Wednesday 23 October 2024, 7.30pm
Simon Fisher Turner is renowned for his film soundtrack work which started with Derek Jarman, for whom he scored many feature films - from Caravaggio (1986), through to Jarman’s final work Blue (1993). Caravaggio (1986) began a long relationship with the BFI, Fisher Turner composed the score for restorations of three silent films, Un Chant D’Amour dir Jean Genet (1950), The Great White Silence dir Herbert Ponting (1924) and The Epic of Everest dir. Captain John Noel (1924), winning a prestigious Ivor Novello Award for the soundtrack to The Epic of Everest. He has also composed film music for Mike Hodges, Michael Almareyda, Isao Yamada. His various collaborators over the years include, Ruicki Sakamoto, Gina Birch, Deux Filles, The Derek Jarman Lab, and The Elysian Collective. The Café OTO performance will feature The Elysian Collective alongside Simon Fisher Turner.
With a career as varied and diverse as his current projects, Simon Fisher Turner has released records under his own name, as The King Of Luxembourg and Deux Filles, and with collaborators including Klara Lewis. Their collaboration, Care (2018, Editions Mego), followed a previous collaboration with Lewis and Rainier Lericolais on a live soundtrack to Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis dir. Walter Ruttman (1927).
In 2020 Simon Fisher Turner released A Quiet Corner in Time (Mute), his collaboration with the artist and author Edmund de Waal, an extension of a piece created for de Waal’s –one way or other– installation at the Schindler House in Los Angeles.
Simon’s new album, Instability of The Signal, is out now on Mute. The new album pulls together four strands of Fisher Turner’s sonic experimentation, which he identifies as Slivers, Sounds, Strings, and Singing. His ongoing sonic blog Guerilla Audio releases regular missives via Touch every two weeks.
Elysian Collective is a collaborative ensemble specialising in all kinds of contemporary, experimental and improvised music. The group formed as the contemporary string quartet, Elysian Quartet in 1999 and went on to be at the forefront of new music for fifteen years. They were the inaugural performers of the Nonclassical label and club night and went on to premiere works by leading composers including Meredith Monk, Keith Tippett, Graham Fitkin, Jason Yarde and Max De Wardener. In 2012 they took to the skies to perform Stockhausen’s infamous Helicopter String Quartet for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Following the tragic death of their violist Vincent Sipprell in 2015 they reformed as a flexible ensemble and in recent years have recorded and performed with PULP, Fontaines DC, Jessie Ware, The Last Dinner Party, IDLES, Philip Selway and The Waeve. Elysian Collective and Simon Fisher Turner have been close collaborators for over twenty years. They appear on many of Simon’s albums, collaborative art projects, the soundtrack to The Great White Silence and together they have performed improvised concerts to delight and confuse audiences across Europe.
Tito Heredia is a legendary Flamenco guitar player, from the Algeciras area of Spain. Heredia and Fisher Turner worked together for the Jarman soundtracks for Caravaggio and The Garden of England, and again on Fisher Turner’s The King of Luxembourg project, and his career has seen him perform in the beloved Spanish bars of Hanway Street, London and on the British children’s television series Teletubbies.
