Saturday 22 November 2025, 7.30pm
A stacked line-up across three days to celebrate the 60th year of the great, Swedish, saxplayer, improviser and composer, Mats Gustafsson!
Whether alongside his groups The Thing, FIRE!, and The End, or across numerous live collaborations with a veritable who's-who of new music, Gustafsson has been responsible for some absolute knock-out moments at Cafe OTO since the very beginning. These three days attempt to bring together several of these strands, featuring appearances from Thurston Moore (with whom Mats released one of the very first LPs on our in-house Otoroku label), Sofia Jernberg, Mariam Rezaei, Pat Thomas, Joachim Nordwall, Roger Turner, Mark Wastell, Liudas Mockunas, Kit Downes and more.
Join us for a very special residency marking 60 times around the sun for one of the most restlessly creative artists on the scene,
"Since the late 1980s, Mats Gustafsson has been active in the worlds of free jazz, noise and rock and everything in between, above, below, around and beyond. Citing Little Richard's horn sections as a key early influence, Gustaffson's music has grown to a wild sprawling landscape held together by an unfailing dedication to intensity and exploration." – Furious
PROGRAMME – Saturday 22 November:
- Liudas Mockunas / Roger Turner / Joachim Nordwall
- Pat Thomas / Liudas Mockunas / Joachim Nordwall
- “The Poetry of Jayne Cortez” with Delphine Joussein, Mariam Rezaei & Mats Gustafsson
- BLZB (Roger Turner / Pat Thomas / Mats Gustafsson)
Hailing from Umeå in Northern Sweden, Gustafsson is a saxophonist/composer/improviser working across noise, electronics, contemporary rock and free jazz as well as contemporary dance, theater and art projects. He has performed both as a solo artist and toured internationally with Peter Brötzmann, Sonic Youth, Merzbow, Jim O´Rourke, Barry Guy, Otomo Yoshihide, Yoshimi, Ken Vandermark and in working groups The Thing, Sonore, FIRE!, Gush, Boots Brown, Swedish Azz and Nash Kontroll. He also participates in the large ensembles Barry Guy New Orchestra, Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet and the NU – ensemble.
Born 1946, ROGER TURNER grew up amongst the Canterbury musical life of the 1960s with a strong foundation in jazz. Since 1974 his work has been focused on exploring a more personal percussion language through the processes of improvisation. Solo performances, connections with experimental rock music & open-form song, extensive collaborations with dance, film and visual art, and involvements in numerous jazz-based ensembles and workshop residencies have all formed part of that development.
Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument,” Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer. Working at the nexus of experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club musics and hip-hop, Rezaei uses a digital vinyl system, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time. Her work has been described as “genuinely ground-breaking” (London Jazz News 2022) and “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian 2022). Praised by The Wire, Uncut and Bandcamp Daily, her latest release FRACTURED (Heat Crimes) is one of The Quietus’s cassette releases of 2024.In November 2022, she received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation #AwardsForArtists in recognition of her contribution to music composition. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE and TUSK NORTH, and is writing a book on turntablism for Repeater.
In addition to her solo work, Rezaei’s projects include a Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez (making their US premiere at Big Ears 2025), supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (with saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, trumpeter/electronics Gabriele Mitelli and drummer Lukas Koenig), and orchestral compositions with Matthew Shlomowitz (6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra). She recently performed Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music with guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe. Other collaborations include duos with Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Valentina Magaletti, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Lukas Koenig, Mette Rasmussen, Gabriele Mitelli, Okkyung Lee and Ali Robertson, Black Top with Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, Cleveland Watkiss and Leon Foster Thomas, and a quartet with DJ Sniff, Rex Chen and DJ SlowPitchSound at Taipei Biennial 2023.
Joachim Nordwall (b. 1975) is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a long background in the Swedish experimental music scene, starting out with recordings with the psych-drone duo Alvars Orkester as a teenager in 1988. His early interest in psychic tension created by sound is now as ever present in his music. His ”Soul Music” albums for Entr’acte shows his deep interest in circular rhythms, analogue synth loops and mind expanding experiments. Nordwall has also released his music on labels like Ash International and Hospital Productions. From 1999-2005 he was sweating with the avant punk rock trio Kid Commando and when that stopped he created the ritual drone rock group The Skull Defekts. Nordwall also runs iDEAL Recordings since 1998 and has been collaborating with artists like Aaron Dilloway, Mika Vainio, Mats Gustafsson, Leif Elggren, Gabi Losoncy, Mark Wastell and Christine Abdelour, and he is a busy organizer of festivals and concert nights in Sweden and abroad.
Liudas Mockūnas is a multi-reeds player and composer, whose name stands for masterly performance and intriguing compositions. His 'natural' idiom is an explosive mixture of free jazz, lyricism and expressionism combined with highly unconventional performance techniques. His in-depth exploration of the properties of sound lead to an innovative and personal approach to wind playing techniques. This allowed him to escape from stylistic conventions and form an entirely original style, distinguished for multiphonics, expressive discharges of sound, overbends and unusual sound effects. Trained as a jazz and classical musician, Liudas Mockūnas has a deep understanding and practical knowledge of both fields, the boundaries of which he traverses back and forth in his own compositions solo and in his numerous international collaborations. During the years he‘s been collaborating with leading European, Japanese and American artists such as Marc Ducret, Agusti Fernandez, Mats Gustafsson Barry Guy, Andrew Hill, Otomo Yoshihide,, Mikko Innanen and others.
Mockūnas is one of the founders of Lithuanian Jazz Federation, highly acclaimed record label „NoBusiness Records“ and improvised music program at Lithuanian Music Academy. For several years has been been curating a concert series and independent record label in Vilnius dedicated to improvised music „Improdimensija“ and “Improdimensija orchestra”.
Besides improvised and avantgarde music Mockunas performs new academic music as a soloist and chamber ensemble musician.
https://www.mic.lt/en/database/jazz/composers-artists/mockunas/
Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill.
"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." - The Jazzmann
