mO Team
Click on each of us to find out more.
Kate Halsall: Manager
Kate is a pianist and promoter/producer of new music events. She plays with a number of ensembles including Piano Circus, duoDorT, Hammers and Sticks and Andrew Poppy's Sustaining Ensemble. As well as her work with Music Orbit, Kate has been projects officer at spnm and is the founder and promoter of Music and the Mind concert series. She is a partner of 3rd Ear, a new production agency for experimental music.
Colin Riley: Director of Music Orbit
Colin Riley’s work integrates many aspects of contemporary music drawing on elements of improvisation, new technologies, song-writing and large-scale classical form. His work is difficult to categorise and reflects a genuine distillation of stylistic approaches, embracing tensions between complex and simple approaches, as well as an experimental approach around traditional audience-performance environments. As an established figure within the contemporary music scene over the last 20 years he has forged a distinctive, and independent path.
He composes for a wide range of performers and ensembles, and also regularly creates work for his two ensembles, the Homemade Orchestra and MooV, where he is composer and performer/director. As an exponent of collaboration he has built up long-term relationships with certain key performers and artists both as a composer and festival director. He is also a committed advocate of the emerging and up and coming in the new music scene and is the Artistic Director of independent network, Music Orbit, established in 2000. He is also senior lecturer in music at Brunel University, London. www.colinriley.co.uk
‘his activities in the past few years have resisted categorisation’ (The Guardian, 2008)
‘unequivocal beauty and genre-busting writing … ‘ (All About Jazz, 2009)
‘something extraordinarily strange and beautiful’ (BBC Radio 1, 2009)
Ben Jarlett: Designer
Ben Jarlett is our webmaster and designer. To make his living he designs clever websites, and printed media - examples here. He has a great passion for music processing, particularily in a live context maily using MaxMSP. He performs with and creates computational toys to musically experiment with for MooV (with Colin Riley), Optik, and when time allows as half of the SuperCasioBrothers. He has a lovely little girl called Saskia who he looks after much of the time.
Chris Jinks: Videographer
Chris is a freelance guitarist, audio engineer and video editor. He studied music with Peter Wiegold and Richard Barrett at Brunel University and has had the fortune of being involved in many kinds of music - recording sessions for TV adverts, 12 piece funk bands, improvising ensembles with Uzbek and Western musicians, semi-improvised pieces with the national youth orchestra and directing groups of musicians in completely spontaneous music making using signals - to shamelessly name a few.
He runs VitalSign Productions, a media production company where projects have included recording and editing improvisations by notes inégales and New Noise, recording sessions with Bash-o and the Joel Bell Quartet, multi-camera HD video productions for Michael Rosen and the Homemade Orchestra, MooV, Piano Circus, the Darbar Asian music festival and SPNM.
Chris films the Sound Source event at Kings Place each month for Sound and Music and Music Orbit.
Kerry Andrew: Curator - Gobsmack
Kerry Andrew is a composer, performer and educator specialising in contemporary vocal music and music-theatre with a twist of pop, jazz, folk, world music and everything in between. Her choral work is published by Oxford University Press; choral and experimental work has been heard on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, Classic FM and on national news channels. She performs with the experimental vocal trio juice, the avant-jazz groups DOLLYman and metamorphic, and as a leftfield pop soloist.
Duncan MacLeod: Curator
Duncan is a composer, lecturer and animateur, born and raised in London. His compositional interests encompass concert music, cross-arts collaboration (film, fine art and contemporary dance), computer music, electro-acoustic composition and writing for amateurs. His most recent projects have included experimentation with varied temperaments and spectral analysis, areas that he is researching as part of his PhD at Brunel University. He currently teaches composition at Trinity College of Music, the University of Hertfordshire and Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is also currently composer in residence at the Handel House Museum, which involves amongst other things facilitating workshops, writing several commissions alongside programming a series of concerts for this Autumn. Further information can by found at www.duncanmacleod.org
Paul Fretwell: Curator
Paul Fretwell has composed pieces for traditional instruments from full orchestra to small ensemble, as well as electronic works which use computer technology to transform and develop sound. His music is dramatic, sensuous and evocative, using drones, textures, grating timbres and luscious harmony. Many of his works have been performed in festivals and concerts around the world. He is an SPNM shortlisted composer and currently lectures at the University of Kent.
Zoe Martlew: Curator - Strung Out
cellist, composer, broadcaster and performer - studied at the Royal College and Academy of Music, Clare College, Cambridge and the Chopin Academy in Warsaw. She has performed and recorded around the world as soloist and with many contemporary music groups, rock, pop and electronica artists including Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Lontano, Radiohead, Super Furry Animals, Paul McCartney, Marc Ribot/ Ceramic Dog, Plaid and Katie Melua.
She has worked extensively in dance and theatre as composer/performer, including collaborations with New York City Ballet’s Antonia Franceschi with Ballet Black at the Lindbury Studio, Royal Opera House; Avant-Garde Collaboration (ballet) Co’s Fin du Temps in Boston; M.D. for the Ballet Boyz show Encore at Sadlers Wells; Ghostward, Almeida Theatre; Warning to the Curious, Eastern Angles Theatre Company; and has played for many London theatre productions including National Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, Gielgud, Almeida and Bridewell Theatres.
Zoë was a judge on BBC2 TV's Maestro; is a regular commentator/presenter for the BBCTV Proms and Radio 3’s Hear and Now; recently appeared on BBC 2 Newsnight Review and was on the UK panel for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.
Recent projects include her one-woman cabaret show Z Unleashed, playing in London and at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath next year; improvisation comedy group Impropera, Leicester Square Theatre; POP8 collaborative dance/theatre piece at Giant Olive Theatre, London; new piece Variation Z recorded by the Primrose piano quartet for Meridian to be premiered at Kings Place, London next year.
She is much in demand for educational activities and has worked with disabled and autistic children, drug addicts, in prisons, universities and music colleges.
She is naturally blonde and draws the line at Country and Western and Dutch Techno.
Jake Thompson: mO admin
Jacob Thompson studied composition for three years with Robert Saxton at Worcester College, Oxford University. He is currently a student of Silvina Milstein's at King's College, London, for which he holds a RVW Trust postgraduate award. Jacob has participated in workshops led by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, John McCabe, the BBC Singers and Philip Cashian and Odaline de la Martinez. He has composed music for Lontano, Oxford University's Ensemble Isis, Worcester College Choir and Susan Milan's Debussy Trio. As well as his work with mO, Jake has also worked for spnm and Sound and Music.
© 2009 Music Orbit. Site designed and maintained by Ben Jarlett.
