"Ferran Fages (1974, Barcelona, Catalunya)

Ferran Fages is an improviser and composer, and an international reference in the sphere of electroacoustic improvisation. Since the end of the 1990s, he has published over fifty discographic references on national and international labels. He has undertaken tours, performed concerts and led workshops around Europe and South America as well as in Canada and Japan.

He plays guitar, resonant objects, acoustic turntable and electronics: "feedback mixing board", pick-ups and oscillators.

From 1999 until 2006 he was a member of the IBA col·lectiu d'improvisació, with whom he organised over one hundred concerts as well as the festivals Improvisa (2000-2003) and the Experimental Music Week at Metrònom (2005), among others.

Besides his projects, he has shared a stage and made collaborations with musicians such as Christine Abdelnour, Sophie Agnel, Núria Andorrà, Derek Bailey, Pascal Battus, Tom Chant, David Chiesa, Albert Cirera, Sébastien Cirotteau, Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Michel Doneda, Axel Dörner, Lluïsa Espigolé, Agustí Fernández, Jean-Philippe Gross, Will Guthrie, Robin Hayward, Barbara Held, Jason Kahn, Martin Küchen,Eduard Márquez, Wade Matthews, Mattin, Manuel Mota, Ivan Palacky, Ramon Prats, Eddie Prévost, Pablo Rega, Àlex Reviriego, Ernesto Rodrigues, Alejandro Rojas-Marcos, Ivo Sans, Joan Saura, Pilar Subirà, Vasco Trilla, Birgit Ulher, Taku Unami, Nikos Velliotis, Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, Mark Wastell, Christopher Williams and Ingar Zach among others.

He has also worked with the choreographers and companies of Olga Mesa (1999), Lanónima Imperial (2003-2004), Carme Torrent (1999-2005), Ktonycia (2007), Constanza Brncic (2008-2009) and Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2009).

He has performed the following pieces of contemporary music: Guitar two, for four, by Phill Niblock (2004); Cobra, by John Zorn (2006); Meditations for Orchestra, by Pauline Oliveiros (2007); Guitar Trio, by Rysh Chatham (2007); Trio I from Trios WHITE ON WHITE, by Robert Ashley (2008); Poem 1960, by La Monte Young (2008); Diferencias familiares sobre las cuerdas, by Christopher Williams (2009); Little by Little, by Sam Sfirri (2011), and Cartridge Music, by John Cage (2012)."

"Alfredo Costa Monteiro was born in 1964 in Porto (Portugal)

Lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

He studied sculpture/installation at the fine art school in Paris with Christian Boltanski.In 1992, he moved to Barcelona. Since then, his work stands somewhere between visual arts, visual poetry and sound. His installations and sound pieces, all of a low-fi character, have in common an interest for unstable processes, raw materials and gestures, where the manipulation of objects as instruments or instruments as objects has a strong phenomenological aspect.

From 1998 to 2006, he was member of espai 22a, an independent collective for contemporary art. From 2001 to 2006, he was also member of IBA col.lectiu d'improvisació

In sound poetry, he performs in solo polyglot and noise pieces ( portuguese, french and spanish), where sound establishes a different semantics.

Ongoing sound projects: Cremaster (with Ferran Fages), i treni inerti (with Ruth Barberán), Atolón (with Ferran Fages and Ruth Barberán), Astero (with Juan Matos Capote), 300 basses (with Jonas Kocher and Luca Venitucci) and duos with Pascal Battus, Tim Olive and Michel Doneda.

He has given workshops at Hangar (Barcelona, Spain), ESDI (Barcelona, Spain), Janácek Academy of Music and Performing Arts (Brno, Czech Republic), Arteleku (San Sebastián, Spain), Facultad de Bellas Artes, (Pontevedra, Spain), ESAD (Caldas da Rainha, Portugal), Crossroads during John Cage's Year, (Lublin, Poland) among others.

He has toured in Canada, Japan and Europe."

"If it's in Paris that Sophie Agnel was born in 1964, it is towards other sounding islands in the heart of a reinvented temporality that she dwells today, at the stern of a grand piano, an instrument that she turns into a real living & vibrating organism.

Classically trained, escaped from jazz (drawn away by the too strict treatment of harmony), Sophie Agnel boards the piano from every sonic angle this musical vessel can offer : keys, strings & board are simultaneously apprehended, in a mixed procedure (as we say of painting techniques) that would be understated if it was reduced to the cagian definition of the prepared piano. Considering the instrument - that she extends with several accessories, paper cups, balls or strings - as a poetic supplier of anamorphic textures, the musician takes it to be an equal match to the wider diversity of musical systems, whatever the craft they where conceived in (from physiological to electro-acoustic) ...

We would then no longer be surprised to notice her understandings with Michel Doneda and to find her to the side of the wet saxophone of Alessandro Bosetti, of the acoustified electric guitar of Olivier Benoit, of the voices of Catherine Jauniaux and Phil Minton, or the keyboard of Christine Wodraska...

The same seal of esthetic evidence marks all of her musical companionships, with this same taste, beyond the narrative, for the delicate sonic quests and blossoming of dimensions to which the auditor takes part through an active listening : in the heart of Jean Pallandre's phonographic worlds, of Jerôme Noetinger & Lionel Marchetti's small scale cinema, John Butcher or Axel Dörner's crimpy tissues, by the lovely machines of Erik M or Ikue Mori, the harmonico-stratospheric rustling of Stéphane Rives...

The originality of the research conducted by Sophie Agnel today leads her to develop, in solo or with significantly chosen companions, a most refined and highly poetic approach to sound that makes each of her concerts a moving construction filled with chiseled musical gestures, a soft and sumptuous irradiation."-Guillaume Tarche