Thursday 17 December 2020, 7pm
Please note that the stream starts at 7:45pm.
Special show and livestream featuring solo and duo sets from ТЕПЛОТА, aka the London-based pairing of Grundik Kasyansky and Tom Wheatley, whose excellent debut, HEAT/WORK, was released on our in-house TakuRoku label earlier this year.
Working in mutual orbit for many years, ТЕПЛОТА formed around a comparison between obsessive learning cycles in acoustic improvisation and heuristic relationships with recursive yet pliant machines. They continue to center on this point via friction, specific technologies and (mis)translation.
We'd love to see you. In order to keep things safe we will be operating with a limited, seated only capacity. Please note that you will only be able to sit with people from your household, and any additional tickets you order should also only be for people in your household. Visitors will be asked to scan a QR code at the door when they arrive, using the NHS COVID-19 app. The bar will be table service only - please wear a mask when arriving and moving around the venue. We will be providing hand sanitiser - and note that we will only be accepting card payments.
теплота is the London-based duo of Grundik Kasyansky & Tom Wheatley. Their work interrogates the haptic, social and liberating relationships with technologies old and new; using feedback synthesizer and computer-acoustic bass, they fuse a spontaneous interplay orthogonally over cyclical structures, with techno as perpetual fulcrum.
Following their debut HEAT/WORK on Cafe OTO’s TakuRoku label and the monthly ЭС research series, Skynned will be released in early 2023 on Accidental Meetings. Half techno, half free jazz, the music is both hypnotic and open-ended, relentless and ephemeral.
Grundik Kasyansky is a Moscow born electronic musician, based in London. He was a founding member of Israeli experimental electronic duo Grundik and Slava. The duo played an important role in the flourishing of the Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem art and music underground in the late 90s-early 00s. He collaborated with many musicians, dancers, painters and filmmakers, and released records through Matchless, Another Timbre, Takuroku, Creative Sources, Cathnor, Earsay, Fact, Auris Media, Stateart, Dromos and Linear Obsessional. He also plays in bands Теплота, Staraya Derevnya and Llull Machines. Before concentrating on electronic music he wrote poetry and it deeply influenced his current practice. Since 2006 he’s been developing a customised setup, which he calls “feedback synthesizer” (a feedback/analog synthesis system).
https://grundik.tumblr.com/
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.
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.
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.
