Wednesday 14 October 2015, 6.30pm, OTO Project Space
Improvising double-bill in the Project Space featuring the guitar duo of Nicola L. Hein and Ross Lambert, and a trio set from Emilio Gordoa (vibraphone and objects), Tom Wheatley (double bass) and Daichi Yoshikawa (electronics).
Mexican composer and vibraphonist based in Berlin since 2012.
He’s involved in numerous projects including his work as a soloist and in collaboration with theater and dance. Emilio is specially focus in sound art, experimental music, noise, free jazz, improvisation and contemporary music.
He is redefining the vibraphone as a source, treating it with preparations and extended techniques, and is a busy composer as well, writing graphic scores for a variety of ensembles, large and small, for theater, documentary films and audiovisual.
Nicola L. Hein is a guitarist, composer and soundartist.
As a guitarist he is mainly concerned about the search for new sounds on his instrument. He plays electric and acoustic guitar with or without preperations and tries to find new ways of playing the guitar within the context of free improvised music and Jazz.
As a composer he tries to use different techniques of writing music and therefore musical thoughts (standard notation, graphic notation, verbal instructions etc.) to ultimately inspire improvisation to happen in another way than it would without a composition.
As soundartist he is mainly involved with sound installations which involve the recipient as a part of the actual work, because the work has to be played by the recipient. The works encourage the recipient to make a special aesthetic experience with different sounds. The aesthetic of these sounds is inspired by the aesthetics of free improvised music.
Northern Irish (and London-based) guitarist and ‘magnetic and vibrating sources’ player Ross Lambert, has in his own words, the following fundamental and simultaneous approaches to live performance: to play as though it was both the first time and also the last; and to able to differentiate between what is good and worth conserving and what is not. Ross has been involved in, initiated and been a connector between a very wide variety of improvisatory music since his first exposure and (immediate) commitment to it, in Sheffield via Derek Bailey during the mid-1980s. Although under-recorded (he claims ‘by choice’), Ross has worked with a huge number of musicians from around the world, including Tetuzi Akiyama, Ami Yoshida, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Paul Hession, Rhodri Davies, John Butcher and Evan Parker, as well as his close friends Eddie Prevost, Seymour Wright, and Sebastian Lexer.
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.
“The relationship between acoustic instruments and technology is historically awkward - everything is compromise or imitation. I want to turn that upside down. Instead of reproduction or expansion of a notional acoustic ideal, I’m interested in what happens when the parts are viewed as equals, and serve each other's potential.”
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. He has also worked with fashion designer Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy label, and in Cast-On with Ilana Blumberg, a duo that collaborated with a revolving cast of practitioners across music, fashion, set design, photography and theatre to build critical environments. Their last project was Dresser Music, a film for Cafe Oto. Set at the margins of a photoshoot for Blumberg’s 2021 knitwear collection, it investigates both the unseen layers of performance that make a photograph, and the unheard undercarriage of background music, a piano rambling through incomplete references.
He also works with Sarah Hartnett (Ghostlore of Britain), as Vesta Payne. They released mlybdmncy on Doyenne Books in 2023, a project that manifested as an EP and a limited run of metal objects. Molten pewter was cast directly into water, and the process was meticulously recorded. The sounds were then gathered and “recast” into the accompanying EP.
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.
Daichi Yoshikawa is a Japanese sound artist based in London and Berlin. A former participant of workshops organised by AMM co-founder Eddie Prevost and sound artist David Toop, Yoshikawa's distinct sound comes from feedback systems generated between homemade assemblages of speakers, contact microphones, and various found objects. Developing his ability as an improviser through years of attendance at Prevost’s weekly workshops, Yoshikawa is singularly unique in his facility to wield electronic feedback as an instrument capable of both dialogic potential and genuine musicality in a group setting. Combining the collaborative sensitivity of a player like Toshimaru Nakamura with a techno and noise-derived penchant for enamel-peeling feedback tones and lurching metallic rhythms, Yoshikawa’s electroacoustic practice creates brutalist landscapes of sound from the space between noise and silence. Yoshikawa is also part of the ensemble lll人, a London-based group with Seymour Wright and Paul Abbott, and has collaborated with Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal, Samo Kutin, Lee Patterson and Rie Nakajima.
