"Ryoko Akama was born in 1976 in Japan, and currently lives in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. She is a member of The Lappetites, Rolex2$, Syth;s. She is a sound artist/composer/performer, who approaches listening situations that magnify silence, time and space and offer quiet temporal/spatial experiences. Her sound works are connected to literature, fine art and technology, and employ small and fragile objects such as paper balloons and glass bottles, creating tiny occurrences that embody 'almost nothing' aesthetics. She composes text events and performs a diversity of alternative scores in collaboration with international artists. Her works and projects have been funded by Arts Council England, Japan Society, Daiwa-Anglo Foundation, University of Huddersfield, Kirklees Council, Pro Helvetia and more.

She is also active as a curator: collaborates with festivals, runs melange edition label and co-edits reductive journal/mumei publishing."

"Rhodri Davies was born in 1971 in Aberystwyth, Wales and now lives in Gateshead in the northeast of England.

He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice and fire harp installations. He has released four solo albums: Trem, Over Shadows, Wound Response and An Air Swept Clean of All Distance.

His regular groups include: a duo with John Butcher, Common Objects, HEN OGLEDD: Dawson - Davies, a trio with David Toop and Lee Patterson, Cranc, The Sealed Knot and a trio with John Tilbury and Michael Duch.

In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on 'Self-cancellation', a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow.

New pieces for solo harp have been composed for him by: Eliane Radigue, Phill Niblock, Christian Wolff, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.

In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award."

"Sarah Hughes is a London-based improviser playing the chorded zither, piano and e-bow. she is part of the Loris ensemble."

"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."

"Pia Palme is a composer of contemporary and experimental music who places listening practice at the core of her work. Her oeuvre includes instrumental, vocal, and electronic music as well as scenic works and performances. For her, composing is a political activity that can extend into contextual disciplines, such as performing, improvising, writing texts, field-recording, making videos and installations. Pia Palme further surrounds her practice with critical reflections and theoretical explorations. She puts together lecture recitals and multimedia compositions.

Pia Palme is born in Vienna, where she currently lives. She finished studies in music at the (former) Conservatory of the City of Vienna, as well as Mathematics and Projective Geometry at the Technical University of Vienna. With her background as oboist and recorder player, Palme turned to experimental music and to composition. From 2011 Palme conducted artistic and compositional research at the University of Huddersfield, UK. In 2017 she finished her doctorate with the portfolio The Noise of Mind: A Feminist Practice in Composition.

Her compositions were recently presented at festivals such as Wien Modern, Klangspuren Tirol, BTzM Bludenz, at the Burgess Foundation Manchester, Salzburg Biennale, Steirischer Herbst, and Q-O2 Brussels. Awards include the 2015 Gorge-Butterworth Prize (UK) and the Outstanding Artist Award of the Republic of Austria (2015), as well as a number of scholarships such as from Sound and Music UK (2014), the City of Vienna (2013, 2015), Siemens Foundation (2017), and the Austrian Republic (2013, 2015, 2017).

In her performance lectures, Pia Palme develops a form of contemporary storytelling combined with musical performance and multimedia art. Lecture recitals were held at ZKM Karlsruhe, Harvard University, Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, Kunstuniversität Graz, Porgy & Bess Jazzclub Vienna, Iklectik London, FAU Erlangen, Splendid Amsterdam, and Goldsmiths University London.

As a performer with her contrabass recorder she has cooperated with several composers to realise new works, such as with Èliane Radigue for OCCAM XVIII, further with Joanna Wozny, Jorge-Sanchez Chiong, Hannes Kerschbaumer, and Katharina Klement.

Interdisciplinary collaborative projects are an important feature of her work. Pia Palme continues to work as a curator and producer; she gives lectures and workshops on composition, improvisation, and experimental art, and conducts projects with children and students."

"Adam Parkinson is a researcher on the Design Patterns for Inclusive Collaboration (DePIC) project, Goldsmiths, which is currently developing and testing haptic devices for visually impaired audio engineers. He also likes running Pure Data on anything he can get his hands on: for a while this was the iPhone, and currently this is the BeagleBoard, a single board computer. He uses this to perform in a duo with Atau Tanaka.

Adam completed his PhD in Music at Culture Lab / ICMUS, Newcastle University, using Gilles Deleuze and Object Oriented Philosophy to explore a philosophy of listening and interogate our relationship with new musical technologies.

As a musician and programmer he has worked with Kaffe Matthews, Arto Lindsay, Phill Niblock and Rhodri Davies. His music ranges from glitchy techno to skewed electronic 'pop', and he has been released on Entr'acte records. When he's not being noisy he likes to go on long psychogeographic journeys around London whilst pretending to be JG Ballard, and he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of post-war American hardboiled crime fiction."

"Lucy Railton is a British cellist and composer whose work bridges experimental electronic and electroacoustic practices with modern classical composition and performance. Since graduating from the Royal Academy of Music in 2008, Railton has worked as a cofounder and director of the London Contemporary Music Festival, played with electronic producers as varied as Peter Zinovieff and Beatrice Dillon and performed works by avant-garde artists such as Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman. In March 2018, she released her debut solo album, Paradise 94, on the Modern Love label. As she explores her interest in electroacoustic music, improvisation and modified cello, Railton's sound is an absorbing, often extreme examination of the potential of an acoustic instrument."

"Born 27 July 1960; Piano, electronics. Pat Thomas started playing at the age of 8 and studied classical music and played reggae. He began playing jazz at sixteen after seeing Oscar Peterson on television then listened to snatches of jazz on the radio before, in 1979, playing his first serious improvised gigs. From 1986 he played with Ghosts which was Pete McPhail and Matt Lewis.

In addition to programming his keyboards, Pat Thomas also utilises prerecorded tapes. He told Chris Blackford (1991), 'As far as the tapes are concerned I'll probably just sit in front of the TV and tape whatever's going on and so some editing afterward to decide what might be useful. ...But I don't actually put a label on each tape saying what's on there, so when I come to use them I don't know what I'm going to be playing. That obviously prevents me from setting things up. I pick them at random and see what happens. So I'm just as surprised as anybody else at what comes out'.

In 1988 he was awarded an Arts Council Jazz Bursary to write three new electroacoustic compositions for his ten-piece ensemble, Monads: Roger Turner and Matt Lewis, percussion; Pete McPhail, WX7 wind synthesizer; Neil Palmer, turntables; Phil Minton, voice; Phil Durrant, violin; Marcio Mattos, bass; Jon Corbett, trumpet; Geoff Searle, drum machines. The intention was to feature different aspects of electronics using improvisation so, for example, one piece - Dialogue - featured Pete McPhail and Neil Palmer, another concentrated on the interaction of percussionists and drum machines, and a third piece had Phil Minton and Jon Corbett improvising with a computer. The pieces were performed at the Crawley Outside-In Festival of new music in 1989.

Pat Thomas was invited by Derek Bailey to play in Company Week in 1990 and 1991 and he also took part in the Ist International Symposium for Free Improvisation in Bremen with the guitarist. He has been a member of the Tony Oxley Quartet (documented on Incus CD 15) and played in Oxley's Angular Apron along with Larry Stabbins, Manfred Schoof and Sirone at the 8th Ruhr Jazz Meeting and in the percussionist's Celebration Orchestra. He plays with Lol Coxhill in a range of combinations from duo to being a member of 'Before my time', is a member of Mike Cooper's Continental Drift, and he has a well established duo with percussionist Mark Sanders and a trio with Steve Beresford and Francine Luce. In 1992 Pat Thomas formed the quartet Scatter with Phil Minton, Roger Turner and Dave Tucker; funded by the Arts Council they toured the UK in 1993 and again at the beginning of 1997.

On the 'Festival circuit', Pat Thomas has appeared at: the Young Improvisors Festival at the Korzo Theatre, Den Haag (with Jim O'Rourke, Mats Gustafsson and Alexander Frangenheim); Angelica 95 in Bologna, Italy; the Stuttgart 5th Festival of Improvised Music 96 (with Fred Frith, Shelly Hirsch, Carlos Zingaro and others); and the 3rd International Festival 96 in Budapest (with Evan Parker, Phil Minton, John Russell and Roger Turner).

"Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, born in Paris in 1979, is a bassoon player who explores sound through improvisation, contemporary music performance and sound installations. Her instrumental approach is centred on the fragility of sound and its emergence and development within a given space. In a concert situation she seeks to create a parodoxical presence of vulnerability and strength by testing the limits of control and instability. A key aspect in her work is the deconstruction of her instrument. She amplifies fragments through miniature microphones mounted inside the instrument. This exploded version of her sound sometimes meets more conventional bassoon playing to generate aural discontinuities between the exterior and the interior, the whole and the parts, wood and electricity - a "reverse-engineered emergence". Dafne Vicente-Sandoval currently lives in Paris and works mainly everywhere else. She favours long-term face-to-face collaborations within which her work keeps an integrity while engaging in a dialogue with that of others. Current projects with Klaus Filip, Bonnie Jones, Pascal Battus, Jakob Ullmann, Éliane Radigue and Klaus Lang. Her work has been presented at contemporary music festivals (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, England; Blurred Edges, Hamburg; Visiones Sonoras, Mexico), festivals of improvised music (Konfrontationen, Austria; No Idea, Texas) and sound art fetsivals (Tsonami, Chile)."