ABOUT
Breath Quartet’s creative methods is through improvisational approaches and breathing techniques that dive into a spiral wave of energy, effectively initiating the body to naturally start moving, aided, and amplified by soundscapes. Wilson, Ziza, and Herne, enter into a trance, erupting into a cosmic phenomenon reaching to an altered state of mind.
HOLY ISLAND (2025)
We Have Always Walked (Part II) continues Breath Quartet’s exploration of shelter as a space of spiritual, physical and ancestral refuge.
This work was created during an overnight pilgrimage to Holy Island, also known as Lindisfarne, a tidal landscape long associated with early monastic life, sanctuary and crossing thresholds. The island’s shifting access and deep time resonance offered a powerful backdrop for an unscripted collaboration. Ziza and Wilson arrived with a shared intention to remain responsive and open.
Ziza brought a hand-dyed textile used in a previous ritual performance in Chile, along with stories from a recent international residency. Wilson filmed using a small Fujifilm camera on loan from photographer James Merrell. Together they followed the horizon with a soft gaze, allowing the work to form at the edges of perception. The resulting footage is handheld and intentionally soft in focus, echoing the fragility of breath and the instability of remembering.
Later in quiet reflection they recorded Ziza’s recollections and performance of a Rwandan clapping song from childhood. That memory now informs the next phase of the project.
Herne edited the final film and composed a soundscape that carries the pulse of ancestral memory and evokes a borderless field where inner and outer worlds converge).
SPRING EQUINOX (2024)
‘WE HAVE ALWAYS WALKED’ is Breath Quartet’s third collaboration celebrating the season change and performing an improvised ritual for our common ancestors. This project is a special one, speaking directly to all the world’s wanderers, pilgrims, uprooted and displaced souls, searchers, explorers, the curious, the lost, the broken, the found, the confused, those grieving, those weeping, those singing, those praying, those speaking, sharing, laughing, teaching, learning, passing on wisdom, exchanging gifts, cooking, eating, sleeping, sheltering, healing, leading, following, holding hands, holding each other, loving each other, loving, breathing, breathing, loving, smiling, hearing each other, heading towards and from the horizon, heading towards and from the sea, sharing a common ancestral thread, sharing common ancestors, hearing them whisper with every step ‘we have always walked, we have always walked….we have always walked….’
Special Thanks: Northumbria County Council
WINTER SOLSTICE (2024)
STUDIO SESSION 001 (2023)
Marcus Herne's original Celtic and shamanic sounds weave a sonic spectacle that urge both performers and audience to raise arms, spreads wings, and fly. Patrick Ziza's continuous flow traces the bends and pulses of the cosmic waves. James Merrell's presence and ethereal eye captures the beautiful collective organ of breath. Breath Quartet is committed to one thing, the universal basis of human life: breath. At the end of the performance we concluded that the improvisation was 'not a performance', neither was it a 'happening'. We're sitting with this.