10 April 2025 Read
On the 13th of April 2025, Cafe OTO turns 17. To mark the occasion we've selected a release from each of those years from our inhouse digital label, all recorded in the venue.
You can download any five of these straight away by becoming a Cafe OTO Digital Member. Then receive five more credits each month to use on any releases across our ever-expanding digital catalogue.
Cafe OTO's first ever 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... 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." - John Chantler
Reiko Kudo's solo work, with Tori on piano. Short songs capture vivid moments of detail in Reiko's life - her cats, her mother, the dying plant on the windowsill. Melodies so simple and unforced, it's as if they came gently floating through her window in the nightime. Peaceful and utterly gorgeous, like a child's book of psalms.
Wizard noise unit FEN (Far East Network) favour the exploration of texture and timbre over melody and harmony. Whilst rarely forming any traditional rhythmic structure, the trio find temporal freedom in clockwork, vibration and distortion, and give out a humming electrical pulse with impossibly natural warmth. Featuring Otomo Yoshihide, Yan Jan and Ryu Hankil.
In 2011 we were lucky enough to welcome Loren Connors to OTO for a sold out show. With the room suitably hushed, Connors' elongated washes build and then evaporate - leaving behind fragile notes which sit and linger in soltude. Dreamy and ethereal, abstract and atmospheric, it's like reading Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' and waiting for the sun to come up. One to shut your eyes to.
Joe McPhee and Chris Corsano have provided some of the absolute stand-out moments at OTO, and this has to be one of the best of them. Playing together for one night only back in August of 2012, the dream duo kick out white hot energy and offer up heart breaking balladry. Corsano's deft hands and a punk rock attitude create haunting textures and huge shadows that allow McPhee to blow lines that make you bleary eyed.
The back alleys and powerplants that were the setting for 'Ghil' might have been replaced by OTO's candle-lit concrete, but Okkyung Lee's live set is as fierce and compelling as the record dubbed 'the noise album of 2013'. Swap Lasse Mahaug's tape recorder for dynamic microphones and Lee's scrapes and scrawls on the cello crawl right up inside your ear.
Despite having known each other for many years, and having a long-held affinity for each other's work, this recording documents the first time Rie Nakajima and Phill Niblock had collaborated together. Recorded in September 2014, the work includes Niblock’s sound collage piece “Crick” and Nakajima performing in response to Niblock’s early seventies film "T H I R”.
Invited to perform at Cafe OTO by Russell Haswell as part of his three-day residency here in November 2015, Tone gave a sublime performance, presenting two versions of a piece, mixing abrasive and meditative qualities to transcendent effect. The two parts of the performance act as disorientating reflection of the other; overlapping and reprising in places but allowing subtle shifts in tonality and dynamics to shift the emphases and take the listener to whole new places entirely.
After rinsing us clean of 2k15, Jamal Moss returned to OTO on New Year's Day for a totally improvised set with London legends Mark Sanders and Orphy Robinson. By the power of the third eye the trio tune into sub-conscious frequencies to cancel your Netflix subscription, corrupt your hard-drive and re-align your chakras. Weirdly therapeutic.
Running the gamut from full throated euphoria to skittering, stuttering, delicate textures, the interplay between Rasmussen and Jernberg never settles for a moment; swooping and circling and briefly coalescing in long, ragged exhalations which blur the lines between saxophone and voice, before spinning off in different directions again. Clocking in at just over 23 minutes, the pair nevertheless leave nothing on the table, crafting the kind of intuitive, improvised reciprocity that seems as if it must have been honed over several years.
RP Boo, Seymour and Paul share a fascination with the musical history of Chicago – a source of which is of continual nourishment to their ongoing practice. While RP Boo’s footwork takes from the rhythmic structures of Chicago house and the samples, grooves and melodies of 60’s/70’s Chicago soul, disco and R&B, Seymour and Paul share a fascination with these musics, and bring to this lineage a long term engagement with Chicago’s jazz traditions, from Baby Dodds to the AACM. Expect spurred soul cut with condensed, triggered kit drums and sax. Samples from The Fog, Gerald Levert, Tweet and Evanescence (!)
A rare solo set from composer, percussionist and sound artist Susie Ibarra. Using the full breadth of a unique set up, Ibarra takes a meditative journey across her kit, taking time to find familiar rhythms and knots and allowing them to offer up new space and sound. Delicate, dynamic and extremely focused, Ibarra finds expressive harmonics in gongs and brushes alike, with refreshingly melodic, even pastoral, results.
An ethereal blend of image and noise, reimagined folklore and femininity, Viridian Ensemble's performances evoke dissociative states, keening and supernaturalism. Utterances and nonsensical languages entwine collective rhythm, tone, and resonance. Using improvised sound and image (digital and analogue), the group produce a collective sound which reimagines female narratives; lacing ambiguity through feminist tropes & reaching for a punk solidarity in the classical.
Across 31 restless minutes Guionnet cranks the uneasiness with electronics that swell and stutter, whilst Guthrie's drums deftly probe and pierce, making tentative forays into the swirling tones and static before both ramp up the propulsive energy in a dizzying, cathartic barrage from which Guionnet's saxophone erupts. A second, shorter coda set brings back the introspection, letting the pieces fall and settle in a series of stop-start divinations before eventually drawing things to a close, though with no easy resolution.
For this set, recorded at OTO in December 2022, Judith draws from process-based materials to do with humming and shaking, and from the start there is an immediate symbiosis between voice and body, body and instrument, with the sense that the cello is not so much being played as acting as extension of the body itself.
From the first stirrings it's clear that something very special has been captured here, the sextet slowly circling and building with inexorable momentum until the energy fully coalesces and nobody looks back. There's a dexterously symbiotic interplay that would be impressive for a group a couple of decades in; that you can hear this level of chemistry from a first performance together is extraordinary.
Wildly exhilarating solo drum kit performance from Crystabel Efemena Riley. Recorded on the first night of Incapacitants residency at OTO in September, Riley presents an absolutely no-holds-barred set that delves deep into the textural and timbral qualities of the instrument. This is a fully committed performance that, as a listener you cannot help but to be fully within - as disorientating as it is all-encompassing. No matter, let yourself be swept away in its eddies and flows and you will find yourself in a profoundly different place than where you started.
To celebrate our 17th birthday, we're delighted to offer a free recording of the phenomenal first meeting between Theodora Laird (voice), John McGrath (guitar) and Douglas Benford (harmonium). Recorded at OTO as part of Phil Durrant's 'Combinations' event in January 2025, the set may only be 10 minutes long, but contains so many layers that we'll be unravelling it for a long time to come.
