Love Cry - Ecstatic Ballads For Broken Hearts Plus Daft Horns

Audio Foundation presents..

Love Cry - Ecstatic Ballads for Broken Hearts

A new musical project by Singapore based Australian saxophone titan Tim O'Dwyer featuring the extraordinary drummer Darren Moore (Singapore/Aus) alongside a slew of local fire breathers.

Love Cry is an ongoing performance project in which we reinterpret sentimental Asian ballads—particularly Thai Luk Thung—through the ecstatic and explosive vocabulary of free jazz, inspired by the work of Albert Ayler. Rather than fusing genres, the project seeks to confront and transfigure them. We approach these songs not with irony but with intensity—treating their sentimentality as a site of power, memory, and transformation. Each performance is a risk: a negotiation between melody and rupture, memory and fire.

Tim O'Dwyer - saxophones
Darren Moore - drums
Jeff Henderson - saxophones
Tashi Stewart & Sean Martin-Buss - electric guitars
Eamon Edmundsen-Wells - double bass

with an opening set by hot new duo DAFT HORNS:
Ivan Mrsic & Sean Martin-Buss - French Horns & drum machines

Tim O’Dwyer is a world-renowned saxophonist, composer, soundpainter and interdisciplinary collaborator. He is as adept at traditional to freer forms of jazz and improvised music as he is realising the most complex contemporary classical notated scores.

O’Dwyer’s career as a saxophonist, composer and educator has constantly stretched across borders of genre, performance practice and art forms. Trained as a jazz musician at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, he furthered his studies with new complexity composer Richard Barrett in Amsterdam and visionary saxophonist and improviser Evan Parker in London.

During the 1990’s, O’Dwyer was a seminal figure in the avante-garde music scene in Melbourne Australia. He was a founding member of the punk-jazz group, bucketrider (1992), that went on to release four acclaimed CDs including tributes to Sun Ra and late period John Coltrane. The group also performed with international rock groups such as Zena Geva (Japan) and Sonic Youth (USA). He was one of the founding directors of the longest running weekly improvised music event in Australia – The Make It Up Club – that is still presenting weekly programmes to this day.

He has been a member of the contemporary classical ensemble ELISION since 1994, premiering many new works for the saxophone and composing works for the ensemble that have premiered at arts festivals throughout Australia, Europe and Japan, including the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK) and Radio Bremen (Germany). He is also a current member of the Australian Art Orchestra, whom he regularly tours with in Australia and also to China.

He formed the Tim O’Dwyer Trio in 2005, which has since released two CDs and performed at important jazz festivals in Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan and Europe including the 2010 Montreux Jazz Festival. He has performed and recorded with some of the most prominent jazz musicians in Australia. Internationally, he has won the Bell and Aria awards for best jazz album as a member of the Australian pianist Andrea Keller’s group.

Darren Moore
Born in Scotland, raised in Australia and based in Singapore, Darren Moore (b. 1974) is a drummer and electronic musician and whose approach to music balances fire and energy with subtlety and timing. He considers creative improvisation as central to his artistic practice whether he is making music on the drums or analogue modular synthesisers. He works predominantly in the fields of jazz, rock, experimental and improvised music styles and has performed throughout Australia, South-East Asia, Japan and Europe.

Creative improvisation is central to his practice maintaining a through-line in his approach to varying projects and activities. He is the musical director for the cellF project which is the world’s first neuron-driven analogue synthesiser (http://guybenary.com/work/cellf/). His ongoing projects include free-improv group Game of Patience, audio-visual duo Black Zenith, improvised duo with Malaysian saxophonist Yong Yandsen and Carnatic rhythm based percussion duo Darren Moore/Suresh Vaidyanathan.

Darren's musical journey began when he starting playing drums at 14 years old in his home town of Perth, Australia. His early musical experiences where playing rock music in the underground local music scene before entering the Western Australian Conservatorium where he completed a Certificate in Classical Percussion in 1993 and a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Drumming in 1997. After graduating from university, Darren moved to London which proved to very formative to his development as musician through having exposure to the broad range of musical experiences. Darren returned to Australia in 2002 where he lived in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

Darren lived in Tokyo from 2015-2018 where he quickly established himself as an exciting new voice on the Tokyo music scene. In Japan he collaborates with Tokyo's most adventurous improvisers including Akira Sakata, Hirose Junji, Fumio Itabashi, Toshimaru Nakamura, Kazuhisa Uchihachi, T. Mikawa, Hirose Hasegawa, Otomo Yoshihide, Jim O’Rourke, Suga Dairo, Cal Lyall and Akira Ishii to name a few.