Sunday 28 May 2023, 2pm
Special matinee show featuring a debut OTO performance from the improvising trio of Eddie Prevost (drums), Silvan Schmid (trumpet) and Tom Wheatley (bass), plus a solo set from N.O. Moore.
With support from
A founder-member of AMM (1965-2022)
“[Eddie Prévost’s] is one of the greatest metallurgists that music has produced. […] sparks delicately arcing through the air, of slow lava ingesting its surroundings, of the shifting grind of tectonic plates across each other, of the rustle and glint of a firebird darting between shadows, and of ore smashing into the surface of the earth; but perhaps this language is overwrought: all that needs to be remarked upon is Prévost's industry, his diligence.”
Nathan Moore — liner note to AMM’s ‘Indúsria’
Matchless Recordings mrcd105.
But beyond this work Prévost has also maintained a relationship with the jazz drum-kit.
“His free drumming flows superbly making perfect use of his formidable technique, but his most startling feature is his stylelessness. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or a Max Roach.” - review of a set with saxophonist Lou Gare, Melody Maker (27.03.1975)
“Prévost, meanwhile, was simply miraculous; it was fascinating to watch him and to compare his approach with that of a Kern or a Nilssen-Love. I can only say that he was possessed of an uncanny, burning intentness that navigated the ensemble through passages of stark, sculpted beauty, grave concentration and full-on, bristling energy.”
Blue Tomato, Vienna 2012. In concert with Marilyn Crispell and Harrison Smith. Richard Rees-Jones
“An excellent release from one of the finest percussionists around, jazz or otherwise.” review of Prévost’s solo CD ‘Collider’
Matchless Recordings mrcd106 – Brian Olewnic, Squidsear (2022).
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
Silvan Schmid is a trumpet player based between Zürich and Maastricht. He plays live and does recordings with people and projects such as Solo, Gamut Kollektiv,Miao Silvan Makossiri, Alex Riva, Mraolia, Félicie Bazelaire, ТЕПЛОТА x RIVASCHMID, Lotus Eddé Khouri, TZUSSS, Fabian Saul.
Tom Wheatley (b. 1991, London) is a composer and improviser, operating in the fractious and fertile interfaces of acoustic and digital sound, extending instruments via technique and technology. Beginning with the double bass, he also works with synthetic sound and processing, and plays a wide selection of instruments in collaboration with a broad range of performers and instrumentalists, from long-standing duos to one-off improvisations.
His score as composer for Giulio Bertelli’s striking debut feature film Agon (2025) was released in 2026 on PAN records. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize (International Federation of Film Critics), the film is a triptych of three female athletes preparing for a fictional Olympic games. Straddling fiction and documentary, the score reflects the film’s hyper-focus on the gesture of sports performances, each protagonist mirrored by an instrumentalist: fencing with cellist Ute Kanngiesser; rifle shooting with saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet, and judo with percussionist Seijiro Murayama, with his bandmate Grundik Kasyansky on electronics and Harry Gorskí-Brown on bagpipes completing the chamber group.
Prior to Agon he worked on scores with award-winning composer Daniel Blumberg, including the Oscar and BAFTA winning score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), as well as director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come (2020), and The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), for which he played viola da gamba and other early European string instruments.
His active projects as a musician centre around the duo Tennota with Grundik Kasyansky, formed in 2019. Once described as ‘half techno, half free jazz’, the project is about the generative friction between physical and digital arenas. They take primary materials – gut strings, sine waves, tree sap, feedback – and engage them with contemporary technologies, towards a taut and nebulous rhythmic language. They have released albums on Accidental Meetings, Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku, and most recently a collaboration with artist and musician Rosa Anschútz on Meakusma.
Other projects include an ongoing collaboration with Italian fashion project GR10K. Among their collaborations was Stringent Manners, a performance at Auditorium San Fedele for the launch of GR10K SS25: Nine Pounds of Dead Landscape. Wheatley worked on musical direction, performance, and co-composition with Andrea Slaviero, choreographing students from the Milan Conservatory as both models and instrumentalists for this ambitious six hour piece, which harnessed the students boredom and frustration to shape the performance.
Growing up in a multi-generational family of musicians, he is a seasoned instrumentalist. Over the years, he has collaborated and performed with stalwarts and luminaries of contemporary music, including Eddie Prévost, Billy Steiger, Ute Kanngiesser, Adam Christensen, Jim White, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker, Ilan Volkov, Steve Noble, Sachiko M, and John Edwards, with releases on OtoRoku, Matchless and Earshots.
Pre-prepared music (prepared air) with live guitar improvisation.
Following my ‘The Tscherkassky Tape’, performed at Café OTO in 2023, this piece is inspired by the films of Jane Arden, particularly The Otherside of Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979). My aim is not to create a point-to-point resemblance or musical equivalent, but to simply produce an affect analogous to the films in a different medium. Through this, to further the development of my own musical vocabulary and responsiveness, in a personal drive towards the universal.
Pertinent issues: capitalist realism – capitalism & schizophrenia. What is mental ‘health’ under conditions of capitalism/neoliberalism/patriarchy/Anthropocene? No answers, just problems.
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Why use prepared air? Admittedly, I don’t read music notation. Obviously, notation is a memorialisation by the composer and a communication to the performer: therefore, a question of memory and practice. Prepared air allows for a more imprecise memory and better miscommunications. Consequently, a different type of performance/practice has to be developed in the moment (i.e. improvised). Prepared air encourages a disclosed composition, or decomposition (rather than an enclosed improvisation), to take place. The interesting possibility is that this gives access to a point where entropy and negentropy (what breaks down and what (self) organises) become indistinct.
N.O. Moore can be heard on recent releases Traktor (Shrike Records, with Iris Ederer and Eddie Prévost) and Under the Sun (Matchless Recordings, with Rachel Musson, Olie Brice, and Eddie Prévost). Upcoming is Chord (Shrike Records) and A Company of Others (Matchless Recordings).
