After performing at Jean-Herve Peron's 2010 Avant Garde Festival, Yumi Hara (keys, violin & voice), Geoff Leigh (winds & electronics), John Greaves (bass & piano) and Chris Cutler (drums & percussion) present their first studio album mixing open-minded composed and improvised music.
"Featuring Yumi Hara, Geoff Leigh, John Greaves and Chris Cutler. The band was convened after a chance encounter in 2010, at Jean-Herve Peron's Avant Garde Festival in Hamburg (3 days of Utopia) and has popped up here and there ever since. This is their first official release, recorded over 2 days at the University of East London, then edited and tweaked into shape over the next half year. Hard to pin down - some of it is obviously written, some obviously improvised - and then there are a lot of grey areas; it's a law unto itself really."-ReR Megacorp
"It started back in 2009, when pianist and singer Yumi Hara and reeds player Geoff Leigh recorded "Upstream" and, around that time, met the latter's former HENRY COW colleagues, bassist John Greaves and drummer Chris Cutler, at a festival. There and then, the four decided to form a quartet, but it's only now that THE ARTAUD BEATS release their first studio album, "Logos," after a few years of playing live and having their concerts captured on a very-limited-edition box set and CDRs. Yet it's a completely fresh experiment, though, with not a lot of looking back to Canterbury scene - as if it's shadows are escapable."-DMME.Net
Says Yumi Hara: "The music sounds new, it doesn't resemble anything, there's no nostalgia. I am very interested in creating unusual grooves - not simply 'rhythm' or 'beats,' but 'grooves' - and I'm so lucky to be able to work with Chris on those. I came up with a new idea of doing West African groove in 5/8+5/8 which, I believe, nobody else has ever done it before, and I explained it to Chris on the airplane on our way to Japan tour in 2013; he got it immediately, and we played it on the same night in Nagoya... Since then we kept doing that kind of stuff, and you can hear it on 'Prefab Wreckage.' You see, it is groove that matters to me, as it is different from straight 5/8+5/8."