Saturday 3 January 2026, 7.30pm
Damon & Naomi (of Galaxie 500) return to Cafe OTO in the New Year for a three-day residency of music, friends, surprise guests, and a celebration for the UK publication of Damon’s book Why Sound Matters (Yale University Press). Expect unannounced musical collaborations, non-musical collaborations, and Damon insisting on playing the drums at least once.
Damon & Naomi began playing music together as the rhythm section, co-songwriters, and sometime singers in Galaxie 500. The band’s three albums on Rough Trade (Today,On Fire, and This Is Our Music) were genre-defying landmarks of atmospheric post-punk, inspiring countless other artists who followed in their wake. Since the early 1990s, Damon & Naomi have worked as a duo exploring folk music, psychedelia, and collaborations with other like-minded musicians on a series of albums for Shimmy Disc, Sub Pop, Drag City, and their own label 20/20/20. In addition to their work as musicians, Damon & Naomi are the publishers of Exact Change, a small press dedicated to avant-garde literature and artists’ writings. Damon is also a writer, author of several books and essayist for publications such as Pitchfork, Artforum, and his own newsletter Dada Drummer Almanach. Naomi is also a visual artist, photographer and graphic designer, as well as director of music videos (Sharon van Etten, Steve Gunn, Lee Ranaldo, Meg Baird, Waxahatchee, Julia Holter) and the essay film Never Be A Punching Bag for Nobody.
Few musicians can claim to have made such a mark on the British music scene in the last thirty years as Laetitia Sadier. As a member of Stereolab, she’s released ten full albums, gaining along the way a large dedicated fanbase and acclaim that rightfully singles out Stereolab as "one of the most influential alternative bands of the '90s”. With influences as wide as Krautrock, bossa-nova and French pop, the band sculpted a truly original and distinctive sound, one that journalist Simon Reynolds describes as "always the same, always different". Solo, Sadier’s work is both a continuity of her time in Stereolab, and unafraid of change. Laetitia Sadier has collaborated with the likes of Mouse On Mars, Atlas Sound, The High Llamas, Blur and Common. She is one of the most innovative and influential musicians of our time.
Stewart Lee (“the world’s greatest living stand-up comedian” The Times), is in danger of being left behind. He’s approaching sixty with debilitating health conditions, his TV profile has diminished, and his once BAFTA award-winning style of stand-up seems obsolete in the face of a wave of callous Netflix-endorsed comedy of anger, monetising the denigration of minorities for millions of dollars. But he can still pack ’em in at CAFÉ OTO!
