Thursday 21 June 2018, 7.30pm
"Hurley remains one of the elusive masters of American folk" – Billboard
A pleasure to welcome back to OTO the legendary singer, songwriter, artist, folk hobo Michael Hurley for his first shows here in half a decade. Hurley is a true American iconoclast and one of that country's songwriting greats. These are two nights not to be missed.
“Michael Hurley's music is often coined as "outsider folk." His hobo lifestyle indeed could be looked upon as eccentric, but it might be better to regard him as one of the last insiders keeping alive the traditions of the folk troubadour.” – Perfect Sound Forever
“There aren’t very many American originals left. Michael Hurley is one of them.” – Boston Globe
Michael Hurley grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. As a teenager in the 1950s he fell in love hearing the music of Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley blast from the radio, and was enthralled by the records of Blind Willie McTell, Hank Williams and Uncle Dave Macon that he sought for his own. This love for music, true and unvarnished, supplied him with a finely tuned musical compass he has not wavered from for 50 years and counting. Hurley's music sounds old, like it has always existed, and simultaneously singular, like something you've never heard anyone else play quite like that before. This timeless quality ensures that Hurley's audience constantly renews itself. From the the beatniks in the NYC Village where he started in the early 60s, to the hippies in Vermont, to the Americana fans, indie rockers and freak folkers from the last two decades, Michael's music never fails to find fresh new ears. Pressed for a description, Hurley has called it "jazz-hyped blues and country and western music".
Hurley's early records were released on Folkways, Warner Brothers/Raccoon, and Rounder, while in recent years stalwart independent labels like Gnomonsong and Mississippi have been carrying the torch. The great news is that there is no stopping Michael Hurley. An album with brand new recordings, Bad Mr. Mike, was released on the Mississippi label in 2016, plus another LP with archival 70s material came out on Feeding Tube Records in 2017. Besides being a truly unique musician, Hurley is also a cartoonist and watercolor artist of note — the instantly recognizable results of which grace his album covers.
Hurley resides on the US west coast near Portland, Oregon. His appearances on the British isles have been scarce the last decade. Old and new fans should not pass up the rare opportunity to catch Michael in action.
Billy Steiger was born in Howth on the 16th December, 1986. Now he plays the violin.
“Then he sat down by a pond and began to play a tune. As he played, the most extraordinary thing happened. One by one the fish in the pond began to jump out and fly about in the air. And what is more, they were all different colours and they were singing to the music.”
Patrick, Quentin Blake.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.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.
“The relationship between acoustic instruments and technology is historically awkward - everything is compromise or imitation. I want to turn that upside down. Instead of reproduction or expansion of a notional acoustic ideal, I’m interested in what happens when the parts are viewed as equals, and serve each other's potential.”
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. He has also worked with fashion designer Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy label, and in Cast-On with Ilana Blumberg, a duo that collaborated with a revolving cast of practitioners across music, fashion, set design, photography and theatre to build critical environments. Their last project was Dresser Music, a film for Cafe Oto. Set at the margins of a photoshoot for Blumberg’s 2021 knitwear collection, it investigates both the unseen layers of performance that make a photograph, and the unheard undercarriage of background music, a piano rambling through incomplete references.
He also works with Sarah Hartnett (Ghostlore of Britain), as Vesta Payne. They released mlybdmncy on Doyenne Books in 2023, a project that manifested as an EP and a limited run of metal objects. Molten pewter was cast directly into water, and the process was meticulously recorded. The sounds were then gathered and “recast” into the accompanying EP.
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.
