"Sergio Sorrentino is "one of the most important contemporary italian guitarists" (RAI Radio Tre). As a performer he promotes the classical guitar and electric guitar contemporary repertory.

As a composer and improviser his music is based on sonic research and combines elements of contemporary classical music, minimalism, avant-garde, ambient, experimental.

His CD Dream - American Music for Electric Guitar (Mode Records) contains works for electric guitar by John Cage, David Lang, Jack Vees, Elliott Sharp, Alvin Curran (a new piece especially written for this CD), Morton Feldman (world premiere recording on physical CD of "The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar"), Christian Wolff (complete works for solo electric guitar and the world premiere of "Going West"), Larry Polansky, Van Stiefel. Dream was reviewed and highlighted in the New York Times by Seth Colter Walls as one of the "Week's Best Classical Music Moments".

He plays with the great Gavin Bryars as a member of the Gavin Bryars Italian Ensemble.

He studied with Francesco Langone, Angelo Gilardino, Mario Dell'Ara, Leo Brouwer, Mark White (Berklee College of Music Summer Course) and composition with Marco Di Bari. In 2010 he obtained the Academic Guitar Diploma with Honors at the Novara Conservatory, with a thesis on Italian avant-garde guitar music. Sorrentino started his international concert career very early and has held solo concerts and master classes in many important festivals and venues (Yale University, Sprague Hall in New Haven, Spectrum in New York, Festival de Música Contemporánea de La Habana in Casa de Las Américas, Cuba, Italian Cultural Institute of Paris, Sala Biala of the Wilanow Museum (Warsaw, Poland), International Guitar Research Conference/University of Surrey (UK), Vortex in London, Performance Room of Luxembourg, Highscore Festival, Filharmonia Gorzowska Concert Hall, ON Cologne Neue Musik Festival, In Situ Art Society in Bonn, Spectrum in Berlin, Music Society of La Scala Theater of Milan, Goldoni Theater of Venice, Nuova Consonanza Festival in Rome, Lagonegro International Guitar Festival, Società del Quartetto of Vercelli, Auditorium Renzo Piano of L'Aquila, SpazioMusica Festival of Cagliari, Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte di Montepulciano, AngelicA Festival of Bologna, etc.). In 2012 he performed, with the Gorzow Philharmonic Orchestra, the Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" for guitar and orchestra with Cecilia Rodrigo, the composer's daughter, as a special guest).

He has worked with important composers and musicians like Sylvano Bussotti, Azio Corghi, Bruno Canino, Alda Caiello, John Russell, Machinefabriek, Steven Mackey, Andrzej

Bauer, Marco Angius, Giorgio Battistelli, Carlo Boccadoro, Mauro Bonifacio, I Solisti Aquilani. He plays in duo with the great contemporary music guitarist Magnus Andersson and with the vibraphone player Antonio Caggiano. He has debuted many new guitar solo compositions (in concert and on CD). Many composers including Alvin Curran, Mark Delpriora (Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard), Mauro Montalbetti, Stefano Taglietti, Luca Lombardi, Tom Armstrong (University of Surrey, UK) have written special pieces just for him.

Van Stiefel (West Chester University) composed especially for Sorrentino "Bound", a Concerto for electric guitar and orchestra.

As a sound artist he has made performances and sound installations at MACRO, Palazzo Merulana, Mercati di Traiano (Rome), Art Site Fest (Turin) and he has made performances for Baldo Diodato exhibitions and Gillo Dorfles exhibition (Palazzo Reale, Milan).

Sorrentino has recorded for Mode Records, Rai Trade, Creative Sources, Silta Records, Carish, Curci, Sinfonica, Aton Records, Fratto9, Setola di Maiale. He released CDs based on contemporary classical guitar music (Tempus Fugit, pieces by Maderna, Corghi, McKenna Lee, Cifariello Ciardi and others), New Music for electric guitar (Music from a parallel world, pieces by Taglietti, Corghi, Montalbetti, Canino, De Rossi Re, Franco), impro and electronic projects (among others Vignettes with Machinefabriek). Sorrentino also released the Sylvano Bussotti Complete Music for Solo Guitar, including the World Premiere of Popolaresca, an unedited manuscript by Bussotti. As a composer, he has won the First Edition of the International Competition of Guitar Composition "Goffredo Petrassi" of the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, with the piece "De Citharae Natura" for solo guitar.

Casa Ricordi and Universal have published his transcriptions for classical and electric guitar of the Azio Corghi's compositions "Tang' Jok(Guitar)" and "De Nocturno Visu".

He teaches master class in contemporary classical and electric music for the Viotti Institute in Vercelli."

"Christian Vasseur began classical guitar as an autodidact before taking classes with Pascal Boëls and Jean-Philippe Gruneissen at the Lille Conservatory. He learned the lute with Eugène Ferré at the Toulouse Conservatory and with Yasunori Imamura and Paul O'Dette during master classes. For 15 years he led musical theatre and free improvisation workshops for different audiences: children and adults, adolescents in detention, adults and disabled children. Meeting vulnerable or destitute people has had a profound influence on the way he works today.

He has composed numerous pieces of music for various instruments and ensembles. Christian Vasseur's music owes as much to classical tradition as to popular expression. It is protean and free of any dogma. Improvisation plays a large part in it. Over the years, beyond the forms it takes, it develops an imaginary folklore that seems to come from familiar lands. Yet a little nothing, something ineffable says that we are elsewhere.

Classical compositions, tinkering, sound collages, cinema without images and iconoclastic chaos are all side roads towards spaces with depth of field, superpositions of shots and panoramic views. In works with voices, interjections are the traces of a language of origins, the sound fossils of a great primitive sensual poem. Words, syllables become abstract objects, bricks of poetic and musical constructions. In the theater, his music is a counterpoint to the text, another voice, melodic, dissonant or noisy according to the dramaturgical needs. Acoustic sounds are often combined with electronics.

He has long been passionate about multi-string instruments such as the eleven-string alto guitar, the archlute, the mohan veena, the weissenborn-harp and the ten-string lapsteel electric guitar. These instruments allow him to explore new sound universes."

"Misha Marks has been part of the Mexico City soundscape since emigrating from New Zealand in 2008. He explores the sonic possibilities of six wires attached to a box, extracting a surprising gamut of sounds through traditional guitaristic approaches as well as extended techniques that probe the physicality of the instrument and its sound-producing capabilities.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand he grew up near the dairy farming town of Karamea, on the West Coast of the South Island. He started playing guitar at the age of six and later studied jazz and classical guitar at Massey Conservatory of Music in Wellington for two years before abandoning academic studies. Outside of school walls he became involved in the creative music scene of Wellington, based around the intrepid music venue Happy, where he played regularly with local and visiting improvisers, worked at the bar and was the cleaner. After spending time living in Barcelona, Vienna and London he moved to Mexico City with the idea of staying for about six months, which has since become eleven years. He plays guitar, baritone horn and latarra (a homemade electric guitar made out of an old metallic first-aid box). He is active in diverse scenes throughout Mexico City playing numerous projects, such as Generación Espontánea, Carlos Marks, Teoqualo, Lágrimas del Cíclope Llorón, Trio Corazonantes, Héroes del Destierro, Doquier, I'm this, I'm that, Lodazal and occasionally with brass bands from the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca.

He has performed in festivals such as High Zero (Baltimore) No Idea Festival (Austin TX) Cha'ak'ab Paaxil, (Mérida, MX) Finse Jazz, (Norway) Music Matters (Colombo, Sri Lanka) Mexico Now (New York) Glatt & Verkehrt (Krems, Austria) Wellington Jazz Festival (NZ) Visiones Sonoras (Morelia, MX) and together with musical accomplice Carlos Alegre organizes the experimental music series Derrepente Enderredor, in Mexico City."

"Henry Kaiser (born September 19, 1952) is an American guitarist and composer, known as an idiosyncratic soloist, a sideman, an ethnomusicologist, and a film score composer. Recording and performing prolifically in many styles of music, Kaiser is a fixture on the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. He is considered a member of the "second generation" of American free improvisers. He is married to Canadian artist Brandy Gale.

In 1977, Kaiser founded Metalanguage Records with Larry Ochs (Rova Saxophone Quartet) and Greg Goodman. In 1979 he recorded With Friends Like These with Fred Frith, a collaboration that lasted for over 20 years. In 1983 they recorded Who Needs Enemies, and in 1987 the compilation album With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends? They joined with fellow experimental musicians John French, and English folk-rocker Richard Thompson to form French Frith Kaiser Thompson for two eclectic albums, Live, Love, Larf & Loaf (1987) and Invisible Means (1990). In 1999 Frith and Kaiser released Friends and Enemies, a compilation of their two Metalanguage albums along with additional material from 1984 and 1999.

In 1991, Kaiser went to Madagascar with guitarist David Lindley. They recorded roots music with Malagasy musicians and discovered music that, he says, "changed us radically and permanently". Three volumes of this music were released by Shanachie under the title A World Out of Time. In 1994 he made a similar trip to Norway, again with Lindley, recording music that was released as Sweet Sunny North (2 volumes, 1994 and 1996).

Since 1998, Kaiser has been collaborating with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith in the "Yo Miles!" project, releasing a series of tributes to Miles Davis's 1970s electric music. This shifting aggregation has included musicians from the worlds of rock (guitarists Nels Cline, Mike Keneally and Chris Muir, drummer Steve Smith), jazz (saxophonists Greg Osby and John Tchicai), avant-garde (keyboardist John Medeski, guitarist Elliott Sharp), and Indian classical music (tabla player Zakir Hussain).

Kaiser has appeared on more than 250 albums and scored dozens of TV shows and films, including Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World (2007). He was given a Grammy Award for his work on the Beautiful Dreamer tribute to Stephen Foster.

In 2001, Kaiser spent two and a half months in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant. He has subsequently returned for nine more visits to work as a research diver. His underwater camera work was featured in two Herzog films, The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), which he also produced, and for which he and Lindley composed the score. Kaiser served as music producer for Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005). He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work as a producer on Encounters at the End of the World."

"Nick Ashwood is a composer and performer of contemporary experimental music, from nipaluna/Tasmanian. Nick's practice explores the possibilities of the steel-string acoustic through means of just intonation, preparations, deep listening and harmonic space. Nick has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists such as Laura Altman, Jim Denley, Robbie Avenaim, Annette Krebs, Amanda Stewart, Splinter Orchestra and Chris Abrahams, amongst others. Nick has toured throughout Australia and New Zealand and performed at a number of large festivals across Australia including Dark Mofo, Sound out, Mona Foma, The Now Now and Avantwhatever."

"Sharif Sehnaoui is a free improvising guitarist. He plays both electric & acoustic guitars, with (or without) extended and prepared techniques, focusing on expanding the intrinsic possibilities of these instruments without the use of effects or electronics. He now resides in Beirut, his hometown, after more than a decade in Paris, where he started his career as an improviser in 1998, playing at Instants Chavirés as a member of several orchestras. He has since performed his music worldwide and played in many clubs & festivals such as Soundfield (Chicago), Moers, Konfrontationen (Nickelsdorf), Météo Music Festival (Mulhouse), CTM & Maerzmusik (Berlin), FEST (Tunis), Skanu Mesz (Riga), 100Live (Cairo) or Musikprotokoll (Graz).

In Lebanon, he actively contributed to the emergence of an unprecedented experimental music scene. Along with Mazen Kerbaj he created "Irtijal" (www.irtijal.org) in 2000, a yearly international festival that is the oldest improvised and new music festival in the Arab world. "Irtijal" celebrated its XVth anniversary in 2015.

He also runs two record labels: "Al Maslakh" (www.almaslakh.org) devoted to "publish the un-publishable" on the Lebanese musical scene. And "Annihaya" (www.annihaya.com), focusing on sampling, recycling and the displacement of various aspects of popular culture.

His main groups and projects include the "A" Trio (with Kerbaj & Raed Yassin), "Wormholes" an audio-visual performance with Kerbaj drawing live on a glass table, and Karkhana (www.karkhana-music.com), a Middle-Eastern based super-group combining musicians from Beirut, Cairo & Istanbul. He performs solo on the acoustic guitar using unique percussive techniques exclusively, and on the electric guitar mostly performing with dance (Atsushi Takenouchi, Omar Rajeh...) and composing music for film (Ghassan Salhab, Mai Masri...)

Over the years he has collaborated with several musicians including Michael Zerang, Paed Conca, Thierry Madiot, Fabrizio Spera, Franz Hautzinger, Xavier Charles, Tarek Atoui, Tony Buck, Maurice Louca, Susie Ibarra, Eddie Prevost, Jean-François Pauvros, Alan Bishop, Umut Çağlar, Michael Vorfeld or Saadet Turkoz to name but a few."