Tuesday 1 December 2026, 7.30pm
Atsuko Kamura / vocals, kb, electronics
Tim Hodgkinson / reeds, lap steel guitar, kb, electronics
"In early 2024 we started work on the project that became the Haiku in the Wide World CD - 37 settings of mostly traditional haiku poems translated by Harry Gilonis, spoken in English by Tim Hodgkinson and sung in Japanese by Kamura. In September 2024 we toured a live version in Japan, then played LEM Festival in Barcelona and the 100 Years Gallery in London. We developed a new programme of settings of Suga Kanno’s poems in December 2025, premiered at Cafe Oto. Then a 15-date tour of Japan in summer 2026 with Japanese release of Songs of Resistance Kanno Suga CD. Joined by Otomo Yoshihide, Sabu Toyozumi, Haco, Yagi Michiyo, Kawabata Makoto, and many others. For our EU tour in November 2026 we will present our live Haiku project with improvisations and additional songs from the Suga Kanno poems."
"Haiku in the Wide World “a dancing, shifting terrain of life moving through the seasons and the comings and goings of the moon and sun. This project is a unique world, distinctly different from what either Hodgkinson and Kamura have previously accomplished." – Hidzir Junaini, Bandwagon Asia, April 2025
“Given the economy of the haiku form, the album is remarkably expressive in both its emotional and intellectual range. Through Hodgkinson’s sparing arrangements of his own clarinet and electronic sonics, plus occasional viola, violin and cello, each track launches or mirrors the reflective, descriptive or dialectical play of the chosen haiku’s words, as fully realised by Kamura.” – Biba Kopf in The Wire.
Atsuko Kamura brings her extraordinary voice and melodic sense: a background in feminist punk-rock leading to avant-noise improvisation with Tenko, Zorn, et al in NYC, followed by a sequence of albums. On “4 am” her first solo album “she douses the anti musical strategies of the late-seventies Rock In Opposition movement … with a soupçon of fizzy electrics, her operatic voice navigating an echoing mirror maze of pulses and tones.” - Stewart Lee, in The Idler, May/June 2022.
One of Tokyo's most emotive and inventive artists, and a member of Japan’s 80’s women’s liberation movement, Kamura is a founder member of the first Japanese all-female punk band, Mizutama Shobodan, also known as Polkadot Fire Brigade, formed in 1979 in Tokyo. Kamura also teamed up with singer Tenko as the female improvisation vocal duo Honeymoons in 1981. They developed a unique style of avant-noise improvisation and performed internationally with seminal New York improvisers Tom Cora and John Zorn, and at the International Women's Music Festival in Montreal in 1988. Their album Laughing Myth, produced by Kenichi Takeda, was released in 1982. Kamura joined Kazuko Hohki’s UK-based Japanese pop group Frank Chickens in 1988, and toured Europe, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, USSR and Japan. She also worked as a traditional Benshi narrator performing A Page of Madness with her original soundtrack at FILM FEST, an international silent film festival in Portugal.
Tim Hodgkinson most recently performed with KONK PACK (w Roger Turner and Thomas Lehn), Iancu Dumitrescu’s Hyperion Ensemble, UT, Fred Frith, gabby fluke mogul, and Zhuyang Liu.
Tim Hodgkinson composes music and also plays lap steel guitar, clarinets, and saxophones. He co-founded the politically and musically radical group HENRY COW with Fred Frith in 1968. He played in The Work, God, and K Space, as well as joining Ossatura and Torba in Italy. Two of his pieces performed recently are the Piano Concerto, played by Daan Vandewalle at Ars Musica Festival, and Under the Void performed by Phoenix Ensemble, Basel. He has a long involvement in improvisation, and from the 1990's researched into music and shamanism in Siberia. Latest recording: This is what happens, on clarinet, in duo with Zhuyang Liu on guzheng.
A founder-member of AMM (1965-2022)
“[Eddie Prévost’s] is one of the greatest metallurgists that music has produced. […] sparks delicately arcing through the air, of slow lava ingesting its surroundings, of the shifting grind of tectonic plates across each other, of the rustle and glint of a firebird darting between shadows, and of ore smashing into the surface of the earth; but perhaps this language is overwrought: all that needs to be remarked upon is Prévost's industry, his diligence.”
Nathan Moore — liner note to AMM’s ‘Indúsria’
Matchless Recordings mrcd105.
But beyond this work Prévost has also maintained a relationship with the jazz drum-kit.
“His free drumming flows superbly making perfect use of his formidable technique, but his most startling feature is his stylelessness. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or a Max Roach.” - review of a set with saxophonist Lou Gare, Melody Maker (27.03.1975)
“Prévost, meanwhile, was simply miraculous; it was fascinating to watch him and to compare his approach with that of a Kern or a Nilssen-Love. I can only say that he was possessed of an uncanny, burning intentness that navigated the ensemble through passages of stark, sculpted beauty, grave concentration and full-on, bristling energy.”
Blue Tomato, Vienna 2012. In concert with Marilyn Crispell and Harrison Smith. Richard Rees-Jones
“An excellent release from one of the finest percussionists around, jazz or otherwise.” review of Prévost’s solo CD ‘Collider’
Matchless Recordings mrcd106 – Brian Olewnic, Squidsear (2022).
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
Born in Wuhan; based in London. Mostly uses electronics or electro-acoustic instruments for solo and group improvisation, while other times also makes unpleasant computer dance music. Enjoys gritty and gnarly textures as well as delicate, amorphous qualities in different sound and space.
https://atunnel.net/
https://zhenghao.bandcamp.com/
Zhuyang Liu is a Beijing-born, London-based guzheng musician, sound and multimedia artist. Described as a “new generation guzheng virtuoso” by the Beijing Daily Music Weekly, her practice bridges traditional Chinese instruments and contemporary experimental sound.
Working primarily with the guzheng, alongside Chinese minority instruments such as the sanxian and duxianqin, as well as Asian string instruments including the koto and gayageum, Zhuyang combines improvisation, electronics, noise, and expanded instrumental techniques to challenge traditional boundaries and rearticulate Eastern sonic languages within a contemporary context.
Her work spans sound, performance, writing, and technological art, constructing immersive sonic environments that move between tradition and futurity. Drawing from Chinese opera, folk traditions, field recordings, poetry, and vernacular storytelling, she creates evolving compositions where acoustic and electronic elements intertwine.
Alongside performance, Liu develops original instruments, wearable sound systems, and hybrid acoustic-electronic structures that reshape listening, language, and physical space, extending musical practice into installation and embodied environments.
She has performed at venues including the V&A, British Museum, Hundred Years Gallery, and IKLECTIK, JZ club Hangzhou etc. and has collaborated and shared the stage with artists including Tim Hodgkinson, Maggie Nicols, Atsuko Kamura, Paul Cheneour, Shabaka Hutchings, Dudu Kouaté,Moor Mother, and Jacob Collier.
As a researcher, Liu focuses on sound politics, instrumentality, and sonic ecology. Her writing includes The Sonic Arsenal of Alternative Instruments: An “Unconventional Warfare” in Sound, Noise, and Conflict.
Ins:zhuyangleiu
www.zhuyangliu.com
https://zhuyangliu.bandcamp.com
