SPACE 4: John Butcher / Yoni Silver / Regan Bowering + Lawrence McGuire + Thea Jeffery Sands / Jackson Burton + Max Ardito

Curated by Regan Bowering, the fourth event in the “space” series invites new work from international and London-based musicians and artists. Each event holds space for creative risk-taking and first-time collaborations spanning improvisation, composition, and conceptually driven practices.

John Butcher: John Butcher Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi tracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands. Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Sophie Agnel, Christian Marclay, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, John Russell, Chris Corsano, Steve Beresford, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and Matthew Shipp. Additionally he values occasional encounters - with large groups ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester (as soloist), and the 20+ piece EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, Isabelle Duthois, David Toop, Mariam Rezaei, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee. Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission), “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award). "Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose-to-tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld." WIRE - October 2024. The Primer by Seymour Wright http://www.johnbutcher.org.uk

Yoni Silver: Yoni Silver One of the leading figures of the Israeli free improvisation scene - bass clarinetist and multi-instrumentalist Yoni Silver's music ranges from just-audible bass clarinet improvisations to full on noise, semi- composed pieces for varying ensembles, and computer music.

Regan Bowering: Regan Bowering Regan Bowering is a percussionist, improviser and sound artist based in London. Her solo work explores various combinations of drums and percussion, objects, amps, speakers, and feedback. Her debut album “Solos for _ _ _ _ Spaces” (Dec 2023 on Bezirk Tapes) was described as “a play of contrasts, contradicting voluminous expressions with confined phrases, taming resounding feedback with faint percussive flutters, but one that feels driven by the desire to craft electrifying drama rather than pure autotelic dissonance.” (The Quietus). She is one third of a collaborative project with Li Song and Conal Blake, with two releases: “2 Movements” (Feedback Moves, 2024) and "Music for Snare Drums and Portable Speakers" (Infant Tree, 2023). Her debut LP “A Technology of Feeling” was released January 2026 on Infant Tree. www.reganbowering.com

Lawrence McGuire: Lawrence McGuire Lawrence McGuire works in text-sound, text-print and phonetic play. His recent work as a sound poet invests in Gertrude Stein’s idea of insistence on non-linguistic forms. For OTO SPACE 4, and in line with McGuire’s recent works, he’ll present his new suite of recitals called Bible Studies; a collection of text instructions for synthetic and natural voice.

Thea Jeffery Sands: Thea Jeffery Sands Thea is a cook, artist and gardener from Paisley. She combines the three in a practice that seeks to feed back into the earth through careful cyclic use of materials found across the kitchen and garden. She runs a low waste, organic kitchen at Cafe OTO, devising affordable, seasonal, nourishing menus using produce she grows at Growing Communities’ urban farms; and uses food/plant scraps to make natural dyes, ink, photographic developers and print emulsions. She studied music at Clare College Cambridge and collects field recordings which inform her own improvisations on tape and occasional performances. She is drawn to visceral imperfect bodily forms, marled, messy, muddy textures, early music, bells, overtones, drones, domestic and folkloric rituals and the dark theatricality of sacred spaces which seep into her photography, drawings, video and sound works. She is interested in dissecting and collaging together the ingredients, materials, tools, sights and sounds experienced across her intensely physical and sensory work as a cook and gardener into a strange, deformed and surreal light that feeds her reality. She writes recipes for Infant Tree’s regular newsletter and keeps a personal website of images and writing. https://theasands.wixsite.com/photography

Jackson Burton: Jackson Burton Jackson Burton was born in Scotland, lives in London and works with scores, text pieces and action-based performances that deal with issues of class, labour practices and community. Recent live output has included performances at Cafe OTO, The Fruit Market Edinburgh and YDP Gallery London. He usually performs in solo or duo combinations and has performed pieces with Graham Lambkin, Aine O’Dwyer, Yan Jun and Rory Salter. Recently he’s released on Infant Tree in 2023, with Adam Bohman, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson and Sue Lynch and a live solo LP on OTORoku in 2025.

Max Ardito: Max Ardito "I'm a composer and musicologist living in Paris, originally from Brooklyn, New York. My music tries to engage with forms of listening that emerge through processes of reification and rationalization, based on a particular conviction that the act of musical listening can imminently interrupt structures that present themselves as autonomous or self-evident. In doing so, my music seeks to disclose these structures as historically mediated and socially produced—exposing what appears as abstract, autonomous, or enlightened as politically contingent and shaped by collective human decision. In parallel, my musicological research examines the social, historical, material, and epistemological conditions that predicate contemporary STEM research in order to better understand STEM's cultural influence on music. I am particularly interested in the various antinomies that emerge as a result of scientific rationalization and mathematical axiomatization—how these antinomies manifest in different musical contexts, and how they produce ruptures in our understanding of musical practice. I'm currently a doctoral candidate at Sorbonne Université, where my work focuses on better understanding the scientific and institutional culture surrounding generative AI music research." https://maxardito.com