After a memorable first concert with Lee Gamble, Roger Turner and Seymour Wright, Muddy Ditch returns to Oto with more irregular and unprecedented improvisations. This evening brings together Sebastian Lexer, Steve Noble, John Coxon and Ute Kanngiesser for a series of duos, promising an intriguing mix of delicacy and violence.

John Coxon, perhaps uniquely for an improvising guitarist, is inspired as much by the plangencies of Reggie Young as by the astringencies of Derek Bailey. As irascible and as spiky as it gets, his playing is always haunted by the ghosts of popular song and fragments of the blues.

Ute Kanngiesser's playing is marked by her intense exploration of the timbral possibilities of the cello and her immaculate sense of placement, and a strong, if at times oblique, rhythmic sensibility that has vivified many musical situations, from AMM to the LIO.

Sebastian Lexer rewires the ultimate nineteenth-century drawing room mechanism with twenty-first-century technology to create a music that hovers inbetween times, exploiting the tension between the automatic and the intentional, making any firm sense of space thrillingly uncertain.

Steve Noble is often typecast these days as a loud and aggressive free jazz drummer but, while undoubtedly a master at cranking up volume and energy, he relishes awkward and unlikely situations and handles them with poise and elegance, as recent duos with Ryu Hankil and Paul Abbott have made perfectly clear.

Sebastian Lexer website
Ute Kanngiesser website



Muddy Ditch website