"John Butcher's work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics.Originally a physicist, he left academia in '82, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians - Derek Bailey, John Tilbury, John Stevens, The EX, Akio Suzuki, Gerry Hemingway, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, Okkyung Lee, John Edwards, Toshi Nakamura, Paul Lovens, Eddie Prevost, Mark Sanders, Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide, Phil Minton, and Andy Moor - to name a few.

He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of place. Resonant Spaces is a collection of site-specific performances collected during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.His first solo album, Thirteen Friendly Numbers, includes compositions for multitracked saxophones, whilst later solo CDs focus on live performance, composition, amplification and saxophone-controlled feedback.

HCMF has twice commissioned him to compose for his own large ensembles. Other commissions include for Elision (Australia), the Rova (USA) & Quasar (Canada) Saxophone Quartets, reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori (USA), "Tarab Cuts" (based on pre-WWII Arabic recordings, and shortlisted for the 2014 British Composer's Award) and "Good Liquor .." for the London Sinfonietta. In 2011 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists.

Recent groupings include The Apophonics with Robair and Edwards, Anemone with Peter Evans, Plume with Tony Buck & Magda Mayas and a trio with Okkyung Lee & Mark Sanders.Butcher values playing in occasional encounters - ranging from large groups such as Butch Morris' London Skyscraper and the EX Orkestra, to duo concerts with David Toop, Kevin Drumm, Claudia Binder, Paal Nilssen-Love, Thomas Lehn, Fred Frith, Keiji Haino, Ute Kangeisser, Matthew Shipp and Yuji Takahashi."

"Sofia Jernberg (born 5 July 1983, Ethiopia) is a Swedish experimental singer and composer.

Between 2002 and 2004, Jernberg studied jazz at Fridhems Folk High School. Later she studied for Per Mårtensson and Henrik Strindberg at The Gotland School of Music Composition. In 2008, she received the Royal Swedish Academy of Music's jazz award.

Jernberg is the leader (together with the pianist Cecilia Persson) of the chamber jazz group Paavo. The group received the "jazz group of the year" award from Swedish Radio.

Jernberg is also working on the contemporary classical music scene, in which she serves as both singer and composer. As a singer she has premiered pieces by composers such as Lars Bröndum. She was a soloist with Norrbotten NEO when they performed Arnold Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Jernberg has composed for several established ensembles such as Duo ego and Norrbotten NEO."

"Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. His time in Oregon, a place of relative quiet and slow time reference, instilled in Nate a musical aesthetic that has informed all of his music making for the past 20 years, but in no situation more than his solo trumpet performances.

Nate moved to New York in 2001, and has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.

Wooley's solo playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet. Along with Peter Evans and Greg Kelley, Wooley is considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn, as well as demolishing the way trumpet is perceived in a historical context still overshadowed by Louis Armstrong. A combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor has led one reviewer to call his solo recordings "exquisitely hostile".

In the past three years, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language. Time Out New York has called him "an iconoclastic trumpeter", and Downbeat's Jazz Musician of the Year, Dave Douglas has said, "Nate Wooley is one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today, and that is without hyperbole". His work has been featured at the SWR JazzNow stage at Donaueschingen, the WRO Media Arts Biennial in Poland, Kongsberg, North Sea, Music Unlimited, and Copenhagen Jazz Festivals, and the New York New Darmstadt Festivals. In 2011 he was an artist in residence at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY and Cafe Oto in London, England. In 2013 he performed at the Walker Art Center as a featured solo artist.

Nate is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music (www.dramonline.org) and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal Sound American (www.soundamerican.org) both of which are dedicated to broadening the definition of American music through their online presence and the physical distribution of music through Sound American Records. He also runs Pleasure of the Text which releases music by composers of experimental music at the beginnings of their careers in rough and ready mediums."

"Matthias Müller was born 1971 in Zeven, Germany and starting playing trombone in the local trombone choir at the age of 10. From 1994 to 1999 he studied jazz-trombone at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, where he also made his first steps into improvised music. His CD "Bhavan", which was released in 2004, was produced by Chicago based musician and journalist John Corbett. In the same year he moved to Berlin and has since been regularly playing with internationally recognized improvisers such as John Edwards, Mark Sanders, George Lewis, Johannes Bauer, Jeb Bishop, Tobias Delius, Olaf Rupp, Paul Lovens, Toshimaru Nakamura, Clayton Thomas, Michael Vorfeld, Axel Dörner, and many more. He is a member of the 24-piece improvising ensemble, "Splitter Orchester", and was also a member of the "German-French Jazzensemble" under the direction of Albert Mangelsdorff. In addition, Müller is also active in the field of contemporary music, having worked with the Berlin-based ensembles "Xenon", "Work In Progress", and "Zinc & Copper Works". He also took part in the performance and CD-recording of composer Mark Andre's opera "...22, 13...". Müller has toured Africa, Asia, North America and many countries in Europe, having played on numerous festivals, and released more than 20 CDs of his own projects."

"Christian Marien , born 1975 in Münster (Westf.), Has been playing drums since his thirteen years. Punk and rock are his roots, but he found an early access to jazz and art, eventually studying jazz drums in Amsterdam and Berlin where he has been living since 2000. There he first made a name for himself in the jazz scene, including as co-founder of the ensembles Olaf Ton and Stereolisa. More and more, he turned to the improvised music, played with a large number of high-caliber improvisation artists (like Frank Gratkowski, Gebhard Ullmann, Jürgen Kupke, Christian Weber and many others) and became an integral part of Berlin's improvisational and jazz- Scene.

For many years, he has worked extensively with his duo "Superimpose" (with Matthias Müller - Trombone) and the trio "The Astronomical Unit" (with Matthias Müller-Trombone and Clayton Thomas double bass). He plays concerts in Europe and North America, among others, at the Montreux Jazzfestival, the Jazzfestival in Hermannstadt, the Leipzig Jazz Festival, and the Jazzfestival. He is also a member of numerous other ensembles (Z-Country Paradise, UnbedingT, Benjamin Weidekamp Quartet, Miss Platnum, Hannes Zerbe Jazz Orchestra) Rüsselsheim, Jazzfestival Frankfurt, Moers Festival and releases CDs on labels such as "leo records", "Jazzwerkstatt", "Klangräume", "NRW Jazz" or "2ndFLOOR Edition".

His interest in genre-encompassing artistic exchange brings him together with visual artists (Thomas Bratzke, Philip Wiegard), actors (Judith Strößenreuter), or dancers (Hans-Werner Klohe, Kadir "Amigo" Memis, July Hamilton). The performance group "Ritsche, Zast & Marien", which combines improvisation in music and painting, contests performances, festival performances and exhibitions."