"Shaun Blezard is a composer and improviser working with digital technology. Currently his interest lies in smart technology and his playing is based around an iPhone and iPad. Touch screen technology, accelerometers and wireless technology are opening up so many avenues of exploration in music and it is becoming much more like playing a traditional instrument.

Shaun has been working with digital/electronic music for 20 years, starting with basic samplers in the 90's, through various versions of laptop set ups, fx boards and current smart technology. Starting in the world of ambient dance, he has evolved into a skilled electronic musician, playing a range of styles from sound art installations to full on free improv, pushing for new ways of expression working with new technologies and how they integrate with traditional instrumentation. He has played with range of contemporary artists including Matthew Bourne, Ryoko Akama, Keith Jafratte, Charlie Collins, Kalendar, Anton Hunter, Mick Beck, Martin Archer, Stephen Grew, Steve Lewis, Seth Bennett, Susan Matthews and Yoko Miura.

Shaun has also been the driving force in many online community projects - He ran one of the early successful net labels, Earth Monkey Productions - (http://archive.org/details/earthmonkey). Over half a million downloads over 80 releases.Soundonation, a crowd sourced album (Live at The Bombed Out Church) where all sounds used were donated by the online community. World wide remix projects, the last being Cumbria Remixed which focused on the artists reworking the sounds of Cumbria.

This model of community working has led to Shaun investigating online streaming of performances and ways to engage with other musicians - Shaun is currently researching this with fellow Hugs Bison and award winning digital technician Phil Powell. They are looking at ways for online performances to be a way of artists to get new audiences but also for artists to get paid, and for better ways for artists to collaborate online. Shaun made a series of field recording broadcasts over 3G from rural Cumbria as part of his mental health project A Safe Space, these included a library, a church and various fields."

"Matthew Bourne (born 6 October 1977) is a British Jazz musician.

Bourne was born in Avebury, England, and grew up in a small village situated in the Cotswolds, where he took up the trombone aged nine. In 1989, Bourne attended Kingham Hill School and began playing Cello the following year. After seeing Frank Sinatra play on television in 1993, Bourne began to teach himself the piano.

Bourne enrolled at Leeds College of Music in 1995 where he began to explore contemporary classical composition and avant-garde. During his time at the college he performed Michael Daugherty's Piano concerto 'Tombeau de Liberace' and John Cage's 'Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra'. In 2001 Bourne graduated from the MMus Jazz Studies course. Bourne has subsequently taught as a part-time lecturer at Leeds College of Music and has a PhD in Performance from the University of Leeds.

Matthew Bourne's success began in 2001 when he was named the Perrier Young Jazz Musician of the Year. His success continued the following year when he was awarded the prize for Jazz Innovation at the BBC Radio Jazz Awards. In this period Bourne was profiled in The Observer Music Monthly as "the future sound of jazz", and 2005 he won the International Jazz Festivals Organisation (IJFO) International Jazz Award. His first solo album, The Molde Concert, was recorded live at the Molde International Jazz Festival and received positive reviews. This performance showcased Bourne's inventive use of samples (including audio clips from The Simpsons and other TV shows) as well as his "cyclonic energy and virtuosity" and "ramblingly self-deprecating and sometimes off-mic announcements".

By this stage, Bourne had also become co-leader of The Electric Dr M, Distortion Trio and Bourne/Davis/Kane and was beginning to work in a wider context, leading to notable collaborations with artists and groups such as Nostalgia 77, Marc Ribot, Paul Dunmall, Annette Peacock, John Zorn, Pete Wareham, Barre Phillips and Tony Bevan.

Bourne has been commissioned to write works for Bath International Music Festival, London Jazz Festival, Leeds Fuse Festival as well as from pianist Joanna MacGregor and Faber Music. Bourne's work has been broadcast on various BBC Radio and Television programmes.

Montauk Variations, Bourne's first studio album as a solo artist was awarded Leftfield Album of the Year by the Sunday Times. Its "lyrical and romantic" mood marked a change in musical direction from the avant-garde tone of his earlier work. Montauk Variations caught the attention of Amon Tobin and Nancy Elizabeth, both of whom invited Bourne to rework their material, and Simon Green of Bonobo selected the composition "Juliet" for inclusion in his release of the Late Night Tales compilation series.

In 2015, Bourne embarked on a UK tour with an audio/visual project entitled Radioland. This was a collaboration with Antoine Schmitt and Franck Vigroux to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Radio-Activity by Kraftwerk. The Anglo-French trio "take the album's melodies and textures as the starting point for avant-garde explorations" that saw Bourne performing on a variety of analogue synthesisers as well as singing in German through a vocoder. An album of this music, entitled Radioland: Radio-Activity Revisited was released digitally on The Leaf Label in December, with physical copies available in January 2016.

Bourne's second solo album, moogmemory, was released on The Leaf Label on 4 March 2016. This is the only album ever recorded to feature only the Lintronics Advanced Memorymoog, a Memorymoog synthesiser converted by Rudi Linhard in a process which is the "equivalent of open heart surgery" replacing "1,300 components over eight weeks". A companion EP entitled moogmemory plus was released in November 2016. The first three tracks were composed during the process of creating moogmemory, but the release also includes new material and a cover of Sussudio by Phil Collins. "

"Keith Jafrate is a writer and musician who grew up in London but who has lived in Yorkshire for many years. He has toured throughout England, and in North America and Europe, performing both as a poet and as a saxophonist. He gained a reputation in the 80's as a jazz-poet with his group Sang, and has since specialised in creating lyrical, spacious and bleak settings for his own texts.

Working somewhere between jazz, improv and contemporary music, he has composed for bands from duo up to octet, writing challenging and beautiful vocal parts and bringing together musicians from a variety of backgrounds to perform his work.

He's completed a number of commissions over the years, including large-scale compositions, text-music performances, and music for BBC radio plays, appeared at festivals in France, Germany and The Czech Republic, and released a number of CDs as a member of a variety of bands.

He formed Orfeo 5 in 2002 and continues to develop the group's particular mix of acoustic and electronic sounds. He also plays with Hornweb, Wolfscarers, Murmurists and with Trio Uroboro, and has recently begun a new collaboration, Pollen Count, with Lou Birks and Richard Knight."

"Simon Prince plays flute & tenor saxophone, known mostly as an improviser. He is half of Our Liberated Winter & Wolf Scarers. He is also a teacher & director of Contemporary Music Youth Group."

"Composer/ Bassist Dave Kane was born in a small town called Bangor in County Down in Northern Ireland. At age 16 he bought an electric bass guitar from a catholic priest for 50 pounds, and began moving his fingers up and down the ' E ' string in local punk and alternative bands. With aspirations of eventually playing on the other 3 strings of the bass, Kane began studying music at a local college with the internationally acclaimed composer and bandleader Brian Irvine. As a direct result of hanging out with Irvine, Kane began to explore the idioms of free improvisation, contemporary jazz, classical music, funk, metal, red wine and general mayhem! Further exploration was required, so Kane rowed across the irish channel on his double bass and studied Contemporary music (essay writing!) at Bretton Hall College of the University of Leeds.

Unfortunately there were no influential teachers there like Irvine, so he learnt how to use a library and subsequently encountered the music of John Cage, Edgar Varese, Cecil Taylor, Barry Guy, John Coltrane, Iannis Xenakis, Charles Mingus, Frank Zappa and John Zorn. Upon graduating from University Kane lived and worked in London for a while trying to get his 'shit together' and playing free music with some British Jazz legends including; Keith Tippett, Paul Dunmall, Elton Dean, Evan Parker, Tony Levin, Mark Sanders, Paul Rogers, Alex Maguire and many other heads! Currently based in Leeds, Kane is a founder member of L.I.M.A. (Leeds Improvised Music Association) and the musical director/ composer for the L.I.M.A orchestra. An ever expanding large improv orchestra featuring some of the UK's finest young musicians inc, Matthew Bourne, Chris Sharkey, Christophe De Bezenac, Petter Fadnes. Other projects include; The internationally acclaimed Bourne/ Davis/ Kane. Dave Kane ( solo double bass + voice ). The Shank Trio (featuring saxophonist James Allsopp and drummer Tim Giles). Didrik Ingvaldsen's Quartet Alpha. Dave Kane's Rabbit Project."