First event of a concert series for experimental contemporary practices, curated by Magda Drozd.
Doors 7:30pm
Tickets: £7-12 Sliding Scale
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.
The name reaches back to a Renaissance that was, in its own time, largely improvised counterpoint conjured over a given line, ornament invented under the hand, the written part no more than a frame for what a body would make of it. That older art turned on exposure: a sound committed to without the safety of being fixed in advance, a gesture that could go otherwise and cannot be taken back. The series holds to that same condition. Across composition and improvisation, acoustic sound and live electronics, it treats sound less as something delivered than as something enacted — worked out in the moment, with something at stake, in the room.
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.
Supported by Swiss cultural fund UK, Stadt Zürich Kultur, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich
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.
Alexander Tucker is an artist working across music, assemblage, painting, comics, collage, sculpture, film, and live performance. Formally trained as a painter at the Slade School of Fine Art, Tucker went on to produce a series of solo albums for Chicago-based label Thrill Jockey, and for ATP Recordings, before recording as MICROCORPS for Alter.
Bridging the gap between his fine art background and his work as a singer-songwriter, improviser, and electronic producer, Tucker continues to collaborate with both visual artists and experimental musicians.
Collaborative projects include avant-pop electronic duo Grumbling Fur, the Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra with Charlemagne Palestine, drone concrète trio NONEXISTENT, and modular duo Brood X Cycles w/ Nik Colk Void.