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TRIM is an improvising quartet brought together by Dominic Lash (guitar) with Phil Durrant (modular synth), Steve Noble (percussion) and Rachel Musson (saxophones). After Musson was unable to make this show, Colin Webster was recruited on saxophone duties, resulting in two absolutely barnstorming sets under the freshly coined banner of TROM. You know how it is. Times are hard, things get stressful. Sometimes you’ve just got to blow off steam by blasting the doors off an unassuming Hackney music venue and sending the audience barreling down the street. Such was the case at OTO on 29th April this year, when Lash, Durrant, Noble and Webster summoned up the kind of utterly cathartic sonic scree that made a wonderful irrelevance of this having been their first ever performance as a quartet. Make no mistake, this is no one-note performance - the group cover a hugely varied amount of terrain over the two sets' combined near-80 minute run-time - but the sheer sense of exuberance on display here is hard to ignore. A rapidly rotating interplay sees all four musicians trading shapes that mutate and evolve with an almost breathless momentum. There's an exhilarating sense of new forms being created in realtime, forms that seems to blur and shift depending on your vantage point. Whatever angle you come at it, however, this one doesn't let up for a second. On this basis we look forward to welcoming back both TRIM and TROM here, with hopes for TRAM, TREM and TRUM too at some point in the future. -- Recorded by Billy SteigerMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

TROM (Dominic Lash / Phil Durrant / Steve Noble / Colin Webster) – 29.4.26

Softcover, 384pp University of Chicago Press, 2026An artist draws two octaves of pitches randomly from a hat, just enough to set each syllable of the dictionary definition of imprimer (to score, to print). Trawling the internet for cute videos of cats “playing” piano, an artist splices together a complete, note-perfect performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11. Half a century after the release of Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue, a jazz quintet spends months of focused practice to reproduce the original exactly. These performances share a common denominator: absolute fidelity to the outcome of a system. From Marcel Duchamp to Yoko Ono, Steve Reich to Sun Ra, The Sound of Thinking brings together a diverse array of musical or sonic works that are algorithmic, automatic, permutational, procedural, or otherwise structured in contrast to the creative expressivity typically associated with artistic production. In twenty-six short essays, each keyed to a term that begins with a different letter of the alphabet, Dworkin discusses work composed or performed according to a predetermined rule, transforming artistic creation into a system running its course. The pieces detailed here, drawn from more than a century of musical experimentation, offer a fresh perspective on the history of innovative music by decoupling music from expression and by shunting creativity from the level of organizing sounds to the level of devising a system that can do the organizing. Not only does this book spotlight the critical role of music in twentieth-century conceptual art, but it also identifies previously overlooked links among diverse artists and movements.

craig dworkin – the sound of thinking

Includes 16 page booklet and 30 day free MUBI subscription. AGON is the directorial debut of Giulio Bertelli. It follows a triptych of female athletes as they prepare and then compete in LUDOJ 2024, a fictional Olympic Games, in their personal disciplines - judo, fencing, and rifle shooting. Informed by the historical figures of Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Nadezhda Durova, these women are portrayed against the political, social, technological and physical contexts that dominate the highest level of sports competition and performance.AGON explores a contemporary account of the contradictions of these sports, which began as peacetime practices for war, as their disciplines are institutionally sanitised, recast as wholesome global entertainment, and ultimately dematerialised altogether in new digital arenas. The events at LUDOJ are conducted not in sports arenas but on soundstages, with no live audience. These spartan spaces are populated only by athletes, sports officials, and film crew, capturing every audio-visual layer of information. Within this environment, every mat crash, sword clash and gunshot is experienced in exacting detail.Tom Wheatley’s score began as a conceptual mirror to this. He took three musicians, each with a singular approach to their instrument, each instrument having a language of articulation that relates to each sport: percussion for judo, cello for fencing, saxophone for rifle shooting. Added to this were claustrophobic analogue electronics, and bagpipes, to represent a state beyond competition: war. The rich, detailed signals from these players underwent extreme processing live in the studio, at times moving the music into a grey area between score, sound design and foley.“I saw a material parallel between the sportsperson and the musician. That you have these tools which you carry through life, which hold complex histories of use. These techniques and traditions are studied, and combined with contemporary technologies to unlock new potentials. As Alex Sokolov is to her gun, Jean-Luc Guionnet is to his saxophone.From this model sprung many ideas, which lay the foundation for the score: applying the gestural language of the fencing epee to Ute’s bow; the ‘tuned air’ of both the rifle and the saxophone; taking the judo concept of barycentre and applying that to a form of rhythmic gravity with Seijiro. It was a rich seam”– Tom Wheatley“Where realism and fiction are blurred in the world of AGON, Tom accomplished the same for the score, obfuscating the boundary between the acoustic landscape of the film and the music, respecting the theoretical framework of the film itself.”– Giulio BertelliAGON premiered at Venice Film Festival 2025, was awarded the Luciano Sovena Award for Best Independent Production, and the FIPRESCI Award (International Federation of Film Critics). It is a MUBI/Match Factory production.  Written & composed by Tom WheatleyFeedback Synthesizer by Grundik KasyanskyBagpipes by Harry Górski-BrownPercussion by Seijiro MurayamaCello by Ute KanngiesserSaxophone by Jean-Luc GuionnetRecorded by Matt Jaggar at Konk Studios, LondonAdditional mixing by Matt Jaggar and Tommaso BarbaroAdditional editing by Tommaso BarbaroMastered by Rashad Becker

Tom Wheatley (With Grundik Kasyansky, Harry Górski-Brown, Seijiro Murayama, Ute Kanngiesser, &Jean-Luc Guionnet) – AGON (OST)

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