Saturday 21 January 2023, 8pm
New Haven, Connecticut’s Tongue Depressor return to Cafe Oto after their incredible performance in 2019. Made up of duo Zach Rowden (fiddle, upright bass, bells, tapes) and Henry Birdsey (fiddle, lap steel, bag pipes), Tongue Depressor write, perform and improve fragmentary reworkings of American church music. Fresh off their amazing LP ‘Burnish’ for Kali Malone’s XKathedral label imprint, they will be touring their first double lp, released by U.K. label Worried Songs.
"empyrean chimes and subterranean drones from out-musick duo Tongue Depressor….in-depth explorations of tuned percussion and just intoned drone that comes highly recommended if you’re into the work of Tony Conrad, C.C. Hennix, John Cage, Philip Corner and Michael Ranta - or if you’re into..." – Boomkat
Conal Blake is a musician from Glasgow. He currently plays solo and improvises with Li Song and Regan Bowering, using electronics and percussion. He also runs the Feedback Moves label.
Regan Bowering is a percussionist, improviser and sound artist based in London. Her solo work explores various combinations of objects and materials, drums and percussion, amps, speakers, and feedback. Her debut album Solos for _ _ _ _ spaces (Dec 2023, Bezirk Tapes) captures this process across a variety of settings, from cavernous concert halls to studios and micro-edits on a laptop. According to the Quietus, Solos is “a play of contrasts, contradicting voluminous expressions with confined phrases, taming resounding feedback with faint percussive flutters, but one that feels driven by the desire to craft electrifying drama rather than pure autotelic dissonance.” Bowering is one third of a trio with Li Song and Conal Blake, whose tape Music for Snare Drums and Portable Speakers was released on Infant Tree in May 2023. She’s currently doing a practice-based PhD in Music at Goldsmiths.
Li Song is a London-based musician and computer programmer. He performs improvised music with his computer and composes music using electronics and acoustic instruments. His collaborative project with Zhu Wenbo, No Performance, focuses on compositions using environment sounds, acoustic instruments, computer algorithms, and random sequence. He is also a member of computer network music ensemble and research group, [ _ _ _ ], focusing on algorithmic collaboration. Recent works include Two Snare Drums (Infant Tree 2022), [ _ _ _ ] (with Jia Liu and Shuoxin Tan, SUPERPANG 2022) and Text (with Zhu Wenbo, Zoomin' Night 2021).
Lucia H Chung is a Taiwanese artist based in London, United Kingdom. She performs and releases music under the alias ‘en creux’ where the sound creation springs from her fascinations in noise generated through no-input feedback mixing board. The volatile nature of the system and the unpredictable glitch from the excessive energy pouring into the equipment becomes her improvisational and compositional strategy.
Lucia’s passion lies in live performance and has regularly performed solo and with collaborators in the UK, Europe, Asia and North America, including Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, Krama Festival, Lisboa Soa Festival, Sanatorium of Sound Festival and Festival Electropixel.
‘Fuzz comes alive, moving at odd angles like the sinuous threads are being chased by a series of subatomic bleeps and flashes. Tension rises as the tempo picks up, fueling the disjointed rhythmic quality within each sterile, self-contained unit.’ – Fox Digitalis
