Alterations

Alterations was/is a chaotic and intensely creative British free improvisation quartet featuring Peter Cusack, Terry Day, David Toop, and Steve Beresford who were first in action together from 1977 to 1986. The group reunited and performed again in 2015 (Club L'Klectic in London) and 2016 (Alterations Festival at Café Oto, London). Alterations' music was entirely freely improvised from start to finish, with each musician at freedom to destroy, derail or interrup what the others were constructing. Rarely would any group member stick to any one instrument during a song; often switching from piano, to drums, to saxophone, to electric guitar, to toys, to violin, to electric devices, and so on (even playing each other's instruments). Unlike other free-improvisation artists or groups of the time, Alterations wasn't afraid to play a beat (however brief) or to use guitar-stompboxes (such as fuzz boxes, flangers, and wah-wah pedals), or to constantly switch music styles from noise to ragtime to doo-wop to blues to bebop to rock, etc. Alterations simply played whatever they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. They released three studio LPs within their lifetime as a group, none of which were ever re-released on CD. In 2003 Atavistic Records published a CD compilation of live material from Alterations titled "Voila Enough! 1979-81". A further CD, "Live Recordings 1980-83" was released by Intutitive Records in 2000, and in 2016 a box set and 4 CDs of live recordings from 1979-2015 were released to celebrate the week-long Alterations Festival at Café Oto in London. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.