A welcome return to OTO for Liverpool's Ex-Easter Island Head, after their fantastic set here as support for Colin Stetson last year. Tonight they bring their newly augmented line-up - Large Electric Ensemble - that sees the group expand to include twelve prepared electric guitars and drums to create a maximalist wash of amplified strings and droning overtones. Support comes from British avant-pop chamber drone artist and one half of Grumbling Fur, Alexander Tucker.

EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD

Ex-Easter Island Head are a Liverpool based musical collective composing and performing music for solid-body electric guitar, percussion and other instruments. Incorporating multiple prepared electric guitars struck with percussion mallets and treated as an infinitely variable sound-source as well as drawing on an arsenal of cymbals, bells, prayer bowls and acoustic percussion, they devise works that explore group interplay, repetition and melodic invention through purposefully limited means.

"A ticking skitter of jangling harmonics funnelled into a spellbinding crescendo...Large Electric Ensemble is another essential release for both group and label" - The Wire

They have performed their original compositions solo, as a duo, three-piece, quartet and as a large ensemble of up to thirty people. They have shared a stage with the likes of acoustic minimalist James Blackshaw, electronic pioneer Dieter Moebius award winning sound artist Philip Jeck. They have collaborated with down-town New York composer Rhys Chatham and have been commissioned by Mercy Arts/Literature agency and the cultural olympiad.

“It’s got clear roots in the churning pulses, alternate tunings and dense harmonic worlds of Glenn Branca’s symphonies, but in other parts, it’s also got some of Slint’s dynamic, splintered riffs, and in the second movement, slow and steady cymbal washes and an immersion in the subtle, chiming, quiet mass: all the strings being heard at once.” - The New York Times

Following on from Mallet Guitars Three for four guitars and three performers, Large Electric Ensemble sees the group expand to include twelve prepared electric guitars and drums to create a maximalist wash of amplified strings and droning overtones.



Commissioned by the first annual World Event Young Artist festival (WEYA) held in Nottingham, UK September 2012, the piece was developed alongside an ensemble of local musicians from a variety of musical backgrounds. Debuted at the festival and developed over further months, the piece was recorded completely live and with no overdubs across two days in March 2013.

Utilising ‘Third Bridge’ preparations - inserting metal rods beneath the guitar strings - and a range of alternate tunings the ensemble adopt a new vocabulary of playing, from billowing harp-like arpeggios to ‘bowing’ the strings with allen keys to produce glinting upper register drones. Microtonal intervals create shimmering difference tones akin to the struck metallophones of Balinese gamelan, whilst electrified strings creates a dense undertow of singing harmonies. Scored in custom notation and balancing aleatoric passages alongside conductor cues, the players collectively create a distinctive sonic landscape allying languid textural drift with muscular, mechanistic forward motion.

www.exeasterislandhead.com


ALEXANDER TUCKER

British avant-pop chamber drone artist Alexander Tucker released his album, Third Mouth, on Thrill Jockey in 2012 to widespread acclaim, including best of year charts in The Wire and Quietus. His live shows fuse self-harmonizing vocal performances with tone generators and looped instrumentation to create a bewildering feast for the senses that seems to tap the wyrd canon of English psychedelia as much as the melodic reverie of contemporary electronic and drone music.