At once a composer (electroacoustic and instrumental music), performer, improviser and sound artist, Christophe Havard (born in 1972 in Nantes) started his career as a jazz saxophonist, before moving gradually towards improvisation and sound experimentation. On stage, or in the context of his sound installations and compositions, there can be found in his creations a taste for sonic space, an attentiveness to surroundings, the quality of timbre, the notion of memory and a shattering of stylistic frontiers, with a mingling of musical means (acoustic, electroacoustic, electronic instruments).

After a post-punk period, in 1982 Jérôme Joy (born in 1961 in Nantes) joined David Ryan for a shared series of performances and shows until 1985, based around positions of refusal, distancing and rebellion (anti-TINA). Ever since that date, as a composer, performer and improviser, he has produced a series of works of experimental instrumental, electronic and electroacoustic music, adding network music to the list in 1997, which have been played and broadcast in a large number of festivals and shows worldwide. Through an exploration of intensities, durations and the scales of sound spaces, with the help of saturated, misused and recombined techniques, he develops, composes and plays a music which he describes as being excessive or borderline, lacking in norms, and even unlimited. For him, this is music which is barely predictable, located on thresholds, margins and experiences of separation from the present of what is being played, and what each person is living, in a laminar, inter-independent way (people making/living music/life).

At the dawn of the 1960s, fascinated by John Cage’s prepared piano, but also by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp, Keith Rowe (born in 1940 in Plymouth) started to exploit some original procedures: the prepared guitar and guitars played flat on a table (a guitar plugged into the cacophony of what he calls “perfectly ordinary reality”, with radios, everyday elements and objects, and electronic appliances). From the 1970s onwards, this transformed guitar was to influence new generations of guitarists, thus placing him firmly in the pantheon of underground rock references. In 1965, with Lou Gare and Eddie Prevost he founded the group AMM, one of the most decisive groups in the expansion of avant-garde music in Great Britain. Since the 1990s, he has multiplied his collaborations (Taku Sugimoto, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz, Burkhard Beins, Toshimaru Nakamura, David Sylvian and Peter Rehberg) and recorded a large number of albums over the past decade.

While still a teenager, Anthony Taillard (born in 1970) abandoned his moped for the electric guitar of Sonic Youth’s Confusion is Sex. As for the rest, he learned it first with punks, then in the milieu of Nantes squats. After that, his music started to take him away from the coasts of noise towards the deeper waters of experimental music, without forgetting one of his current projects, Subutex Social Club, an extremely raucous noise-rock trio. He has played in a variety of set-ups, such as Formanex, Man, Halfzouhair Schag, etc. Now with over twenty years’ experience of diverse forms of experimentation, he is continuing to develop installations proceeding from new instrument making, complex sound set-ups and an innovative musical grammar (including his orchestra of automatized instruments, Bobbyland, with Rasim Biyikli) while leading the interdisciplinary platform Le Studio d’en Haut (Nantes). His latest explorations have led him to play in the Nantes Guitar Quartet and the Immensity of the Territory, and to participate in a large number of collaborative projects with other musicians (Sylvain Chauveau, Phil Durrant, Noël Akchoté, Taku Sugimoto, AMM, ONsemble).