Secret(e) Sounds Festival Night 2 - Duos

Audio Foundation presents..
THE 3RD AOTEAROA INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF SECRET(E) SOUNDS

A stunning selection of sounds, secreted away in some of Tāmaki Makaurau's most exclusive listening rooms.

Night 2 - Duos
Christoph (Switzerland) & Phil Durrant (U.K)

Ira Hadžić (Berlin-Germany) & Rāhana Tito-Taylor

Anna Fält (Fin) & Ducklingmonster

The duo of Phil Durrant (U.K) - electric mandolin & electronics, and Christoph Gallio (Switzerland) - saxophones, was formed in 2022 during Gallio’s residency in London. However the musicians first met in Switzerland 40 years previously and have occasionally worked together in adhoc projects. Individually, they are veterans of the international ‘free improvised music’ scene and have been involved in notable projects that have shaped the development of the music. These projects include Butcher/Durrant/Russell, Trio Sowari, DAY & TAXI. As a duo, they have a forthcoming release on Empty Birdcage Records.

Ira Hadžić is a Berlin-based sound artist, gong player, and writer whose work unfolds at the intersection of music, literature, performance, participant observation, and embodied research. With a background in cultural anthropology, she explores themes of transition, inner landscapes, and the porous boundaries between reality and fiction—often challenging the very limits of representation.
Her projects have been produced by radio broadcasters such as Deutschlandfunk Kultur (DLF) and Südwestrundfunk (SWR), and have been presented at festivals including Heroines of Sound (Berlin). Her sound piece Heimatgefühle received the Karl-Sczuka-Förderpreis for radio art in 2022, followed by a residency at ZKM | Hertz Lab in Karlsruhe.
Trained as a Deep Listening facilitator at the Center for Deep Listening (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), she incorporates these practices into her compositions and sound installations. Ira Hadžić is a member of Initiative Neue Musik Berlin e.V.

Anna Fält is a versatile voice artist, folk musician, composer and singing teacher. She works widely within the culture branch, which includes theater stages, art projects and various festivals and venues. Born and raised in Finland, living in Sweden she combines the different vocal traditions, languages and singing aesthetics to a unique combination of sounds. Her big passions in life are human voice, Nordic folk vocals, improvisation, teaching, and spontaneously joining unexpected co-operations!

Phil Durrant
Durrant is a multi-instrumentalist improviser/composer/sound artist who currently performs solo and group concerts. As a violinist (and member of the Butcher/Russell/Durrant trio, News From The Shed and the Chris Burn Ensemble), he was one of the key exponents of the ‘group voice approach’ style of improvised music. In the late 90s, his influential trio with Radu Malfatti and Thomas Lehn represented a shift to a more ‘reductionist’ approach. The above groups performed at concerts and festivals all over Europe and Canada and released cds and records on Acta and Emanem Records.
In recent years, as an acoustic or electric mandolinist, he has been performing duos with guitarists Daniel Thompson and Martin Vishnick as well as saxophonist Christoph Gallio. He also performs regularly in a trio with Mark Wastell and John Butcher and has many ongoing projects with drummer Emil Karlsen including a trio with Maggie Nicols.
As a semi-modular synthesist, Phil Durrant continues to perform with Bertrand Denzler and Burkhard Beins in Trio Sowari. He is also a member of the international electronic ensemble MIMEO with Keith Rowe, Kaffe Matthews, Thomas Lehn, Rafael Toral a.o. With Mark Wastell, Steve Beresford and David Toop, he is also involved in a new audio/visual project celebrating the work of the celebrated Scottish artist, Alan Davie.
In addition, Durrant has many ad-hoc groupings with a wide variety of musicians including Dominic Lash, Andrew Lisle, Colin Webster, Tansy Spinks, Khabat Abas, Tim Hodgkinson, Mark Sanders, a.o.

Christoph Gallio
The Swiss saxophonist and composer Christoph Gallio, who lives in Baden near Zurich, was born in 1957. He studied classical saxophone with Iwan Roth at the Basel Music Conservatory and music with Steve Lacy in Paris. Later he completed a Master of Arts in Transdisciplinarity at the University of the Arts in Zurich (ZHdK).
In his younger years he played with goldfish or worked with dancers - also in Japan.
He played with most of the improvisers in Switzerland and Buenos Aires. Among others with Irene Schweizer, Urs Blöchlinger, Mani Neumeier, Peter Kowald, Fred Frith, Haco, Tetsu Saitoh, Phil Minton, Pablo Diaz, Marcelo von Schultz, Olie Brice, Andrew Lisle, Cath Roberts, LIO.
He has recorded with musicians such as Irene Aebi, William Parker, Rashied Ali, Matthew Ostrowski, Gerry Hemingway, Sven-Åke Johansson, Olaf Rupp, Jan Roder, Oli Steidle, Andrea Neumann, Ernst Thoma, Julian Sartorius, Nicolas Stocker, Paula Shocron, Sergio Merce, Alistair Zaldua, Phil Durrant, Roger Turner, Dominic Lash, Mark Sanders and many more.
Extensive tours have taken him to China, Taiwan, Japan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, USA, Argentina, Chile, Germany, Austria, Switzerland. He has performed at many festivals, such as Taklos Zurich, Toronto Jazz Festival, Vision Festival NYC, Almaty Jazz Festival, MaerzMusik Berlin, Vancouver Jazz Festival, Yokohama Jazz Festival, Arkhangelsk Jazz Festival.
He is the leader of the trio DAY & TAXI for 35 years, currently with Silvan Jeger on bass and Gerry
Hemingway on drums. In duo he plays with Markus Eichenberger, Roger Turner, Phil Durrant and
Alistair Zaluda.

Rāhana (aka Larsen) Tito-Taylor is a multi-dimensional artist, primarily working with sonic mediums via taonga puoro, improvisation, and recording/music production. The whakapapa of Rāhana traces back to Tangiteroria in the mid-north and his community connections are firmly rooted in Tāmaki Makaurau. Rāhana is the founder of Noa Records, a pan-Moana ‘record label’ with a core intent of platforming Māori/Tagata Moana/indigenous alternative musicians and artists. In 2021 he received an Arts Foundation Springboard Award, an award which recognises and supports creatives with outstanding potential to pursue an arts career, and was tasked with composing the score for Nova Paul’s short film ‘Hawaiki’ which was part of the Sundance Short Films selection for 2023. Rāhara continues to work in compositional, improvisational and music performance spaces, finding unique ways to interface between the different worlds he inhabits through his creative practice while striving to summon new modes of connection and transformation between people and places.

Beth Dawson aka Ducklingmonster is an audio-visual artist from Onehunga, Auckland | Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand | Aotearoa.
She investigates installation composition through a range of practices focusing on community empowerment. Publicly, her work has predominantly been in experimental sound performance, most notably in the group The Futurians and solo as Ducklingmonster. Blatantly and happily ignoring art hierarchies, she works in performance, sound, ink, moving-image, broken electronics, painting and whatever else takes her fancy. She is a founding member of Uniform, an art-based collective with core members Beth Dawson, Kiran Dass, Tina Pihema (Ngāgti Whātua Orakei), Hanna Lacey, and Sjionel Timu (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu). She is currently a kaiako and PhD candidate at AUT School of Visual Art & Design with her practice-based research into a queer feminist elevating and valuing that which is temporary, collective, amateur, and improvised.