Arrington de Dionyso (b. January 4th, 1975) of Olympia, Washington uses performance as a vehicle for driving through the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll. After living in Chicago, Arkansas, and Spokane, Arrington moved to Olympia in 1992 to attend the Evergreen State College, where he studied Ethnomusicology, Music Therapy, and Butoh dance theater.
Fred Hersch (born October 21, 1955 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is a contemporary American jazz pianist who has become a consistent and highly demanded performer on the international jazz scene. Hersch began playing piano at a very young age and graduated from the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. His teachers included Sophia Rosoff. He moved to New York City in the late 1970s where he soon found a place playing with notable artists such as Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Lee Konitz, and Charlie Haden.
Bushman's Revenge is a Norwegian free jazz group, consisting of: Even Helte Hermansen (Shining) - Guitar
Rune Nergaard (Marvel Machine, Bullet, Team Hegdal) - Bass
Gard Nilssen (Puma, Heidi Skjerve Quintet) - Drums. Bushman's Revenge aims to combine the jazz/improv background of the rhythm section with the rock/metal background of the guitarist to create their own expressive music inspired just as much by Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix as by Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.
FURT is the electronic composition/performance duo formed by Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer in London in 1986. FURT’s dense and intricate musical forms are produced at every level by an interpenetration between free improvisation and systematic composition, and use primarily concrete (sampled/processed) materials. This activity is concerned above all with allying the physicality and expressivity of sound-structures to FURT’s vision - but also with deriving methods of musical production from the nature of the (electronic) medium itself.
Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie uses home-made instruments, amplified found and junk, microphones & electronics alongside more conventional drums and cymbals. Originally a drummer he has worked in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation, studio composition.
Multiple artists are known as Roch. (1. Roch is a collaboration between Ronald Nijhof and Christian Toonk in wich they make multi-instrumantal improvisations.
Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, composer and performer (born Dec. 29th 1973 in Trondheim, Norway), finished composition studies at the Norwegian State Academy of Music in Oslo in 2000. Her compositions have been performed by Oslo Sinfonietta, The Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Arve Tellefsen, Cikada and Vertavo string quartets, Quatuor Renoir, ticom, Crash Ensemble, Torben Snekkestad, Spunk, Frode Haltli and Poing among others.
Frederic Rzewski (born Westfield, Massachusetts, 1938) studied music first with Charles Mackey of Springfield, and subsequently with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton Universities. He went to Italy in 1960, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and met Severino Gazzelloni, with whom he performed in a number of concerts, thus beginning a career as a performer of new piano music.
There are four different bands named Altered States, listed in order of popularity: a Japanese free/noise jazz / avant-prog group from the 90s, an 80s gothic rock band, a Bass music production trio from Manchester and a psychedelic rock band from Dallas. 1. If pure musicianship is the guiding criterion, Altered States are arguably one of the greatest guitar/bass/drums trios in the history of rock, which may strike some as an overstatement but the evidence is there for anyone willing to seek out the band's Japanese label releases.
