Monday 8 August 2016, 8pm
“This album from Trupa Trupa comprises always clever, often beautiful, and at times very angry guitar music that defies definition. Razor-edged no wave rumblings, anguished Bad Seed shanties, sopping wet blue-eyed soul ballads - Trupa Trupa touch on it all. The result is their first moment of true greatness. This is incredible work.” – The Quietus
Supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in London.
This quartet from Gdansk, Poland, make mesmerising guitar rock that - over the course of three critically-acclaimed albums - has prompted comparisons to Faust, Swans, Can, Soft Machine and even Speed, Glue & Shinki! Their latest album, Headache, available on CD and cassette from Blue Tapes topped a litany of end of year polls and even saw the band nominated for the Polish equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize.
This show marks Trupa Trupa's hugely anticipated UK debut and should not be missed.
Norwegian composer Benjamin Finger has released 10 full-length LPs since 2009 that have taken in a wide variety of musics, from delicate ambient to modern classical, free jazz and techno - sometimes even within the space of one piece!
His Amorosa Sensitiva LP for Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records was described by The Ransom Note as "a gleaming reverie, slightly submerged, redolent of Alice Coltrane’s graceful, spiritual ecstasy and the decelerated density and dusky forest-plunge of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project. A fever dream at turns gorgeous and fiery."
"Shy techno for introspective cyberpunks, futurism shrouded by a fog of distortion devoid of aggression," is how 20 Jazz Funk Greats described Unfollow's latest release on Blue Tapes. "If Demdike Stare adopted a puppy, this would be its dance."
Tony Boggs, the Toronto-based producer behind Unfollow, describes his music, meanwhile, as being good for “3am on the dancefloor when everyone’s drugs have run out and all the poseurs have taken Uber rides home.”
Boggs' beautiful, melancholic techno should find an appropriate home and sympathetic ears at Cafe Oto for his UK debut.
In her previous Blue Tapes incarnation as Kurosounds, the Paris-based Greek sound designer Alex Photaki weaved subtle field recordings around looped shards of music to create intuitive and atmospheric soundworlds that sucked the listener in. Rechristening herself Wild Anima, Alex has collaborated with a range of musicians to further develop her own brand of "spiritual pop" - a transcendent and uplifting sound that draws on techno, spiritual singers and mbira music.
Wild Anima's debut will be released to coincide with this show and will be available to buy here first.
