HEARding Cats Collective is honored to present internationally renowned improvisers John Butcher and Thomas Lehn.  Hailing from Europe, Butcher (UK; saxophone, reeds) and Lehn (Germany; electronics, piano) are considered to be amongst the top tier of improvising musicians in the world.  Both have traveled the globe in various ensembles (Konk Pack, Ex Orchestra, London Skyscraper) and as individuals, creating temporal soundscapes that challenge listeners to think about musical expression in new ways.  The pair has been featured in major publications such as Wire, Coda, and Signal to Noise. 

John Butcher was born in Brighton, England and has lived in London since the late 1970s.  His music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions,

Click on image for a video of John Butcher

multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics.  Time Out New York said, “English saxophonist John Butcher is without question the most jaw-dropping technician we’ve ever heard wielding a tenor, equally capable of brawny assault and textural meditations at the very edge of audibility.”  Originally a physicist, he left academia for music after publishing his Ph.D in 1982.  He has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians, including Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Gerry Hemingway, and Gino Robair.  Butcher is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place.  His work “Resonant Spaces” is a collection of site-specific performances collected during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.  Compositions include pieces for Rova Quartet, Futurist Intonarumori, Polwechsel, Elision, and “somethingtobesaid” for the John Butcher Group.  In 2011 he was one of three recipients of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Composers.

Since the early 1980s Thomas Lehn has been working as a composer and performer of contemporary music.  Lehn studied recoding engineering and classical piano in Cologne, Germany leading him to a career as a performer of contemporary new music.  Parallel with his work as a pianist, since the early 1990s his major contributions have come in performing and producing live-electronic music.  He has toured the world as a performer, and been involved with projects throughout Europe supported by the Goethe Institute.

Rooted in the experience of a wide spectrum of musical fields based on his background as an interpreting and improvising pianist in classical, contemporary, and jazz-music Lehn has developed an individual ‘language’ of electronic music.  He primarily uses the late 1960s analogue synthesizer, EMS Synthi A. Besides the substantial characteristics of its analogue sound synthesis, the facilities of this modular instrument – for example to modify electronic sounds very directly as well as to combine and to control several parameters of the sound synthesis at the same time – allows him to spontaneously act and react in close contact with the various structural degrees of the musical process.  Coda Magazine said, “Thomas Lehn’s ancient analogue synthesizer is an honestly electronic sound source, but he plays it with pianistic animation, a responsive improviser in an ever-shifting, fluid and powerful music.”