Tuesday 13 July 2021, 7.30pm
Very pleased to host a TakuRoku double bill in the form of the mermaid café, the creative collective made up of Joanna Ward and Ruari Paterson-Achenbach; and London based duo Natalie Williams & Mark Courtney aka Leyden Jars, who create work of fragmented musicality, electro-acoustic emission, disembodied dub, radiophonic interference, and revelatory DIY poetics.
London based duo who debuted with a triptych of albums for the unimpeachable Mordant Music through 2016-2017. Followed by a fourth on the singular Outer Reaches (2020) and were part of the Cafe Oto Takuroku digital series. Their last album 'forgeries' was released in early 2023. "This is one for late nights and misty mornings....musique concrete, haunted folk and some dub attitude" (Rewind Forward). A new album is on the horizon in 2025 via Altered States Tapes out of Hobart, Australia.Beginning as a dare, live shows became central to their way of working. Outings included an inaugural performance in Paris, support for Tropa Macaca and Echtoplasm Girls. Most recently they played Strange Brew, Bristol with Fiesta En El Vacio and Acte Bonte.
Their live emissions are based on electronics that breathe! Incorporating sonic place, sonic space with all manner of sound-makers and once eloquently described as "Dank!!" (Jackson Burton).They have recently set up the Goods Outward label with no set of rules; more a set of possibilities. Mysteries, histories and curiosities. So far, releases include full albums by Middex, Eli!, P.Vivax, picoFarad and a Jim Edgar Morgan soundtrack. With more scheduled for 2025.
The mermaid café is a creative collective made up of Joanna Ward and Ruari Paterson-Achenbach.
As a group, they aim to think towards, and imagine the potentials of, a contemporary compositional-curatorial-performative artistic practice which is radical, feminist, queer, antiracist, anticapitalist, anticolonial; resistive in concept and practice. They have a postmodern, referential artistic vision, infused with playfulness, and inspired by a joyful mix of the musical and extra-musical. They love musical practices that have a point of view and are oriented towards the body: riot grrl, northern soul, queer cabaret, free jazz, fluxus. Their creative work is explicitly influenced by their research and activism, engaging with things like experimental novels, free green spaces, the black radical tradition, the (non)semiotics of shape and of colour... Through all of these interests, they want to create sites for sonic resistance, and to reject traditional power structures inherent in composer/performer/audience relationships.
