Saturday 27 August 2022, 8pm
“She effortlessly dissolves barriers between herself and her fellow musicians, between music and listener, between language and expression.” – The WIRE
Josephine Foster makes a welcome return to OTO with her masterful self-honed songbook - some singalongs, some deep atmospheric tales that leave the listener yearning to know more. Josephine Foster is not only a captivating songwriter and performer, but also is daring, versatile and irreverent in her approach to subject and form.
"It's a pretty much perfect set, a quiet masterclass in songwriting with melodies that find the sweet spot in unexpected places and a self-possessed beauty that only grows with every listen." – Time Out, review of I'm A Dreamer
Joining Josephine on the night will be songwriter, Dan Haywood, whose most recent Wire-endorsed LP ‘Country Dustbin’ was co-released on our TakuRoku imprint last year, and singer, songwriter and poet, Louise Levi.
Coloradoan Josephine Foster’s route is a free, chromatic music, a tuneful montana of mind–an expansive harmonic space dominated by mountains on the horizon. As highwater as the music is, as broad the stylistic palette of it, her music really exists in service of the lyrics.
She has performed for an audience of burros, concerts of Federico Garcia Lorca poems set to music. A music of wandering and a music of roots. An impermanent tradition passed down for generations. Let your loved ones know.
With his cliché-busting compositions covered by his peers and admired by the late great David Berman, Dan Haywood is a true songwriter’s songwriter. His freewheeling guitar and vocal sets can draw on 25 years of engrossing craft and wild inspiration, with selections from his breakthrough cosmic-folk triple album ‘Dan Haywood’s New Hawks’, to his most recent Wire-endorsed ‘Country Dustbin’ on Café Oto’s Otoroku-- and anything in between, including his punky parallel career leading Pill Fangs.
Described by Record Collector magazine as ‘the greatest songwriter you’ve probably never heard of’, this is a great chance to catch the sometimes-reclusive singer at the top of his game.
Louise Landes Levi is a poet, translator, musician, and performer whose travels have charted an elaborate constellation of mystic and cosmic pathways. A founding member of Daniel (Abdul Hayye) Moore’s Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, she participated—from 1967 to 1969, alongside Terry Riley and Angus Maclise—in multidisciplinary drama inspired by Artaud’s research with the Tarahumara, the Balinese Gamelan, Tibetan monastic ritual, and Indian dance. Following studies at Mills College with sarangi master Pandit Ram Narayan, Levi traveled alone from Paris through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to reach northern India for research into its musical and poetic tradition. There, she studied with Sri Annapurna Devi and Ustad Abdul Majid Khan, later becoming Ali Ak Bar Khan’s pupil at the Basel Conservatory of Music and in California. Completing her journey in her birthplace of New York, Levi studied with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, monitoring their Dream House into the 21st century. Levi has translated the work of Henri Michaux and Indian mystic Mira Bai (whose Sweet On My Lips La Monte Young wrote the introduction for) and is responsible for the first English translation of Rene Daumal’s Rasa, or, Knowledge of the Self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics (New Directions, 1982). She has published over a dozen books of her own poetry, most recently Crazy Louise (or la Conversazione Sacra), a series of poems examining sexual trauma from the perspective of an initiate, delineating an oriental interpretation of lunacy to reclaim the notion of the feminine hysterical from its subordinate and abusive occidental role. Levi’s introverted lifestyle and reverence for musical tradition and attainment have left comparatively little space for musical dissemination, but the last decade has seen the reappearance of works from the ‘80s in addition to several contemporary releases featuring contributions from her friends, the late Ira Cohen and Catherine Christer Hennix. Whether alone or with accompaniment, Levi’s elegiac sarangi, bells, and flute exude the feeling of otherworldly, indeed forgotten ritual. Her invocation & interpretive sense of raga, in these recordings, overlaid with spoken and sung poetry, invoke threshold experience, railing against mono culture with a sincerity & presence as sardonic or mournful as it is devotional.
