Saturday 6 August 2016, 8pm
Following two sold-out performances with This Is Not This Heat earlier this year at Cafe Oto, guitarist Charles Bullen returns with a new improvising trio featuring multi instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan and drummer/percussionist Paul May.
Charles has shared his solo improvisations from earlier this year below. Thanks to Nosleep Nigel for mastering these - enjoy!
Charles Bullen was a member of timeless pre/post-everything trio This Heat. He grew up in Liverpool and after moving to London in the early 70’s he formed the improvising duo Dolphin Logic with Charles Hayward, which later, with the addition of “non-musician” Gareth Williams, became This Heat. After releasing two seminal albums the band split in 1982 and Bullen made an album the following year under the name Lifetones focusing on repetition and a more syncopated dub influenced sound. Earlier this year, after a series of re-issues on Light In The Attic Records, Bullen and Hayward formed This Is Not This Heat, a group assembled to realise and re-imagine the music of This Heat with several musical luminaries from the London experimental music world including Daniel O’Sullivan, Alex Ward, James Sedwards, Alexis Taylor, Frank Byng, John Edwards and Oren Marshall.
"The music of Daniel O'Sullivan plays like a haunted jukebox." - Wire
"A multi-dimensional artist that successfully soundtracks our profoundly confusing 21st century" - Prog
"O'Sullivan's dreampop mantras casually open up portals into other dimensions" - Uncut
Daniel O'Sullivan is a composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer living and working in London and has been contributing a vibrant, chameleonic brew to the music landscape since the late 1990's. He has achieved international acclaim writing, recording and performing both solo and with a myriad of celebrated groups including Grumbling Fur, Ulver, Sunn O))), Guapo, Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses, Laniakea, Miracle, Æthenor and This Is Not This Heat.
DOS collages a wide range of musical disciplines and has collaborated with a number of artists including several live performances and recordings with 'continuous music' pioneer Charlemagne Palestine and large scale surround sound/AV installations with Turner prize-nominee Mark Titchner. As well as playing and recording several albums with Norwegian experimental metal group Ulver and occasionally donning the robe with Sunn O))), O'Sullivan has been at the core of the wildly successful reincarnation of This Heat as a live entity.
Whether solo or in his varied collaborative projects, O’Sullivan’s work is strikingly dense and allusive, alive with enticing sonic diversions, hypnotic syncopation and highly ornamented song-craft. Both lyrically and within the intricately knitted arrangements, traditional forms are reshaped into transcendent pocket symphonies. Both intimate and alien, archetypal and atypical, joyous and melancholic, the aperture of O’Sullivan’s music is wide open and light streams in.
Paul May is a drummer and percussionist from London. Currently playing in psych-trance outfit Woven Entity, May has played in several mythical constellations within the London improvised music realm including Fourth Page (with Carolyn Hume and Pete Marsh), Ladywoodsman (with long-term ally Duke Garwood), Little Wet Horse (also featuring Garwood and Daniel Beban of Orchestra of Spheres) and Alexander Tucker’s Decomposed Orchestra.
