“Two Duos” is pressed from cellist Okkyung Lee’s most recent OTO Residency; the first side a duo with Jérôme Noetinger on Revox B77 and the second with Nadia Ratsimandresy on ondes Martenot. Cut together, the two meetings seem to raise three cellos in the search for expressive voice: the cello, it’s magnetic reproduction, and the dual controls of the machine invented to expand on its musical qualities. On the A side Noetinger’s opening tape hiss establishes a current; an electrical partner who gives Lee room to slide across and stretch out. Progressively the cello is returned, duplicated and manipulated with increased velocity and distortion. Noetinger draws out the full extent of Lee’s extended technique; rewinding strands of Lee's horse hair and transmuting her percussive attacks into shuddering echos, before letting his own concrete interjections spin the duo's sonic tussle into an almost romantic daydream. On side B the ondes (invented by French cellist and wartime radio operator Maurice Eugene Louis Martenot and so loved by Bernard Parmegiani, Varese and Messiaen) seems shaken from classical tradition and those long, drawn out horrorscapes it has come to be associated with. In a duel with Lee, Ratsimandresy grasps the ondes’ extraordinary capacity for dexterity, nuance and speed, hounding Lee’s cello in a bid to drive her instrument out of the past and into the future. Two fantastic pairings and a testament to the freshness with which Lee and her collaborators continue to work with their instruments. --- Okkyung Lee / cello Jérôme Noetinger / revox b77 Nadia Ratsimandresy / ondes martenot --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Thursday 28th March & Friday 29th March by Paul Skinner and Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Designed by Maja Larrson. ROKU027.

The 2nd in a series of two new releases by French tape-based experimental artist Jérôme Noetinger, who has treated us to countless unforgettable live sets at OTO. For this he presents two pieces in collaboration with Jean-Philippe Gross based on the idea of the exquisite corpse. "There is a great tradition of exchange and correspondence work in experimental music. In the 80's, there were a lot of cassettes with musicians who had never met each other but were exchanging sounds by mail. Nowadays it's even simpler and more obvious. The imposed period of confinement - in France between March 17 and May 11 - was ideal for restarting such projects.With Jean-Philippe Gross, our collaboration is older and we have had the opportunity to play several times as a duo. I have always been impressed by his dexterity, rigour and discipline in the electronic field. For the first track, a musician created a first sequence lasting between 10 seconds and seven minutes, and sent only the last 10 seconds to the next one who then mixed or pasted his sequence into it, and so on for a total of 16 exchanges. For the second, the number of exchanges has been limited to 14, with a duration of between 10 seconds and three minutes, but each having a maximum reserve of 10 minutes. The final result was only filtered and slightly equalized in terms of volume." - Jérôme Noetinger

The first in a series of two new releases by French tape-based experimental artist Jérôme Noetinger, who has treated us to countless unforgettable live sets at OTO. In this collaboration with Anthony Laguerre, each musician sent a 15 minutes improvisation to the other. Then each one made his own edit based on these two sequences. "There is a great tradition of exchange and correspondence work in experimental music. In the 80's, there were a lot of cassettes with musicians who had never met each other but were exchanging sounds by mail. Nowadays it's even simpler and more obvious. The imposed period of confinement - in France between March 17 and May 11 - was ideal for restarting such projects. Among those I was able to start, I was very happy to continue a new duo with Anthony Laguerre. A CD named "DnT" was released in the shadow of the pandemic on March 5th on the Dutch label Aagoo in the REV.Lab series. Anthony is a drummer, sound engineer, ingenious multi-instrumentalist and we also created together a small workshop to repair Revox tape recorders." - Jérôme Noetinger -- Anthony Laguerre & Jérôme Noetinger - all music & recording -- "Propagation 1" (15'45") edit by Jérôme Noetinger."Propagation 2" (14'53") edit by Anthony Laguerre. Recorded March / April 2020. Artwork design by Oliver Barrett