Saturday 18 January 2025, 7.30pm
ExOrg abbreviates the LA based free improvisational group Extended Organ to three of it’s five members: Paul McCarthy (vocals and guitar), Joe Potts (“Chopped Optigan”) and Alex Stevens (processing and synths), who will be joined on this occasion by fellow LAFMS collaborator Rick Potts (electronic and customised acoustic instrumentation).
Later in the night the group will be joined by Charles Hayward (This Heat, This Is Not This Heat, Abstract Concrete) on drums.
Support TBA
Extended Organ was formed in 1995 by Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, Paul McCarthy and Fredrik Nilsen as an experiment in sonic interaction over a droning substate. Mike Kelley was a member of the group between 2000 and his passing in 2012. Alex Stevens has been a member since 2011.
Extended Organ takes its name from the titles of two sixties experimental music LPs, "Extended Voices" and "A Second Wind for Organ". Starting out as a description of Joe Potts’ self-engineered drone instrument, the "Chopped Optigan", it soon becomes apparent that the name describes Paul McCarthy's primal vocal utterances equally well. Just as the name suggests, the group aspires to straddle the profound and the profane.
“XOXO is creepy and wonderful. It may sound like a gross exaggeration, but we are wondering if this CD might not just be the Sgt. Pepper's of noise records.” -Soundohm
“The music moves with velocity and direction revealing surprises at every turn. The resulting sound is ominous, humorous, harmonious, chaotic and at times quietly erotic. This is abstractly powerful music.” -Boomkat
Extended Organ is a part of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS), the seminal West Coast experimental noise cult and visual arts collective that formed in the mid 1970s as part of the international DIY movement in which artists developed systems for self-production and distribution of works. It was during this early period when members of the LAFMS had studios in what was at that time the derelict 35 South Raymond building in Pasadena where Paul McCarthy also had his studio. This proximity planted the seed for future collaboration.
Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.
McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of West Coast artists. McCarthy began collaborating with the LAFMS in the late 70s, and in 1995 was among the founding members of Extended Organ.
Joe Potts was hailed by The Wire (UK) as “something new and revolutionary”.
Though he holds degrees in Fine Arts he studied electronic composition at the California Institute of the Arts dropping in on classes taught by Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and working in the Buchla equipped electronic music studios. He has composed electro-acoustic music exclusively since 1973 creating Art/Sound installations and performing in the U.S., Italy, Japan Germany, Belgium and Norway.
A founding member of The Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) a seminal experimental music collective he is also the “man behind the curtain” in Airway, an art/sound collective that combines walls of sound with subliminal treatments and treats live musicians as electronic signals which are processed and manipulated. For the past 25 years he has been composing for the “Chopped Optigan” a Seventies optical sampling console organ that he has customized and rewired in order to create dense undulating chords of up to 64 notes at a time.
Recordings of his music can be found on LAFMS, Birdman, Cause and Effect, Staalplaat, Organ of Corti, Boudisque, Vinyl On Demand, Important and other labels. Musical collaborators include Director David Blum, Chris and Cosey (Throbbing Gristle), Paul and Damon McCarthy, John Duncan, Mike Kelley, Thurston Moore, David Toop, Yoshihide Otomo, Don Preston and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.
Alex Stevens is a multidisciplinary artist and musician living in Los Angeles. He has collaborated with a wide variety of contemporary artists, performers and musicians including several projects with The Los Angeles Free Music Society. Stevens also performs in such acts as Extended Organ, The Bum Cheeky Bum Bums, Alexander and or the Xanders, No Hope, Carpet Thrower, P.C.D.C and any other group that will have him.
Rick Potts is an improviser and instrument maker who has been on the musical fringe of Los Angeles for several decades. A home-made sound scientist and founding member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) which was started in 1975. Rick produces sounds which are unique, alarming, and strange with custom hinge-neck guitar, musical saw and synthesizer. He has recorded and performed with Dinosaurs with Horns, Solid Eye, Airway, Le Forte Four and others. Solo performances and collaborations with other experimental musicians have taken him around Japan, Europe and the U.S.A.
Charles Hayward is an English drummer/singer/composer and was a founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. He also played with early European improv group Mal Dean's Amazing Band and gigged and recorded with Phil Manzanera in Quiet Sun as well as a short stint with Gong. Since the late 80's he has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations including Massacre (with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith), Monkey Puzzle Trio, Albert Newton (with Pat Thomas and John Edwards) and This Is Not This Heat which toured the UK, Europe, USA and Japan between 2016-2019 performing expanded versions of This Heat’s oeuvre to unfaltering critical acclaim. Hayward’s latest group, Abstract Concrete, formed from London players from a diversity of European underground scenes, released it’s self-titled debut album in November 2023.
