Thursday 24 April 2025, 7.30pm
Kumio Kurachi returns to Cafe OTO after 16 years! Poet, illustrator, multi-instrumentalist - Kurachi is thought of by many as a genius. He’s worked with Jim O’Rourke, Tori Kudo, Eiko Ishibashi and Taku Unami to name a few. As a singer-songwriter there are lines to be drawn between Kurachi and Kazuki Tomokawa or Kan Mikami, but also Francis Plagne or Fairport Convention. Ultimately though there is nothing else like it - it’s a brand of strange songcraft that’s totally captivating.
Formed of musician and artist Rie Nakajima, Cafe OTO co-founder Keiko Yamamoto, percussionist and photographer Marie Roux and violin player Billy Steiger, O Yama O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. They move between pop and the philosophical, defined by the overall space afforded to texture and movement. In small, delicate sound an intimate musical climate is established that reflects on life, telling stories of improvised clockwork, whispered dreams, small movements of the hand and the rhythm to be found in the shuffle of a deck of cards.
The group have performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as noshowspace, Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, and allEars Festival.
'Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all'
- a very naughty french man
Hedgehog is a Manchester based quintet plumbing the depths of post-folk. Noise, free improvisation and children's music hide within the cracks of poetry and song.
