NEIL CARVER
Since being a founder member and principal composer for electronic jazz group Bass Tone Trap, Carver has maintained a steady relationship with improvised music by occassionally suprising audiences with his unique soundworld of adapted toys, home made instruments, junk and natural materials alongside his idiosyncratic acoustic and electric guitars.
Guitar projects include endless variations of the trio Wire Assembly with John Jasnoch, the rarely heard guitar quartet Six by Four and a duo with Herve Perez.
Work with Helmut Lemke has focussed on the use of childrens electric toys sometimes in the Sleepers Trio (featuring up to six fully functioning amplified train sets) with fellow guitarist and points operator Jasnoch.
More recent projects involve the use of acoustic or amplified small percussion, often in the duo Play with John Jasnoch. In recent live and studio performances with Martin Archer these sound sources have been subjected to software manipulation. The reemergence of this latter duo has given new impetus to a compositional collaboration which extends back to 1980.

MARTIN ARCHER
Since his move in the early 1990s from free jazz saxophonist to studio based electronics composer, Archer has produced a series of highly acclaimed CDs which combine electronics-based structures with written and improvised parts for brass, woodwind, strings and voices. Elements from jazz, free improvisation, contemporary classical music, electronica, and cutting edge rock music are all present within his work.
Current live emphasis on solo laptop / woodwind performances, but also live and studio collaborations with all-acoustic improvising sextet ASK, laptop duo Inclusion Principle with Herve Perez, Hornweb with Charlie Collins and Derek Saw, (all represented on Discus) and as part of Gated Community, Mick Beck's 14 piece improv and compositions band. As a performer, Archer seeks to avoid the inert and inexpressive performance style inherent in much live electronic music.
Archer acknowledges groups such as Faust, Henry Cow, Soft Machine and Magma as being highly influential in his work alongside Cage, Stockhausen, Feldman, and of course the school of European free improvisation. This combination of sources makes Archer a unique inhabitant of the school of English maverick composers.

ARTEFACTS
These six electroacoustic compositions are from a duo that has worked together sporadically since the Mesolithic, and which has always used both melody and repetition alongside more abstract elements. Although in the past this duo has performed entirely improvised concerts, for this recording chance procedures have been harnessed within carefully composed structures.
Several pieces are based on ideas for modified electric guitar sometimes combined with natural or processed woodwind, while others exploit recent experiments with music boxes. Occasionally these are inserted into an unsuspecting ukelele, producing an artefact from now on to be known as the boxophone. The soundworld moves from the uneasy minimalism of "Retrieving" to the guitar brutalities versus west coast clarinet stylings of "Forgotten things".The "hau" builds on an idea for sopranino saxophone playing naturally occuring melodic fragments set in a pre-industrial landscape of questionable reality. These longer pieces are balanced against the almost heard as played guitar of "Brodger" and the granular alchemy of "The art of a conjurer". During the recording of "Material flow" we heard of the sad passing of Jackie McLean. He might not have liked what we've played, but we hope he would appreciate the sentiment.