Friday 13 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
This new collaboration between Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor is a highly kinetic and playful endeavour. Body centric vocal explorations, meet with intricate rhythmic systems in an otherworldly space occupied by sounding inhalations, hedonistic swells, dissociative beats, mimicked samples and meandering word play.
Focusing on the expanded edges of voice and computer music and how they merge and escalate one another, their collaboration plays with an effusive form of experiential listening. One that lifts, releases and invites the audience into new terrains of ecstatic and at times jarring physical and sensorial musical encounters.
After playing Counterflows Festival & Fylkingen 90th in 2023 they are currently working on an upcoming new record with a select few live shows planned in the lead up to the release.
- THE WIRE, review from Counterflows Festival 2023
In the middle is a collaboration by returning Counterflows performers Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor. Tolmie uses a vocal practice called internal singing, controlling her inhalations and exhalations in an utterly astonishing way, mimicking digital samples, luring the audience into a thrilling kind of experimental listening where they question what they are hearing. Experiencing her breathwork and word play over Treanor's searching, hypnotic rave beats is the weekend's stone cold standout, hitting a sweet spot where skill and hedonism come together. An intersection where the truly inventive, massively enjoyable Counterflows festival often finds itself. - Claire Sawers
Cara Tolmie (born Glasgow, 1984, based in Stockholm) spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely and internationally at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space – both as solo presentations and collaborative projects.
Her practice at large centres itself upon the singing voice, the body, and the complex ties between the two. All at once subjective as well as socially determined, she explores voice and body as two co-dependent entities able to confirm as well as contradict one another. Within this she often explores performative techniques that disorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of the defamiliarised, uncanny and sampled singing voice.
Cara is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.
British artist Rian Treanor's music is complex yet highly kinetic, reflecting equal interest in club culture and experimental sound design. He has released records on Planet Mu, Nyege Nyege Tapes, The Death of Rave and Warp sub-label Arcola. Using the programming language Max/MSP he develops bespoke software to explore extended rhythmic techniques and algorithmic processes, building devices that enable spontaneous pattern modulation within various collaborations, workshops, live performances and installations.
He has presented work at multiple leading arts festivals and residencies internationally inducing: Aphex Twin Curated Warehouse Project (UK), Nyege Nyege Festival (UG), WWW (JP), Bergen Electronic Kunsthall (NO), Le Guess Who? (NL) Unsound (PL), Mira Festival (SP), GES-2 (RU), Serralves (PT), Berghain (DE), CTM (DE), Rewire (NL), No Bounds (UK), Geometry of Now (PL), Cafe Oto (UK), Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts (UK), Empty Gallery (HK), Irish Museum of Modern Art (IRL), Summerhall (UK) among others. He has also taken part in artists residencies at yU+co[lab] in Hong Kong, Counterflows in India and Shape Platform 2020.
Nakul Krishnamurthy is an Indian artist who works with Indian Classical music and explores new ways of conceiving it at the intersection of Western Classical, experimental and electronic music traditions. Using procedural approaches and electronic music making techniques, his work experiments with and attempts to reconfigure the structural foundations of Carnatic and Hindustani musics to generate new interpretations and alternative modes of engagement with the art forms. Through such
radical reimaginations, which draw from his extensive study of Carnatic, Hindustani, Western Classical, and Indian Popular music, he attempts to imagine new possibilities for Indian Classical music— possibilities that are sensitive to its history of marginalisation, and critically examine and challenge its power and hegemonic status within Indian society.
Nakul’s debut titled ‘Tesserae’, which reinterprets Indian Classical music at the intersection and interstices of cultures to imagine a transcultural musical space, was released on Café Oto’s label Takuroku. His music has been performed at various venues and festivals including Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; No Bounds Festival, Sheffield; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto; Serralves em Festa, Porto; Café Oto, London; Harrington Art Gallery, Kolkata; KM Music Conservatory, Chennai; and Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. He lives in Glasgow and just completed his doctoral research at Edinburgh College of Art.
Conal Blake is a musician from Glasgow. He currently plays solo and improvises with Li Song and Regan Bowering, using electronics and percussion. He also runs the Feedback Moves label.
Hannan Jones is an artist of Algerian and Welsh origin raised on Binjareb Noongar Boodja, Western Australia. Research-led and practicing at the intersections of moving-image, sculpture and sound Hannan deep dives into concepts of hybridity, language, and rhythms that are associated with cultural and social migration, and psychogeography. Sonically, Hannan explores through improvisation, electronics, music concrete, and analogue recordings. Using samples and layering of audio material to create alternate possibilities, reclaims parallel histories, and reimagine connections between them.
Previous presentations include David Dale Gallery x Clyde Build Radio; CCA Annex; Edinburgh Art Festival; New Radicalisms, Rotterdam; Tate Lates, London and REWIRE, The Hague and La Chunky, Glasgow. Under the ongoing project 'Re-Imagining in Conversation,' in collaboration with frequent partner Shamica Ruddock, performances have been held at Oscillation Q‑O2, Counterflows, Future Soundscapes in Berlin, Archive Sites at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, and Cafe Oto in London. Hannan is a 2023 Oram Award winner and also a 2024-25 Wysing Arts Centre Resident.
