Wednesday 12 August 2015, 8pm
Following his duo performance with Chris Corsano at OTO last summer – one of the standout's of Corsano's residency here – Massimo Pupillo (ZU, The Original Silence, Hairy Bones etc etc) returns to OTO alongside Daniel O'Sullivan (Grumbling Fur, Guapo) and Steve Noble.
A much in demand electric bass guitarist, Pupillo's playing runs from clipped stacatto augmentations to the jaw-droppingly visceral. This will be the first performance of this new trio – extremely gifted improvisers all, this promises to be one hell of a show!
Massimo Pupillo is a bass player and composer originally from Rome Italy. He is mostly known for his work with the band Zu. For over fifteen years, his modus operandi of straddling and abusing musical genres has resulted in over 15 album releases across labels such as Ipecac, Atavistic, Daymare Recordings and Headz (Japan). John Zorn described Zu as "a powerful and expressive music that totally blows away what most bands do these days".
Massimo has released over 50 albums and performed more than 2000 shows throughout Europe, US, Canada, Asia, Russia, Mexico and Africa, touring with the like of Mike Patton (as the Zu/Patton quartet), also sharing the stage with Faith No More, Sonic Youth, Fantomas, The Melvins, Lightning Bolt, The Ex, Nomeansno, Deerhoof, and countless others.
He has collaborated with a vast number of musicians including Mike Patton, Thurston Moore, Stephen O Malley, Damo Suzuki (Can), Mats Gustafsson, Buzz Osbourne (The Melvins), Dälek, David Tibet (Current 93), Jim O' Rourke, FM Einheit (Einsturzende Neubauten), Peter Brötzmann, Nobukazu Takemura, Eugene Robinson (Oxbow), Steve MacKay (The Stooges), The Ex, Nomeansno, Guy Picciotto and Joe Lally (Fugazi), Toshinori Kondo, Chris Corsano, Otomo Yoshihide, Paal Nilssen-Love, Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt), Oren Ambarchi, Alvin Curran, Lasse Marhaug, Lukas Ligeti, Han Bennink, Ken Vandermark, Hamid Drake, Bobby Previte, Carla Bozulich, and in classical music with Katia & Marielle Labeque, Viktoria Mullova, and many others.
Steve Noble is London's leading drummer, a fearless and constantly inventive improviser whose super-precise, ultra-propulsive and hyper-detailed playing has galvanized encounters with Derek Bailey, Matthew Shipp, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Stephen O'Malley, Joe McPhee, Alex Ward, Rhodri Davies and many, many more.
In the early eighties, Noble played with the Nigerian master drummer Elkan Ogunde, Rip Rig and Panic, Brion Gysin and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, before going on to work with the pianist Alex Maguire and with Derek Bailey (including Company Weeks 1987, 89 and 90). He was featured in the Bailey's excellent TV series on Improvisation for Channel 4 based on his book ‘Improvisation; its nature and practise’. He has toured and performed throughout Europe, Africa and America and currently leads the groups N.E.W (with John Edwards and Alex Ward) and DECOY (with John Edwards and Alexander Hawkins).
"The music of Daniel O'Sullivan plays like a haunted jukebox." - Wire
"A multi-dimensional artist that successfully soundtracks our profoundly confusing 21st century" - Prog
"O'Sullivan's dreampop mantras casually open up portals into other dimensions" - Uncut
Daniel O'Sullivan is a composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer living and working in London and has been contributing a vibrant, chameleonic brew to the music landscape since the late 1990's. He has achieved international acclaim writing, recording and performing both solo and with a myriad of celebrated groups including Grumbling Fur, Ulver, Sunn O))), Guapo, Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses, Laniakea, Miracle, Æthenor and This Is Not This Heat.
DOS collages a wide range of musical disciplines and has collaborated with a number of artists including several live performances and recordings with 'continuous music' pioneer Charlemagne Palestine and large scale surround sound/AV installations with Turner prize-nominee Mark Titchner. As well as playing and recording several albums with Norwegian experimental metal group Ulver and occasionally donning the robe with Sunn O))), O'Sullivan has been at the core of the wildly successful reincarnation of This Heat as a live entity.
Whether solo or in his varied collaborative projects, O’Sullivan’s work is strikingly dense and allusive, alive with enticing sonic diversions, hypnotic syncopation and highly ornamented song-craft. Both lyrically and within the intricately knitted arrangements, traditional forms are reshaped into transcendent pocket symphonies. Both intimate and alien, archetypal and atypical, joyous and melancholic, the aperture of O’Sullivan’s music is wide open and light streams in.
