Current collaborations:

ebb & flod

photo: Oscar Brask

2023 - present ebb & flod is a musicians' collective started in January of 2023 by multidisciplinary artist Gabriel Nils Edvinsson and is currently functioning as a think-tank and incubator where participants share and test ideas within electroacoustic improvisation - exploring processing techniques, performance and more. Latest sessions have recorded the results of solo, duo, up to sextet improvisation-constellations, game-pieces and graphic-scores. Plans are underway to open ebb & flod to the public and work is currently being done to establish ebb & flod's own label-imprint. The debut-release is set to feature a quartet version of a previously unpublished visual score by Lance Austin Olsen, featuring myself, together with Edvinsson, Giorgios Diapolous and Oscar Brask.

Viktoria Pressman

photo: l i f

2025 - present We met at an ad-hoc improv night at club Brötz. We didn't get thrown on stage together that night, but saw the potential in each other's playing and immediately planned to get together. It gelled immediately, not just because of the inherent rightness of the classic piano/drums orchestration, but because of a shared understanding around concept and approach to improvisation and to the demarcation of time. The music is both spacious and dense, often simmering with high intensity at low volumes. The album we have recorded was drawn from our first three meetings; we are already working on a follow-up while seeking a label for the newly finished album and testing the waters with various soloists to make a trio. Local gigs and beyond are planned for Autumn '25 and into 2026.

Tim Perkis

photo: l i f

2023 - present Following his recent relocation to Gothenburg, Tim and I have been exploring percussion and electronics in the duo-format and, more recently, live-processed percussion and electronics. So far it's been a pleasure to play with someone for which decisive-action and the ability to remain focused amidst constant flux is self-evident and natural. The fluidity of Perkis' electronics array and his ability to change direction on the head of a pin mean that the level of mental-awareness and physicality I need to to maintain, particularly at the drumset is an intense and exciting challenge. Early attempts have been intriguing to say the least; we are both looking forward to pushing the music further. It's all been recorded and we are discussing concepts for live performance. https://perkis.com

Rasmus Persson

photo: l i f

2021 - present Persson and I met through our shared residency at ELEMENTSTUDION in Gothenburg. Since our first recordings made in early 2021 we quickly found compatibility and a fluid working-relationship combining his Nord Modular Mini (a modular synthesizer in the Max/MSP-realm) with my own inputLoop sampler rig (a pair of empty Roland sp's chained in tandem). What I most appreciate is the unspoken and effortless balance we seem to achieve in playing, where entirely digital abstract sounds are humanised by gestural in-the-moment decision-making and by Rasmus' uncanny ability to make decisions that work. Our debut release "Ratios" was released 1 Nov 2024 on idealstate recordings. The follow-up, "ACTON" was released Feb. '25 on isr digital.

Barrie James Sutcliffe

photo: l i f

2014 - present Barrie and I have had a standing-duo since we first met at Brötz performance-space in Gothenburg a decade ago. At that time Barrie was setting up installations and performing with a stressfully unreliable no-input mixer and setting objects in motion with piezo speakers. Since that time we have played a splattering of concerts and amassed untold-hours of recordings exploring many instrumental and non-instrumental formats, some of it published (for example, here, here and here) and much of it not. Currently on hiatus due to health-issues, we hope to welcome Sutcliffe back into the fray again soon.

Barry Chabala

photo: Rosy Chabala

2006 - present I first came across guitarist Barry Chabala, now my longest-running musical partnership (and, if I'm not mistaken, his also) on the now long-defunct freejazz.org discussion forum . A shared-interest in the trend toward a more pared-back, reductionist style of improvisation led to us working together, reaching its most refined form in our 2009 release "The Shade & The Squint" . Barry subsequently went even deeper into this most fertile area, performing works by Wandelweiser composers, among them Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro-Liu, both on album and in concert. Our collaboration was taken up again with the onset of the global-event of 2020/21, culminating in releases on Mark Wastell's Confront label and Chabala's own Roeba imprint. The respect for silence and space remains in our current works, for example the the wholly electronic "Facets" from 2022, and our latest work "The Lightgiver", released on Ftarri this year, which has me composing at the piano after a break of several years, supported by Chabala's recent delving into virtual instrument environments. https://barrychabala.bandcamp.com/

Lance Austin Olsen

photo: Jamie Drouin

2012 - present Lance and I began working together shortly after being paired together by his Infrequency Arts co-founder Jamie Drouin in his video-project, RE_MOTE. Having already built a lifetime's body of work as a visual artist prior to his move into sound-art in the early-2000's, Lance's experience and dedication to the creative-life shows through everything he does. What I love most about his work is that there is not the least trace of tentativeness in his gesture, yet at the same time his works reveal an exploratory spirit, open to chance-occurrences and genuine surprise. This sense of the material leading the artist forward is beautifully exemplified in music that is firmly rooted in openness and dedicated listening. This parallel is possibly why Olsen now divides his time between both practices. I can almost hear Lance's scores as I am looking at them. It is a joy and honour then, to attempt to interpret them sonically. Previously published are the Olsen/Noyes duo albums Craig's Stroke (2014) and Particles & Waves (2017), both on Infrequency Editions, as well as the large-group realisation of the Olsen score Battle Maps, Battle Hymns: The Vast Field of Liberation (2017) on Suppedaneum. Solo realisations of the 17-page Night on the Veldt and the text/visual score entitled RUZAWI were completed this summer and will be published on Ftarri in 2025. https://lanceolsen.ca/

Massimo Magee

photo: Gosia Basinska

2007 - present Saxophonist Massimo Magee and I first met on the freejazz discussion boards. We did engage in some file-sharing activity early on, but as Massimo was living in Brisbane at the time it wasn't too long before I travelled there from New Zealand to play with him in person. On the first occasion we recorded at his home (recordings later released by Massimo himself on his then-label ARRAY) and a year or so later we performed live in Melbourne. That so, the majority of our collaboration has been via file-sharing back and forth. In the early days of the internet there was a good deal of skepticism around this method of working, whether it was 'genuine', or somehow an affront to the very idea of improvisation. From the perspective of this player, however, there is no other method that can better hone the skills of reacting, following and maintaining and of making your playing-partner sound good. In any live setting you have the option of pushing another player in another direction if you don't like what they are doing. What better way to let go of ego, to sharpen attention and perseverence, than playing with someone who absolutely will not budge from their train of thought? I am thankful for what this method has brought to my live-playing. Massimo and I have continued to work, to release work and follow each others' work over the years. Our latest album, exploring the classic woodwinds & drums format and entitled Fallen Feathers, was completed in August 2023. https://www.massimomagee.com/

Past collaborations:

Finn Loxbo

Active 2012 - 2016 Christian Munthe introduced me to Finn shortly after my arrival in Sweden in January of 2012. We played often as a duo, and on occassion in trios with among others Anna Högberg, Isak Hedtjärn and Hunrik Munkeby Nørstebø. Finn plays an impressively wide array of styles, but it is his sense of space and internal timekeeping as well as the crystaline harmonics he coaxes from the acoustic guitar that are most missed since his move to Stockholm. Available to listen to are a guitar duet, Time Is Its Instrument. We adapted Ellsworth Kelley's Brushstrokes Cut into Forty-Nine Squares and Arranged by Chance 1951 for acoustic guitar and electronics, which can be heard here, and finally there is our full-length album HEX, a composition derived from I-Ching processes. Finn has continued to refine his sound and is creating wonderfully engaging music, particularly in his role as composer and bandleader of the ensemble Kommun. https://finnloxbo.bandcamp.com/

Johnny Chang

Active 2012 -2013 I believe it was hearing my duet with composer and fellow-New Zealander, Phil Brownlee that led to Johnny contacting me and suggesting a project. He sent me a text score which we interpreted independently - Johnny in Berlin, myself in Gothenburg. Later in May of '13, I spent four days in Berlin rehearsing and recording ahead of our premier of the work, Having Never Been To Beirut at Labor Sonor: a performance later described as "wide-open, managing to attain something of an epic quality, full of air and undulations" by Brian Olewnick in his review of the subsequent album-release. Now back in Auckland, NZ, Johnny is organising concerts and events under Partitions and Resonances. https://soundcloud.com/johnnychchang

Sally Ann McIntyre (Radio Cegeste)

Active 2009 - 2011 Sally and I began working via our mutal connection to None Gallery, the central-hub of the Dunedin experimental scene at the time. Her solo project, Radio Cegeste is a micro-broadcast on the FM spectrum. Utilising an FM transmitter with approx. 100m radius, Radio Cegeste captures and re-presents sonic information (78's, birdsong, field-recordings and more) to a given space on an array of mini radio-receivers. While Sally's stands on a rigorous conceptual-foundation, what appealed to me was the opportunity to work with and complement her material at exceptionally low volumes; to interact without overwhelming - emphasising situation and location... the close-in, spatialised listening of small speakers and small receivers. We performed and recorded at the None Gallery, art-openings, house-concerts, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Lines of Flight Festival; the latter of which demonstrated to me the power of a whisper to quiet a room. Our album-releases include If witness was an architect on idealstate no-number series and our farewell, to orient themselves with coastlines on ISR. https://radiocegeste.blogspot.com/

Paulo Chagas

Photo: Pedro Cabral

Active 2008 - 2020 Paulo is a phenomenal and prolific woodwind player based in Peniche, Portugal and someone with whom I have collaborated with often over the years since we first made contact online. The As Birds album, a jazz-trio release with Bruno Duplant was a particular highlight, as was his work on the 2014 ISR release Edges, his clarinets playing the fox traversing an icy lake of electronic-feedback. The latest in our sporadic, but ongoing musical dialogue is the quarantine/lockdown-instigated virtual-trio Where Fear Ends, released in 2020 and with Paulo on oboe and flute, myself on drums and featuring Italian jazz-pianist, Nicola Guazzaloca. Paolo is a main organiser of the M.I.A. festival of improvised music and publishes works on the Zpoluras Netlabel. https://zpoluras.blogspot.com/

Bruno Duplant

photo: Bruno Duplant

Active 2008 - 2013Bruno and I first connected in the days of MySpace, when he was simply A Man And A Guitar. A self-proclaimed autodidact with a shared enthusiasm for distance-collaboration, we quickly began producing work with little consideration given to genre or instrumentation. From bedroom-folk experiments with loose song-form, Milford Graves-inspired percussion-duets, to more explicitly "free-jazz" material, over time the music changed to reflect our growing interest in composition for improvisors and for the prominant use of silence, equally important as sounds, which themselves were becoming more sparse. My period of burnout and subsequent recovery after my move to Sweden meant that our work took a pause in 2013. Ceaslessly active, Bruno continued collaborating, producing and publishing at an extraordinary rate and has since established himself as composer of standing within the field of minimalism.15 Questions - an interview with Bruno Duplant

Stuart Porter

photo: Motoko Kikkawa

Active 2008 -2011Alto saxophonist Stuart Porter was a pioneer of the Wellington, NZ improvised music scene, active since the early 1980's. I'm not sure when he moved down south, but by the time I arrived in Dunedin in 2003, he had already established himself there with partner Susan Ellis. They were hosting meet-ups and recording-sessions out of their Maitland Street home with a revolving-door of different local musicians. With his proximity to the Ornette-tradition both generationally and instrumentally, I found my playing often moved into areas already amply covered by my legacy-influences on the drums, Billy Higgens, Ed Blackwell, et.al. It was only when I asserted my own tastes toward a more deconstructed style that, when combined with Stuart's ardent and lyrical playing, things got really interesting. Our collaboration culminated in the album like also and any, released just before my move to Scandanavia. While described as oil and water by some, it was precisely this willfull-contrariness that led to others describing it as vast, powerful, original, airy, poetic, simple, accessible, beyond genres and labels, intense, a refreshment and a renewal of certain music. Stuart Porter's The Blithenian Mysteries YT Channel

Alex McKinnon

Active 2007 - 2011 Alex was an integral part of Dunedin's None Gallery scene as guitarist, installation-artist and live-in resident and he epitomised the ethos of the New Zealand D.I.Y. underground, where there's nothing that can't be fixed without solder and duct-tape. This was a neccessary skill given the physicality of his playing, a style that put the equipment under a great deal of stress, but gave me as a drummer turbulent, ecstatic waves of guitar noise to ride out on - absolutely liberating. We played many shows as a duo in Dunedin and Christchurch and together formed the core of several other bands, including the power-trio Wu when we were later joined by woodwind player Matt Middleton (CRUDE). A good deal of footage from the 2007 -2010 period that we were most active and offering insight into the Dunedin scene at this fertile time can be seen on Alex's Vimeo channel. Alex MacKinnon

Richard Neave

Active 2007 - 2008 Richard Neave was at a show Alex MacKinnon and I played at the Borderline Ballroom in Christchurch and felt compelled to send me a cdr of his playing. His guitar style was absolutely unique: brittle, angular, uncompromising in its awkwardness. I overdubbed drums to his playing in one or two sessions to make the album later released as Un-Repent. An excerpt appeared on The Wire compilation Dirt Beneath the Daydream, a compendium of the NZ experimental music scene at the time and we also had a track included in the Fax the Root compilation on the Root Don Lonie For Cash label. We managed to play one show in Dunedin before Richard travelled to Thailand for a period to teach english. Plans to continue our collaboration were tragically cut short however, due to his untimely passing while there. Although I never got the opportunity to get to know him particularly closely, the loss of a kindred-spirit hit me acutely at the time and his absence left a huge hole in the NZ cultural-scene.

cja (Clayton Noone)

photo: l i f

Active 2004 - 2011 Meeting and working with Clayton Noone (aka cja) was a revelation for me. It wasn't just that his song-based, metronomic guitar-strumming took charge of all timekeeping duties, allowing me as a drummer to pick and choose when I double down on the pulse or ignore it completely, though that was definitely part of it. It wasn't only the opportunity to jump in on the new bands Clayton was forming and reforming every few months, pushing the NZ-noise, sludge/doom/shoegaze/ethic that I'd fallen in love with backwhen I first caught Michael Morley (GATE/Dead C) as a teenager back in 1996, although that did fulfill a deep personal need in my musical life. No, what was most significant for me working with Clayton was his attitude every single time we played... the fact that everything we did was recorded was released, either on his own Root Don Lonie For Cash label, or on any one of the seemingly hundreds of international connections had built up over his years of activity in the NZ underground. This working-method exemplified a level of professionalism not often present in underground circles: always show up ready to play. Since that time, I treat every session like a gig and I'll walk out of a session the second I feel people are noodling, not invested, not listening or simply 'jamming'. Kia kaha, Clayton! https://rootdonlonieforcash.blogspot.com/

phil hargreaves

Active 2002 - 2011In 2002 I was living in a rural town in the the north of the South Island of New Zealand, scratching a living in horticulture to suport a young wife and one year old son, and at the same time trying to keep alive a dream of playing music. But improvised music, the kind I was ravanously seeking out that had its origin in London, Berlin, Paris or New York, was nowhere to be found in this part of the world. Somehow, in this early period of the internet I found the freejazz.org discussion-forum, and among its contributers, one phil hargreaves. Being Liverpool-based, phil was just outside the circle of the London-hub, but had played with a number of musicians whose names I was already familiar with, Paul Hession, Simon H.Fell, Maggie Nichols and Caroline Kraabel among them. I'd seen on his website that he had already done a "postal project" in the same vein as works I'd already heard by musical heroes Derek Bailey and Han Bennink, so I braced myself, wrote to him suggesting we work together and took the plunge, not knowing how, or even if he would respond. To my utter suprise he agreed - a watershed-moment for me, setting me on The Way. Our project, released as a present from the pickpocket, took four years to complete, but it was the first of many. phil has one of the most unique voices I've heard on saxophone and should be more well-known... but maybe he will be? His latest release "Pi" is fantastic: check it out on Martin Archer's Discus Music.https://www.whi-music.co.uk/