Surrounded by handmade instruments, French folk singer, harpist, spinet and hurdy-gurdy player Emmanuelle Parrennin delivered an entrancing solo set to a winter crowd. Stripped of some of the more electronic, psychedelic tones that appeared on Maison Rose and Pérélandra, Parrennin creates an unearthly atmostphere with her vocals and a wired approach to instrumentation. Though in the past Parrennin has collected songs around rural France in a similar manner to the work carried out by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins, this isn't simply revival folk; there's a tinge of a strange future to every song.  --- Emmanuelle Parrennin / vocals, harp, spinet, hurdy-gurdy --- Tracklisting 1. Le Rêve2. La Bar Mitsva3. Laisse Filer 4. Le Son De Ta Voix5. Le Secret 6. Entre Moi - Ce Matin à Frémontel 7. Hurdy Gurdy Drone ( improvisation )  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Friday 3rd November 2017 by Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Photo by Jonathan Crabb. Artwork by Oli Barratt. 

Despite counting Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno as fans, Belgian composer Dominique Lawalrée's compositions have been hard to find and scarecly heard. New York label Catch Wave have been working hard to change this, and last year helped put together 'First Meeting' - a collection of pieces Lawalrée had only ever released on his own tiny imprint Editions Walrus. We were delighted to welcome Lawalrée to OTO to reimagine those early compositions and debut new works. A fan of Satie, The Beatles and Eno, Lawalrée’s music of makes no secret of its influences, whilst taking a distinctly unique approach to decay, timbre and tone. "a quiet, understated music that is both touching and elegant" - Gavin Bryars --- Dominique Lawalrée / piano, keyboards Britton Powell / piano, keyboards, percussion  Leo Svirsky / piano, keyboards --- The Dominique Lawalree Ensemble is Dominique Lawalree, Leo Svirsky, and Britton Powell. Recorded on Sunday 1st October 2017 by Shaun Crook. Mixed & mastered by James Dunn. Photo by Abby Thomas and artwork by Oli Barratt. 

All members of the OTO family in their own right, the group casts Blumberg’s songs as through-ideas to weave four threads around. New material from their forthcoming album Minus - out 4th May on Mute Records - heard for the first time here. --- Daniel Blumberg / steinberger guitar, piano, harmonica, voiceUte Kanngiesser / celloTom Wheatley / double bassBilly Steiger / violin --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Shaun Crook on Wednesday 28th February 2018. Mixed and Mastered by Marta Salogni. Drawing by Daniel Blumberg. All songs written by Daniel Blumberg and published by Mute Song Ltd.  

Wildly dynamic 2013 performance by this sextet recorded as part of saxophonist Urs Leimgruber’s two day residency during the London Jazz Festival that year.  All six members of the ensemble are leading protagonist’s in Europe’s free improvisation community and this recording sees them on fine form, rendering unruly sonics and spontaneous freedoms alongside exhilarating passages of collective unity and chamber-like luminosity.  --- Jacques Demierre / pianoOkkyung Lee / cello Thomas Lehn / synthesizer Urs Leimgruber / soprano saxophoneDorothea Schürch / voice, singing sawRoger Turner / drums, percussion --- Recorded by Katherine Arnold at Cafe OTO on Wednesday 19 November 2013.  Mixed by Thomas Lehn. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx, Berlin.

New York improvising vocalist, composer, and performance artist Shelley Hirsch met the Swiss turntables and electronic musician Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant) at a festival in Biel, Switzerland, where they were both performing solo. Shelley was struck by his performance and Joke admitted that he has “loved her work since the early ’80s.” Booked to play OTO as part of NEXT festival, the pair explored consciousness, both immediate and memory based, and drew on personal experience to create a three act improvisation which reinterprets the strange and the known. “Hirsch’s command of extended vocal techniques imparts enormous variety to her music. The tone of her voice can range from audacious vulnerability, to charismatic intimacy (especially in the story-telling segments), to hallucinatory excursions floating effortlessly out of the spoken/sung voice and into pure Hirschian singing. Such transitions always remain viscerally connected to the text and in context.” - Anne LeBaron’s "Surrealism in Post Modern Music" (Garland Press) Great interview with Shelley here, by Peter Urpeth of the Free Improv Pod.  --- Shelley Hirsch / vocals Joke Lanz / turntables ---  Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Wednesday 11th November 2015 bu Luca Consonni. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Artwork by Oli Barrett. Special thanks to NEXT festival for organising the show. 

Pleased to see Kawaguchi's blistering solo set surface from the archives. The bleak, lonesome root of enka runs through maxed out psychedelic guitar in surely one of the loudest sets ever played at the venue. Surprisingly delicate in parts, but it's obvious his work with Haino has had an ear splitting effect. “Kawaguchi Masami's machine gun guitar, which stutters in a polyglot tongue drawing equally from Rory Gallagher, Jerry Garcia and Lou Reed.” – The Wire "One of the greats of modern Japanese psychedelic rock, Masami Kawaguchi has been an influential figure in the Japanese underground scene for two decades. Known for bands such Miminokoto, LSD-March, Broomdusters, Los Doroncos and more recently with his New Rock Syndicate. Heʼs also a regular Keiji Haino collaborator in Aihiyo and more recently in Hardy Soul. Masami's voice is the true updating of the enka tradition: not the rehash or nostalgia, just the bleak lonesome heart which runs through enka core." --- Masami Kawaguchi / vocals, guitar --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Tuesday 13th March 2018 by Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Artwork by Oli Barrett.

To celebrate being open for 10 years we thought we'd share the very first show we hosted as a download. John Chantler organised Saya's first show outside of the UK and remembers it like this: Saya was in the UK for a short stint to work on the mix for the Pastels/Tenniscoats LP 'Two Sunsets' - travelling to Glasgow from Japan via London. I'd heard word of a new venue opening up in town with the Japanese name and got in touch to see if they'd be interested in having Saya play. Turned out they'd be (fingers crossed) open just in time, and as big fans of Tenniscoats would love to have play the venue's first show.   The paint was still fresh on the walls. There was no proper mixing desk (I brought my own and got a bit heavy-handed with the echo). The PA was far from the best and the sound meter that they'd had to install wasn't set up right. It tripped not once, but twice during 'Baibaba Bimba' (you'll hear the silence as the power cuts out on the recording) - leaving Saya to switch from keyboard to guitar to finish it off. Despite all that it was a magical early sunday evening. Saya was nervous playing her first solo show outside Japan, but the attentive crowd of 70 odd stuck with her and sat in rapt attention. No one show is going to capture the essence of cafe OTO, but if they say you should start as you mean to go on and that's what happened here. It's nice to finally be able to share this little slice of the venue's history. Enjoy. - John Chantler

Really happy to have had Ambuya Stella Chiweshe join us at Cafe OTO last November. Here she shares three parts of the night - an a capella call to her homeland of Zimbabwe, a new track accompanied by her mbrira, and a slow, rhythmic version of one of her most well-loved songs, 'Chachimurenga'. Chiweshe sings with great strength, soothes with the mbira and continues to expand on tradition in new, inventive ways.  --- Stella Chiweshe / vocals, mbira --- Tracklisting: 1. One - 7:08 2. Two - 13.01 3. Three - 27:19 --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Shaun Crook on Tuesday 28th November 2017. Mixed & mastered by James Dunn. Photo by Felipe Vasquez and artwork by Oli Barratt.

Live recording of the debut London performance for the duo of Limpe Fuchs and Evan Parker - two giants of avant garde music. Having met at Fort Process Festival in 2016 and seen each other perform solo in a tiny underground bunker, the two then paired up for a couple of duo concerts - one at OTO, and one in Brighton for Lost Property Arts Collective. Fuchs brings her unique menagerie of sounds to the space - variable wood and stone blocks (marble and serpentinite sourced from Sondrio in Upper Italy), ringing bronze pendulum strings and a variety of skin and bronze drums sound out alongside her own voice and a two toned harmonic violin. Fuch's huge set up, spread out across the stage area and unique to each performance, means the music to develops through movement - as each instrument is played, another is left in silence.  Their duo evolves in phases, navigated by Fuch's movement around the room, and Parker's intuitive  finding of endings, of pauses and of ways to engage with Fuch's personal rhythms is perfect. Surely the beginning of a regular duo? We hope so.  --- Limpe Fuchs / percussion, vocals, violin Evan Parker / saxophone --- Tracklisting: 1. Set 1 - 28:58 2. Set 2 - 20:13 3. Set 3 - 16:02 --- Recorded liveat Cafe OTO by James Dunn on Monday 28th May 2017. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Artwork by Oli Barrett - original photograph by Edith Stocker. 

OG footwork DJ/producer RP Boo aka Kavain Space brought 3½ hours of footwork fire to OTO in November. Mixing his own tracks with cuts from Rashad and samples of Roy Ayres, Del La Soul, Jocelyn Brown and Gerald Levert to name a few, Boo kept his crowd on their toes the whole way - occasionally joining them to dance his adidas into thin air. Simple, sweaty and infectious - if you're stuck for something to play in the wee hours of New Years Day we reckon this will mix in nicely after 'Auld Lang Syne.'  --- RP Boo / cdjs --- Tracklisting: 1. 10.11.16 - 3:33:37 --- Recorded by Tom Mudd live at Cafe OTO on Thursday 10th November, 2016. Mixed by Abby Thomas. GIF by Oli Barrett. Big thanks to Kavain and Pedro. 

Second release in an on-going series from saxophone and guitar 'duo' Daniel Blumberg and Seymour Wright. Mutated recordings made with heavy distortion and extreme amplification are live processed and manipulated to create a sinister, metallic ricochet. Release includes an ekphrasis by Brady Corbet responding to the music. --- Daniel Blumberg / guitar Seymour Wright / saxophone --- Tracklisting: 1. 23.5.16 - 17:00 --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Monday 23rd May 2016 by Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Ekphrasis by Brady Corbet. Font by Billy Steiger. Etching by GUO. 

Incredibly pleased to finally release this from the archives! Kumio Kurachi is truly one of the most original figures in Japanese music, and his music exists within its very own colourful world. Recorded across two nights way back in 2009, Kurachi is joined by Taku Unami and London improvisors Steve Beresford and Angharad Davies. These two shows still remain as Kurachi's only concerts outside Japan. "Kumio Kurachi depicts our mind and feelings with unthinkable and bizarre words which can be embarrassing to listen to. And yet he manages to create a world which is so familiar to us - small events of our everyday life that we don't pay much attention to. Whether it is a conversation between a funeral service conductor and his helper that you overheard in a supermarket (Supermarket Chitose), or about the people affected by a dam construction (A Dam with 30,000,000 Teardrops), his songs are fragments of our human behaviours and experiences. His lyrical world is made even more unpredictable by his unique guitar style which is apparently inspired by the koto. The music is so melodious that the mixture of the strange wording, guitar and variations of voices thrives all together and it can haunt you without noticing it, just like the small events of everyday life you can't escape from." - Midori Ogata --- Kumio Kurachi / guitar, vocals Taku Unami / guitar Angharad Davies / violin Steve Beresford / piano --- Tracklisting: 1. Train Song (poetry reading)2. Instrumental l3. Asahi4. Cling Film (Saran Wrap)5. Full of Miso (Miso Ga Ippai)6. Instrumental ll7. A Dam with 30,000,000 teardrops (30,000,000 Tsubu Dam)8. Best Camera9. An Event On An Island (Tsudoe Nokonoshima) ft Unami, Beresford10. Slow Walker (Yukkuri Aruku Hito) ft Unami, Beresford11. Supermarket Chitose ft Unami, Beresford12. Here Comes Tatamiya (Tatamiya Ga Kita) ft Unami, Beresford, Davies13. Steel Tower (Tettou) ft Unami, Beresford, Davies14. Soshu Yakyoku (蘇州夜曲) <cover> written in 1940. Lyrics by Yaso Saijo (西條八十) Music by Ryoichi Hattori (服部良一)15. Blues of Blue Natchan (Natchan Blue) --- Mastered by James Dunn from the original recording made by Pete Coward - thanks Pete! Artwork by Kurachi & Oli Barrett. Massive thanks to Midori Ogata, without whom this wouldn't have happened.

Originally recorded for Philip Glass's private press label Chatham Square and tracked after hours at John Lennon's home studio, Gibson's 1973 LP "Visitations" is a minimalist masterpiece. Performing with his new group back in September, Gibson re-imagined the piece with modular synthesizers and a digital projection of 16 mm film entitled "One Way" depicting the California desert. Shot by Gibson around the same time as the LP, the film showed seemingly never ending desert landscape of America cascading across the screen - perfectly reflecting the expanse of his fresh take on the unique environmental soundscape of Visitations. --- Jon Gibson / winds Britton Powell / percussion and objects  John Also Bennett / electronics Jeremy Gibson / percussion George Bennett / percussion    ---   Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Friday 15th September by Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Artwork by Oli Barrett. 

Composer, musical theorist, multi-instrumentalist, and one of the founders of Fluxus, Philip Corner's debut show at OTO was funny, sincere and inventive. Alongside his wife Phoebe Neville, the pair mixed relatively unheard compositions with stage interventions and brand new improvisations. At one special point, Corner and Neville - both blind behind Javanese masks - played a borrowed Casio and named the piece 'Understanding'. Gold. Solo, Corner performed one of his more recent pieces, 'Agnesia', a one note near-Elemental number inspired by the painter Agnes Martin. 'An Ideal Amen' was derived from the final chords of the Berlioz Requiem and features Neville adding vocals. Corner and Neville closed by playing touching tribute to their dear friend and esteemed Fluxus collegue Ben Patterson - a piano version of Patterson's 'Paper Piece'. A generous and wonderous pair of people -- more high-jinks and meditations inside. Notes for the show as printed for the audience: "buy something to eat or drink and then sometime during …… make consciously & explicitly a sound with it. Thus adding to the music …” --- Philip Corner / piano, keyboard Phoebe Neville / vocals, keyboard --- --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Monday 19th September by James Dunn. Mixed and Mastered by James Dunn. Photo by Dawid Laskowski. 

Delighted to release Brazilian composer-performer Manuel Lima's set from June this year. Features a live re-working of his brilliant release on Editions Verde (EV006: 36 English to Portuguese Lessons), plus some plus new & gold material. Lima works between language, sound & performance to make absurdist cocktail of confusion & absurd recontextalisation. Following randomly generated instructions dictated to him from a Python script, Lima fuses sound from Youtube videos, analogue synthesiser and cassette recorder, alongside English to Portuguese translation phrases to delightful effect. Synonymy slips, and simple translations evolve & mutate to the sound of Jorge Ben, baroque lute and submerged speech.  --- Manuel Lima / analogue synth, mixer, cassette recorder --- Tracklisting: 1. 30.6.18 - 15:50 --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Paul Skinner on Friday 30th June, 2017. Mixed and mastered by Manuel Lima.  

Live set from new and extremely good London band who create huge strung-out tracks with minimal kit. Their newest self released 12” should be in your top ten. Recorded in front of about forty people, a bass pawl thrums as the guitar ratchets the room up up up up, before a solo escapes that unzips the atmosphere completely.  “...A bass / drums / guitar trio that play somewhere between DNA de-tuning their instruments before practice or Sightings with the PA system and all their effects turned off.” – Yellow Green Red --- --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Simon Holliday. Mixed by James Dunn and Clive Phillips. Mastered by James Dunn.

Duo from regular good guy Sholto Dobie (Mucklemouth) and Alvaro Daguer of Chile’s Glorias Navales (Kye Records). Sholto's on diatonic symphony hurdy gurdy, and Alvaro picks up his Casio SA-1 - a monophonic old school number. After playing together for the first time that morning (Sholto had kindly put Alvaro's band up) the pair decided they play the support slot that night. The two instruments meld surprisingly well, and what follows is a melancholic, minimal and lo-fi lament in the key of Conrad or Cale. "In April, Alvaro and his brother Ivan (from Santiago, Chile) were touring Europe with their group Glorias Navales. They stayed one night at my house in Lewisham, we had fava beans for breakfast and afterwards me and Alvaro ended up playing music for a short time together in my kitchen. To us, it sounded fresh and we decided to perform together that night (the result of which is kindly documented here!). I named it 'Cat's Foot' after a symbol used in eastern european and russian embroidery - the flatness of the instrumentation and repetition of simple forms reminded me of weaves. The shimmering drones notes of the mechanical instruments - one acoustic and one electronic - create an wavy 'moire'-like effect. Although, weaving patterns would suggest structure, this music ambles, without any strict rhythm, agenda or narrative - a cat's foot is also playful!"   Sholto, July 2017 --- Sholto Dobie / hurdy gurdy Alvaro Daguer / keyboard --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Wednesday 12th April 2017 by Shaun Crook. Mixed & mastered by Mr J T Dunn. Artwork by Oli Barrett.  --- 

Totally brilliant set from local legends Pat Thomas & Orphy Robinson (Black Top). Scuzzy electronics, dub bass rhythms and Pat's perfectly timed acoustic interludes on keys fuse with heavy vocal samples to produce a truly diasporic sound. Sounds like a walk down Ridley Road market soundtracked by Thelonius Monk and Jamal Moss.  "When you arrive in England there should be a bus or a trainline you can catch to your hotel. Getting from one side of London to the other should cost you no more than your entire life savings or first born child. If possible, try not to eat the food. If you really must then your safest bet is battered swan, chicken pyramids or tea pie - which is a pie with tea in it. The English brain is divided into two hemispheres - the left which produces spheres of shame and self loathing, and the right, which produces spheres of shame and self loathing." --- Pat Thomas / piano, keyboard, iPad Orphy Robinson / vibes, xylosynth, cajon, iPad, laptop & effects --- samples from: 1/ 'Hugh Masekela in discussion "We're bad imitations of those who oppressed us..." 2/ Willie Williams- Stand Up (Jah Shaka)  3/ Exurb1a England a beginners guide... --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Tuesday, April 17th 2017 by Shaun Crook. Mixed & mastered by James Dunn. Photo by Dawid Laskowski.