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No Pancake: Phil Durrant / Mike Gennaro / Alex Ward trio + Fault Thrower 

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Tuesday June 2nd 2026
7.30pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Bees Mouth
Brighton,  BN3 1AE

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No Pancake is the trio of Toronto based drummer Mike Gennaro, Phil Durrant and Alex Ward. They have an album – Apollonia – out on Silver Set Records.

Canadian drummer Mike Gennaro burst into improvised music circles in 1999 with the release Port Huron Picnic (Spool), a disc with lauded Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. Then still in his early twenties, Gennaro also made two appearances at the Toronto Jazz Festival, duetting with trailblazing saxophonist John Butcher. Subsequent concert collaborations have included internationally acclaimed improvisers such as Juini Booth, Wilbert de Joode, Veryan Weston, Trevor Watts and Tobi Delius.

Born near London in 1957, Phil Durrant is a multi-instrumentalist improviser/composer/sound artist who currently performs solo and group concerts. As a violinist (and member of the Butcher/Russell/ Durrant trio), he was one of the key exponents of the “group voice approach” style of improvised music. In the late 90s, his trio with Radu Malfatti and Thomas Lehn represented a shift to a more “reductionist” approach. Recently, he has been performing solo and duo concerts with Bill Thompson and Gaudenz Badrutt using a semi-modular synth system.

Alex Ward is a composer, improviser, and performing musician, working primarily with clarinet and guitar. His involvement in freely improvised music dates back to 1986, when he met the guitarist Derek Bailey. He subsequently took part regularly in Bailey’s Company events, and has gone on to become a major figure in British improvised music.
His current work includes the avant-rock duo Dead Days Beyond Help in which he plays guitar, sings and co-writes the material; various groups which perform his compositions-for-improvisers including Forebrace, the Alex Ward Quintet/Sextet and improvising collaborations both regular and ad-hoc with musicians including Steve Noble, Dominic Lash, Kay Grant, Joe Morris and Weasel Walter.

Fault Thrower

Fault Thrower is a duo of James Parsons on drums and Al Strachan on electronics and cornet, playing music that leans on the fast and wild side of improv.

Marey + Matt Clark

Programme

Thursday July 23rd 2026
7.30pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
At The Coach House
22 Walpole Road
Brighton, BN2 0EA

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Marey

Marey is an Icelandic duo that plays improvised experimental music mixed with electronics and poetry, where contemporary classical music, sound art, spoken word, and folk music meet.

They are two sisters: Anna Sóley and Lilja María. Anna Sóley plays the violin and sings, exploring soundscapes and extended techniques, using her voice at times between spoken words and singing. Lilja plays an instrument she designed called Hulda. They both design the electronics. For that, Anna mainly uses samples from Hulda, while Lilja works on a conceptual basis, taking inspiration from the poems and prose.

Lilja María is a composer, performer, and visual artist based in Iceland. She completed a PhD in composition from City, University of London. Her works have for example been performed at the festival eavesdropping in London, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage in Germany, Dark Music Days in Iceland, and New Music Dublin in Ireland. She is a member of the group Hlökk, and their album Hulduhljóð (2019) won the Kraumur Awards and was nominated for the Icelandic Music Awards. Lilja María released the audio-visual album Internal Human in 2022 in collaboration with dancer Inês Zinho Pinheiro.

Anna Sóley studied music and literature in Iceland and the Netherlands, graduating with a BA in jazz & pop vocal performance from the ArtEZ Conservatory in Arnhem and a Master’s degree in literature from Utrecht University. She released her debut album, Modern Age Ophelia, in 2022. Anna has performed around Europe both as a vocalist and violinist.“Composer of the repertoire, she sings in English and Icelandic, and leaves space for moments of improvisation and poetic-lyrical flights.” Matthieu Jouan for Citizen Jazz, writing about Anna Sóley’s Modern Age Ophelia Concert at the Reykjavík Jazz Festival.

Matt Clark

Matt Clark is a guitarist and improviser based in Brighton.

His work sidesteps traditional notions of harmony and melody, instead exploring the random and unexpected within improvisation around twelve tones, and the sonic possibilities of unorthodox techniques.

Long standing projects Simian Carbuncle (with Adrian Southby) and MC3 (with Charlotte Keeffe and James Edmunds) have proved fertile breeding grounds for experimentation, whilst recent collaborations with Annie Kerr and Toma Sapir as Larker, Gus Garside and Mark Wastell  have led to ideas for frameworks, leading to more structured improvisations.

Image: Agata Urbaniak

He regularly performs in Brighton and London with a number of collaborators and ensembles, and is a regular participant and member of Brighton’s Safehouse collective and London’s Mopomoso Improvised Music series. His music has been played on both local and national radio stations, including Resonance FM and BBC Radio 3

“Brave and experimental as if the boundaries have shifted somehow – anything is allowed, and as long as it makes sense – which this album does totally – it is okay.” – Sammy Stein (Review of Sounds of The City) on Free Jazz Collective

“This trio produces a version of free playing which uses familiar traces of music to give a frame to its more radical elements . This brings an appealing warmth and humor to the work, and is a far cry from the usual forbidding stereotypes given to free music...” – Jerome Wilson (review of Sounds Of The City) on allaboutjazz.com

Wildcard Quartet

Yoko Miura, Viv Corringham, Lawrence Casserley, Gus Garside, James Parsons

Programme

Thursday October 8th 2026
7pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
The Rose Hill

Japanese pianist Yoko Miura as part of her European tour 2026 will improvise in two trios: with Viv Corringham and Lawrence Casserley, and with Gus Garside and James Parsons.

Yoko Miura is a pianist currently living in Fukuoka, Japan. Born in Tokyo, she started studying classical piano from the age of 5 and later became interested in jazz and improvised music. She says of her musical approach: “I am trying to make a kind of different universes interweaving and exchanging with different process, values and ways, with people, not only the musicians but also painters and dancers”

Viv Corringham is a US based British vocalist and sound artist, who has been described as “a vocalist of stunning virtuosity” (Louise Gray, The Wire). She makes concerts, soundwalks, workshops and installations. Her practice explores relations between voice, place and walking, responding with sung improvisations to both natural and urban soundscapes.

Lawrence Casserley has performed live performance electronic music in a wide variety of ways for more than fifty years. Since 1995 he has worked with many leading improvisers, particularly Evan Parker and his Electracoustic Ensemble. He also uses voice, percussion, home-made instruments and found objects as separate sound sources or inputs for his self-designed Signal Processing Instrument.

Gus Garside is a double bass player focusing these days on improvised and contemporary music.He has played with many notable musicians including Yoko Miura, Laura Cole, Anton and Johnny Hunter, Marcello Magliocchi, Marcio Mattos, Lol Coxhill, John Russell and Sylvia Hallett (with whom he was a member of the string trio Arc for 37 years until the passing of their beloved cellist Danny Kingshill).

James Parsons plays the drums in various improvising groups: Bolide, In Threads, Fault Thrower, God’s Teeth and lots of others.

Wildcard Quartet