of the Noise and Hardware Caravan Club (coming *2021).

Commissions in 2020/21 include a caravan-themed mutlimedia love song for the Schallfeld Ensemble (Aug.’20:Graz), a new full-length feature project for the Barton Rhys duo (’22:UK), and new concert and installation projects for Lovemusic collective (Spring’21:FR), Concavo&Convesso (Mar’21: IT), and Ensemble Rizonanze Erranti (TBC,GE).

Music has been commissioned and performed by, amongst others, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (UK), the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra (BE), L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (FR), the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg (AT), the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (RU), United Instruments of Lucilin (LX), Riot Ensemble (UK), lovemusic collective (FR), the ZhDK Zurich (CH), soloists Jon Roskily and Shabaka Hutchins.

His first solo exhibition, ‘CONTACT RESULTS IN CONTAGION’ was showcased at the Solyanka Gallery, Moscow in April ‘19. It was awarded a 2019 British Council grant. The exhibition was curated by Sasha Elina.

Cameron is an associate lecturer at the University of Surrey, leading modules in masters level and undergraduate composition, and studio techniqeus and composition. He has also taught at Trinity Laban, and Goldsmiths College.

From ‘18-22, he is a PhD scholar working between the universities of Southampton and Bath Spa in the U.K, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

He studied at Brunel University and at the Royal College of Music.

Robert Luzar

Robert Luzar is an artist, writer, researcher and educator. He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Module Coordinator for the MA Fine Art, and PhD director of studies and supervisor.

He was born in the former Yugoslavia, now Slovenia; as a child he immigrated to Canada, raised by a single mother. Luzar has lived in England for over a decade. His practice has been shaped by experiences of immigration but also, by coming from a low-income background, dispossession, trauma, and forms of ideological change.

He is interested in critical practices where ‘thinking’ takes place as an event, trace and multiplicity. These concepts resonate with claims that ‘ideas matter’ and are ‘deeply lived’ – rather than mentally preconceived. This poses challenges to worldviews, or more specifically ideologies, that complicate any event of ‘real change’ politically, socially, economically, and metaphysically.

Luzar uses drawing critically, openly and unconventionally. Under a model of ‘point’, he ‘traces’ absences and erasures that echo trauma. By tracing blank pages and legal documents, staining walls, clearing floor spaces, and pixelating skies, his works give visibility and gravity to the body. With a focus on the body––beyond one’s own, with others (human and non-human)––the trace is used to rethink ideologies that privilege ‘mark’ and ‘marking-making’. From this change of coordinates, he uses live-art, performance, situations, installations, video, projection and the Web.

His current artist projects are in two forms. The first project is a set of drawings that reflect socio-economic abstractions that implicate bodies and spaces. These drawings re-present ‘blank pages’ that reflect information and compositions found in documents, paperwork and political constitutions. The second project is on paradoxical performances and videos that resonate with un-working, as in the French Désouvrements, also translated as inoperativity. Both projects rethink aesthetic qualities of a liberal-economic ideology that is experienced through labour, creative economy, race and identity, political demonstrations, and truth. The projects are evidenced by the following works: Demonstrations (2015-2020), Traced Papers & Drawing Bureau (2019-2020), and Screened Pages of Magna Carta & The Constitution of The United States (in progress).

Luzar continues to exhibit internationally in live-art events, galleries, residencies, museums, and Web based projects. Previous venues include Palazzo Loredan Venice (IT), Torrance Art Museum (USA), Talbot Rice Gallery (UK), DRAWinternational (FR), Katzman Contemporary (CA), Künstlerhaus Dortmund (DE), and CUMT Institute (China). His writings on art, culture and philosophy are published in books and journals such as Nancy and Visual Culture (Edinburgh University Press 2016), Differences in Identity in Philosophy & Religion (Bloomsbury 2020), Theatre and Performance Design (Routledge 2017), and Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (Intellect 2019).

He studied fine art and modern philosophy at York University (Canada), and, in 2005, moved to London to complete a Master of Arts degree from the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Between 2009 and 2013 he conducted doctoral research and was subsequently awarded a Doctor of Philosophy from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

His doctoral thesis, Drawing Upon Multiplicity: Mark, Body, and A Trace of Thought (2013), is a substantial practice-led investigation into the question of thinking in so-called performative drawing practices.

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Harry Matthews

Harry Matthews (b.1994) is a composer, pianist and musical co-director of OUT-TAKE Ensemble based in Bristol, UK.

His work focuses on composing for instruments and field recordings, exploring various methods of listening to human noise.

Recent works have been composed for Daniel Molloy, Jane Chapman, Quatuor Bozzini, Juliet Fraser, Nebula Percussion Quartet, GBSR Duo, James Saunders, and OUT-TAKE Ensemble. Harry’s current projects include works for Ben Jameson, Caitlin Rowley, Material Ensemble, and Ben Clark.

Harry is currently studying for a PhD in Composition at Bath Spa University and the University of Southampton with James Saunders and Matthew Shlomowitz (AHRC Funded by SWW DTP). He completed his BA in Music (1st) and MMus in Composition (Distinction), supervised by Benjamin Oliver, Matthew Shlomowitz, and Michael Finnissy at the University of Southampton in 2016/17.

His works have been performed across the UK, and he has been featured as an emerging UK composer in Montreal, Canada by Ensemble Paramirabo.

Aaron Moorehouse

[Aaron Moorehouse] is a [musician], [writer], and [educator]. His primary areas of interest are [socially engaged composition] and [post-sonic perspectives on music], and he cumployed in [special education (working alongside students diagnosed with attachment and developmental disorders)] and [as a psychological and emotional support worker]. Meanwhile, his PhD thesis explores the links between [music therapy], [experimental composition], and [the politics of participatory art]. He is supervised by [James Saunders] [Robert Luzar], and [Stuart Wood].
As a member of the Open Scores Lab, [Aaron] is interested in [how we discuss the sociological impact and implications of our compositional practices], [how we discuss our practices more generally], and [how we locate meaning in our work]. Subsequently, [Aaron’s] creative practice often [appropriates, explores, and deconstructs various tropes from these discourses].
Recently, [Aaron] has had [articles] [published] by [Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music], [Question: Journal of the Arts and Humanities], and [The Square Ball]. [Furthermore], his latest compositions have been performed [by numerous non-musicians], [entirely within his own imagination], and [not at all].
His works are usually [conceived as a reaction against other work he dislikes], however he [hopes to be nicer and less angry than this makes him seem]. Away from music, Aaron enjoys [tipping cows], and can often be found [at the side of the road, shouting at cars].

James Oldham

James Oldham is a composer, performer and theatre artist based in London. His work explores ideas of comic timing in music, narrative, worlding, temporal storytelling devices, live feedback loops, and data translation often through multimedia collaboration. James is co-Artistic Director of Waste Paper Opera. Much of his work can be seen under the umbrella of Waste Paper, whether in the form of large-scale opera, variety show, or site-specific performance experiment.

His work is can be difficult to define, often meandering between composition, devising, improvisation, clowning, and directing – and awkwardly spanning genre, style and performance convention.

James’s composition work has been performed and toured across the country with Waste Paper Opera, for whom he has written six large-scale operas and many smaller site-specific works – including a collaboration with Joanna Rajkowska for a Polish Expats Association commission. Other notable projects and collaborators include: Riot Ensemble, Sally O’Reilly, Dorcha, Amsterdam Collage Ensemble, Project 128, Decibel, Riot Ensemble, John Butt, and Joe Lycett. His work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Scotland, and Resonance FM.

James is currently researching comic timing in music for an AHRC-funded PhD as part of the SWW-DTP2, receiving supervision from Matthew Shlomowitz (University of Southampton) and James Saunders (Bath Spa University). The research is focussed on the translation of mechanisms from comedy to music, performer specificity, and the shifting of performance modes through the changing of context. He has previously studied composition at Birmingham Conservatoire, receiving tuition from Andrew Hamilton, Joe Cutler and Howard Skempton.

As a performer James works collaboratively and in the works of other artists. He has performed with Object Collection at Café Oto and on Twitch.tv for international broadcast. He regularly performs as his 80s popstar alter ego Clint, who hosts all Waste Paper Opera variety show performances including Whole Punch, London Experimental Variety Show and Purgatory Shelf Object Theatre Variety Show. James received clown training from SpyMonkey’s Toby Park in 2018. He is guitarist for The Bank Accounts, who have been regular guests at Barbara Nice’s Christmas Cracker and performed on That’s the Way, A-ha, A-ha, Joe Lycett, which was broadcast on BBC 2.

James has led workshops on performance practice, collaborating with neural networks, and devising methods for Birmingham Opera Company, Central Saint Martins, CoDarts (Rotterdam), Birmingham School of Acting, L(AI)Bour, and The REP Foundry. He has also worked as assistant director for Graham Vick at Birmingham Opera Company and National Opera Studio.

Goni Peles

Goni Peles (b. 1988) is a composer based in London undertaking a PhD in Composition at Bath Spa University under the supervision of James Saunders. he holds two Master’s degrees in Composition and Music Theory from the Hochschule für Musik Basel, where he studied with Caspar Johannes Walter and Jakob Ullmann, and a B.Mus. in Composition from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music (Tel Aviv University), where he studied with Dan Yuhas. he completed a 2-year course in sound and music production at BPM College and produced trance and electronic music when he was a teenager.

Misha Penton

Misha Penton is a soprano, composer, director, filmmaker­ and writer. Her projects blossom in many forms: live performances, video and audio works, site specific installations, and writings. Recent projects include Threshold, a site-specific experimental new opera created for the cavernous Silos at Sawyer Yards in Houston, Texas; Anecdote of the Spirit, a contemplative music work for the Rothko Chapel in Houston; The Medusa Project with its premiere performance at the Women Composers Festival of Hartford, CT (US) with a film version created for Bath Spa University’s 35’ high MediaWall in the UK; a 13-part Micro Opera project; (micro)Requiem, a new film inspired by Mozart’s unfinished Requiem in D minor; and her directorial debut with Houston Grand Opera directing a new web opera in HGO’s series Star Cross’d. Misha has conceptualized, produced, and directed over 16 original evening-length performance works and more than six music video projects. Professional affiliations include Houston Grand Opera, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Menil Collection Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, The Foundation for Modern Music, The University of Houston Center for Creative Work, Jewish Community Center Houston, Liminal Space Contemporary Music Ensemble, DiverseWorks Arts Space Houston, and the Open Score Lab Bath Spa University, UK. Upcoming projects: a video EP of cyber fairytales including the recently released music video, Visible Darkness, celebrating the magnificent transformative feminine. Visit Misha’s work at mishapenton.com

Caitlin Rowley

Caitlin Rowley is a composer, artist and performer. She works in a range of media, including conventionally notated music for instruments and voices, text scores and fine art. She is interested in blurring the boundaries between music and the visual arts and her work often addresses questions of private experience, memory, visual/auditory disconnect and aural imagination.

Caitlin’s work has been performed or exhibited in venues including Kings Place, the Barbican, Southbank Centre, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Morley Gallery, Brisbane Powerhouse, Blackheath Halls, the Thames Tunnel Shaft, the Royal Academy of Arts, Proud Archivist Gallery Café and 44AD Art Space, and at festivals in Australia, Denmark, Norway and the UK. Her music has been broadcast on national radio in Australia and the UK. She is an Associate Artist at the Australian Music Centre.

Caitlin studied composition with Peter Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney for her Bachelor of Music degree with Honours, and screen composition with Jan Preston at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. After moving to the UK, she studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance* where her teachers and mentors included Errollyn Wallen MBE, Paul Newland, Stephen Montague, Dominic Murcott and Sam Hayden. She graduated with Distinction from Trinity Laban’s Master of Fine Arts Creative Practice (Music) course in 2014. She studied Sound Art and Field Recording at Morley College following her Masters degree, and is now working on her doctorate in interdisciplinary composition under the supervision of James Saunders and Robert Luzar at Bath Spa University.

Caitlin is also active as a researcher and writer. Her work on Erik Satie began during her undergraduate degree and continues to the present day. This is published online at Erik Satie’s Crystal Ball, which has been recommended as a research resource by Ivy League universities and the NSW Government’s HSC Online website. You can view a list of Caitlin’s publications here, and she also writes about her current research, works in progress, the creative process and the role of fear in creativity on her blog on this site.

Caitlin works freelance as a composer, performer, producer, teacher and website designer/developer. She is a member with the acclaimed London-based composer-performer group Bastard Assignments, with whom she produces events and creates new experimental music and art pieces. She lives just outside London.