Saturday 15 October 2016, 8pm
Founded 2000 in Bratislava, the NEXT Festival of advanced music is an annual celebration of exploratory music and sound art: from electronic experimentation and freeform improvisation to audiovisual projects, it brings together artists who push the boundaries of music.
As a precursor to the 17th edition, the NEXT Festival is bringing to Cafe OTO a group of artists who have performed at previous editions, and will introduce some of their new international collaborations.
This year the NEXT festival in Bratislava is taking place from 23th to 26th November, featuring Thighpaulsandra, Will Guthrie, Chris Corsano, Sharif Sehnaoui, Tony Elieh, Thor Magnusson, Vlad Kreimer, Michaela Antalova and many more artists.
Valerio Tricoli is a composer and performer of electro-acoustic music. Since the mid ’00 is main instruments for live presentations is the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, used as a completely analogue / ergonomic device for live sampling and real-time transformation / editing / mixing of pre-recorded (field or studio recordings).
His latest release “Miseri Lares” (PAN) has been described as a “album which reads like a story full of provocative signifiers which converge to create an allegory of unsettling beauty” (Mischa Mathys, The Formant).
Over the years Valerio has been active in some long-term collaboration with other musicians, composers, choreographers and multimedia artists. He has been working extensively with Thomas Ankersmit, Antoine Chessex, Werner Dafeldecker, Anthony Pateras, Robert Piotrowicz.
Puce Mary is the solo moniker of Copenhagen based sound artist Frederikke Hoffmeier. Since her first LP released in 2013, the project has then explored the fields of industrial noise and experimental music with a vast amount of releases on labels as Posh Isolation, iDEAL Recordings, Ascetic House and Freak Animal featuring collaborations with noise artists such as Loke Rahbek, Dan Johansson of Sewer Election and Rodger Stella of Macronympha.
Her current other projects are JH1.FS3 and Body Sculptures. The performances and releases portrays her work methods to be many and diverse from textured sound collages and noise, to straight forward industrial music. She has performed throughout Europe, Japan, Russia, Canada and America.
SOTE:
Ata ‘Sote’ Ebtekar is an electronic music composer, sound artist, and recording engineer currently based in Tehran, Iran, whose work reconstructs traditional or regional tonal systems and rhythmic structures through synthesis and modular electronics. His current work approaches techno from a maximalist perspective, creating structural groove through programmed, pitched sounds rather than orthodox beats. Also active in the sphere of sound art and academia, Ebtekar’s compositions and multi-channel installations decode and re-generate patterns of thought (both folkloric and contemporary) using electro-acoustic techniques, microtonal systems, and polyrhythmic motifs.
Special live visuals: Stix
STIX:
Palmovka is a project by Lucia Udvardyová who hails from the Slovakian-Hungarian borderlands. She makes improvised electronics using field recordings and custom-made hardware. Besides being a musician Lucia is also very active in promoting music. She co-founded the blog Easterndaze and the label Baba Vanga for mapping and releasing experimental music from Eastern and Central Europe. Her radio shows have been broadcast by Resonance FM and Czech Radio, and her writing has been published by Dazed, The Quietus, and Electronic Beats. She also works for SHAPE (Sound, Heterogeneous Art and Performance in Europe), a festival initiative that promotes innovative and aspiring musicians and interdisciplinary artists.
Paul Abbott is a musician and drummer. He plays with real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.
Projects include: XT with Seymour Wright; XT+Pat Thomas; Kavain Wayne Space (RP Boo) Trio with XT; XT+Anne Gillis; X Ray Hex Tet; yPLO with Micheal Speers; F.R.David, very good* & Rosmarie with Will Holder; film sound for Keira Greene and The Creaking Breeze Ensemble with Nathaniel Mackey. Paul has performed at venues and festivals internationally. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics, and resident artist at Cafe OTO 2015 & 2023.
Recent releases include: Slip; Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary)*; YESYESSPEAKERSYES; Knees, Elbow Bag; Deorlaf X; Fugitive Equation and very good*.
Miro Toth is a composer and saxophonist whose main focus is on contemporary, improvised, electroacoustic music and conceptual audiovisual work. He has written several compositions for solo instruments, chamber and ensemble pieces, and has scored music for film.
He is also a founder of Frutti di Mare, an improvisational orchestra, which is an ensemble of more than 60 people spread along 11 conceptually different projects. Miro is also a founder of improvised orchestra Musica Falsa et Ficta.
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.
