Saturday 11 July 2026, 7.30pm
I-D.A Projects presents a three-night residency for members of The Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) and Extended Organ:
Paul McCarthy / vocals and guitar
Joe Potts / “Chopped Optigan”
Rick Potts / electronic and customised acoustic instrumentation
Alex Stevens / processing and synths
Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.
McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of West Coast artists. McCarthy began collaborating with the LAFMS in the late 70s, and in 1995 was among the founding members of Extended Organ.
As part of a wider programme of visual and sonic art, on July 9 at the nearby Rio Cinema, Paul McCarthy will introduce a selection of his pioneering video performance works, from the early Black and White Tapes to the UK premiere of a new episode from the ongoing A&E project with Lilith Stangenberg.
Conceived as both a survey and an introduction, this one-night event offers a rare opportunity to encounter the groundbreaking video practice of one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time in a focused cinema setting.
Joe Potts was hailed by The Wire (UK) as ''something new and revolutionary".
Though he holds degrees in Fine Arts he studied electronic composition at the California Institute of the Arts dropping in on classes taught by Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and working in the Buchla equipped electronic music studios. He has composed electro-acoustic music exclusively since 1973 creating Art/Sound installations and performing in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Germany, Belgium and Norway.
A founding member of The Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) and Extended Organ, he is also the “man behind the curtain” in Airway, an art/sound collective that combines walls of sound with subliminal treatments and treats live musicians as electronic signals which are processed and manipulated. For the past 25 years he has been composing for the “Chopped Optigan” a Seventies optical sampling console organ that he has customized and rewired in order to create dense undulating chords of up to 64 notes at a time.
Recordings of his music can be found on LAFMS, Birdman, Cause and Effect, Staalplaat, Organ of Corti, Boudisque, Vinyl On Demand, Important and other labels. Musical collaborators include Director David Blum, Chris and Cosey (Throbbing Gristle), Paul and Damon McCarthy, John Duncan, Mike Kelley, Thurston Moore, David Toop, Yoshihide Otomo, Don Preston and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.
Rick Potts is an improviser and instrument maker who has been on the musical fringe of Los Angeles for several decades. A home-made sound scientist and founding member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) which was started in 1975. Rick produces sounds which are unique, alarming, and strange with custom hinge-neck guitar, musical saw and synthesizer. He has recorded and performed with Dinosaurs with Horns, Solid Eye, Airway, Le Forte Four and others. Solo performances and collaborations with other experimental musicians have taken him around Japan, Europe and the U.S.A.
Alex Stevens is a multidisciplinary artist and musician living in Los Angeles. He has collaborated with a wide variety of contemporary artists, performers and musicians including several projects with The Los Angeles Free Music Society. Stevens also performs in such acts as Extended Organ, The Bum Cheeky Bum Bums, Alexander and or the Xanders, No Hope, Carpet Thrower, P.C.D.C and any other group that will have him.
The Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) is the seminal West Coast experimental noise cult and visual arts collective that formed in the mid 1970s as part of the international DIY movement in which artists developed systems for self-production and distribution of works. It was during this early period when members of the LAFMS had studios in what was at that time the derelict 35 South Raymond building in Pasadena where Paul McCarthy also had his studio. This proximity planted the seed for future collaboration.
Extended Organ was formed in 1995 by Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, Paul McCarthy and Fredrik Nilsen as an experiment in sonic interaction over a droning substate. Mike Kelley was a member of the group between 2000 and his passing in 2012. Alex Stevens has been a member since 2011.
Extended Organ takes its name from the titles of two sixties experimental music LPs, "Extended Voices" and "A Second Wind for Organ". Starting out as a description of Joe Potts’ self-engineered drone instrument, the "Chopped Optigan", it soon becomes apparent that the name describes Paul McCarthy's primal vocal utterances equally well. Just as the name suggests, the group aspires to straddle the profound and the profane.
“XOXO is creepy and wonderful. It may sound like a gross exaggeration, but we are wondering if this CD might not just be the Sgt. Pepper's of noise records.” -Soundohm
“The music moves with velocity and direction revealing surprises at every turn. The resulting sound is ominous, humorous, harmonious, chaotic and at times quietly erotic. This is abstractly powerful music.” -Boomkat
Charles Hayward is an English drummer/singer/composer and was a founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. He also played with early European improv group Mal Dean's Amazing Band and gigged and recorded with Phil Manzanera in Quiet Sun as well as a short stint with Gong. Since the late 80's he has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations including Massacre (with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith), Monkey Puzzle Trio, Albert Newton (with Pat Thomas and John Edwards) and This Is Not This Heat which toured the UK, Europe, USA and Japan between 2016-2019 performing expanded versions of This Heat’s oeuvre to unfaltering critical acclaim. Hayward’s latest group, Abstract Concrete, formed from London players from a diversity of European underground scenes, released its self-titled debut album in November 2023.
Drums, Bass Guitar, FX, FM Radio x 2
Charles Hayward and Nathan Greywater.
Nathan Greywater has been on the London experimental and improv. scene for over a decade now, initially as a sound artist and electronic musician with HARMERGEDDON but focussing on electric bass since after the pandemic.
He currently runs the legendary free improv. open mic night, Skronk as well as playing in Joe Plastic and engineering for acts such as Abstract Concrete, Albert Newton, Jaw Harp and Meat Strap. Classic Form Morf is the latest in a series of collaborations with Charles Hayward where the two improvise along / against live radio broadcasts of classical music and talk stations.
Graduate in Electroacoustic Composition, violinist and viola player Agathe Max aka Agate, besides her collaborations with Charles Hayward's Abstract Concrete, These Towns, KURO, Mésange, Melos Kalpa... works on different projects including music and sound design for documentaries, animated movies, short movies, theatre, contemporary dance and art exhibitions/sound installations, as well as being a session musician for lots of renowned artists.
`My practice of the violin is stimulated by the location of boundaries with its melodic aspect, its heritage through ages, its different influences in terms of styles and modes, as well as it’s capacity to be constantly renewed, in a very contemporary approach. I explore both the acoustic sound of the violin and the power of the electricity going through its body, the resonances it creates, the vibrations of the strings. I’m interested in textures in sounds, overlaid patterns with different sound qualities and dynamics. I experiment with the mixing of the instrument itself and a more electronic way of playing with it, especially with the use of electroacoustic composition. My influences are wide from Classical Music to Minimalism, Spiritual Jazz, Noise, Doom, Improvised music, Traditional Music from anywhere, music for films…. the most important part of my practice in music is the bridges it creates between people, between time, the way music can dive into someone’s inner world and bring all sorts of feelings and revelations whatever it could be, beyond words, the connexion with our past, present and future, the place in the space, the elements, the alchemy between all of that.'
Simon Parris is a London-based DJ, producer and music director working primarily in fashion and film. He hosts an eponymous show on NTS Radio, blending and rearranging cross-genre music and sonic fragments - chiaroscuro moments from then and now. In 2025 he put out his debut music release 'heavy night waits on the dawn' and is working on a follow up for later this year.
https://www.instagram.com/simonmparris
https://soundcloud.com/simonmparris
