https://squareears.bandcamp.com/album/waste-management
Comyn / Odie Ji Ghast / Whiteman
Francis Comyn
Fran Comyn is a percussionist and improviser. He has worked on various improvised music events and projects in Manchester, Sheffield and London in addition to solo field recordings. Current activities include the quartet Fjall soon to release their first recording on Discus Music and a duo project with Adam Fairhall.
https://francomyn.bandcamp.com
Odie Ji Ghast
Odie ji Ghast (a.k.a. Greta Buitkute) is a Lithuania-born improviser known in Newcastle and Manchester scenes. She is part of Historically Fucked and Impossibility Knox, and has shared the scene with many creators in the last decade. She also produces music and makes mixes, and has released solo albums with Beartown Records and Chocolate Monk. Since 2019 she started doing solo voice shows which resemble scripts – improvised melodies and rhythms with written word spoken and familiar songs reimagined.
https://odiejighast.tumblr.com
Nina Whiteman
Nina Whiteman is a composer, vocalist, and multimedia artist. Her project BELOW GROUND is a collaborative interdisciplinary investigation of the subterranean (funded by Arts Council England in 2023), and has included multisensory multimedia performances as well as ‘sonic gardening’ workshops in the community.
In 2022, Nina created a cycle of multimedia works titled The Cybird Trilogy, investigating potential of AI in both sonic and visual domains to express complex relationships between nature and technology.
Her music has been performed widely in the UK and abroad by ensembles such as Manchester Camerata, Quatuor Danel, Dutch accordion duo TOEAC, Ealing Youth Orchestra, Psappha, Colinton Amateur Orchestra (Adopt-a-composer scheme), and Distractfold Ensemble at venues and festivals including the Cheltenham Music Festival, Kettle’s Yard, the Bridgewater Hall, Kings Place and the RNCM. International performances include The Galaxy Rotation Problem at the World Music Days festival (Slovenia, 2015; selected by British and international panels).
Curington / Diurnal Burdens
David Curington
David is a composer, visual artist and improvising oboist based in Hadfield, UK with interests in density, texture, noise, waste, commercialism, collage, the everyday, the absurd and their manifestations in the internet age.
He is the founder of Square Ears records and, to date, his music has been released on both his own label and Difficult Art and Music and aired on Freeness on BBC Radio 3. As an improviser, he is interested in reconceptualising the oboe as a noise instrument and has performed both at Square Ears label nights and the Curious Ear series in Manchester.
David holds a PhD in composition from the Royal Northern College of Music and is a former winner of the RPS Composition Prize.
https://www.davidcurington.com
Diurnal Burdens
Ross Scott-Buccleuch records music as Diurnal Burdens and as half of the duo Liminal Haze. He has collaborated with Brandstifter, Matt Atkins, Several Wives, Andy Jarvis, Territorial Gobbing, Andrew Sharpley, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Tim Olive, James Wyness, David Curington, Craig Johnson, Daniel Vujanic and Howard Stelzer.
Albums from these projects have so far been released on Invisible City Records, Matching Head, Falt, Chocolate Monk, More Mars, Crow Versus Crow, Moonside Tapes, Courier, Bivalve, Sound Holes, Kirigirisu, Flux on Demand, Test Recordings, Park70, Liquid Library, Steep Gloss, Hooker Vision, Ubanu Tarasa, Anticipating Nowhere.
Ross also runs the tape label Steep Gloss, which specialises in collaborative sound works of all things delirious, bewildering, melancholy, abstract, etc.
Fish El Fish
Fish El Fish (a.k.a. Kamran) is an improvising electronic artist based in Manchester working with analog synths and voiceovers to create ad hoc sonic collages somewhere between spoken word, lofi ambient and an inspirational mixtape left at the back of the fridge for too long. He has performed at the Curious Ear series at the Peer Hat.