OTOROKU RELEASES

Improvisation

“Two Duos” is pressed from cellist Okkyung Lee’s most recent OTO Residency; the first side a duo with Jérôme Noetinger on Revox B77 and the second with Nadia Ratsimandresy on Ondes Martenot. Cut together, the two meetings seem to raise three cellos in the search for expressive voice: the cello, it’s magnetic reproduction, and the dual controls of the machine invented to expand on its musical qualities.

On the A side Noetinger’s opening tape hiss establishes a current; an electrical partner who gives Lee room to slide across and stretch out. Progressively the cello is returned, duplicated and manipulated with increased velocity and distortion. Noetinger draws out the full extent of Lee’s extended technique; rewinding strands of Lee's horse hair and transmuting her percussive attacks into shuddering echos, before letting his own concrete interjections spin the duo's sonic tussle into an almost romantic daydream.

On side B the ondes (invented by French cellist and wartime radio operator Maurice Eugene Louis Martenot and so loved by Bernard Parmegiani, Varese and Messiaen) seems shaken from classical tradition and those long, drawn out horrorscapes it has come to be associated with. In a duel with Lee, Ratsimandresy grasps the ondes’ extraordinary capacity for dexterity, nuance and speed, hounding Lee’s cello in a bid to drive her instrument out of the past and into the future.

Two fantastic pairings and a testament to the freshness with which Lee and her collaborators continue to work with their instruments.

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Okkyung Lee / cello

Jérôme Noetinger / revox b77

Nadia Ratsimandresy / ondes martenot

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Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Thursday 28th March & Friday 29th March by Paul Skinner and Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Designed by Maja Larrson. ROKU027.

ROKU027 - Okkyung Lee / Jérôme Noetinger / Nadia Ratsimandresy - “Two Duos” [sample]

Composer Lea Bertucci's collaborative works and solos for saxophone and bass clarinet are often layered and processed through unusual methods, including archaic tape recorders and multichannel configurations. Fascinated by acoustic phenomenon, Bertucci is as likely to perform in a club as in a cave or handball court. Solo and ensemble works are explored in this program, with comments from the artist on technique, technology, and adventurism. Bertucci’s 2022 album, Murmurations, is on Bandcamp.

roulette.org

Lea Bertucci: Trespassing

ROKU031 - Ecka Mordecai "Promise and Illusion" [Study Of A Flame]

First physical solo release from legendary vocal improvisor, dancer, and performer Maggie Nicols, and the follow up to her brilliant 'Creative Contradiction’ (Takuroku 2020).

While she might be best known as an improviser, most notably in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Feminist Improvising Group and more recently with the likes of 'Les Diaboliques', Maggie Nicols’ talents stretch into song, dance, poetry, performance and composition. Whilst Cafe OTO was shut over lockdown we invited Maggie Nicols to follow up her brilliant Creative Contradiction’ (Takuroku 2020) with some time spent singing alone at the piano. The release comprises an LP of songs and a 2CD edition including a companion disk of free improvised meditations entitled, ‘Whatever Arises.’ The LP and 2CD contain different material.

ROKU032 - Maggie Nicols "Are You Ready / Sans Papiers"

Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’  (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow. 

Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Readers may laugh, but ‘Potential’ is calmer than Kim’s previous offerings. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music. 

On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words:

“Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.”

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Artwork by Sunik Kim
Layout and design by Jeroen Wille 
Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders
Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios

All music by Sunik Kim
Track 1 edited by John Wall

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OTOROKU
18-22 Ashwin Street
Dalston, London
2023

OTOROKU is distributed internationally by Cargo. For any further enquiries about this release, contact abby@cafeoto.co.uk.

Potential

ROKU035 - Sunik Kim - Potential [sample]

"Cat's Flux" from ROKURE007 - Collective Calls (Urban) (Two Microphones)

First solo release from vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary music theatre and performance art. Solo Throat draws on the work of African-American and African-Caribbean poets Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Una Marson and N. H. Pritchard as source material for twelve new vocal compositions
Elaine Mitchener is a veteran of vocal expression in the global Black Avant Garde, traversing free improvisation, cross-disciplinary music theatre and contemporary composition with clarity and joy. Most recently, Mitchener has been improvising and composing with the written word as source material - challenging classical ensembles with her piece (“the/e so/ou/nd be/t/ween”), and commissioning composers Matana Roberts, Jason Yarde and George Lewis to respond to the work of Sylvia Wynter (“On Being Human as Praxis”, Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2020). Her performance of Umbra poet N.H Pritchard’s text FR/OG at OTO in 2021 was a revelation - a solo vocal recasting of the powerful visual-material form that Pritchard uses to disrupt semantic ‘sense’.

Building on this performance, Solo Throat takes the work of Pritchard alongside poets Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire and Una Marson as its source material. Its compositions are a loose translation - a carrying from text to voice which holds multiplicity and celebrates the transformative power of literary possibility. Surrendered to the spacing and repetition of consonants and vowels, Michener’s exceptional phonetic freedom gives rise to a sensuous experience which intensifies the roles of rhythm, timbre and breath in expressing meaning.

Solo Throat comes together as much through difference as similarity. Mitchener’s own solo improvisations sit alongside the work of Brathwaite, Césaire, Marson and Pritchard, forming a constellation of unlikely alignments which make no aesthetic conclusion. Instead, Solo Throat is a site of encounter, an irreducibly plural de-composition of words into a heterogeneous assemblage of sounds and impulses, emphasising what Anthony Reed calls, “the play on and the surplus of margins of lyrical translation to resituate other pathways of expression”. Just as the poets cited use white space to complicate our act of reading, so Mitchener utilises silence and multiphonics to complicate the act of voicing and the way we listen.

Solo Throat

ROKU036 - Elaine Mitchener - "stretchedwoundspeaks" from Solo Throat

Sawt Out is a German-Lebanese "percussion trio" with:
Burkhard Beins: percussion 
Mazen Kerbaj: trumpet
Michael Vorfeld: percussion

Sawt Out – Live in Munich (2016)

New !!! CD available FRAGMENT FACTORY : http://store.fragmentfactory.com/products/677806-eryck-abecassis-siamoises-cd-fragment-factory
SIAMOISES is my new project for twin-necked bass//guitar and synthesizer, soon to be release  at Fragment Factory on a ten tracks CD . A powerful hybridation exploring the state of beeing double in one body. For infos, booking, tech rider please contact : eryckabecassis@gmail.com
check video demo here : https://vimeo.com/288745730

CASCADES (uncutted version)

In the first time collaboration between innovative sound artists Todd Barton, Rachelle Rahmé, and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, the trio tonally sculpts a hypnotic sci-fi dreamscape.

Roulette Concert Archive // roulette.org

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe 12 Jan 2020

A stunning open improv matching of John Zorn on alto sax and game calls with shamisen master Masahiro Sato.

John Zorn & Masahiro Sato 4 Oct 1985

As you can imagine we are under huge pressure at the moment and are working flat out to ensure Cafe OTO survives this. The impact of this situation is extremely acute for small venues like ours and we need all the support we can get to pull through. Please donate what you can, if you can. Thank you. 

Cafe OTO opened in April 2008 with the aim of providing a home for creative new music that exists outside of the mainstream. It comprises one large cafe/performance space open during the day serving food and drink with an evening programme of live music almost seven nights a week. 

OTOROKU is part of OTOProjects - a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) that has been set up to manage the programme at Café Oto. Any profits from OTOROKU are put back into supporting what we do and will help us to continue programming the best musicians and performers from all over the world.

www.cafeoto.co.uk

ROKU027 - Okkyung Lee / Jérôme Noetinger / Nadia Ratsimandresy - “Two Duos” [sample]

cafeOTO