Monday 2 February 2026, 7.30pm
Dusty Ballz brings a triple bill featuring OTO regulars Li Yilei and Li Song, and a rare chance to see Yang Yu-Chiao, one-of-a-kind Taiwanese folklorist, sound poet, and free improvisor. Li Yilei will open with a solo set, and Li Song will perform a duo with Anne-F Jacques, our friend and guest visiting from Montreal. Yang Yu-Chiao will present a specially designed performance of his onomatopoeic poetry, which will feature improvised sounds from Li Yilei and Li Song and, hopefully, from everyone else in the room.
Dusty Ballz is a London-based label that releases Chinese underground music on cassette tapes. The term originates in an old Soviet joke, which somehow still speaks to the situation today.
Yang Yu-Chiao is an interdisciplinary narrative and sound artist from Taiwan, as well as a scholar of narratology with a focus on oral literature. With extensive training in piano and voice, he has focused on solo folktale performance for many years and integrates traditional storytelling with extended vocal techniques to develop experimental sound performances. Yang also creates the visual-sound poetry series “䚻 (Ballade),” which combines chalkboard writing with live vocal and sonic performance, and has been invited to stages across multiple countries. In addition, he has long been committed to education in the performing arts and free improvisation, serving as a teaching artist at the National Art Center in Taiwan since 2020.
Yang has long been engaged in writing, focusing on the environmental acoustics and contemporary shifts and applications of oral literature. His essays appear in a wide range of publications, and he has published collections of sound poetry alongside works on music history and oral literature. His series Onomatopoeic Sound Poems and The House of Onomatopoeia will continue to be performed in London, Paris, Seoul, and beyond.
https://www.youtube.com/@vaeinaemoelnen
https://yangyu-chiao.bandcamp.com/
Yang Yu-Chiao & Marcello Busato, Organ Sequences XXX, at Taborkirche, Berlin. Nov 2025
Li Yilei is a Chinese-born, London-based artist and composer whose work moves through tacit listening, perceptual thresholds, and the quiet tensions between presence and disappearance. Guided by a quietly mystic approach to sensing, Li treats sound as a porous field of attunement where intuition, resonance, and the barely perceptible begin to speak. Li’s multi-media practice attends to silence, absence, and non-verbal states as active agents that shape perception as much as the audible.
Unfolding through restrained gestures and spectral drift, Li’s compositions often incorporate instruments, objects, spanning tapes, theremins, ethnic instruments, field recordings, self-built devices, and organic materials. Fragments, objects, and transient sites enter the work as momentary anchors within shifting terrains, creating spaces where attention deepens, thresholds blur, and sound becomes a mode of attunement.
Since 2017, alongside releasing music records, Li’s work has spanned performance, installation, and composition for film, theatre, and dance. Their work has been performed and presented internationally at Barbican Centre (UK), King’s Place (UK), Cafe Oto (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), TATE Britain (UK), V&A East Storehouse (UK) ESEA Contemporary (UK); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (FR), UCCA Contemporary (CN), Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK), Lincoln Center (US); MAO Torino (IT) and more.
https://liyilei.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@li_yi_lei_/videos
Li Yilei at Cafe OTO, 7th May 2023:
Li Song is a London-based musician and computer programmer. He performs improvised music with his computer and composes music using electronics and acoustic instruments. His collaborative project with Zhu Wenbo, No Performance, focuses on compositions using environment sounds, acoustic instruments, computer algorithms, and random sequence. He is also a member of computer network music ensemble and research group, [ _ _ _ ], focusing on algorithmic collaboration. Recent works include Two Snare Drums (Infant Tree 2022), [ _ _ _ ] (with Jia Liu and Shuoxin Tan, SUPERPANG 2022) and Text (with Zhu Wenbo, Zoomin' Night 2021).
https://lisong.bandcamp.com/
https://notimportant.org/
Li Song at Cafe OTO, 12th January 2023
Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in amplification, oblique interactions between materials and construction of various contraptions and idiosyncratic systems. Her particular focus is on low technology, trivial objects and unpolished sounds. Anne-F is involved with Crustacés Tapes, postal sound distribution project, and Precarious Press.
https://anne-fjacques.bandcamp.com/album/lampoule-et-linsecte
Anne-F Jacques live at CJLO 1690AM
