In this seminar/workshop, John Butcher, Werner Dafeldecker, and Roy Carroll offer insights into the methods and aesthetics behind their trio work. Participants will engage with key aspects of their practice, including focused listening, timbral exploration, and real-time structural decision-making. Through discussion, demonstration, and collaborative exercises, the trio will unpack their individual and collective approaches—ranging from acoustic phenomena to electronic processing—highlighting how their music emerges through attention to detail, materiality, and the dynamic interplay of contrasting perspectives.

Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands. 

Werner Dafeldecker was born in Vienna in 1964 and studied the double bass which he plays with passion. As a musician, composer and sound artist he takes advantage of the manifold possibilities offered by electro-acoustics. His musical projects are often inspired and deduced by outside influences such as architecture, science, photography and film - partially resulting in the creation of graphical scores for various ensembles and instrumental performers.

Roy Carroll is a musician / composer working with electroacoustic media, which is broadly a set of materials and processes that includes amplification, transducers, synthesis, feedback, audio recordings, software, - auditory and psychoacoustic phenomena even. Feedback, the horror of an instrument hearing itself, is a recurring component of Carroll's work, creating multi-layered forms that continually renegotiate the transformation of electrical audio signals into disturbed air. Roy is based in Berlin.

Photo credit for John Butcher: Sean Kelly