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Geoff Bright

I am a Sheffield-based UK improvising musician on voice and saxophone, live art performer and writer/researcher on improvisation.

About Me

As a Live Art performer and sonic improviser using saxophones and voice, I have performed and had work installed in a Chelsea, New York, gallery; 're-sonated' in a former knitting machine factory in central France, worked out of a stage that unfolded from the back of a lorry in Tempelhof airport, Berlin, and sonically re-enacted a catastrophic explosion in a former steel works in the UK. Playing in bands from duos to more than fifty pieces, I co-curated the large-scale improvising event Magna: node/flow/mass; was a part of Mick Beck’s Gated Community and an original member of Juxtavoices, the Sheffield UK based anti-choir led by Martin Archer. I have also developed practice-based sonic research 'actions' as Alchemy/Schmalchemy and Dividual Machine with my main creative partner, bricolagekitchen. As a university-based research fellow, now independent, I have presented and published internationally on improvisation research, led an ethnographic study of the Noise Upstairs improv scene in Manchester, UK and remained research-active around free improvisation as a knowledge form that is resonant with meditation practices emerging from Buddhism, theoretical and ethical perspectives arising in process philosophy and forms of autonomous counter-capitalist community. I am currently busy with my meditation-inspired duo, not one, not two, with Hervé Perez, and a schizoanalytic multimedia project, Two Regimes of Madness, with Gill Whiteley (aka bricolagekitchen). I am also putting together the Polimprov website which proposes a hybrid politicised/spiritual practice of improvised performance - see www.polimprov.com