The Squid's Ear Magazine


DeSaram, Mandhira / Steve Beresford / John Edwards: Felix (Listen! Foundation (Fundacja Sluchaj!))

Captured live at London's The Vortex in 2025, violinist Mandhira de Saram, pianist Steve Beresford, and bassist John Edwards engage in detailed free improv that unfolds with the coherence and clarity of spontaneous composition, balancing chamber-like restraint, abstract textural interplay, lyrical precision, and sharply responsive exchanges in intuitively structured collective dialog.
 

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Product Information:

Personnel:



Mandhira de Saram-violin

Steve Beresford-piano

John Edwards-bass

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UPC: 5903878255082

Label: Listen! Foundation (Fundacja Sluchaj!)
Catalog ID: 6/2026
Squidco Product Code: 37386

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2026
Country: Poland
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded live at The Vortex, in London, UK, on January 5th, 2025, by Alex Ward.
Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

Artist Biographies

"Violinist Mandhira de Saram is a founding member and leader of the Ligeti Quartet, who specialise in contemporary and experimental music. The quartet has residencies at Sheffield University, Goldsmiths University of London, and Cambridge University, which involves numerous workshops with emerging composers and performers and outreach work.

She is also a busy soloist, chamber musician, improviser, and collaborator, and works regularly with musicians including Steve Beresford (piano, objects and electronics), Benoît Delbecq (prepared piano), TableMusic, Riot Ensemble, Chineke!, Wadada Leo Smith, Laura Jurd, Alex Ward, Shabaka Hutchings, Ethan Iverson, and Trish Clowes.

International solo and chamber music tours have taken her around Europe, as well as the USA, India, China and her country of origin, Sri Lanka. She has performed at prestigious venues such as the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre and St Johns Smith Square in London, and Carnegie Hall in New York. She has broadcast on BBC Radio 3, featuring on programmes such as In Tune, Jazz on 3, Hear and Now, and Late Junction.

Mandhira is currently a mentor for the Young Music Leadership Programme in association with the Royal Academy of Music and Kuumba Youth Music. She teaches at home and regularly leads performance workshops and masterclasses.

A Leverhulme Scholar at the Junior Royal Academy of Music, she went on to study Music at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Her violin teachers have included Igor Petrushevsky, Howard Davis and Levon Chilingirian, and she currently plays a 1735 Sanctus Seraphin violin kindly loaned to her by Derek Clements-Croome."

-Mandhira de Saram Website (http://mandhiradesaram.com/)
6/16/2026

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"Steve Beresford (born 1950) is a British musician who graduated from the University of York. He has played a variety of instruments, including piano, electronics, trumpet, euphonium, bass guitar and a wide variety of toy instruments, such as the toy piano. He has also played a wide range of music. He is probably best known for free improvisation, but has also written music for film and television and has been involved with a number of pop music groups.

Beresford played in Derek Bailey's Company events and in the groups Alterations with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack, and the Three Pullovers with Nigel Coombes and Roger Smith. He was also a member with Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno of the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

Beresford has continued to play free improvisation with a number of prominent musicians, including Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, John Zorn, and Han Bennink. He has collaborated extensively with Swiss-American artist/musician Christian Marclay and is an active member of the long-standing London Improvisers Orchestra.

From 2010 he performed various pieces by John Cage, including Indeterminacy with Tania Chen and comedian Stewart Lee, and a performance with Ilan Volkov at The BBC Proms 2012 at The Royal Albert Hall in London.

He has also worked with a number of popular musicians, including Ray Davis, The Slits, Frank Chickens, Ted Milton and The Flying Lizards. In 2015 he performed a duoproject with the upcoming Norwegian singer Natalie Sandtorv at the Blow Out! festival in Oslo, Norway.

He was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2012. He is a senior lecturer on the Commercial Music course at University of Westminster.

Beresford's music and his teachings have inspired the musical community in the UK for over a decade. British songwriter and performer Katy Carr cites Steve Beresford's lectures on musical themes associated with Free improvisation, Experimental music, John Cage, musique concrète, Diamanda Galás and The Slits as a source of initial inspiration with regards to the creation of her debut album, Screwing Lies released in 2001."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Beresford)
6/16/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"After taking up the bass, around 1987, John Edwards co-formed The Pointy Birds who went on to win awards for their music for The Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs dance troupes. The group appeared at festivals in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Moers, Leverkusen, Copenhagen. Around 1990, Edwards played his first gigs with London improvisers such as Roger Turner, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton.

Between 1990 and 1995 Edwards was a member of three touring groups simultaneously: B-Shops For The Poor, The Honkies and GOD. During this period he also became an increasingly regular player on the London improvised music scene and performed his first solo gigs; he composed and performed music theatre with the bass and cello duo The Great Explorers, street-busked a lot and appeared at many more festivals in Germany, Estonia, France, Italy, Czech, etc.

Since 1995 John Edwards has become a "mainstay" of the London scene, playing with just about everybody, an activity that has seen him clocking up between 150 and 200 gigs a year. He has become regular player with Evan Parker, in many groupings, and with Tony Bevan, Veryan Weston, and Elton Dean, often in collaboration with Mark Sanders on percussion. He has become a more frequent player on the European (and festival) scene, appearing at Taktlos, Ulrichsburg, Nickelsdorf, Budapest, New Zealand and in the USA. He continues to work on solo performances."

-EFI (http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/musician/medwards.html)
6/16/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:
Related Categories of Interest:

May 2026
Improvised Music
Jazz
Free Improvisation
London & UK Improv & Related Scenes
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
Trio Recordings
Stringed Instruments
Piano & Keyboards
Collective & Free Improvsation
New in Improvised Music
Recent Releases and Best Sellers

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Listen! Foundation (Fundacja Sluchaj!).


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