Amongst the shows over the next seven days, we’re hugely excited to welcome the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) – the internationally renowned collective of Dutch composer-improviser-instrumentalists formed in 1967 by Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink and Willem Breuker – to OTO for a very special two-day residency following their 50th anniversary last year.
On Sunday, stock up on your Christmas presents at the Cafe OTO Xmas Fair followed in the evening by OTO DJ’s, the OTO Xxmas Choir and an intimate festive performance from Pat Thomas playing Thelonious Monk.
This week’s digital release features subterranean saxophones and self made instruments from the first time collaboration between Takahiro Kawakuchi and Seymour Wright. Using everyday horns powered by homemade airpumps, Kawaguchi generates swelling peals and perforates them with pinches of his tabletop valve box. Having laid three saxophones on the floor, Wright live mixed their feedback from the back of the room, producing undulating gargles which bubble under Kawaguchi and surface in the gaps. Neither artist simply ‘investigates the specifics of space’ but instead fully regurgitages the innards of their dreamt up instrument with devilish humour.
£6 (£5 Venue Members) / Digital Members: Download with credits
Subterranean saxophones and self made instruments from the first time collaboration between Takahiro Kawakuchi and Seymour Wright. Using everyday horns powered by homemade airpumps, Kawaguchi generates swelling peals and perforates them with pinches of his tabletop valve box. Having laid three saxophones on the floor, Wright live mixed their feedback from the back of the room, producing undulating gargles which bubble under Kawaguchi and surface in the gaps. Neither artist simply ‘investigates the specifics of space’ but instead fully regurgitages the innards of their dreamt up instrument with devilish humour.
One of the final Incus releases and one that was written up in The Penguin Guide to Jazz as ‘an essential document of modern music’. Otoroku is proud to release the first ever vinyl re-issue of Evan Parker’s legendary recording The Snake Decides. Featuring 4 solos recorded in 1986 in St. Paul’s Church, Oxford by the late Michael Gerzon. The Snake Decides is a groundbreaking example how far the language of a particular instrument can be taken.
From Brian Morton’s liner new notes:
“The Snake Decides attracts a certain array of adjectives – intense, radical, fearsome, hypnotic, virtuosic – and occasionally allows a more ambitious reviewer to avoid platitude by talking more specifically about 32nd harmonics, circular breathing, multiphonics and Gerson’s exact choice and placement of microphones. But this misses a point, too. Listening to this record, either for the first or the fortieth time, is an arousing experience.”
Dakim (USA) / Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (Iran) / Ailie Ormston & Tim Fraser (SCO) / MC Carol (Brazil) / Katz Mulk (UK) Myriam Van Imschoot & Doreen Kutzke (Germany/Belgium) / Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid & Alexander Hawkins (Trio) (USA/UK)
From its foundation as an experimental music festival Counterflows has evolved, sharing space for diverse voices, radical ideas and community joy. Fighting the creeping isolationist agenda and loom of age-old hierarchies, our desire to work locally and internationally – to hold onto and mutually nurture everyone’s capacity to be deeply human, deeply connected and deeply alive – is stronger than ever.
Through live events, clubs, discussions, film screenings and hang-outs – woven through some of the best spaces in Glasgow – Counterflows aims to enact a human flow and provide an inclusive, fun space to engage with important marginal music.