Tuesday 26 August 2025, 7.30pm
Jackie-O Motherfucker was founded by Tom Greenwood in the mid 90’s, the group has had more than forty members over the years drawn from the U.S. experimental scene, notably Natalie Mering, who now records under Weyes Blood, briefly on bass. The current line up is a 4 piece lead by Tom Greenwood.
Jackie-O Motherfucker's music draws from a variety of subgenres including various folk musics of the world, drone, free jazz, psychedelia, and noise rock, and is heavily improvisational in its nature.
The group has had recordings released by many different labels including Fire Records, Ecstatic Peace, Feeding Tube Records, ATP Recordings and their own U-Sound Archive and has been on several international tours including several performances at All Tomorrow's Parties Festivals by way of Sonic Youth. The band played the 2002 and 2004 festivals curated by Sonic Youth and the 2007 festival curated by Thurston Moore.
Born in 1966, a child of the high Dakota plains, Tom Greenwood showed intermedia tendencies early on. While in high school he divided his time between visual arts (winning a scholarship from Kodak for his photographic work) and sonic arts (playing “Purple Haze” at biker rallies). He bounced around art schools of the frozen north, before ending up on the streets of Minneapolis, where he took his degree in Media Arts.
After spending the end of the ‘80s immersed in the aesthetic milieu of rural scum rock, creating the splendid Project A-Bomb record label in the process, Greenwood drifted into the open bowels of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Tom found work as an art director and participated in the Maynard Monroe-curated group show, URBAN ANALYSIS (with Nan Goldin, Rene Ricard, Lady Pink, a.o.)
Greenwood ended up in Portland, Oregon in the mid ‘90s, where he headbirthed the seriously disturbed musical project that continues to this day – Jackie O Motherfucker. An extraordinarily mutable feast, Jackie O’s music encompasses everything from industrial ho-hum to acid-volk readymades, and has included hundreds of participants over its lifespan. Under the influence of mysterious Northwest bohemians (often associated to some degree with the Holy Modal Rounders), Greenwood studied how to spin garbage into garlands. This technique proved invaluable when he drifted back to NYC, where he connected with Thurston Moore, who encouraged his conceptual moves.
In the 21st Century, Greenwood has created dual vistas of strangeness, all of them whistling like the rings around the o-mind. The musical projects – Jackie O, the U SOUND series, various shows and galleries – have blended into the visual ones, and splattered in a million unexpected directions.
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
