Wednesday 31 October 2018, 7.30pm
"Eli Keszler is experimental electronic music’s favorite drummer." – Pitchfork
First OTO show in three years for New York based artist, composer and percussionist, Eli Keszler, performing solo before a special duo set with saxophonist John Butcher.
Eli Keszler’s installations, music and visual work have appeared at Lincoln Center, MIT List Center, 67 Ludlow, Victoria & Albert Museum, Sculpture Center, The Kitchen, South London Gallery, Hessel Museum, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Luma-Foundation, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Barbican-St. Lukes, Walker Art Museum, LAX Art, and Greater New York at MoMa PS1. He is a regular collaborator with Oneohtrix Point Never, Laurel Halo, David Grubbs and Rashad Becker amongst others. His work has been featured in Frieze, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Wire Magazine, The Washington Post, Gramophone, Modern Drummer and Modern Painters among others. He has released solo records for Empty Editions, Esp-Disk', PAN and Stadium on Shelter Press in October of 2018. As a composer Keszler has received commissions from the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, ICE Ensemble, Brooklyn String Orchestra and So Percussion. Keszler is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and was a 2016 New York Foundations for the Arts fellow.
Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi tracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Sophie Agnel, Christian Marclay, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, John Russell, Chris Corsano, Steve Beresford, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and Matthew Shipp.
Additionally he values occasional encounters - with large groups ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester (as soloist), and the 20+ piece EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, Isabelle Duthois, David Toop, Mariam Rezaei, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee.
Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission), “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award).
"Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose-to-tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld." WIRE - October 2024. The Primer by Seymour Wright
