Friday 17 November 2023, 7.30pm
Pleased to host a collaborative event between OTO and Rotterdam based non-profit foundation and a multi-media alternative cultural centre, WORM - which focuses on experimental, new media art, avant-garde and underground art - featuring various groupings of some exceptional improvising musicians from the UK and the Netherlands.
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
Duncan Harrison, poet and sound maker, is one of the strong holders within the South English Weird Noise scene. His music displays a broad array of cut-up sound poetry, improvisational strategies and audio collages with sonic left-overs abstracted from daily environments. No surprise he regularly collaborates with the likes of Dylan Nyoukis, Karen Constance, Pascal Nichols, Ali Robertson and many more.
vo ezn -- sound && infrastructure artist, working on server-side tensions and introverted interfaces ][ figuring out tools for-to knowledge-sharing / opting-out / autonomy ][ --to-for-by-with on my own terms. brewing a monthly radio transmission -- non-zero exit at radio worm. part of feminist server collectives/networks systerserver / anarchaserver / minadoraserver ///// infrastructure caretaker at hackers & designers [sound] ————– field recordings _ configure / reconfigure / split-splice in anti-gravity.Blood’s boiling waters [lever burns.
Jacco Weener is a performance/visual/audio artist from Rotterdam. Besides his solo performances (which are about the intersection of pop culture and religion/spirituallity mostly) he also sings in the bands Cantos Deus (a religious no wave band) and Buurtbeheer (a social housing punk band). With both band and solo he has released a multiple of records on CD, Vinyl and Cassette.
www.jaccoweener.nl
Reinier van Houdt started working with taperecorders, radio's, objects and various string-instruments at a young age. He studied piano at the Liszt-Akademie in Budapest & the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He developed a fascination for matters that escape notation: sound, timing, space, physicality, memory, noise, environment - points beyond interpretation and improvisation. He has built himself an unusual repertoire that consistently resulted from personal quests; be it from collaborations with composers & musicians, from research in archives, from the composing and staging of music-performances or from unorthodox studies of classical music.
He premiered music by Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Francisco López, Charlemagne Palestine, Yannis Kyriakides, Maria de Alvear, Jerry Hunt, Michael Pisaro, Walter Marchetti. He has also worked with John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Luc Ferrari, Olivier Messiaen and Christian Marclay. Reinier van Houdt plays in Current 93, recently releasing an album with contributions by Nick Cave, John Zorn and Antony Hegarty. He is also one of the moving forces behind the experimental music outfit MAE/MAZE.
https://www.reiniervanhoudt.nl/
Lia Mazzari is a sound artist and researcher working with open-source sound transmission technologies in environmental research as unique tools for alternative ‘live’ models of listening, responding to, and composing with more-than-human environments. Her solo and collaborative works span activist radio labs, cryospheric sound transmissions, whip cracking performances and experimental cello concerts. Winner of an Oram Award in 2022, Lia has developed works for Tate Modern/Britain (UK), Biennale Gherdeina (IT), Zone2Source Gallery (NL), South London Gallery (UK), V&A Dundee (UK), Q-02 (BE), and Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts (IN). She is currently an AHRC/Techne-funded PhD candidate at the Centre for GeoHumanities/Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Billy Steiger was born in Howth on the 16th December, 1986. Now he plays the violin.
“Then he sat down by a pond and began to play a tune. As he played, the most extraordinary thing happened. One by one the fish in the pond began to jump out and fly about in the air. And what is more, they were all different colours and they were singing to the music.”
Patrick, Quentin Blake.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Ash Kilmartin is a visual artist, writer and radiomaker from Aotearoa New Zealand who lives in Rotterdam. Her work is concerned with the speaking voice as a tool for finding and making public space, as the hinge between the physical material of the body, and the social fabric of language. She is interested in historical characterizations of the speaking body; in non-linguistic vocalisations as communication; and in how the voice can be translated into orthography, texture, or space. With Linus Bonduelle she is co-host of weekly radio show Ever Widening Circles on Radio WORM.
