While neighbouring city Glasgow prides itself with the self-endowed banner 'People Make Glasgow', the cobbled street capital of Edinburgh lives under the cursed aphorism of 'Inspiring Capital'.  The biggest financial accumulator the city has each year, the Edinburgh Festival, is representative of this apparent 'inspiration': tourists arrive in their droves, Air B'n'b prices sky-rocket, corporate pop-up bars & restaurants lace the streets and the overwhelming majority of local residents get understandably disgruntled.Tucked in a spot in Lochend End Park, 2 of the usually disgruntled locals -  Ali Robertson (fae OTO favourites, Usurper) & Firas Khnaisser - relish in the festival's covid-induced absence over the course of two days, engaging in a delectable jumble of scrape, rattle, pop, twang and whizz. The park is just 0.4 miles from Ali's house and 0.7 miles from Firas's , and it's clear they picked a space for comfy communion. Firas gently plucks shards of melodies and sheets of detuned wonder, while Ali creates tactile moments of intrigue and mischief with his menagerie of objects. Conversations are shared with chip-thieving feathered friends, who hover over the tumbling sound world, clearly intrigued with whatever its ardent creators are serving up. Who needs the Edinburgh festival when you can have a musical picnic with your pals instead?  -- Firas Khnaisser - classical guitar, drum and objects Ali Robertson - amplified objects -- Record live on zoom with almost no edits 0.4 Miles was recorded on 20.07.20, and 0.7 Miles on 24.07.20

Neil Charles has long been one of the key figures in our local community, presenting group projects with the likes of Elaine Mitchener, Alexander Hawkins and more, not to mention an unforgettable 3 days residency in collaboration with Anthony Braxton. Neil's own work on the double bass is rarely brought to the fore, so we're delighted that he's shared with us this new set of recordings made in his studio during lock-down. These 9 tracks are filled with searching passages, bowed refrains and rough and dexterous exploration, embracing the full physical possibilities of his instrument. Neil's style lands somewhere between Gary Peacock, William Parker and Fernando Grillo to our ears, but heralds its own unvarnished poeticism.  - Neil Charles - double bass -- Recorded by Neil Charles Photography by George Nelson Mastering & artwork design by Oliver Barrett

HEAT/WORK is the debut release from ТЕПЛОТА, the London-based duo of Grundik Kasyansky and Tom Wheatley.  Working in mutual orbit for many years, ТЕПЛОТА formed around a comparison between obsessive learning cycles in acoustic improvisation and heuristic relationships with recursive yet pliant machines. They continue to center on this point via friction, specific technologies and (mis)translation. The foundation of HEAT/WORK was recorded in late 2019 onto a mangled metal tape, live in Cafe OTO’s Project Space. It was reconstructed/reimagined by ТЕПЛОТА over the first half of 2020, as they focused on dub, redub & overdub as creative agents to play off against one another. The result is a techno of the swamp - the origin of each sound half-obscured in the sludge. Both тепло[heat] and работа[work] wind their way to 130bpm, but by different means. тепло[heat] finds the duo moving through layered meshes of strings and rhythm-grids, bolstered by intermittent glowing orbs of tone, towards a seemingly piston-powered groove. работа[work] opens to a sparser view, held together with a metamorphic yet relentless tick. Finding its tempo, ТЕПЛОТА engages in a playful interrogation of the four, before releasing it into a postscript flight. -- Grundik Kasyansky - feedback synthesizer Tom Wheatley - double bass --- Mixed byТЕПЛОТАand Gosha Hniu Mastered by Gosha Hniu Artwork byТЕПЛОТАandOliver Barrett

Following the cancellation of their Central European tour as a duo in June 2020, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan and Sholto Dobie, together and apart, unveil a remote sonic partition between their respective abodes in Lebanon and Lithuania. Letting a melange of new and archival material wind around each other, swell back and forth and coalesce into a nebulous mass, they tease the temporality of real time improvisation, opting instead for a near mythical, ghost-like exchange.  The two have never played together in real life, and while each sonic element can sing on its own, nothing falls out of the frame or feels like a loose fractal. Sholto's self-built organ breathes deep sighs and hisses, meeting Shakeeb's undulating electronics and ricocheting rhythmics in a series of harmonic, tumbling gestures. Like Limpe Fuchs' work with Anima, there is space given for elements to clatter and scatter, but also bring towards circling motifs. Organ dirges & patterned drums emerge out of the misty plains, raising themselves skywards. Sholto and Shakeeb's own locality might or might not have contributed to their ventures, but we can't help but feel an imprint embossed in its genetic make-up. Listen closely and one can hear the spectres of regional folk musics, ceremonies, lonely streets, day-to-day banality... Together they let their complex inner & outer worlds meet and dance in a sonic apparition. -- Shakeeb Abu Hamdan: drums, amplified drums and electronics Sholto Dobie: self-built organ -- Drum parts on tracks one and three: from a live recording by Graham Dunning at The Old Hairdresser’s, Glasgow 2019. Tracks two, four and five: recorded by Shakeeb Abu Hamdan at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2018 - 2019.Organ parts on tracks one, three and five: recorded by Simas Okas and Vytautas Franukevičius in Vilnius 2020. Track two: recorded in Empty Brain Resort, Vilnius 2020. Track four: recorded in the studio of Arturas Bumšteinas and Gailė Griciūtė, SODAS 2123, Vilnius 2020. Assembled and mixed by Shakeeb Abu Hamdan in Beirut and Gharifeh, July - August 2020Mastered by John Hannon at NO Cover design by Oliver Barrett

Please be aware that the download contains a rapidly strobing gif version of the cover included in the file. Secluded Bronte are a multi-faceted experimental trio whose work has embraced scrapheap musique concrete, clattering post-punk, spoken word, poetry, improvisation and more. Collected from a mixture of studio and live recording, this suite of perfectly planned mischief slips and slides between the physical and metaphysical, pathos and alien-abstraction, wry humour and obscenity - relishing in awkward dualities and eccentric imbalances. Tuneful ditties emerge before switching frame to an aural car crash. Shared refrains and in-jokes from live shows are unveiled, then jump gear to a Morricone-soundtracked car-chase. Listen close, arrange the junk and unpack the mystery. -- Secluded Bronte are:Adam Bohman - voice, home made string instruments, objects.Jonathan Bohman - voice, piano, electronics, objects, percussion.Richard Thomas - voice, guitars, bass, piano, synthesizers, harmonica, computer, drum machine, percussion, telephone -- withAdrian Northover - soprano saxophone on Neighbourhood.Daniella De Paulis - voice on Ramble North. Recorded at Studio 35, South Wales; Harrison Sound Studios, London; All Round, Chertsey; Trade Gallery, Nottingham; Dartington Hall, Dartington; Rammel Club, Nottingham; SARC/Queen's University, Belfast; Cafe Oto, London; Westwerk, Hamburg. Recording engineers: Shaun Crook, Craig Jackson, Ramon Flak, Kris Jakob, Helge Hasselberg, Felix Kubin, Bruce Asbestos, Hoover Nettlebeck, Richard Thomas. Edited and Produced by Richard Thomas

"I left London at the beginning of March to spend lockdown in Portaferry, Northern Ireland with my family. I ended up staying there for 5 months. I feel incredibly fortunate to have such a place to return to and even more so to have such supportive parents. Many nights were spent talking shite with my dad and further developing our affinity for a certain single pot still whiskey. I spoke to Olan Monk about my contribution to this series—he suggested that I submit a recording of my dad’s advice. My original plan was to distil material I had generated over lockdown, using processing and synthesis techniques I had been working with, alongside recordings of a local barn that I had some open microphones in, which live streamed throughout April. Upon returning to London, I called my dad asked him how he thought I should approach generating a new piece. I recorded the call, combined elements of his instructions (loosely followed and executed) with some of the processing techniques I had been working with during my time in NI—applied to his voice and the material generated over lockdown." - Michael Speers -- “Now it’s time for a Green Spot!!!!! After a few Green Spots it may sound completely different.” —Paul Speers

Re-engaging with a traumatic experience in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona, the narrator of Roy Claire Potter's Entrance Song; last time tells their story through foggy wisps of memory, it's a refracted portal laid out and rendered hybrid in form. An ominous, experimental cross-artform publication brought to life by spoken text passages, recorded sound/music and additional visual PDF document. Rather than directly recounting their experience, the story's narrator focuses instead on Gothic Quarter's architecture, topography, history and people. These details unfurl as weighted shadows of the exterior world that loom over a corrupted memory: a memory that cannot be directly accessed. Accompanying and adding to the text are glimpses of music and field recordings. A piano performance of a piece of sheet music found during a research trip to the Abbey of Santa Maria De Montserrat, field recordings of a violin practice by a fountain and a hidden bass track gift a third eye to the dissociative memory and its surroundings, as well as breathe tonal hues to proceedings. A PDF document includes notes and edits of the text, as well as pictures of the towering churches and spires of the city: overwhelming pieces of architecture with spiked edges and webbed partitions. A fly-trap where words don't tread. A story instigated and evacuated, one last time. -- Entrance Song; last time was written, read and produced by Roy Claire Potter and includes the following field recordings by Lisa Lavery: Courtyard violin practice drippy fountain Rome; Calle de las Cortesías; Train platform bell Sicily. Hidden track Bass Piece was written, performed and recorded by Lisa Lavery. With special thanks to Bridget Hayden for piano instruction and Sam Mcloughlin for recording advice. Proceeds from the sale of this album will go to Rape Crisis UK and Safenet, a domestic abuse charity in Burnley.

  "On those days I had a feeling of everything happening far from the ground. Perhaps because I spent the first two nights completely sleepless: the first assembling a sound installation I had brought over as luggage, and the second one because after we presented the work, we decided to join a party held very high on an industrial building somewhere in Kowloon. It was during the moon festival, but I can’t recall having really seen the moon at all. Only a dark forest around other tall buildings, and the two incredibly pale hands of a dancer that the darkness turned into two white doves. We did this record the next day, and I remember telling Nerve that all my equipment buzzed and fed back very differently, and that it must have been because the electricity in HK had a very different character from the one in Tokyo. I think this music condensates that moment precisely. Two electricities growing in space before discharging." - Aquiles Hadjis, August 2020 -- Aquiles Hadjis - self-made synths & amplified electric stringsNerve - electronics -- Recorded at Twenty Alpha on 16 September 2019

One of our favourite videos from OTO archive is a duo set by Makoto Oshiro and Takahiro Kawaguchi from Multitap Festival in 2014 . Embracing improvisation with a sense of mischief, the duo fill the space with motorised kinetic objects, hand-crafted instruments and a small mountain of inanimate miscellanea, transforming junk yard objects and erecting them into a hissing, buzzing and writhing rickety super structure. Created at home on his own, Makoto has kindly presented this new work for us, rendering both the imaginative tactility and sense of wonder of his practice in hypnotic audio form: "The sounds on this track are made by my hand-crafted instruments that I call "Kachi Kachi." They are quite simple; an electro-magnetic relay, which is an electronic component / physical switch driven by a coil and makes a "click (kachi)" sound, combined with a variable timer circuit that controls the frequency of the clicks.  These small components are commonly displayed in front of many market stalls selling electronics in Tokyo's Akihabara area, and they are usually sold in different variations from large to small. I'm using three different types for different textures, and place them on materials that resonate such as wooden boards and boxes. I think of them as acoustic oscillators, but at the same time, the outcome of the performance has a polyrhythmic, or parallel-rhythmic factor." - Makoto Oshiro -- Makoto Oshiro - various objects & machines -- Ryo Fujishima - artwork photography Oliver Barret - artwork design

These pieces originate from the COVID-19 Fundraiser Auction that Cafe Oto ran in early 2020. Lot 178 offered a unique opportunity to have a composition remixed by Rafael Anton Irisarri, who has previously remixed ambient luminaries such as Biosphere, Loscil and Christina Vantzou. This release presents the outcome of this collaboration. The original track by Adrian Newton (Nemeton) features processed sounds derived from an improvised 'cello performance by Stan Adler, who had a long career making adventurous music with the likes of Chrome Strings, the Jon Lloyd Sextet and Apparitions. Sadly Stan passed away just a few days after these recordings were made in Adrian's studio, so this piece is a small tribute to him. Multi-track stems of the piece were made available to Rafael, enabling him to create his own distinctive soundworld with these same materials. The artists have very kindly offered all proceeds for this release to be passed to Cafe OTO.

The Taipei leg of Xu Shaoyang's two part release on Takuroku (click here for the Beijing leg). Each part documents an ensemble engaging in multi-faceted aural mischief, taking places in the spring of 2019 in the "two Chinese capitals" of Beijing and Taipei. Coincidentally both performances were held "underground" in pedestrian underpasses, therefore designed for the anticipated acoustic properties of such a space and ambient temperatures in the north and southern climates, and further adjustments based on the local collaborators. Each release is a collective communion of ramshackle buzz, rattle, fizz, snap, thump, feedback and bumbling melody, slipping in and out of focus between experimental song form, no-wave/free form rock jams and amateur non-dogmatic improvisation. Xu and his ensemble embrace sound with a giddy and youthful sense of play. Sonic crudeness and tenderness meet hand in hand in an underpass. -- Jyun-Ao Caesar: Electric guitar, voice La-La Reich: Percussions, voice Xu Shaoyang: voice, various Recording and post-production: Kaku Organisation:  Chia-Chun Xu - "Outer Pulsation" Artwork design: Oliver Barrett

The Beijing leg of Xu Shaoyang's two part release on Takuroku (click here for the Taipei leg). Each part documents an ensemble engaging in multi-faceted aural mischief, taking places in the spring of 2019 in the "two Chinese capitals" of Beijing and Taipei. Coincidentally both performances were held "underground" in pedestrian underpasses, therefore designed for the anticipated acoustic properties of such a space and ambient temperatures in the north and southern climates, and further adjustments based on the local collaborators. For this Beijing release, a theme was proposed by Zhu Wenbo "30 songs for rest time" and the performance was driven along that theme. An encore was performed as per the style and directed by the local group "kaoru abe no future" Each release is a collective communion of ramshackle buzz, rattle, fizz, snap, thump, feedback and bumbling melody, slipping in and out of focus between experimental song form, no-wave/free form rock jams and amateur non-dogmatic improvisation. Xu and his ensemble embrace sound with a giddy and youthful sense of play. Sonic crudeness and tenderness meet hand in hand in an underpass. -- Zhu Wenbo: Acoustic guitar, recorder, voiceLiu Lu: Electric guitar, recorder, voiceAke: Violin, recorder, voiceXu Shaoyang: voice, variousRecording: Zhu Wenbo Artwork design: Oliver Barrett

For this rare solo audio release, multi-disciplinary artist Phoebe Collings-James lays out, overlaps and tangles a curious and often contradictory selection of material over a bed of slowly tumbling electronics. Like picking up someone's phone and briefly eavesdropping on their photos, diary notes, recordings & what they've been watching or listening to ‘Can You Move Towards Yourself Without Flinching?' renders an aural tapestry with a bracing question . Like her compelling collaborative work 'Sound as Weapon, Sounds 4 Survival' with SERAFINE1369, Phoebe's placement and arrangement of audio is masterful in its sleight of hand, inviting numerous interpretations, without losing its ability to beguile. -- In a diary entry for 2019 I found this question which I struggle to answer. I creep toward it, in a wish to catch a glimpse of myself - without hesitation. If I do catch it, to find an unbearable balm, a suckling connection of love without dread - what would I hear? I invited friends to answer the question with their own sounds. They did so in myriad ways, all of which were woven into the piece. For my production i work in a collaging style, using sound libraries, adhoc recordings from my daily journeys, alongside live recording with musicians and poets. When sharing the track this week, I encouraged it to be listened to while laying down, comfortable. Ideally on good speakers or headphones. Allowing the scene to unfold into the space like an elaborate, sonic pop-up book. -- Phoebe Collings-James - music, arrangement & cover artwork -- Contributors (& Cameos): Ain Bailey, percussion. Rox Devlin Horton, drums. Sandeep Salter, song. Serefina 1369, lyrics. Zezi Ifore, lyrics. Secrets & Lies. Beau. Lancaut echo. Naeem Dxvis. Mario. Lynette Nylander. Adam Bainbridge.

Li Yilei treats us to an 8 part polymorphic sonic journey. Slipping in and out of genre categorisations, 'Specimen' offers a snapshot of a young artist bursting with ideas, thoughts and feelings: an aural documentation reflecting the various conditions of being.  Secondary reading of 'Specimen':

If there's anything the 2020 lock-down has been missing it's been the Twitter commentary of experimental music's own enfant-terrible WANDA GROUP/LJ/PRESSURE CARCASS. His mischief, caustic call-outs and hilarity embossed in capital might have drifted away, but we're delighted that he's spent some instead documenting 127 beguiling (!!) tracks of musical verite, recorded over August on his phone in Huddersfield. Where do we start with this one.... perhaps the most honest and stripped-back collection of musique concrete there's ever been? Where autuers of the genre mostly mould delicately selected audio fragments to piece together a narrative, LJ instead just turns on his phone whenever he feels appropriate and shares the moment with us untouched. It's sound-art; songs with his daughter MTP; sounds of work and play; sounds of doing nothing; the sound of life uncovered and rendered unvarnished in its all its banality, hilarity, sadness & beauty. In his own words: "IT FEATURES SOUNDS OF HUDDERSFIELD, THE BREWERY AND WHATEVER FUCKING ELSE IS INSIDE THAT LOT. DRUMS, BANJOS, SINKS AND TAPS AND A BATH AND LOADS OF STUPID FUCKING CARS THAT DRIVE TOO FAST UP OUR ROAD. DRUMS AND RADIO FREQUENCIES FROM THE CAR AND OTHER POINTLESS SHIT."

"Listening is and always has been at the core of The Quiet Club’s (Danny McCarthy & Mick O’Shea) work combined with their policy of not discussing the work before or after its performance this has been the hallmark of their practice.  Unable to listen to each other perform during the Covid 19 Lockdown the duo resorted to Telepathic Listening. Uninterested in Zoom, Facetime etc. the duo decided to each perform in their own separate studio’s miles apart at a given time on appointed days for twenty minutes. The concept was that then the two recordings would be combined together unedited. On June 16th 2020 (Bloomsday) the artists inspired by Joyce, performed separately but at the same time and the recordings were then combined together unedited to form Telepathic Lockdown Tape No 7. There are several other works in the series including one which they both played at 4:33pm as a tribute to John Cage. Telepathic Lockdown Tape No 9." - Danny McCarthy & Mick O’Shea -- All music by Danny McCarthy & Mick O’Shea -- Artwork design by Oliver Barrett

Nour Mobarak is a compelling new artist from Los Angeles whose work, as she describes "excavates violence and desire – the compulsions, and glitches in both a person or nation state." We fell in love with what she does thanks to her 2019 album 'Father Fugue', released on Sean McCann's Recital label. In it, the left channel of the audio documents conversations with her father Jean Mobarak - a polyglot who has a 30-second memory and lives in the mountains of Lebanon - while the right channel is composed simply of improvised song. The result conjures a similar effect that of Godard's 'Numéro deux' - whereby documented, composed and improvised elements are projected through two channels, then coagulate to form a multi-faceted, beguiling whole. To understand Nour as a film-maker - someone who acts behind and in-front of the lens - is perhaps easier than that of a musician. When we asked Nour to do a release for Takuroku she kindly responded by offering us compositions used in her multi-disciplinary, multi-channel live performances over the past 2 years, mixed down to stereo as self-contained works. What we hear is just one part of her overall projection, but that of which delves deep; investigating the voices of others, her own voice and vocal material that forms human languages. It's poetry, a Cassavetes set piece, a walk in the park, a voice in abandon, a philosophical meditation on voice, agency and human beings - but of course much more than ideas projected on a flat canvas. Each piece moves and shakes, creating rhythms emanating from the syntax and intonation of language and the voice. Toothtone sounds like rippling streams of water running concurrently, splashing into themselves and overlapping one another. Allophone Movement and its arrangement of voices captures the immediacy of machine-funk sampling techniques, whipping the immediacy of vocal expression into a composition that swings back and forth, like a Ron Hardy edit stripped to its bones. On Phoneme Movement her own vocals take centre stage with spirals, gurgles, purrs and cries that reach ecstatic heights: the voice excavated from its bodily origins. Hopefully we'll be able to present Nour's work in Cafe OTO some time in the not too distant future. -- All music & recording by Nour Mobarak Photo: Performance of “Phoneme Movement II”, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, December 8, 2018. Photo by Marco Kane Braunschweiler, design by Oli Barrett. “Allophone Movement” samples sourced from the UCLA Phonetics Archive. “Toothtone” voices recorded in Pershing Square, Los Angeles, September 2019.This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Editing technical assistance for “Allophone Movement” and “Toothtone” by Sean McCann & Juliette Amoroso

Cara Tolmie's practice centres itself upon the voice, the body and the complex ties between the two. All at once subjective as well as socially determined, she explores voice and body as two codependent entities able to prompt as well as contradict one another.  Here, on her debut release, her vocal ruminations explore a practice of sounding on both the inhale and exhale as well as a self-soothing touch strategy she developed in reaction to symptoms triggered by post-concussion syndrome. In an attempt to displace vocality towards and through parts of the body extraneous to the mouth, Cara lets sounds forge paths and encircle the body's inner topography, soaking her voice through a labyrinth of pumping blood, organs and the touch of skin. The result is a music that offers snapshots of the body tempered by different conditions; resting, moving, listening, pleasure, strain and sensitivity. Cara invokes waves of sound; sometimes calm and meditative, sometimes teetering on discomfort; sometimes falling into an anxious refrain. 'Lit by a Car' offers the space and time to come to terms with these feelings and give them life - letting the breath of voice twist and turn in compellingly peculiar new directions. -- All music & recording by Cara Tolmie -- Artwork design by Oliver Barrett Special thanks to Nisse Bergman, Stine Janvin, Gavin Maycroft, Kimberley O'Neill, Duncan Marquiss, Deirdre J. Humphrys, Frida Sandström, Birk Gjerlufsen and Susanna Jablonski for lending their ears