'Ample Profanity' is composer Laurie Tompkins and cellist Oliver Coates' collaborative debut: coagulated gristle surfacing from a Beal, Brooklyn-brown, Ray V, Bangs, GAN, Rugs and Works acid bath.
The EP collects 5 pieces composed by Laurie and then co-edited and performed with Olly. The former plays keys, tape player, and samples, the latter cello with effects. Both sing.
Here is grazed, contorted classicism, here post-binge hallucinations, here gunky funk.
"I met [Laurie] when I was 16, at school. I don’t know where along the way he’s found that he can make a piece out of flower pots and shouting, and it can be genuinely moving. With Laurie, there’s this thing with Netflix culture and tropes in the promotion of electronic dance music. Like, “you must all listen to footwork now” because they market that at you. Ample Profanity is all about awkward juxtapositions: bits of music from House Of Cards coupled with RP Boo. That’s the headspace he’s in and he’s trying to articulate these as cello rhythms. I find that really satisfying. It looks really spidery and architectural on the page. You’ve got to repeat it 17 times and then shout the next thing, so it’s absurdly difficult to play. To play it physically, the energy of playing it, that’s why I do it." - Oliver Coates, The Wire, September 2018.
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Laurie Tompkins / vocals, keys, tape player, samples
Oliver Coates / vocals, cello, effects
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Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Laurie Tompkins and Suze Whaites.
Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC
Tracklisting:
1. Sniffin' Samgh - 6:26
2. Peejayargh - 2:31
3. RP Beal - 3:28
4. Lime Rugis - 2:50
5. Charterhouse, Vinci - 7:32
Oliver Coates is a cellist, composer and producer based in London. He has performed solo shows in China, Russia, Brazil, Egypt and Australia, and made his New York debut at Le Poisson Rouge. He was the winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award 2011 and is an Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre. Two major commissions premiered in 2017: HELIOTONES, for girls' choir, flutes, cello and electronics, for Borealis Festival, and Shorelines, for string quartet and electronics, for Cryptic at Operadagen Rotterdam.
In 2016 Coates released a solo record, Upstepping, on PRAH, and a collaborative record, Remain Calm, with Mica Levi on Slip. He works closely with Levi, London Contemporary Orchestra, Elysia Crampton, Jonny Greenwood and the visual artist Lawrence Lek, for whom he has scored the award-winning video pieces Unreal Estate and QE3. He has conceived and programmed the Southbank Centre’s long-running Harmonic Series and its first DEEP∞MINIMALISM festival in 2016, which featured Pauline Oliveros’ last public Tuning Meditation.
Laurie Tompkins (b.1990) is a UK composer, performer and co-founder and co-director of the Slip label.
From scores for samples, instruments and voices he creates a grabbable music that dreams and confounds. Bodies, things, words, and sounds strain under duress, looping their way through scenes of grubby presence, not-quite riff, mouldy echo, and swollen bombast.
His spring 2022 discs for Entr’acte, 33-33 and Hyperdelia are a thick, unruly soup of keys and computer with pianist Eliza McCarthy; a desperate suite of consoling, tanked songs with takes from Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Teresa Winter, Gwilly Edmondez and videos by Joel Wycherley; and some dilated rotten soul with Eliza and Ashley Paul.
Laurie helms Slip, which has released music by Yeah You, Mica Levi, Julia Reidy, Bass Clef, Object Collection, ilgendo, Chaines & Competition, Old releases of his own include ‘Ample Profanity' (2018), with cellist Oliver Coates; 'Heat, War, Sweat, Law' (2016); and 'Exorcise' (2021), as Yes Indeed with bassist Otto Willberg, justly hailed as “proper, mad scones” (Boomkat).
Performances: Café Oto, Aldeburgh Music, Spike Island, Harp Art Lab (Harplinge) and National Sawdust (New York). Commissions: House of Bedlam, Daylight Editions, LSO Soundhub Scheme, ddmmyy and 840 series. Radio: specials for NTS and Resonance FM and a session with Adam Bohman recorded at Maida Vale studios, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
