Thursday 5 August 2021, 7.30pm
"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 South West 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.
MICROCORPS is the new project by artist and musician Alex Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Alexander Tucker, Imbogodom) exploring electronics, cello and voice. The debut release XMIT, an eight-track album featuring collaborations with Gazelle Twin, Nik Void, Simon Fisher Turner and Astrud Steehouder, came out in April 2021.
Tucker’s ever-evolving soundworld continues to unfold with this collection of harsh realms centred around processed electronic systems, strings and vocal manipulations. On the new album, MICROCORPS employs altered voices, sound synthesis and atomised beat constructions. In a move away from previous projects XMIT investigates erasing the self, removing obvious traits of the hand and voice, and allowing a focus on the humanoid rather than the human. Instead of recognisable lyrics and coherent imagery, MICROCORPS evolved synthesised voices to generate alternate characters.
He expands, “I was investigating how language brings our world into being and how manipulating the actual grain of the voice could open up momentary shifts in perception.”
Each track is born from a balance between composition and improvisation within set parameters. At each stage audio is heavily processed and then reconfigured. Setting up systems that are non-repeatable, where decisions can be premeditated and intuitive but never the same with each performance, using hardware and instruments outside of the computer to make live stereo takes that have limited room for editing and mixing.
“I’d been looking into combining dream music with machine rhythms, but there are so many great examples out there of both music forms, so I started to cut up the drones and really filter the drum patterns to create a hybrid space.”
The album artwork features manipulated ink drawings by Tucker that originally featured in his recent comic ENTITY REUNION 2. XMIT refers to a time in which information both physical and nonphysical transfers at an alarming rate beyond human comprehension into an age which is at once banal and terrifyingly alien.
Debut performance of this improvisatory trio featuring legendary This Heat and Lifetones guitarist Charles Bullen on prepared strings, Daniel O’Sullivan on drums and Joseph Carvell on upright bass.
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. 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, Frank Byng and Merlin Nova. Bullen has recently been developing a system of improvised music for hammered strings using dulcimer, prepared guitar, pedal steel and electronics.
Daniel O'Sullivan is a syncretic composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer living and working in South West 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, Miracle, Æthenor and This Is Not This Heat.
Joseph Carvell lives in London and plays in Pink Shabab, Malphino and Down Is Up (A Moondog tribute). He has appeared at Cafe Oto before playing bass with Baby Dee, Little Annie and I'm This, I'm That. He has also recorded and played with (mostly via Coventry's finest Tin Angel Records) Peter Zummo, Laetitia Sadier, Marker Starling, Sandro Perri, Daniel O'Sullivan, Batsch, John Southworth, Ryan Driver, Tim Burgess. Doug Tielli, Nicholas Krgovich, Devon Sproule.
Serena Korda is interested in the various ways we think about ourselves in relation to the world. Working across performance, sound, sculpture and film, she considers how communion, tradition and ritual shape our lives. Her interest in ancient cosmology, new age philosophy and theories of quantum physics have drawn her to the imperceptible connections between nature, plants and animals – all bound together by vibration, sound and energy. Giving the rational mind and the imagination equal weight, she strikes a balance between the scientific and spiritual realms by creating multi sensory experiences that make invisible and inaudible forces palpable. Audiences are often encouraged to participate at some point in her process creating collective experiences that focus on the forgotten and overlooked.
Serena was the Norma Lipan/BALTIC Fellow in Ceramic sculpture at Newcastle University 2016- 2018, whilst recent solo shows include, Missing Time at BALTIC Gateshead, Daughter’s of Necessity at The Hepworth Wakefield 2018, The Bell Tree Trust New Art and Bluecoat 2018 and Missing Time a performance for The High Line NYC 2018.
Serena became a mother for the first time in 2019 and has been recording her daughter Yuffie's voice for the last 20 months, she will use these recordings to improvise with her partner and daughters father Chris Egon Searle. A family affair exploring the development of language and its intrinsic links to rhythm, melody and music.
