"Violinist Mandhira de Saram is a founding member and leader of the Ligeti Quartet, who specialise in contemporary and experimental music. The quartet has residencies at Sheffield University, Goldsmiths University of London, and Cambridge University, which involves numerous workshops with emerging composers and performers and outreach work.

She is also a busy soloist, chamber musician, improviser, and collaborator, and works regularly with musicians including Steve Beresford (piano, objects and electronics), Benoît Delbecq (prepared piano), TableMusic, Riot Ensemble, Chineke!, Wadada Leo Smith, Laura Jurd, Alex Ward, Shabaka Hutchings, Ethan Iverson, and Trish Clowes.

International solo and chamber music tours have taken her around Europe, as well as the USA, India, China and her country of origin, Sri Lanka. She has performed at prestigious venues such as the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre and St Johns Smith Square in London, and Carnegie Hall in New York. She has broadcast on BBC Radio 3, featuring on programmes such as In Tune, Jazz on 3, Hear and Now, and Late Junction.

Mandhira is currently a mentor for the Young Music Leadership Programme in association with the Royal Academy of Music and Kuumba Youth Music. She teaches at home and regularly leads performance workshops and masterclasses.

A Leverhulme Scholar at the Junior Royal Academy of Music, she went on to study Music at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Her violin teachers have included Igor Petrushevsky, Howard Davis and Levon Chilingirian, and she currently plays a 1735 Sanctus Seraphin violin kindly loaned to her by Derek Clements-Croome."

"Benoît Delbecq was born in St Germain en Laye (F), June 6, 1966. He lives in Bondy, near Paris. A dreamer and an adventurer in music, pianist/composer/producer Benoît Delbecq has been one of the activists of Hask (1992-2004) and Astrolab (1994-1999), two Paris-based cutting-edge jazz/improv collectives that have contributed to significantly revitalize the french creative music scene around the club Instants Chavirés in Montreuil/Paris. His music and projects include works for theater, dance, litterature, visual arts and motion pictures, that are being regularly invited by major festivals worldwide. He has released about 35 records as a leader or co-leader among a discography of more than a hundred discs.

Anchored in both jazz history as well as in aesthetical stakes of today's new musics, Delbecq's works are world-widely acclaimed since the early nineties. He is a renown specialist for a personal and polymetric approach of "prepared piano", and has also an regular activity in the electronic department. His works are experimenting a blend of improvisation and composition in which he reveals a rich pallet of sounds, enlightened by stratas of multiple momentums, articulations and seemingly floating harmonies. Inspired by alternative urban musical experiments and electronic music adventures, he also improvises a personal approach of drum'n bass and ambient.

Benoît was awarded 'Prix jeunes affiches de la SACEM' in 1995 with group KARTET, prix de la Villa Médicis Hors-les-murs 2001 for his first solo piano recording " Nu-Turn " (Songlines, 2003), was awarded with the fellowship of Civitella Fundation (New York, 2009), was awarded in 2010 a double Grand Prix International du Disque (Académie Charles Cros, the French Grammy Awards), and his trio CD "The Sixth Jump " (Songlines) was listed in the New York Times top ten jazz/pop records of 2010. His works for the Fred Hersch/Benoît Delbecq FUN HOUSE double trio (premiered and recorded in May 2012, to be released FEB 2013) have recently received the French Ministère de la Culture " Commande d'Etat " funding. Recently he was commissioned by JAZZTOPAD Festival in Wroclaw (Poland) for a new piece for the Lutoslawski String Quartet and two improvisers (Miles Perkin on bass and himself on piano)."