Sunday 3 September 2023, 7.30pm
Wojciech Rusin presents new graphic scores interpreted by the trio of Otto Willberg (double bass), Ecka Mordecai (cello) and Lara Agar (violin), following performances at Ment festival in Ljubljana, and Unsound festival last year with the ensemble Spoldzielnia Muzyczna.
Wojciech Rusin is a Polish-born audio visual artist based in London. He draws inspiration from alchemical and gnostic texts, early renaissance choral music and Eastern European mythologies. He released The Funnel LP on Akashic Records in April 2019. He designs and makes 3D-printed reed instruments, reworking ancient designs with contemporary 3D modelling technologies. In 2020 he released Meat for the Guard Dogs on Cafe OTO’s Takuroku digital imprint, and the Rufus Orbis cassette for Boomkat Editions / Documenting Sound series. His music has been featured on BBC Four and he has worked for The National Theatre, The Southbank Centre and National Theatre Wales.
Otto Willberg plays various bass instruments and lives in London. Live, Otto performs unashamedly melodic improvisational workouts created almost entirely with heavily filtered bass harmonica and electric bass. Strangely abstracted funk and fusion, a blend of the abstruse and immediate. silky smooth, luxurious, odd and compelling, "like listening to Eberhard Weber through a drainpipe”.
Otto is often heard on acoustic and electric bass with Laurie Tompkins (Yes Indeed) and Charles Hayward (Abstract Concrete//This Heat), as well as the fractured No Wave unit Historically Fucked. His previous solo releases have ranged from extended technique double bass to explorations of the acoustics of a 19th century artillery fort.
He has a solo record called ’The Leisure Principle’ out on Oren Ambarchi's the Black Truffle label. 6 unashamedly melodic & profoundly strange workouts for heavily filtered bass harmonica & electric bass!
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
Lara’s music blends electronic soundscapes and sampled material with traditional acoustic and classical instruments. Taking a home grown and intuitive approach, Lara’s interests lie in the accidental, the found, indeterminacy, messiness of stuff, experimental and collaborative music making, going with mistakes, (Beckett - “Fail again, fail better”), not knowing, and so on... Her work takes interest in voice: own voice, other voices, human voice, emulating voice. Space as a place to inhabit, cerebral, imagined vs physical. Direct, subtle. Intimacy is relevant. Gut feeling, sometimes humour. Instinctive, intuitive.
Performers and collaborators who have played Lara’s music include Juliet Fraser, Mark Knoop, Orkest de Ereprijs, Louis D’heudieres, Lola de la Mata, members of the London Symphony Orchestra, the National Dance Company of Wales, Exaudi, Plus-Minus Ensemble, Quatuor Bozzini, National Youth String Orchestra, Vaganza, Matsena Productions, Waste Paper Opera Company, Satoko Inoue, Quatuor Danel and No Door Theatre Company.
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