As the title implies, +minus [first meeting] is the result of the first meeting of Bernhard Günter with Graham Halliwell, and Mark Wastell. It also implies that what was intended to be a recording project has become a group, my first group since fifteen years, and named +minus:

Bernhard Günter: electric cellotar and composed basis tracks
Graham Halliwell: saxophone feedback
Mark Wastell: amplified textures, nepalese prayer bowls and gong

+minus’ music is improvised, but not purely so: two of the four tracks on our first artist use some of my older, noise oriented pieces as their structural basis, while the two others are indeed improvised. We understand improvisation as ’instant composition’, and the result is an intuitively played cross-over between electro-acoustic and improvised music of generally quiet and comtemplative character. Our group name alludes to our playing ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ pre-recorded composed basis tracks.

Our first meeting led to the virtually immediate creation of a new musical vocabulary and language specific to this particular group of musicians — something I have never experienced to happen in such a short time in the past.

+minus will play live for the first time at the Archipel Festival in Geneva, Switzerland on March 24th. This concert will also feature electro-acoustic music sets by Richard Chartier and myself, and Richard will join +minus for part of our set. We will record more music and play four concerts in Norwich, Manchester, Leeds, and London in May (confirmed dates will be announced in the next Trente Oiseaux newsletter).