Wednesday 3 September 2025, 7.30pm
Great triple-bill from the Infinite Expanse label, featuring three of the most exciting emerging voices from the European experimental underground: shapeshifting Parisian musician Tom Val's solo project Orion Music Workshop, Finnish minimalist composer Juho Toivonen and London-based enviro-ambient composer Luke Cowan.
Juho Toivonen (b. 1997) is an experimental musician from Pori, Finland, known for his minimalist and home-recorded compositions. His work has been released in multiple countries, including the United States, the UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands. He actively collaborates with artists such as Loren Chasse and Mika Rättö (Circle). Toivonen is also known for running the independent label Akti Records, which has released music by artists like Lau Nau, Jon Collin, Acid Mothers Temple, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and Tetuzi Akiyama. Toivonen’s upcoming album, Lapsikuninkaan Fanfaari, will be released through the Swedish imprint Discreet Music in July 2025.
Luke Cowan is a composer and musician based in London. He has self-released a small collection of enviro-ambient works which are deeply imbued with the geography and atmosphere of the fenland landscape in which he grew up. Various configurations of piano, strings, brass and reeds form the basis of his arrangements, which are woven also with the sounds of non-traditional instruments such as pinecones, spoons, wine glasses and handfuls of grains. This open approach to arrangement, combined with a vérité approach to recording, gives his music an undeniable pastoral quality, as well as a certain vitality. Improvisation is central to Luke's creative process, and in his work he seeks to strike a balance between the preconceived and the spontaneous. His upcoming album, Six Places, will be released by Infinite Expanse in September 2025.
Independent child of the new European hybrid music, Tom Val (also leading his own DIY label Les Disques Omnison) has been hiding behind his Orion Music Workshop for nearly five years now. His music seems to wander through a maze of distorting mirrors, avoiding the trap of categorization: folk? industrial? jazz? Out of time, like watching a dreamachine turn upside down in a megalithic enclosure. Ancient evocations of the flute, detuned synthesizers, pantraditional rituals, fragile improvisations. The filiation with the French experimental musicians of the 70s and 80s (DDAA, Pascal Comelade, Vox Populi come to mind) is never far away, and neither is that with their unclassifiable contemporaries, the stage is set in the bizarre and DIY Hexagon.
