Saturday 1 June 2024, 7.30pm
Label and Resonance FM show Dig That Treasure! returns to OTO for two nights as part of this year's festival. Tonight's double-bill features Fievel Is Glauque - aka New York City based keyboardist Zach Phillips and Brussels based singer Ma Clément, plus one of the most exciting groups currently performing in the UK, the Tara Clerkin Trio.
Building something of a cult following over the last few years, Fievel Is Glauque is a “series of live bands” led by New York City based keyboardist Zach Phillips and Brussels based singer Ma Clément. The pair craft intricate, harmonically-complex lo-fi jazz-fusion miniatures that are decorated by a rotating cast of musicians spread out across the globe. This is Fievel Is Glauque’s debut London show and simply cannot be missed.
TARA CLERKIN TRIO formed in Bristol (where none of them are from yet all of whom are deeply engrained) in 2020. Despite the singular authority implied by its name, they consist of the titular Tara Clerkin, her partner Sunny Joe Paradisos, and Sunny’s brother, Patrick Benjamin. With two extraordinary mini-albums – In Spring (2021) and On The Turning Ground (2023) – making a splash on London’s formidable World of Echo label in wake of their self-titled 2020 debut, this upcoming Somewhere Good LP (out now) is, in many ways, the band’s most realised work. In running their usual gauntlet of idiosyncratic (*an overused adjective for which here there is regrettably no sufficient alternative) approaches, Clerkin & Co. color in and outside of compositional lines over the course of 40+ celebratory minutes - never wallowing, despite inherently somber subject matters of self-defeat, disease, displacement, restlessness, gentrification - allowing their arrangements and improvisations ample space and time to situate, stretch out, breathe, cross-pollinate, and ultimately take deeper hold on the listener’s imagination – all while somehow sounding more like themselves than ever before. There are elements of avant-pop, modern classical, kraut-folk, audio verité, and nods to trip hop, but Tara Clerkin Trio have fun transcending easy categorisation.