Scott Smallwood was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up at 10,000 feet in elevation in the Colorado Rockies. When Smallwood was 10 years old, he received his first tape recorder, and ever since he has been fascinated by the possibilities of recorded sound. Currently based in New Jersey, Smallwood's work deals with real and abstracted sound textures based on a practice of listening, improvisation, and phonography. Ranging between sonic photographs, abstracted studio pieces, improvisations, and composed structures, his work attempts to deal with the puzzle of pulling signal out of noise.
He has performed with a variety of improvisors including Cor Fuhler, Joe McPhee, Phil Gelb, Todd Reynolds, John Butcher, Mark Dresser, and Pauline Oliveros. His instrumental compositions have included performances by Network for New Music, Ensemble SurPlus, the Boston Sound Collective, and the Brentano String Quartet.
His work has been presented in a variety of national and international venues including recent presentations at Roulette in NYC, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the 2004 ICMC in Miami, and the Kulturhaus E-Werk in Frieberg, Germany. His work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Televaw, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Webbed Hand Records.
Silo is the product of three conscientious improvisers who had the rare opportunity of daily rehearsal and exploration for 20 days in upstate New York. The result is a special communication and a group sound that is organic, biological, mechanical, and very personal. The three players are making their first appearances on the international improvisation scene: Leonel with his work with Wade Matthews and Axel Dorner, Nate with his solo work on Creative Sources Recordings, with his trio Blue Collar and many sideman projects in New York, and Audrey with her stellar new album, LIMN with Tatsuya Nakatani and work with Gianni Gebbia. All of this is only of secondary interest, though, as Silo is a band of composite sound, textures that defy separation into individual voices and an overpowering desire to find new sound.The trio has a new cd out on Utech Records (www.utechrecords.com), and completed a successful tour of Belgium, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and England in the winter of 2006. The group will also be on tour in the United States in late September of this year, traveling through the Midwest, South, and East Coast.
Leonel Kaplan is largely a self-taught musician, though he had taken informal jazz lessons for many years with legendary local free jazz trumpeter Enrique Norris. These formatives years were fundamental in his artistic development. But it was the discovery of free improvisation which led him to understand how to take maximum advantage of those aspects of his instrument directly linked to air itself. Thus, the physical nature of the instrument and the presence of air as the bearer of sound became fundamental points of reference in his quest for a personal language in which he draws away from the tradition of the trumpet in order to draws ever closer to its nature. During the past years Kaplan has participated in multiple tours throughout South America, USA and Europe, including a series of concerts, recordings and festivals participations with improvisers such as Michel Doneda, Jack Wright, Axel Drner, Xavier Charles, Bhob Rainey and L Quan Ninh between many others.
Nate Wooley grew up in a finnish-american fishing village in Oregon. He has spent the rest of his life trying musically to find a way back to the peace and quiet of that time by whole-heartedly embracing the leap between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. He began playing trumpet professionally at age 13 with his father. Nate's music deals more with a cobweb of sound then with pure melody and meter. He is sought out for his work in the free jazz idiom, but finds more meaning in a well prepared sound or silence or burst of feedback. He currently resides in Jersey City, New Jersey and has performed or recorded with Anthony Braxton, John Butcher, Alessandro Bosetti, Chris Forsyth, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tony Buck, Joe Morris, Jack Wright, Fritz Welch, Jason Roebke, Scott Rosenberg, Herb Robertson, Randy Peterson, and Tim Barnes.
Audrey Chen, Using her trusty cello, self-styled vocal techniques and ever surprising content/concepts, Audrey Chen has emerged as one of the most vital experimental free-improvisers in the United States and beyond. She has toured extensively around the world bringing her sounds and intuition to Poland, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Japan, and the United States. Among musicians, she has worked with many great improvisers, including Phil Minton, Mazen Kerbaj, Jaap Blonk, Michael Zerang, Tony Buck, Tatsuya Nakatani, Assif Tsahar, Scott Rosenberg, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, and Gianni Gebbia. Some current projects include: duo projects with Tatsuya Nakatani (percussion) and Gianni Gebbia (saxophone) from Palermo, Sicily, Trockeneis (Baltimores power quintet), and a new trio (SILO) with Nate Wooley and Leonel Kaplan (trumpets). Recent performances have included a duo tour with Nakatani through China and Japan celebrating the release of their new duo CD, LIMN. www.hhproduction.org. Upcoming engagements include duo and trio tours with Gebbia and SILO through Europe in February /March 2006.