Minor Renaissance — concert series for experimental contemporary sound practices
#3 with Marina Mello & Nicola Genovese (duo), Thomas Stone (solo), Cath Roberts & Magda Drozd (duo)
Doors 7:00pm
Tickets £7-12
Minor Renaissance, a concert series for experimental music, traces quiet renewal through shifting relations between instruments and electronics, composed and improvised material, and inherited techniques and wayward contemporary practices.
Minor Renaissance, a concert series for experimental contemporary sound practices, traces quiet renewal through shifting relations between instruments and electronics, composed and improvised material, and inherited techniques and wayward contemporary practices. Minor Renaissance invites the audience to notice the small shifts already underway: instruments losing their familiar edges, materials changing form, technologies acting less like tools and more like collaborators. Rather than a rebirth announced by a movement, it points to smaller transformations — fragile, unfinished, temporary communities of sound.
For the third edition of the series, these transformations take the form of two new duets and a solo performance. Harpist Marina Mello and multi-instrumentalist Nicola Genovese will present their research into improvisation with instruments and electronics live on stage for the first time, while saxophonist Cath Roberts and violinist Magda Drozd will expand their prior encounters with acoustic improvisation into spheres of electronics and synthesis. Composer Thomas Stone will present a solo version of his latest album, The Shunned Path. Written as a duet for contrabassoon and timpani, both with electronics, the work is an exploration into coercion, performed by Stone himself.
Curated by Magda Drozd
Supported by Swiss Cultural Fund UK
Marina Mello is a Brazilian harpist based in Zurich with a wide range of experience as a musician. She has developed a unique and very expressive style through the harp and its infinite possibilities. In this sense, she presents her artistic journey, mainly researching new sound textures through paradoxes between emptiness and noisy textures, and harmonic and random-spontaneous vertical sounds. Focusing on non-traditional ways of playing - with extended technique, prepared instrument and with effect pedals (hybrid, acoustic and electric harps), Marina believes that as a harpist there are many stereotypes and expectations that can and should be disrupted.
In spring 2024 Marina collaborated with Theater Neumarkt in Zurich - she composed and performed the music for the production Dunkler Frühling directed by Yana Eva-Thönes and Tine Milz. In the summer of 2024 Marina toured in Brazil, Colombia and Peru with Constanza Pellicci (ag), Thelmo Cristovão (br), Linda Vogel (ch), Marcel Gschwend (ch) and Mara Micciche (ch). The IOIC Fitzcarrado Tour was produced by IOIC (institue of incoherent cinematography) and supported by Pro-Helvia South America.
Marina has playing in various constellations in Switzerland, Germany and South America. At the end of 2019, together with Diego Kohn (ag), Gemma Galeano (es) and Ferran Gorrea (es), she founded the Slide Ensemble (two saxophones, viola and harp), dedicated to new and improvised music. In 2022, they performed co-created pieces on a tour in Switzerland. This project was supported by Fondation Suisa, City of Zurich, Pro Helvetia, Swiss Performers Foundation SIS, etc. In the fall of 2022, the Slide Ensemble won the first prize at the 11th Music Competition of the 22nd Annual Congress of the Society for Music Theory in Salzburg (AT).
Photo by Francesca Camilla
Born in Venice Italy, Nicola Genovese is a visual artist and musician based in Zurich and London. He earned a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Zurich University of the Arts in 2017 and completed a PhD in Artistic Practice at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, in June 2023.
Genovese’s practice explores the intersections of sculpture, performance, and soundscapes, frequently challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries. Music plays a pivotal role in his performance art, forging a dynamic interplay between sound
and visual elements. As a saxophonist and flautist, Genovese’s musical foundation lies in free jazz and the avant-garde. In recent years, he has expanded his approach, incorporating granular loopers and modulated delays to experiment with the harmonic potential of late Renaissance music.
Thomas Stone is a composer based in London.
His practice focuses on live performance, drawing inspiration from disparate sources such as his tinnitus, the act of ritual and the physical effect of sound.
His influences include the chamber works of Galina Ustvolskaya and Dmitri Shostakovich and the experimental techno of acts such as Emptyset and Pan Sonic.
Refined through presentation in various resonant spaces – from churches to a disused water tank; Cornish coastal caves to the hull of a ship – Thomas's compositions use contrabassoon and sampling devices as oscillators for his snare drum. Blurring the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sound sources, his post-classical / post-techno soundscapes use the relatively ugly means of long tones, dissonances and cyclic rhythms to reach moments of austere, fragile beauty.
His music has been released on the record labels Bloxham Tapes, Sensory Leakage and Cloudchamber recordings. Billed as an artist to watch by Nick Luscombe on BBC Radio 3.
Performances at institutions including Tate Britain, The Serpentine Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, Kings Place and Britten Pears Arts.
For Minor Renaissance Thomas will be presenting special solo versions of music from his latest album The Shunned Path. Written as a duet for contrabassoon and timpani (both with electronics), the work is an exploration into coercion - where does free will stop? Are the things we’re led into not doing more significant than those we are encouraged to do?
Photo by Baris Ucar
Cath Roberts (they/them) is an improviser, composer and artist based in Hastings, UK, whose work combines acoustic and electronic improvised music, experimental composition, and DIY publishing practices.
On saxophones Cath has collaborated with a wide range of artists and ensembles internationally for over a decade. Their band Sloth Racket has released five studio albums, touring widely and ‘lurching between riff and abstraction’ (The Wire) since forming in 2015. Other recent exploits include playing with Chris Corsano as part of his 2022 Cafe Oto residency, and being one of two UK artists (with Mandhira De Saram) commissioned by Australian Art Orchestra to co-create and perform Fresh Water – Salt Water in Melbourne and Huddersfield (a hcmf// and AAO co-commission, also in 2022).
Cath works with live electronics (SOMA Lyra-8 synthesiser, samplers, and small tabletop machines) in ongoing collaborations with Kate Carr (as Quartz Sand), Graham Dunning (as Grid & Robots) and Tullis Rennie (as Composite Mashworks). Be unafraid to open things up, a solo improvisation on tabletop electronics, was released on Fractal Meat Cuts in 2022. Cath’s sampler-based solo collage set appeared at hcmf// 2024, Sonics Hastings 2025 and Sacrum Profanum (Kraków) 2025.
In 2021 Cath was commissioned by hcmf// to create And then the next thing you know, a cross-artform installation/performance piece involving a giant, hanging, fragmented graphic score, elements of which are being integrated into a new audio-visual collaboration with Tullis Rennie. In 2024 Cath established the DIY small press Ink-Paper-Sound, and they co-run the Luminous label and the BRÅK concert series.
Photo by Adriana Kochańska
Magda Drozd is a composer, violinist, and sound artist based in London and Zürich. Moving between improvisation and composition, she builds music that inhabits in-between states: an electroacoustic approach to field recording laced with violin layers, orchestral and choral fragments, fragile voices, and noise. In her hands, the violin is rarely just a violin, drawn out into drones, manipulated into texture, or left to surface into a clear melodic line before folding back into the whole. Folk memory threads through this material — less as quotation than as something half-remembered, deconstructed and reshaped. With a strong interest in listening to the fragmented and granular, she turns close attention into an intuitive, speculative way of perceiving the world through sound.
Drozd has released four solo records on the Swiss label Präsens Editionen, most recently Divided by Dusk (2026), with further releases on Hallow Ground, Flaming Pines, and her own label Rivercore. With Nicola Genovese, she founded the post-genre duo Sopraterra.
Photo by Keith de Mendonca