Saturday 16 April 2016, 8pm
Incredibly excited to bring the legendary vocal performer and composer, Joan La Barbara to OTO for the first time! Acclaimed as a sympathetic and insightful performer of – and passionate advocate of – the likes of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Robert Ashley, La Barbara is also a formidable composer in her own right. Her work explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries in developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks that have become her “signature sounds”.
This performance is presented in conjunction with THIS IS A VOICE at The Wellcome Collection. THIS IS A VOICE traces the material quality of the voice by looking inside vocal tracts, restless minds and speech devices to capture its complex psychological and physiological origins.
The exhibition focuses on the emotions that resonate in the voice through rhythm, pitch and tone, as well as non-verbal forms of communication. It demonstrates how utterly flexible the voice is, and how it can be dramatically changed with treatment and training.
“Though her music is strange, it is also wondrous; it is put together with such unfailing imagination and unusual beauty that you listen to it in a kind of composer-induced haze, mesmerized.” – The Orange County Register
THF Drenching is a dictaphoneplayer, vocalist and composer of musique concrète from Levenshulme, Manchester. Odie is a vocalist and she improvises, both in her live performances and when working with recorded music, when sampling bits and pieces and when drastically glueing them different creatures togetha, hybrid.
It is in Newcastle upon Tyne that three years of collaborations were most persistently arousing her curiosity in the whole array of musics and arts, but especially, curiosity in music that defies expectations, an element of surprise in a moment makes you jump up and exclaim ''I'm so stoked!''. Now based in Manchester Greta is working in (and outside of) different genres of music, and hunting for exclamation marks all along.
Drenching runs the mailorder label Council Of Drent. All his music is essentially oral in character, obsessive and devouring, and all of it aspires to the condition of jazz in the sense of determinate physical decisionmaking. He was one fifth of Derek Bailey's final band Limescale. He now works in different settings with various improvisors and has a regular trio with David Birchall and Odie ji Ghast. His duos with Alan Wilkinson and with Ghast have proved themselves conversational to the point of hallucination. He is in the process of plotting a disquieting sidestep into dance.
Drenching also makes collages and writes poems and his favourite Dictaphone is the Aiwa TPM 130. As for Ghast, she sits there quietly for a minute and then says: ''ok so if I was a painter I would draw landscapes of parades when not myself parading.''
http://www.councilofdrent.com/
https://thfdrenching.bandcamp.com/
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/THF_Drenching/
http://plushwattle.tumblr.com/
https://soundcloud.com/readingmyeyes
