Counterflows: Cafe OTO
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Counterflows is a new series of festivals exploring international networks of underground music. This first festival takes place across London, Berlin and Glasgow from 6th-15th April. Produced by OTOProjects in Berlin and London and AC Projects in Glasgow the festival was made possible with support from Sound and Music, The British Council, Creative Scotland, The PRS for Music Foundation and The Goethe Institut. Fluid Radio will be sending Gianmarco along to the Cafe OTO sessions covering performances, exclusive interviews and film work…
Cafe OTO – Friday 6th April 2012: Caspar Brötzmann Massaker / Sven Åke Johansson Trio w/ Werner Dafeldecker & Axel Dorner
Caspar Brötzmann:
Primarily active between the mid-eighties to mid-nineties when Massaker recorded 5 LPs, Caspar Brötzmann returned to live performance in 2010 after a 14 year break with his friends Eduardo Delgado Lopez, on bass and vocals, Danny Arnold Lommen on drums. Returning with equal intensity Caspar Brotzmann Massaker is more than just brute force it is deep, sculptural and timeless music.
“…his attack on the instrument — explosive, obstreperous, large scale, textural, timbral — asserts the material facts of string-pickup-amplifier more bluntly than anyone else currently involved in rock” Ben Watson, THE WIRE
In addition to Massaker, Caspar Brötzmann has recorded solo and collaborated with F.M. Einheit of Einstürzende Neubauten and his father, saxophonist Peter Brötzmann.
www.casparbroetzmannmassaker.com
Sven Åke Johansson:
Sven Åke Johansson is a composer and musician, poet and visual artist, author and initiator of several music-theater productions, such as “Die Harke und der Spaten”, “Über Ursache und Wirkung der Meinungsverschiedenheiten beim Turmbau zu Babel” together with Alexander von Schlippenbach (Hebbel Theater Berlin). He is most well-known as a virtuosic drummer, but also performs as a singer and speaker.
Sven Åke Johansson has had numerous exhibitions, book publications, and released more than 50 LP and CD recordings. A major stylistic forerunner within European free improvisational music, he developed a European form of free jazz in the 60s together with Alexander von Schlippenbach, Peter Kowald and Peter Brötzmann.
He has collaborated with Alexander v. Schlippenbach, Rüdiger Carl, Hans Reichel, Dietmar Diesner, Axel Dörner, as well as cooperations with Shelley Hirsch, Andrea Neumann, Manfred Schoof, Ludwig Gosewitz, Thomas Kapielski, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Heiner Goebbels, Blixa Bargeld, and others.
Sven Åke Johansson wears suits by Sali Saliu.
Werner Dafeldecker / double bass, electronics:
Dafeldecker’s musical projects are often inspired and decuced by outside influences such as architecture, physics, photography and film. Longtime sound and structure studies and the formulation of distinct articulations are in the center of his work as a composer and musician and are parallel to technological developments often connected with with electronic formats.
He has performed and recorded with Christian Fennesz, Martin Brandlmayr, Dean Roberts, Chris Abrahams, Patrick Pulsinger, David Sylvian, Christof Kurzmann and many more…
Axel Dorner / trumpet:
Dörner is one of the most distinctive and versatile voices in European creative music, his playing distinguished by its great concentration and focus, perfect timing, sensitivity to group dynamics, and a textural range that seems to defy physical possibility, from solid sheets of white noise to impeccably articulated pure tones, massively elongated slurs to sharp percussive shocks.
His range of collaborations is also impressive, from steely modernism with Keith Rowe to playing the complete works of Thelonius Monk with Alexander von Schlippenbach, small groups such as The Contest of Pleasures (with John Butcher and Xavier Charles) and Toot (with Thomas Lehn and Phil Minton), larger projects such as Phosphor and Otomo Yoshihde’s New Jazz Orchestra, and duos with Angharad Davies, Mattin, Diego Chamy and Fred Lonberg-Holm.
Cafe OTO - Saturday 7th April 2012: Michael Gira + Grouper
Two radically different approaches to song – Gira’s songs are stripped back to a raw and powerful simplicity where Grouper submerges herself in layers of ambient fog. This will be Michael Gira’s first solo set in London since reigniting Swans and Grouper’s counterflows appearances will be her only song-based sets during her European tour.
Michael Gira:
Starting in the late 1970s, Michael Gira, founder of Swans, has made some of the most abrasive, visceral and violently beautiful music imaginable. Counterflows is thrilled to have Michael perform two rare solo shows here at our inaugural festival (in London and Glasgow).
Grouper:
Grouper is the musical project of Portland’s Liz Harris. Stripped down guitar lines and looped wurlitzer and environmental recordings form a bed of drifting tones over which Liz’s haunting voice intones unforgettable harmonies and melodic lines that embed themselves in your consciousness.
Liz is touring Europe this spring with a new work of tape collage material ‘Violet Replacement’. This return concert at Cafe OTO however will see her dip into her luminous songbook…
www.myspace.com/grouperrepuorg
Cafe OTO - Sunday 8th April 2012: Kim Doo Soo + Steffen Basho Junghans
This will be the first ever UK appearance for Korean acid folk singer Kim Doo Soo (PSF/Blackest Rainbow) and a return visit to Cafe OTO for Steffen Basho-Junghans offering another opportunity to catch the tightly focussed creative intensity of his post-Takoma guitar playing.
Kim Doo Soo:
Kim Doo Soo is the deepest and most introspective of Korea’s acid folk singers. Many are the legends that cling to his songs — political oppression, alcoholism, suicide, a ten-year period of mountain seclusion. Despite having been active since the mid-’80s and having released four acclaimed albums in Korea, most Western listeners only became aware of him through his tracks on the recent Damon & Naomi compilation, International Sad Hits. On 10 Days Butterfly, his fifth album, he mines productive veins of profound melancholy, animistic nature, and unfathomable, hermetic affection. The whole is couched in a veil of the most gorgeous, still melodicism, Kim’s vocals and guitar shaded with subtle accordion, violin, piano, organ and harmonica. A reflective and unearthly beautiful masterpiece.” – Alan Cummings
www.psychedelicfolk.com/kimdoosoo.html
Steffen Basho Junghans:
Whether working with the paintbrush, the guitar or the pen, Steffen manages to conjure up works of extreme intensity, focus and creativity.
Initially, interested in the writings of Basho, the Japanese poet and diarist of 17th century… Living on the ‘wrong’ side of the then still standing Berlin wall (wrong side for collectors of world music, probably the right side for internalising a persons unique creativity). Not everything from ‘out side’ culture penetrated through the wall, but fortunately two very important tracks did: Elk Dreamer’s Lament and Variations on Ezumi by 60s Guitarist, Robbie Basho. The style of playing heard on these tracks would be the start of a journey of fascination and homage for Steffen, a journey that would end some years later with Steffen Junghans becoming Steffen Basho-Junghans. On hearing Robbie Basho’s playing, one can indeed hear the influence/similarities, but don’t be fooled, SB-J is certainly his own man. – Architects of Harmonic Rooms
Cafe OTO - Monday 9th April 2012: Michael Hurley + Josephine Foster
Welcoming the return to OTO of one of our favourite singers – Josephine Foster – for a full set of songs at the OTO baby grand and we’re honoured to present for the first time, singer, songwriter, artist, folk hobo Michael Hurley aka Doc Snock – a true American iconoclast and one of that country’s songwriting greats.
Michael Hurley:
Tracing the lineage and citing the fore-bearers of the New Weird America, one can’t help but mention the music of bizarre folk singer/guitarist/artist Michael Hurley. If you haven’t been following his career since the 1970’s (when he was collaborating with the likes of the Holy Modal Rounders and Jesse Colin Young) then you probably discovered him in the past couple of years via Devendra Banhart’s & Andy Cabic’s label Gnomonsong, who have released Hurley’s recent recordings.
Hurley’s debut album, First Songs, was recorded for Folkways Records in 1965 on the same reel-to-reel machine that taped Lead Belly’s Last Sessions. He was discovered by blues and jazz historian Frederick Ramsey III, and subsequently championed by boyhood friend Jesse Colin Young, who released Hurley’s next two album on The Youngbloods’ Warner Brother’s imprint, Raccoon. How’s that for cred?
Josephine Foster:
Hailing from Colorado, Josephine Foster began to sing publicly at age 15, singing operatic hymns in the services of a Rocky Mountain log cabin church. After studies in classical music she moved to Chicago, where she abandoned the idea of dedicating herself to opera and returned to her love of writing songs. Since then, Josephine has traveled around the world sharing her music. She is married to Spanish composer Victor Herrero.
“Fosters vocal style draws on a clutch of contradictory modes. It combines a facility for expressive extremes comparable to Patty Waters with the precise comportment of folk singers like Karen Dalton and Shirley Collins, and the kind of fast vibrato most associated with the flapper style of early Tin Pan Alley. Fosters recorded work draws much of its unusual power from a dialectic that reconciles a feel informed by the experimental underground with a more mainstream tradition as transmitted by artists as disparate as Josephine Baker and the McGarrigles. As such, her music exists in the same kind of liminal space as anachronistic counter-cultural figures like Tiny Tim, The Incredible String Band and R Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders.” – D Keenan / THE WIRE
Cafe OTO - Tuesday 10th April 2012: Kazuki Tomokawa + Margareth Kammerer
Kazuki Tomokawa:
There are a handful of artists that have been on the Cafe OTO wish list from way back when the venue itself existed only in our minds. Right up at the top of the list is Kazuki Tomokawa. Now a reluctant traveler outside of Japan it has taken years of asking to try and get him here but at last it looks as though it is happening!
Poet, singer, artist, bicycle race commentator, essayist, actor and drinker Tomokawa embodies the romance of the vagabond poet.
Inspired the example of Bob Dylan and others, the early 1970s in Japan witnessed a boom in folk music. Tomokawa found himself caught up in the movement, taught himself to play acoustic guitar and began to set his poems to music. In 1975 he made his long-awaited record debut, releasing the album yatto ichimaime (Finally, The First Album). Around this time he got to know the members of the radical Japanese rock band Zuno Keisatsu. He got on particularly well with the group’s percussionist, Toshiaki Ishizuka, who would go on to become one of Tomokawa’s most important musical collaborators. In the late seventies, Tomokawa would become heavily involved with several theatre companies, writing songs for their plays and even appearing on stage as an actor. This was a period when he seemed to seek ever new spaces into which to expand his creativity. It was also during this period that he first became interested in art..
Margareth Kammerer:
Margareth Kammerer composes minimalist, abstract songs which are influenced by fields as diverse as experimental voice, soundresearch and early Blues. She is unusual in seeming equally at home improvising with the likes of Fred Frith and Otomo Yoshihide as singing jazz standards in a haunting voice that recalls the likes of Karen Dalton and Sibylle Baier.
In 2000 she started working solo, composing just for herself using voice, guitar and the texts of E.E. Cummings, Anne Carson and others. She also started to collaborate and compose with bands again more recently such as The Magic I.D. with Kai Fagaschinski, Christof Kurzmann, Michael Thieke – a group that floats in the ether between sound research and extended songforms. She is also part of Therubyrubyruby with Steve Heather and Derek Shirley singing laid back Jazz standards…
She performed and worked with Fred Frith, Otomo Yoshihide, Burkhard Stangl, Paolo Angeli, Axel Dörner, Jason Forrest, Stefano Pilia, Andrea Belfi, Daniela Cattivelli, Claudio Rocchetti, the new contemporary music ensembles Die Maulwerker und Ensemble Zwischentöne, and most recently with Ignaz Schick, Luciano Chessa, Ellen Fullman, Teresa Wong and Big Daddy Mugglestone.
www.myspace.com/therubyrubyruby
Cafe OTO - Wednesday 11th April 2012: John Tilbury & Marcus Schmickler
A very different side of German electronic master Marcus Schmickler on display here after he blasted a bright ray of noise in cahoots with Peter ‘PITA’ Rehberg for the PAN Festival in January. Here he returns alongside the master British pianist John Tilbury for a set of exacting stillness and subtle, shifting atmosphere.
John Tilbury:
British pianist John Tilbury is renowned for his remarkable touch and in constant demand as an interpreter of piano pieces by composers such as Morton Feldman and John Cage. He is also an incredible improvisor, most famously as a member of legendary british group AMM. During the 1960s, Tibury was closely associated with the composer Cornelius Cardew, whose music he has interpreted and recorded and a member of the Scratch Orchestra. His biography of Cardew, “Cornelius Cardew – A life unfinished” was published in 2008.
Tilbury has also recorded the works of Howard Skempton and John White, among many others, and has also performed adaptations of the radio plays of Samuel Beckett.
With guitarist AMM bandmate Keith Rowe’s electroacoustic ensemble M.I.M.E.O., Tilbury recorded The Hands of Caravaggio, inspired by the painter’s The Taking of Christ. In this live performance, twelve of the members of M.I.M.E.O. were positioned around the piano in a deliberate echo of Christ’s Last Supper. The thirteenth M.I.M.E.O. member (Cor Fuhler) is credited with “inside piano” as he interacted and interfered with Tilbury’s playing by manipulating and damping the instrument’s strings, essentially doing piano preparation in real time. Critic Brian Olewnick describes the album as “A staggering achievement, one is tempted to call The Hands of Caravaggio the first great piano concerto of the 21st century.”
Marcus Schmickler:
While rooted in electronic music, Schmickler has a background in contemporary composition, having studied under the prominent Stockhausen collaborator Johannes Fritsch.
Schmickler has created solo in a variety of different styles under the Wabi Sabi, Sator Rotas, and Param pseudonyms, as well as five techno-oriented CDs as Pluramon. In addition, he has long-standing collaborative projects, most notably with synth wiz Thomas Lehn, guitarist Keith Rowe, and pianist John Tilbury.
