Simon O’Rorke (New Zealand) Meets Music for Hard Times and Joe Lasqo at the Nunnery - in various combinations

Music for Hard Times is Tom Nunn - inventions and Paul Winstanley - bass

Simon O’Rorke - synthesizers

Joe Lasqo - laptop, synthesizer, small percussion, solkaṭṭu

"Simon O'Rorke bought that devil-may-care attitude to playing all the way with him from the U.K. and was one of the earlier players on the New Zealand free improv resurgence in the 90s. His approach is quite anarchic and liberating and definitely part of a gritty and uncompromising m.o. that comes from the improv crowd there." Paul Winstanley

Music For Hard Times is a free-improvisation noise band, exploring syntax and duration through the use of wildly extended techniques and unique invented instruments. The sounds range from conversational, to tonally haunting, to purely textural landscapes which seamlessly evolve.

Joe Lasqo studied classical music in India; computer music at MIT, Columbia, Berkeley CNMAT and has been a long-time performing avant jazz musician. His special interests include application of artificial intelligence techniques from expert systems development, natural language processing, and computational linguistics to music.