Thursday 12 September 2024, 7.30pm
Scotland’s longest running festival of experimental music, Counterflows, lands in London’s cauldron of creativity that is Café Oto for 3 days of exciting performances. Featuring Scottish and Scottish-based artists either in solo or in collaboration, the mini festival gives a snapshot of the wide-range of innovative music being made today from the land of haggis, irn bru and tattie scones.
The 3 day event is made possible by support from Creative Scotland
Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh is a viola player exploring the tonal possibilities of gut strings and wood in both amplified and acoustic contexts.
Amalgamations of influences from improvised, traditional and early music styles can be heard on solo recordings Oreing (Fort Evil Fruit 2017), The Rounds (KRUT 2021) and most recently Live At Sonic Acts (Scatter Archive 2023).
She lives in Glasgow where she plays in free-improv quartet Dome Riders with Fritz Welch, Armin Sturm and Mike Parr-Burman.
An active collaborator, Nic Oireachtaigh has toured with experimental Irish bands Woven Skull and Cian Nugent & the Cosmos and has performed internationally with artists Josephine Foster and Circuit des Yeux. She has created music for theatre works by Isadora Epstein and collaboratively with Pat Thomas and Rhodri Davies. In May 2022 she composed New Mountain, Reaching Plane, a surround sound piece for orchestral and gamelan musicians as a commission for BBC Scotland’s Tectonics Festival.
Recent performances include a newly commissioned work by Natalia Beylis and a premier of Eliane Radigue’s Asymptote Versatile(1963-64) at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2023.
Other passing/recurring musical companions include Jorge Boehringer (in viola duo Swiss Barns), Andrew Cheetham (free style drum/viola duo Lus), Cal Folger Day, Lori Goldston, Josh Thorpe, David Lacey, Aonghus McEvoy, David Donohoe, Anna Clock.
www.ailbhenicoireachtaigh.com
https://soundcloud.com/ailbhenicoireachtaigh
https://ailbhenicoireachtaigh.bandcamp.com/
Wormhook (Martin Steuck) lives and works in Glasgow,
Wormhook is a channelled project, a experiment in neurodivergent free-folk
Or free mad-folk,
What started as an experimental strategy around processing grief and psychic rupture transmuted into a practice akin to divining,
to become like scaffolding that spirit can alight on, fly through,
to become host to an un languaged underneath in order to receive that which is borne on the wings of the Diamons.
Pan rules this latest chapter in free devotional song craft.
Rufus Isabel Elliot is a composer and musician originally from Tower Hamlets, living now in Skye.
Rufus has written funerary music for doomed spaceships and orchestral music about rotting seaweed. It cares about honesty and openness. Its work is concerned with testimony, the conditions in which one speaks out, and how those stories are passed on.
Its music is ‘fluid and ambitious’ (The Wire), ‘stunningly intimate’ (The Quietus), and 'achingly fragile' (The Scotsman).
Since coming ashore a few years ago, Rufus has worked with the likes of The Night With…, sound festival scotland, Red Note Ensemble, The Riot Ensemble, Magnetic North, Knockvologan Studies, ATLAS Arts, Drake Music, and the Nevis Ensemble. Rufus was a Sound and Music Composer-Curator in 2020, and trained in workshop facilitation with Tempting Failure during the coronavirus lockdown.
Born in Chiba, Japan, Chihiro Ono is a London-based Japanese violinist (also plays viola and baroque violin) and sound artist specialising in baroque/classical/contemporary/new music, experimental music and sound art. She has been performing as a solo chamber musician at major festivals and venues across the worldwide, and working with esteemed experimental and classical ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Apartment House, CHROMA, London Mozart Players and more. Alongside performing in arts on stage, since 2018 Chihiro’s work as a sound artist has led to her producing works for radio, theatre and film productions in the UK, and collaborating with artists such as Klara Kofen, Neil Luck, Ryoko Akama and Tim Etchells . Her creative work draws on influences from a rich variety of repertoires, encompassing folklore, field recording, improvisation, Western and Eastern musical/theatrical methods, elements, techniques and philosophies with the extremely strong vision/s on sounds.
