Monday 27 June 2022, 8pm
Australian artist Jonnine Standish’s solo work both dilates and deconstructs the damaged, sensual minimalism of her iconic, decade-plus collaboration alongside Nigel Yang in HTRK. Skeletal rhythms slink and echo through dimly lit streets framed by fragments of guitar, bass, breath, keys, scrapes, and haze, anchored by Standish’s narcotic, nocturnal voice. The moods she conjures are lovelorn but oblique, between dream and coma, scenes glimpsed through fogged glass.
Supernatural, her 2019 EP for Good Morning Tapes, is a chic suite of stripped, spectral dub, both spoken and sung, between confession and come on. 2020’s Blue Hills, for Boomkat Editions, ventures even further towards the outskirts of her sound, haunted assemblages of memory and melody, naked emotion and negative space. A forthcoming collection for DJ Sundae’s Idle Press hints at a further embrace of cracked mirror intimacy and torch song abstraction.
Standish’s Café Oto appearance will be in collaboration with London MC and producer Brother May, performing pieces from Blue Hills alongside unreleased material. Her body of work and artistic vision continue to bloom and beguile, and in the live setting its mysteries assume forms even more untethered and unknown.
Time is Away is Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, two visionary storytellers who map personal, poetic and sometimes playful dérives through the histories of their imagination. The voice is an instrument, a letter from home, the colour of pomegranates. Over the better half of a decade, they have made tender and heartfelt transmissions through countless mixes, sound works, live appearances and radio. Exploring themes of memory, persistence and resistance using an assemblage of source material, the duo’s unique mode of storytelling has culminated in Ballads, their first officially licensed compilation, due for release in October 2022.