Saturday 9 January 2016, 8pm
London launch event for Heather Leigh's new album on Editions Mego, I Abused Animal. Joining her on the bill will be musician, songwriter, composer and producer, Simon Fisher Turner, in his first OTO appearance in over 5 years.
“All notions of the pedal steel’s laid-back, country harmony are shattered as Leigh extols jagged notes and blocks of electric noise that seem to rail against rock, jazz and other notions of freedom music.” – Dusted Magazine
The daughter of a coal miner, weaving a trail from West Virginia to Texas and now residing in Scotland, Heather Leigh furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar. Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with a feel for the full interaction of flesh with hallucinatory power sources. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions. In recent years Leigh has been touring the world extensively as a solo artist following the release of her studio album, ‘I Abused Animal’ on Ideologic Organ/Editions Mego and in BRÖTZMANN/LEIGH, a duo with Peter Brötzmann, who have released 2 albums, ‘Ears Are Filled With Wonder’ and ‘Sex Tape’ on Trost. A new BRÖTZMANN/LEIGH studio LP/CD is forthcoming in 2018 and she’s currently working on a new solo LP for Editions Mego.
Simon Fisher Turner is renowned for his film soundtrack work which began in collaboration with Derek Jarman, for whom he scored many feature films, from Caravaggio (1986) through to Jarman’s final work Blue (1993). Caravaggio began a long relationship with the BFI, with Fisher Turner composing the score for restorations of three silent films, Un Chant D’Amour (dir. Jean Genet, 1950), The Great White Silence (dir. Herbert Ponting, 1924), and The Epic of Everest (dir. Captain John Noel, 1924), for which he won a prestigious Ivor Novello Award. His most recent work, A Quiet Corner in Time (2020), is a collaboration with the ceramist and author Edmund de Waal.
