Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, London E8 3DL
£7 advance / £6 Oto members / £9 door / £5 students
Buy tickets here
Season tickets available here
Student ticket price only available on the door. Please email us to reserve your tickets, as there will be no ticket sales on the door if a show sells out. Student ID will be needed at entry.

Programme

19.00 until 20.00 at the Oto project space (free entry)

A conversation between Mary Jane Leach & Frances Morgan

/

19.30 Doors
20.30 Programme begins
22.30 Programme ends

Fresh Klang: Dawn Scarfe, Tuning to Spheres, a performance with wine glasses, sine tone generators and turntables

 

/

Mary Jane Leach, Kirchtraum, 1992

radio sound piece, stereo diffusion

Mary Jane Leach Wolff Tones E-Tude, for piano and 4-6 instruments, 2004

Ashley Paul, saxophone
Tom James Scott, piano
Yoni Silver, bass clarinet
Thurston Moore, guitar
Lucy Railton, cello

/

Mette Rasmussen & Sofia Jernberg

improvised set

Mary Jane Leach in conversation with Frances Morgan

From 7pm to 8pm Mary Jane Leach will talk about her work with Frances Morgan in the Oto project space on Ashwin Street (free entry). The music will then start in the Cafe at 8.30pm sharp.

Frances Morgan is a writer based in London. She writes about music, film and sound for The Wire, Sight & Sound and others, and is currently researching histories of electronic music at the Royal College of Art and the Science Museum.

Programme Notes

Dawn Scarfe, Tuning to Spheres

A wine glass can be played by rubbing a finger around the rim in smooth circular orbits. It can also be played without being touched using sound alone.

Tuning to Spheres uses wine glasses as ‘lenses’ to amplify the sound of sine tones played from small loudspeakers.

The player changes the pitch of the sine tone to ‘tune in’ to individual glasses sat on turntables. When the turntables are set in motion, specific glasses are prompted to resonate as they pass underneath the speaker. (dawnscarfe.co.uk)

Mette Rasmussen

Mette Rasmussen is a Danish saxophone player based in Trondheim, Norway. She works in the field of improvised music, drawing from a wide range of influences, spanning free jazz to textural soundwork. Rasmussen works on exploring the natural rawness of her instrument – experimenting on what the saxophone is capable of in sound and expression, with and without preparations. Much in demand, she has performed with the likes of Alan Silva, Chris Corsano, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and with her Trio Riot group with Sam Andreae and David Meier.

“Mette Rasmussen has a remarkably fluid and expressive tone on the alto saxophone. Her playing at times evokes the rich, heavenward clarity of Albert Ayler, at others the throaty roar of Mats Gustafsson. Equally, though, she’s able to sidestep these influences and assert her own individual sound in piercingly high tones and controlled outbursts of free playing.” – Viennese Waltz (Cafe OTO)

Sofia Jernberg

Sofia Jernberg is a singer and composer, born in Ethiopia in 1983 and currently based in two cities: Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden. As a singer she is developing the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Sofia’s singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a natural singing style. She has dug deep into split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.

“…it is the singing that is most impressive. Jernberg’s vocal agility is sweeping, analogous, conceivably, to the range of sounds that Wadada Leo Smith can generate with the trumpet. She is a phenomenon that merits attention.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz  (Cafe OTO)

Mary Jane Leach

Mary Jane Leach is a composer/performer whose work reveals a fascination with the acoustic properties and how they interact with space. In many of her works Leach creates an other-worldly sound environment using difference, combination, and interference tones; these are tones not actually sounded by the performers, but acoustic phenomena arising from Leach’s deft manipulation of intonation and timbral qualities. The result is striking music which has a powerful effect on listeners. Critics have commented on her ability to “offer a spiritual recharge without the banalities of the new mysticism” (Detroit Free Press), evoking “a visionary quest for inner peace” (Vice Versa Magazine), and “an irridescent lingering sense of suspended time.” (Musicworks Magazine) Leach’s music has been performed throughout the world in a variety of settings, from the concert stage to experimental music forums, and in collaboration with dance and theatre artists. Recordings of her work are on the die Schachtel, Lovely Music, New World, XI, Starkland, Innova, and Aerial compact disc labels.

Ashley Paul

Ashley Paul is an American performer/ composer currently based in London. Her intuitive process integrates free form song structures with a focused approach to sound and clatter. A complexity of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, prepared strings, bells and percussion create a delicate palette, uniquely her own. Her solo albums have received critical acclaim being chosen in The Wire: Top 50 Albums of 2013, Pitchfork’s “The Out Door” best experimental sounds of 2013, number one on Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s “Tongue Top Ten” in Arthur Magazine, and included on NPR’s All Songs Considered “Best of 2010”. She has been interviewed and/ or featured in the Wire, The New York Times, Spex, Jungle World, The Sound Projector, Gonzo (circus), Dummy, BOMB, The Quietus, Ad Hoc, Foxy Digitalis, NPR’s “All Songs Considered” and Rare Frequency. Ashley’s composition “The Pace of Time” premiered at Roundhouse (London), August 2013, and was performed collaboratively with Nik Colk Void and Simon Fisher Turner.

Tom James Scott

Tom James Scott is an instrumentalist, composer and improviser currently residing in North-West England, UK.

Scott’s early interest in music was informed as much by a fascination with sound and improvisation as it was by traditional musical training, and his work continues to explore both lyrical and abstract means of sound making and composition. Since 2007’s ‘Red Deer’, Scott’s solo releases to date have seen a switch between guitar, piano and keyboard as their focal point (often with the addition of bowed objects and strings, field recording and electronics). United by a preoccupation with modern composition, traditional music, improvisation and song, Scott’s recorded work also draws inspiration from visual and literary sources, with certain titles often citing a now largely archaic form of dialect particular to Scott’s home county of Cumbria.

Scott is currently an active member of Charcoal Owls (with vocalist Russell Walker), and continues to collaborate widely with artists including Andrew Chalk, Timo Van Luijk and Jean-Noël Rebilly, releasing music both on his own Skire imprint and other labels including Where To Now?, Carnivals, Alter, Night School, Bo’Weavil Recordings, and Night People. (Cafe OTO)

Yoni Silver

A renowned bass clarinetist and multi-instrumentalist, Yoni Silver‘s current projects include different combos with Sharon Gal, Steve Noble, Mark Sanders, Tom Wheatley, Grundik Kasyansky and he is a long-time member of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana Maria Avram’s Hyperion Ensemble. (Cafe OTO)

Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore needs little introduction – an inventive and instantly recognisable guitarist both in his solo work and as a member of Sonic Youth. (Cafe OTO)

Lucy Railton

photograph by Camille Blake

Dawn Scarfe

photography by Benjamin Borley

Dawn Scarfe is an artist based in London working with field recording, sound installation and performance. Her work explores things that seem to sound themselves such as resonating glasses, aeolian wires and self-opening swell boxes.

Dawn has collaborated with Ryoko Akama, Jem Finer, Jiyeon Kim and Volkhardt Müller. She works with soundCamp to organise Reveil: an annual crowd sourced live broadcast which tracks the sound of the sunrise around the world for 24hrs. Her work has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. She has exhibited at ZKM Karlsruhe, Q-02 Brussels and New Mart, Seoul. Residencies include Sound and Music’s Embedded programme with Forestry Commission England, MoKS Centre for Art and Social Practice, Estonia, TOPOS Exeter and Octopus Collective with Cumbria Wildlife Trust at South Walney, Cumbria. Commissions include Organ Reframed, Union Chapel, Continuous Drift, Dublin and Tonspur MuseumsQuartier Vienna.