Sunday 7 May 2023, 8pm
Michiko Ogawa is a performer-composer specialising in the clarinet, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She performs not only classical repertoire but also contemporary and experimental musics, including free improvisation and film soundtrack work. She is also working with Hammond organ and "sho"; Japanese bamboo organ.
She also has been collaborating with musicians Samuel Dunscombe, Taku Sugimoto, James Rushford, Carolyn Chen, Golden Fur, Manuel Lima, Lucy Railton, Jonny Chang and Klaus Lang. She also frequently collaborates with visual artists, such Angela Jennings, Lindsay Bloom, Brianna Rigg, Laurence Favre and Sabina Maselli. She is one of the core members of the collectively oriented Harmonic Space Orchestra in Berlin since 2019.
As a researcher, she has been researching about Teiji Ito, a Japanese-American performer and composer based in New York City since 2015, and received a DMA for his dissertation focusing on Teiji Ito's film music. She is currently working on his biography.
Li Yilei is a Chinese-born, London-based artist and composer whose work moves through tacit listening, perceptual thresholds, and the quiet tensions between presence and disappearance. Guided by a quietly mystic approach to sensing, Li treats sound as a porous field of attunement where intuition, resonance, and the barely perceptible begin to speak. Li’s multi-media practice attends to silence, absence, and non-verbal states as active agents that shape perception as much as the audible.
Unfolding through restrained gestures and spectral drift, Li’s compositions often incorporate instruments, objects, spanning tapes, theremins, ethnic instruments, field recordings, self-built devices, and organic materials. Fragments, objects, and transient sites enter the work as momentary anchors within shifting terrains, creating spaces where attention deepens, thresholds blur, and sound becomes a mode of attunement.
Since 2017, alongside releasing music records, Li’s work has spanned performance, installation, and composition for film, theatre, and dance. Their work has been performed and presented internationally at Barbican Centre (UK), King’s Place (UK), Cafe Oto (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), TATE Britain (UK), V&A East Storehouse (UK) ESEA Contemporary (UK); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (FR), UCCA Contemporary (CN), Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK), Lincoln Center (US); MAO Torino (IT) and more.
https://liyilei.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@li_yi_lei_/videos
Li Yilei at Cafe OTO, 7th May 2023:
