Friday 27 June 2025, 7.30pm
Three artists originally from Wales and Ireland who all share a liminal existence congregate for an evening of experimental music, celebrating the release of Severin Black's 'Country Music'.
Elvin Brandhi is an improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist from Bridgend, Wales, who builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument and voice. Using sound and voice as an expansive language transgressing intrinsic systemics and inherited syntactical etiquettes, her live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where her caustic stream of consciousness cavorts with restless, glitched out heaviness. Her creative momentum comprises a range of collaborations and an endless nomadism.
Her first E.P ‘Shelf life’ was released on ‘C.A.N.V.A.S’ in 2018. She one half of father / daughter noise-improv berserkers Yeah You who released on Alter, Slip, Opal, Psychik Dancehall and Good Food. She also performs in collaborations such as the Avril Spleen project with Joseph Jadame (maltash), Bahk with Daniel Blumberg (MUTE), as well as contributions to Drew Mcdowall’s agalma, just to name a few.
Running the experimental label and event series Archaic Vaults, Severin Black has been forming a worldwide community around marginal music since 2020. Their live practice centres around the sonic spectrums of ethereality and dissonance, primarily using woodwind and feedback improvisation. This has led to collaborations with Pavel Milyakov, Flora Yin-Wong, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Vanessa Bedoret, Chantal Michelle and Owen Pratt, performing in spaces such as the ICA (London), Volksbühne Theater (Berlin), Le Poisson Rouge (New York), Mission To Seafarers (Melbourne) and on a giant pipe organ in a north-east London church.
For this event, there will be a one-off performance of Severin Black's Country Music featuring special guests.
Mel Keane is a composer and visual artist from Dublin. Often using tradition as a point of departure, his multidisciplinary approach to sound utilises acoustic and electro-acoustic tools, physical instrumentation, sampling, and sequencing, and draws from Irish traditional music, musique concrète, laptop emo, and sound system music. He has published projects and performed live under his given name, as Frog of Earth, and as a member of the ensemble Princ€ess.
His current research practice is centred around the pipe band tradition of Ireland, the musical output of which he will present at Café Oto. The set investigates the immediate, microtonal and trance-inducing properties of pipe bands using DIY chanter pipes, software, and electronics.
