Saturday 28 June 2025
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
15 musicians/performers – 3 spaces – 3 hours
The first ‘Musical Relay’ took place in London in 1993 and became an annual event spreading to Berlin, Athens and Madrid and culminating in a large scale performance over 2 days at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005 to which all the International organisers / musicians were invited. The event was promoted by the 2:13 Clubs in their respective cities. The 2:13 Club was named after a stopped clock in the London venue (The Library Gallery in Stoke Newington).
It begins with a trio in each performance space (9 players) who improvise with each other until one of the remaining 6 players walks into their space. The new arrival displaces one of the players, who then sets off to another space. This system creates a kaleidoscope of musical combinations over three hours.
The event is not something which audiences sit down to and experience as they would a conventional concert. It usually takes place in the daytime, in public spaces, and listeners find different ways to access the performances: some do in fact stay in one place and allow the groupings to unfold before them; some choose one musician and follow him or her; others move about from space to space frustrated that they can’t be in all three at once, always missing something, always catching something else.
Running order / performers-musicians
Charlie Beresford – guitar
John Bisset – lap steel guitar
Iris Colomb – performance/text
Chris Cundy – bass clarinet
Rhodri Davies – harp
Nia Davies – poetry
Dan Johnson – percussion
Hywel Jones – tuba
Jenn Kirby – electronics
Jessica Lerner – dance
Peter Marsh – bass
Maggie Nicols – voice/tap
Dan Linn-Pearl – guitar
Rose Linn-Pearl – violin
Performers
Charlie Beresford – Charlie Beresford lives in the Welsh Marches in the UK. He initially trained as a fine art painter and print-maker at the then Falmouth School of Art and Design. Alongside his musical work he still works in the world of visual art and design, his practise spanning the fields of architectural design, graphic design, film making and general design related problem solving.
John Bisset – Facilitating and performing Relay since 1993, in London, Berlin, Athens, Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and, most recently, Leeds in May 2025. www.johnbisset.net
Iris Colomb – Iris Colomb is an artist, poet, improviser, curator, editor, and translator based in London. Her practice merges poetry and other art forms to explore various relationships between visual and verbal forms of text through projects involving performance, poetic book-objects, experimental translation, and improvisation.
www.iriscolomb.com
Chris Cundy – Chris Cundy plays bass clarinet, saxophones, and rarified woodwinds. He is a composer, performer, and sound installation artist based in the South West of England and has released four solo albums: The Disruptive Forest, Gustav Lost, Crude Attempt, and Of All The Common Flowers. In recent years his practice has focussed on site-specific phenomena incorporating 3D sound mappings and ambient location recordings. Important partnerships with The Roman Baths and Corinium Museum have resulted in a number of ensemble works incorporating objects, field recordings, and reconstructed historic texts. Collaborations have also seen him working extensively in pop music, writing instrumental arrangements for songwriters including Little Annie, Baby Dee, and Ladan Hussein (aka Cold Specks). He has toured internationally as a solo artist and has performed with acts such as Timber Timbre, Cold Specks, Devon Sproule, and Mercury Prize nominated band Guillemots.
Rhodri Davies is a harpist, improviser, composer and multidisciplinary artist. He plays harp, bray harp, horsehair harp, electric harp and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released eight solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: Derek Bailey, Hamid Drake, Simon H Fell, Will Gaines, Jenny Hval, Sofia Jernberg, Kahimi Karie, Lina Lapelyte, Nicole Mitchell, Butch Morris, David Sylvian, Pat Thomas and Otomo Yoshihide. In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Abertawe.
Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance, embodied practice, intermedia and hybrid writing. She is also a writer, researcher, performer and literary curator. Her second collection of poems, Votive Mess, is published by Bloodaxe in October 2024. Nia was recently awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford. Her first book-length collection of poems All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was shortlisted for the Roland Matthias Prize for Poetry (2018) and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for First collection (2019). This followed the pamphlets England (Crater, 2017), Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Hafan/Boiled String, 2016) and Then Spree (Salt, 2012).
Dan Johnson – Dan Johnson is a percussionist working in improvised sound and expanded composition. Undermining conventional notions of drumming, their experimental work manifests across a wide range of projects; from eight-hour solo improvisations responding to instructions provided by the audience, to invite-only performances in rail tunnels, lifts and public toilets, to non-hierarchical group improvisation project Ecstatic Drum Beats. Running through this multifaceted output are consistent concerns with balancing chance and control, exposing performer-audience relationships, and the demands of discipline and physical endurance, drawing on a wealth of approaches from Fluxus instructional scores to the work performance artists like Tehching Hsieh, and most of all Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice.
Dr Jenn Kirby is a composer, performer, lecturer and music technologist. Her output includes contemporary instrumental composition, electroacoustic music and experimental-pop. Jenn’s work often explores humour and theatre. Her music has been described as having a “sense of adventure and experimentalism”. Jenn has been commissioned by Kirkos Ensemble, Glasshouse Ensemble, Ensemble Entropy, among others. She has undertaken residencies with Cove Park, soundSCAPE Festival and National Theatre Wales. Jenn’s performance work is centred around hybrid instrument design, building software, re-purposing hardware, and processing improvised vocalisations. Jenn is the President of the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association, founder and director of the Swansea Laptop Orchestra and a founding member of the Dublin Laptop Orchestra. She lectures at the University of the West of Scotland, where she is also Programme Leader for MA Music programmes.
Jessica Lerner – Jessica is a visual movement artist. Originally from London she has been living in Carmarthenshire, Wales since 2002, where she has a movement studio. She has been making and showing work since 1989 within experimental dance venues and galleries. She has collaborated with film, dance, visual and sound artists. Her work is in live performance, installation and painting. Jessica’s performances are playful, inventive and show vulnerability. She dances with objects and responds to location in an interplay creating a collage including somatic dance and live art. Through her improvisations, elements from family history, personal relationships and everyday life situations surface in a dreamscape of the abstract and concrete. She is drawn to the wild spaces of the Black Mountain where she lives.
Peter Marsh – Bassist and occasional lap steel guitar/electronics stumbling around the margins of jazz, improv, folk, avant rock and electronica. Member of Fourth Page, Elvers, Sonnamble, Found Drowned, Woven Entity etc. Has played with – Lol Coxhill, Paul Rutherford, Steve Beresford, David Toop, Rhodri Davies, John Coxon, Mark Sanders, Pete Flood, Ashley Wales, Tony Bevan, Klaus Filip, Martin Siewert, Robert Dick, Gareth Sager, Karl Blake, Adam Bohman, Roger Turner, Tom Chant and so on…
Maggie Nicols – Maggie Nicols joined London’s legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist. She then became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the group Centipede, led by Keith Tippets and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the remarkable Feminist Improvising Group. She continues performing and recording challenging and beautiful work, in music and theatre, either in collaborations with a range of artists (Irene Schweitzer, Joelle Leandre, Ken Hyder, Caroline Kraabel) as well as solo.
Daniel Linn-Pearl is a Welsh born artist and film maker. He has a degree in Sound Arts & Design at LCC, and currently lives and works in London. His focus ranges through sound installation and live improvisation to film & radio work. He is affiliated with Gwaith Swn, a London-based collection of artists working primarily with sound, with whom he exhibits and organises performances throughout the city. Daniel also works in collaboration with architectural stained glass artists Amber Hiscott & David Pearl, crossing mediums to create new works for commission-based projects. Daniel has exhibited and performed in London, Swansea, New York and Toronto, and has made broadcasts for Resonance 104.4fm.
Categories
