Wednesday 26 August 2015, 8pm
Debut OTO show for Italian electronic musician Alessandro Cortini – who makes use of the Buchla synthesiser also favoured by the likes of Morton Subotnick and Charles Cohen as part of his set-up, plus a DJ set from Demdike Stare's Sean Canty.
Having spent considerable time performing lead electronics in addition to revisiting his initial instrumental forays in guitar for Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels, as well as continuing a solo project under the banner SONOIO (an Italian echo from "sono io" translating to "it's me"), Cortini released his first recordings under his given name with the Forse series of works created on the Buchla Easel for Important Records.
Italian-born composer and performer Alessandro Cortini is a musical voyager. Having spent considerable time performing lead electronics in addition to revisiting his initial instrumental forays in guitar for Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels, as well as continuing a solo project under the banner SONOIO (an Italian echo from "sono io" translating to "it's me"), Cortini released his first recordings under his given name with the Forse series of works created on the Buchla Easel for Important Records.
In 2014, Cortini began an ongoing series called Sonno for Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions, a gorgeously "restrained yet oddly emotive" call-and-response with the Roland MC 202, playfully dancing out of the academically driven approaches that typically infiltrate the aesthetic of hardware enthusiasts. Under his Skarn alias (debut released on front line techno-experimentalist Shifted's Avian label in late 2014) Cortini once again displays his strengths as an interdisciplinary and incredibly talented producer and composer. Further works under the guise of Slumberman find spirit-collaborations with prominent techno/electronic label CLR and Den Haag's notorious Panzerkreuz series.
Bass frequencies, live audio feeds and found sounds are recurring themes within Shelley Parker’s performance, installation and music production. In 2003, two years after her DJ debut at the club night Nerd, she was invited to join the Haywire agency alongside Andrew Weatherall and Radioactive Man. Her distinctive style, encompassing elements of old school hardcore, noise and techno has led to DJ sets in venues as diverse as Fabric and Tate Britain. Since 2007 she has run the label and events programme Structure. Her recent releases include the Power Station EP and Spurn Point, an album of edits and extracts from her music/sound projects produced from 2011 – 2013. As well as releasing on her own label, her solo work and remixes have come out on Acre, Adaadat, Bulletdodge, Entr’acte, Myzuk, Opal Tapes and WotNot. She has also contributed to the Wire Magazine’s Below the Radar series with Drill and her track Spectral from the album Spurn Point appears on Boomkat’s 14 tracks series. Her music production has received wide support from artists such as Ontal, Sturqen, Nic Bullen, Manni Dee, Richard Norris, The Black Dog and Ancient Methods and the Sleeper Line EP for Entr’acte was voted by Fact Magazine as one of the best EP's from Jan - June 2013. Shelley regularly performs her own music and DJ sets for events such as Flussi Festival (Italy), Sound of Stockholm Contemporary Music & Sound Art Festival, The Outer Church at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Borealis Festival (Norway), Strefa Monotype at the Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw) and the Test Dept’s event Total State Machine (UK).
