7–8 June 2019
Cafe OTO are proud to present this new and unique collaboration between a seminal award-winning author and five uncompromisingly exploratory artists.
Nathaniel Mackey and the Creaking Breeze Ensemble meet in London for the first time to develop two live performances based on letters from Mackey's From A Broken Bottle epistolary series. Inspired by Mackey's fictional music, these experimental performances will explore the mysterious balance between sound and word. Together the group perform real and imagined music using voices, drums, saxophone, cello and violin.
The Creaking Breeze Ensemble are: Billy Steiger, Evie Ward, Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright and Ute Kanngiesser.
Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of thirteen chapbooks of poetry, 6 books of poetry, and the five-volume work of fiction From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. He is also the author of two books of criticism, Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018) the most recent. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company; Stray: A Graphic Tone, a vinyl LP of poetry and commentary, was released by Fonograf Editions/ROMA Publications in 2019; Fugitive Equation, a double-CD collaborative performance with The Creaking Breeze Ensemble, was released by Creaking Breeze in 2019. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, a coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and a coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry from the National Book Foundation (2006), the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society (2008), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015), the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress (2017), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2024). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1974-1976), the University of Southern California (1976-1979), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1979-2010).
Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Evie Ward (she/her) is a writer and researcher based in London. Evie is interested in writing that engages with collaboration, art and daily life. Her poems can be found in publications, including Viscose Journal, motor dance journal, and SALT. Evie hosts LIT.MIX on No Bounds Radio and organises the poetry event series, Chips, with writer Thea McLachan. She is Fiction & Poetry Editor at The Toe Rag and her debut poetry collection is forthcoming from JOAN.
www.evieward.com
Paul Abbott is a musician and drummer. He plays with real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing. His work has grown in relation to collaborations with a range of musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers and artists.
Projects include: XT (with Seymour Wright); Kavain Wayne Space (RP Boo) Trio with XT; XT collaborations (with Pat Thomas, Anne Gillis); X Ray Hex Tet (with Pat Thomas, Edward George, Seymour Wright, Crystabel Riley and Billy Steiger); Strangeness Of Drumming (with Edward George), OWLLL (with Ute Kanngießer); yPLO (with Micheal Speers); F.R.David, very good* & Rosmarie (with Will Holder); film sound for Keira Greene and The Creaking Breeze Ensemble (with Nathaniel Mackey, Ute Kanngießer, Billy Steiger, Seymour Wright and Evie Ward). Paul has performed at venues and festivals internationally. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics, and resident artist at Cafe OTO 2015 & 2023.
Recent releases include: Slip; Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary)*; YESYESSPEAKERSYES; Knees, Elbow Bag; Deorlaf X; Fugitive Equation and very good*.
Seymour Wright's work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential.
Ute Kanngießer is a London based cellist and composer from Germany. Over the years, she has carefully deconstructed her classical roots and almost exclusively performs unscripted, improvised music - solo and in collaboration with others. Much of her work has evolved in relationship with other art forms such as film, poetry, and site specific work. She is interested in the vast expressive possibilities of her instrument in relation to body, space, and others, always looking to rediscover or redefine what is musical/lyrical in this moment in time.
Recent collaborations have been with Paul Abbott, Tom Wheatley, Theodora Laird, Nik Colk Void, Okkyung Lee, Caius Williams, Bo-Sung Kim, Steve Noble, Kenichi Iwasa, and Phil Minton. She has also performed alongside poets Denise Riley, Nathaniel Mackey, Evie Ward, and Zara Joan Miller.
