Holly Marland (Kora & Vocals)

‘beautiful and mesmeric and very charming too’…’Love the fact she has no airs and graces…just talent!’(audience feedback, Embryo Feb 13)

Holly is rapidly gaining a reputation as a unique and exciting kora player, combining the authentic rhythms and songs of West Africa with her own compositions and collaborating with a culturally diverse range of instrumentalists and artists. Last year Holly performed as Kora soloist with the band Delphic the Manchester International Festival, toured New York performing in a variety of hospitals and healthcare settings, arranged and performed settings for Kora and choir with the BBC Daily Service Singers for a live broadcast on Radio 4 and gave many solo concerts across the UK.

Holly has a First Class BA hons degree in Popular Music and Recording from Salford University as well as an MA in Community Music Therapy (Nordoff Robbins) from City University in London.

A freelance professional singer, Holly performs weekly with Radio 4’s Daily Service Singers and regularly participates in broadcasts, concerts and recordings as a soloist and choir member. She has performed with the Britten Singers, Halle Orchestra, Lancashire Sinfonietta, Goldberg Ensemble and many other notable groups. Holly is also a member of the early music trio, the Accordes, as a singer, recorder player and lutenist as well as performing with an award winning larger ensemble, Partita.

Holly set up the Music for Health programme at Central Manchester University Hospitals in response to a burgeoning global interest in the relationship between music, health and wellbeing. The programme now stands as a beacon of good practice in the UK and internationally, providing training and support for student and professional musicians from across Europe who are interested in working in health and social care settings

In 2009, Holly was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to explore the different uses of music with older people in New York and Paris. In 2012, she was awarded a Finzi Scholarship to study the Kora with Muhammed Saho, an extraordinary griot from the Gambia with whom Holly spent 7 weeks.

hi there, here is a collection of new songs which are in their rough first sketch formulas! hehe, so please forgive me for the terrible singing, bum notes and anything else which is out of place!!! they have a habit of just coming out the way they want at times! plus there's some old tunes and remixes with various people i've met x hope you enjoy.  been working on many more, but these are ones which i need to finish first i think, Raindrops rolls into another song too in places. ;0) thankyou for taking the time to listen better recordings will be on their way once i actually get my bum in gear! to record them properly and spend the time on them they deserve anyway i'm rambling so i shall leave you be x take care fellow buddies x ;0)   

'mejor contigo (homesick)' is out now!!
https://ninacobham.ffm.to/mejorcontigo

Christian Vasseur had been learning the guitar on his own for some time when he met his first teacher Pascal Boëls. 
Then, he took classes at the Conservatoire de Lille with Jean-Philippe Grüneissen and discovered the Renaissance Lute with Eugène Ferré at the Conservatoire de Toulouse for four years and took classes with renown Lute players such as Paul O'Dette and Yasunori Imamura. Practicing the Lute made him curious of improvisation and oriental music. At this time he began to perform on stage with various bands or solo, playing Early music with the Lute as well as contemporary music with the guitar. 
After several years of Early music repertory, He chose to dedicate himself to stage performance and music writing. At this stage, he started introducing some acting in his performances, mixing acoustic and electronic sounds, improvised and written pieces. 
For 15 years, he has been teaching musical theater and free improvisation classes to various groups of people : 
children and adults teen-agers in custody at the Maison d'Arrêt de Loos ; 
disabled adults and children (Compagnie de l'Oiseau Mouche at Roubaix, Ecole de Pratique Théâtrale at Villeneuve d'Ascq, psychatric hospital of Saint-André ). Meeting with highly vulnerable or helpless people has had a deep influence on the way he works today. 
Christian Vasseur has composed many pieces of music for various instruments and bands. Truly motivated by the possibilities offered by music applied to other disciplines, he works with video artists, dance and theatrical companies.

The Christian Vasseur' music borrows as much from classical tradition as from popular music. It is free of any form of dogma. As a polymorphic musician he every often takes part into interdisciplinary events where music combines itself with other artistic media, such as photography, video, dance and theatre. In theatrical events, his music acts as a counterpoint to the text, creating an extra voice, sometimes melodic, sometimes dissonant or noisy, based on the requirements of the staging, where acoustic and electronic sounds usually intermingle. Christian Vasseur plays lute too and composes new original music for this instrument. On top of solo concerts,he usually plays in a duet with cello player Jean-Christophe Lannoy (N’Gaddi), with guitar player Philippe Lenglet (Soliloques en loque, free improvisation), with belgian guitar player Gilbert Isbin (Bubble Fauna, free improvisation), with electronic music composer Denis Streibig (Les Chromonautes) with Djuwel (trio with singer and lute player Habib Guerroumi and Jean-Christophe Lannoy, two albums on Playa Sound label). He founded the band Mr Agata which plays tinny electro hardbarock opera music (La vie d'un homme on Dog Eared records). With the comedian musician Patrick Sourdeval he founded the duet Chamane/Shamane. He joined the electric guitars quartet OGR in 2010 and create the duet Fire Walk With Us with the eight string guitar player Steve Gibbs in 2018. Two CDs (Alam and Poèmes saturniens) was edited in may 2009 by Humming Conch.
More albums here : https://christianvasseur.bandcamp.com/
A trilogy is published by Thirsty Leaves :
https://thirstyleavesmusic.bandcamp.com/album/cent-millions-dann-es-a-la-limite-du-pr-sent-vol-1-3
https://thirstyleavesmusic.bandcamp.com/album/barreaux-dans-le-ciel-a-la-limite-du-pr-sent-vol-2-3
https://thirstyleavesmusic.bandcamp.com/album/un-amour-infini-a-la-limite-du-pr-sent-vol-3-3

Christine Tobin grew up in Dublin, later moving to London to attend the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She was an integral part of the London contemporary scene for many years before moving to New York in 2015 where she made a considerable impact on the city’s creative music world. She returned to Ireland in 2020. The forthcoming March 2023 release of ‘Returning Weather’ will be Christine’s twelfth album under her own name. In 2012 she won a BASCA British Composer Award for her settings of poems by WB Yeats, ‘Sailing To Byzantium’. The following year, her striking arrangements of Leonard Cohen songs won a Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Festival. In 2014 she was awarded ‘Jazz Vocalist of the Year’ at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards. Earlier in 2008, she won a BBC Jazz Award for ‘Best Vocalist’. Aside from her own projects, she has worked and recorded with an array of artists including musicians Django Bates, Billy Hart, Julian Joseph, Kenny Wheeler, Mark Turner, Louis Stewart, Nigel Kennedy, Jean Toussaint, Francesco Turrisi, Ingrid Jensen, poets Paul Muldoon, Eva Salzman, Don Paterson, actor Gabriel Byrne and film director Mike Figgis. She has played at major festivals and venues around the world.

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