Monday 29 June 2015, 8pm
Debut OTO show for the great, Edinburgh-based, improvised noise duo, Usurper, aka Malcy Duff & Ali Robertson.
“A deliberate, luddite refusal to speak music’s language “properly” … the foremost exponents of contemporary post-punk improvisation in the UK... By favouring the sounds other musicians might ignore or avoid – placing a beer bottle on a table, the clicking of a pedal’s pot-switch, the resonant clang of a dropped coin – Usurper, paradoxically, go right through “lo-fi” and come out the other side. It’s this transformative process of enticed attentiveness that produces a genuinely collaborative environment in which focus on the incremental allows us to appreciate the delicacy and subtlety of sound-worlds we normally ignore or take for granted” – Foxy Digitalis.
“We have a punchline at the end of each set which equals one joke every three weeks: "I'm not laughing at him. I'm laughing with him. No, i'm not laughing at him. I'm laughing with him."
Combined comprehensive educations of Fife and Edinburgh failed to curb luddite tendencies or discourage low forms of wit: Ali Robertson got remedial as Giant Tank head-honker. Malcy Duff draw.
Meanwhile: A lack of understanding proved that if you leave something broken long enough it'll start working again and Usurper got born.
Minusculist practical pranks and barely there puns for sound keep us chortling like never since John Candy jammed with his dashboard.”
For a long time now Phil Minton has been working as a improvising singer, solo and in groups and situations at various locations all over the place, deserts, quarries, concert halls, pubs, holes, dodgy clubs, containers, up trees, in prisons, on mountains, in churches, under bridges and cafe oto etc.
Phil Minton comes from Torquay. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s - Then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later of part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s.
For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as an improvising singer in lots of groups, orchestras, and situations. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians, including tours with American singer Audrey Chen - with whom he has sang far and wide in the last ten years.
Since the eighties, His Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.
Matilda Rolfsson is a Swedish percussionist and improviser living in Trondheim. She is educated at the Institute for Music NTNU and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance, London and has since been active as a freelance musician internationally, solo as well as together with dancers and musicians. Performers with whom she repeatedly associates through collaborations are pianist Lisa Ullén, vocalist Maggie Nicols; (Trio Generations) bassist Joëlle Léandre, pianist Elisabeth Harnik, percussionist Mark Wastell, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (Hidros 9), bassist Elsa Bergman (Playon Crayon) and seen and heard in several versions of Trondheim Jazz Orchestra as well as with dancers Marcela Giesche, Bára Sigfussdottir and Anna Westberg. As an artistic researcher PhD (Scholarship) at the Institute for Music NTNU, she is in the process of deepening her artistic praxis within the interdisciplinary interaction and expression between music and dance in free improvisation.
