Tuesday 31 March 2020, 9.30pm
This show has unfortunately been postponed due to travel issues relating to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. We're working to reschedule this show and hope to have an update on that as soon as possible. Please see: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/coronavirus/
Eleven years after playing his first shows in the UK at Cafe OTO, we're delighted to welcome back Fukuoka native, Kumio Kurachi. Kurachi is one of the most original musicians of the Japanese underground. When he’s not making visual art, he writes, sings and performs his unique brand of song – often pairing surreal lyrics and unorthodox guitar tunings with theatrical vocal mannerisms. He has performed actively in Japan since the 80’s and still plays shows in Fukuoka regularly. Past collaborators include Taku Unami and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. He has played with Tenniscoats, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Katsura Yamauchi, Tori Kudo, Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi. His first album released outside of Japan ‘Sound of Turning Earth’ was released on bison in June.
“The music is so melodious that the mixture of the strange wording, guitar and variations of voices thrives all together and it can haunt you without noticing it, just like the small events of everyday life you can’t escape from.” – Midori Ogata
Pete Um is a tape-poet from Cambridge, UK, with sardonic humour, an unreliable MD player and a bunch of weird electronic miniatures. Attempts to define his personality provoke his peers to phrases like...
"...Um is an electro-dadaist pop star peddling audio anxiety and monomania from the digital kitchen sink
...Um is the glint in Delia Derbyshire's eye as she puts Kurt Schwitters and Julian Cope to the razor blade
...Absolute belter of oddball proportions..."
"To whom are your lyrics addressed to?" Felix Kubin once asked Um:
"A lot of my music is made just for its own sake, and I'm kind of talking to myself, but sometimes I'm bitching about a specific other person or how this world of ahistorical squares has done me wrong."
Um's 2019 LP 'As You Were' was one of the best of 2019. Low Company wrote: "Where so much contemporary stuff in this vein sounds hopelessly mannered and contrived and untouched by actual real-world experience of being on the outside of ANYTHING, 'As You Were' sounds fully free and unforced, hopelessly alienated from the thing we call society and GLAD of it, and even at its most demented and disorderly your man sounds like he’s wrenching everything he possibly can out of his primitive keyboard-and-mic set-up cos it’s all he’s bloody well got, not cos he's self-consciously imposing limitations on himself."
Historically Fucked is a four way entanglement made to create short, eruptive songs and then set about obliterating them from the inside, like improvising a barrel to encase themselves in and then proceeding to lick their way out of it.It is about playing and laughing at playing, and it is about not doing either of those things sometimes. Sometimes it is to do with talking, howling or grunting, and sometimes it is to do with hitting and rubbing. It has to do with some of the four people who do it, who each share the same duties, and whose names in sequence are Otto Willberg, David Birchall, Greta Buitkuté and Alecs Pierce and who would like to be remembered by them, so that when they have finished doing this thing, their names carry on doing other things.
