Peter Graham - piano, keybord
Seijiro Murayama - snare drum
Ivan Palacký - amplified knitting machine Dopleta 160
Petr Vrba - trumpets, clarinet, objects
Peter Graham (pseudonym of Jaroslav Stastny-Pokorny) studied organ at the Brno Conservatory, and went on studying composition under Alois Pinos at the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU), also in Brno. After completing his studies, he worked temporarily in quite a number of capacities - as an accompanist at the Conservatory, in theatre, as a music director in radio, as an employee of the Czech Music Fund, as a music school teacher, and as music editor for Czech TV in Brno.
At present he is employed as a professor at JAMU, Brno, until recently he was artistic director of Exposition of the New Music Festival. His greatest interest, however, is in composition. Graham says of his own music, that it "grows as does timber in a forest", without predetermined plans and goals. He is concerned with creation itself rather than with the cultivation of the personality: "I am what I do." Several of his works have met with success at performances in Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Romania, Holland, Sweden, France and the USA. In 1993 his chamber cantata Der Erste gained him second prize in the Musica iudaica festival's international competition for works on texts by Franz Kafka.
Percussionist Seijiro Murayama started performing improvised music in 1972, under some influence of Vinko Globokar and musicologist Fumio Koizumi. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1982 with a degree in urdu studies, then toured the USA with Keiji Haino as part of the seminal psychedelic band Fushitsusha. He stayed in New York for several months before returning to Japan to teach mathematics until 1998. He continued playing drums and electronics in K.K. Null‘s noise/rock band A.N.P. (Absolut Null Punkt), while further exploring free improvisation with regular collaborators Jean-Luc Guionnet, Eric Cordier, Michel Doneda, Mattin, Lionel Marchetti, among many others. Murayama now lives and works in France.
His artistic principal is especially to work with the idea of the plural or inter disciplinarity between music and other disciplines of art: dance, video, paintings, photos, literature etc. In the same way, he collaborates with musicians, composers, and sound artists. Improvisation is always for him the major concern, even if it is not his artistic goal. His approach is based on the attention to space and place, to the energy of the audience, to the quality of silence in various levels. Otherwise, he develops, by means of texts, his reflections about the framework of the " concert " system, the relationship with the audience, etc.
Ivan Palacký is a musician and architect. He has played with various groups and taken part in several music projects. He was a member of the guitar/doublebass/bassoon group"Sledě, živé sledě/Herring, live herring" - and currently performes in a duo called "Tílko/Singlet" with Jennifer Helia DeFelice and audiovisual project of "Koberce, záclony" (Carpets Curtains) with Filip Cenek. He "writes" a sound diary from all his journeys - collects excerpts of stories, wierd sounds and various acoustic mistakes. He likes to take part in one-shot improvisational groups or duos (with Cremaster, Ruth Barberán and Margarida Garcia, Will Guthrie, Andrea Neumann, Klaus Filip...) as well as playing solo performances. As an architect he is interested in architecture without "building", in sociological methods in designing and in morphogenetic maps in digital architecture. In 2009 he established a label UCEROZ and till now he released two albums with his most favourite collaborators. With Peter Graham they started duo Palagrachio.
Petr Vrba - DJ at Radio 1 in Prague since 1994, temporary student of gamelan music at Institute of Art of Indonesia in Yogyakarta, since 2005 both passive (music journalist, promoter) and active (trumpets, clarinet, egg cutters, broom etc.) explorer of non-idiomatic improvisation. His first experiences with bands unwind from the cooperation with Eduardo Borsuci In Optima Forma, which resulted in Zvuková brigáda (Sound brigade). In 2009, Chaos und Logos came into the world, which is a trio. A year later, he became one of the founding members of improvisation ensemble IQ+1 which released their debut "tváří v tvář" this summer. With korean experimenter Ryu Hankil they started Yanagi duo where there share their common interest in musical structures hidden in various and variously vibrating objects which enables a very natural communication through rolling typewriter or toothpicks bouncing along a plastic plate.
