Saturday 14 October 2023, 8pm
Arthur Morgan “Arto” Lindsay was born in Virginia in 1953 but was raised between the US and Brazil due to his parents’ work. Considered one of the intellectuals of rock music, he is influenced by giants like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, by the free jazz and American experimental music.
Arto made his debut on the music scene when at the beginning of the Eighties, he founded, together with keyboardist Peter Scherer, the dance-pop band Ambitious Lovers. The band’s first album was 1984’s Envy, a record presenting an elegant rhythm that perfectly balanced the noise music tendencies of the artist and the traditional Brazilian music influences. Envy was followed by Greed in 1986 and Lust in 1991.
During the Nineties, Lindsay was even more involved in the Brazilian music movementand began collaboratingwith luminaries of the genre like Tom Zè, Marisa Monte, and Joao Gilberto, who brought him to publish his first solo album. He released Aggregates 1-26 in 1995 which presented itself as a collection of vanguard songs, establishing the record as the noise genre’s standard. Arto released his following effort, Mundo Civilizado with Bar/None Records, a label with which he would collaborate until 1998.
Lindsay became the first artist to publish an album with Ani Difranco’s label Righteous Babe. He started with The Prize in 1999, followed by Invoke in 2002 and Salt in 2004, each of them exhibiting his distinctive summary of Brazilian music and vanguard guitar arrangements.
The following years were a succession of collaborations, from his contribution to the Anarchist Republic of Bzzz’s debut album to the performance in Rio de Janeiro along with drummer Paal Nilssen-Love in 2013.
In 2014 Arto released with Ponderosa Music & Art, Encyclopedia of Arto, containing a double feature, one with already released music and one of live performances. Three years later, inspired by his move to brazil, released - once again with Ponderosa Music & Art - Cuidado Madame. It was the first original song album in ten years and Lindsay explored rhythms associated with Candomblé, a Brazilian religion.
Otto Willberg plays various bass instruments and lives in London. Live, Otto performs unashamedly melodic improvisational workouts created almost entirely with heavily filtered bass harmonica and electric bass. Strangely abstracted funk and fusion, a blend of the abstruse and immediate. silky smooth, luxurious, odd and compelling, "like listening to Eberhard Weber through a drainpipe”.
Otto is often heard on acoustic and electric bass with Laurie Tompkins (Yes Indeed) and Charles Hayward (Abstract Concrete//This Heat), as well as the fractured No Wave unit Historically Fucked. His previous solo releases have ranged from extended technique double bass to explorations of the acoustics of a 19th century artillery fort.
He has a solo record called ’The Leisure Principle’ out on Oren Ambarchi's the Black Truffle label. 6 unashamedly melodic & profoundly strange workouts for heavily filtered bass harmonica & electric bass!
