fORCH was initially formed for the 2005 New Jazz Meeting of the SWR (South West German Radio), which consisted of a week of intensive rehearsing and recording followed by four concerts. CD recordings from this project are being released by Psi Records - the double CD spin networks in June 2007 and a further CD equals later in the year. In June 2007 fORCH makes its UK debut at the Spitalfields Festival.

fORCH is based around the electroacoustic duo FURT (furtlogic.com), which was formed by Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer in 1986 and which has performed throughout Europe and released five CDs of its own. FURT's music is a unique combination of kaleidoscopic electronic/concrete sound with the headlong energy of free jazz, and has recently been described in The Guardian as "one of the most blisteringly energetic and experimental partnerships over the past 20 years." Expanding FURT into a new kind of "orchestra" (hence the name fORCH) was been an objective of Barrett and Obermayer for many years, and the SWR project created an opportunity to establish such an ensemble, in which the electronic duo is combined with two vocalists and four instrumentalists, all leading players in the world of improvised and experimental music who have developed their own unprecedented sounds and techniques, so that the boundary between electronic and acoustic sound may be constantly crossed from either direction.

fORCH plays a combination of "pure" improvised music and composed frameworks by Richard Barrett which serve to coordinate and channel the musical energy of the ensemble in clearly structured but still "free" directions, so that it has a strong musical "personality" which is more than the sum of its parts. This is a new kind of contemporary music ensemble which no longer recognises any hierarchy between composer and performers.

In 2005 the lineup was Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer (electronics), Phil Minton and Ute Wassermann (voices), John Butcher (saxophones), Paul Lovens (percussion), Wolfgang Mitterer (piano/electronics) and Rhodri Davies (celtic and concert harps). More recently the group has also incorporated the young New York-based trumpeter Peter Evans and violist Aleksander Kolkowski so that future performances might expand the personnel to ten or more players.

Richard Barrett, born in Swansea in 1959, studied composition principally with Peter Wiegold. His compositions have won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1986), Gaudeamusprijs (1989) and the British Composer Award for chamber music (2003). He taught electronic composition and performance in the Institute of Sonology in The Hague from 1996 to 2001; during 2001-02 he was a guest of the DAAD Berlin Artists’ Programme, remaining in Berlin until 2006 when he became a professor at Brunel University. Within this role he teaches composition at postgraduate levels and with Peter Wiegold, he hosts a series of post-graduate seminars and lectures including visiting guest artists; specialists in their fields, such as composer Jonathan Harvey, David Chatterton, RPO contra-bassoon, Carl Rosman (clarinet) and Mark Knoop (piano) (2007 seminar series). Richard Barrett’s work encompasses both composition and improvisation, ranging from chamber music to innovative uses of live electronics and collaborations with visual artists. Recent projects include NO, commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and premiered in February 2005 at the Barbican Hall in London, conducted by Tadaaki Otaka, and the ensemble pieces Melos and Island, both premiered by Elision in November 2006 and both part of CONSTRUCTION, a two-hour work for voices, ensemble and electronics commissioned by Liverpool Cultural Capital to be premiered complete in 2008.

Richard Barrett also continues his twenty-year collaboration with Paul Obermayer in the electronic duo FURT and performs regularly with vocalist Ute Wassermann, saxophonist Evan Parker, bassist Adam Linson, cellist Arne Deforce and numerous ensembles from both compositional and improvisational areas, including the vocal/instrumental/electronic octet fORCH, which gave its first performances in Germany and Switzerland in late 2005. His work as composer and performer is documented on over 20 CDs, including four discs devoted to his compositions and four by FURT.

Paul Obermayer (born 1964) is an improviser and composer living in London. He studied maths at University College London and acoustics at South Bank Polytechnic. He has mostly made (live) electronic music - primarily in the electronic performance duo FURT with Richard Barrett, and in the improvising trio BARK! with Rex Casswell (electric guitar) and Phillip Marks (percussion) - as well as occasional notated instrumental pieces. His piano piece "coil", played by Philip Thomas, has recently been released on CD by Bruce’s Fingers.

Since 2004 he has been a regular member of Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. He has also performed keyboard/sampler solo as well as with Mick Beck, Adam Bohman, Crow, Karlheinz Essl, Harry Gilonis, Alan Tomlinson, Michael Vatcher and members of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, among others. He is a co-director of the London-based ensemble RESERVOIR, and has taken part in RESERVOIR performances of pieces by Globokar, Nono, Saariaho, Stockhausen, Varèse and Xenakis.

From 1993 to 1996 he was a regular contributor to The Institution of Rot – a permanent art installation in London conceived by installation/performance artist Richard Crow – working on sound installations, and producing the soundtrack for a "documentary" film. He has also collaborated on another short film, with computer-animator Andrew Greaves and composer Ian Willcock, and presented a new multimedia project with Crow in London in 2004.

John Butcher’s music ranges through free improvisation, composition, multitracked saxophone pieces and work with live electronics, amplification and feedback. He is well known as a solo performer, recently exploiting extreme acoustics, and has composed pieces for Chris Burn’s Ensemble, Polwechsel, the Elision Ensemble and the Rova Saxophone Quartet. He started playing the saxophone whilst studying physics, but, after finishing a doctorate on quantum chromodynamics he left academia in 1982 and went off with music - working with Burn, John Russell, Phil Durrant, Paul Lovens and Radu Malfatti.

In the early 1990s he joined what became the final version of John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble and also began playing with Derek Bailey and Phil Minton. Electronic music was an early influence on his approach to saxophone playing, and became explicit in his electromanipulation duo with Durrant, and, more recently, in duos with Christof Kurzmann and Toshimaru Nakamura.

Some current projects include Thermal with EX guitarist Andy Moor & Thomas Lehn, The Contest of Pleasures with Axel Doerner and Xavier Charles, and duos with Steve Beresford, Gerry Hemingway, Rhodri Davies, Paal Nilssen-Love, Gino Robair, John Edwards and Eddie Prevost. Butcher continues to play in many occasional, sometimes just one- off encounters - ranging from large groups such as Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper, Radu Malfatti’s Orkestra and the EX Orkestra, to duo concerts with Fred Frith, Akio Suzuki, and Otomo Yoshihide.

www.johnbutcher.org.uk

Photo: Bryony McIntyre

Rhodri Davies has been a significant figure in European experimental and improvised music for over ten years and is based in London. He uses a range of inventive techniques to extend the possibilities and sounds of the harp.

His regular groups include Broken Consort, Q-02,Common Objects, Cranc, Portable, Apartment House, The Sealed Knot and a trio with David Toop and Lee Patterson.

He has performed and recorded with diverse artists such as: Derek Bailey, B J Cole, Philip Corner, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, Luc Ferrari, Evan Parker, Christian Marclay, Sachiko M, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.

He also performs and researches contemporary music and is part-time lecturer at Huddersfield University. He has commissioned new works for the harp by: Carole Finer, Catherine Kontz, Michael Maierhof, Michael Parsons, Tim Parkinson, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone and John Lely.

www.rhodridavies.co.uk

Peter Evans has been a member of the New York musical community since 2003, when he moved to the city after graduating Oberlin Conservatory. Peter currently works in a wide variety of areas, including solo performance, chamber orchestras, performance art, free improvised settings, electro-acoustic music and composition.

As a performer, Evans has been working to break through the technical barriers of his instrument and enjoys playing with steady configurations of improvisers; each band explores a specific concept or style as much as possible. Current bands include the Peter Evans Quartet (with Brandon Seabrook, Tom Blancarte, & Kevin Shea), Moppa Elliott’s terrorist bebop band Mostly Other People Do the Killing, the hyperactive free-improvisation duo Sparks (with Tom Blancarte), the free-jazz quintet Carnivalskin (with Klaus Kugel and Bruce Eisenbeil), the Language Of with Charles Evans, duos with trumpeter Nate Wooley and saxophonist Dave Reminick, the New York Trumpet Ensemble, as well as a sustained interest in solo performance. In New York, Peter also performs contemporary notated music with groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Contiuum, and Ensemble 21.

He has continued to perform on piccolo trumpet in Baroque settings, performing Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 at the Bargemusic series, and in Bach’s Mass in B Minor at St Peter’s Church. Other collaborators have included: Mary Halvorson, Dave Taylor, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, Taylor Ho Bynum, Perry Robinson, Jim Black, Evan Parker, Ned Rothenberg, Mark Gould, Jack Wright, Luka Ivanovic, Brian Chase, and Alan Kay. Recent travels have brought Peter to venues and festivals in the U.S., Canada, Europe, the UK, and Southeast Asia. Recordings include "More is More", a solo trumpet album on psi, the self-titled first album of the Peter Evans Quartet (on firehouse12), and Shamokin!, the second album by MOPDTK, on HotCup Records.

www.recording-angels.info

Phil Minton, Born in Torquay, UK in 1940, both his parents were singers. He learnt tumpet from age 15 and played and sung with local jazz groups, moving to London in 1963 to play with Mike Westbrook.  From the mid 1960s he worked in dance bands in the UK, Canary Islands and Sweden. Rejoining Westbrook in 1972 he was a regular member of his Brass Band untill 1984, playing trumpet and singing extensively in Europe, the USA and beyond.

Thru the last 30 years he’s worked mainly as a improvising singer and sung with most of the worlds leading improvising musicians as well as been a guest singer for many composers music. He collaborated with pianist Veryan Weston on compositions such as “Songs from a Prison Diary” and is currently a member of improvising groups TooT, No Walls and Axon, he also has a quartet with Veryan, John Butcher, and RogerTurner.

He was a Nesta awardee in 2005 and in the last 15 years has travelled to many countries with his “Feral Choir”, a workshop and concert for all people who want to sing.

Mitterer studied organ, composition and electroacoustics in Vienna and Stockholm. He is not only one of the Austrian specialists for electronics as well as being equally brilliant on the keyboard and on the slide controls, but is also one of the most innovative composers. His work oscillates between composition and open form. Apart from music for organ and orchestra, a piano concerto and an opera he has produced electronic pieces, conceptualized sound installations, and engaged in collective improvisation with diverse groups, developing a language of extremes, tension and complexity. The pleasure he takes in experimenting leads him to combine contrasting elements in the creation of unpredictable musical events. In one major composition, for instance, he juxtaposes musical bands and children’s choirs with specialized instrumentalists and singers, while filling the hall with surround sound created by live electronics. But his work transcends the merely spectacular, precisely because of his musical presence and the high – deeply moving – intensity and complexity of his compositions. Listening intensely to low sounds has its place just as much as the “installing” of exploding sound fragments in the listeners’ minds. Far from being smoothly pleasurable, Mitterer’s music is still uncannily beautiful at times.

www.wolfgangmitterer.at

Vocal artist Ute Wassermann is a composer/performer, improviser and interpreter of contemporary music. She studied at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts with Henning Christiansen, specializing in sound installation and vocal performance, and studied classical singing with Carol Plantamura (San Diego) and Arnold van Mill (Hamburg). Since 1984 she developed many special multivoiced vocal techniques, catalogued by register, timbre and articulative sequences which may be deconstructed and/or superimposed and used to explore spatial resonance phenomena. She has given numerous performances of her own solo work and performs regularly with many improvising musicians including duos with Richard Barrett (live electronic), Aleksander Kolkowski (strohviola, musical saw) and with Birgit Ulher (trumpet) in venues ranging from international festivals (Japan, Australia, Hongkong, Buenos Aires) to lofts.

She has collaborated frequently with composers who have created works especially for her voice, including Henning Christiansen, Richard Barrett, Chaya Czernowin, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Sven Åke Johansson, Ana Maria Rodriguez and has performed with many ensembles and orchestras including ASKO, KNM Berlin, ELISION, and Münchener Kammerorchester. Recent projects have included performances of “code*switching” for voice, computer and video installation by Ana Maria Rodriguez, a staged production of Savatore Sciarrino’s “Infinito Nero” (with KNM Berlin) and the completion of a cd of her own solo and multi-track vocal compositions.