Monday 22 November 2021, 7.30pm
Please note: this event will be streamed live on the NEXT Festival website for free on the night: https://www.nextfestival.sk/
Founded 2000 in Bratislava, the NEXT Festival of advanced music is an annual celebration of exploratory music and sound art – from electronic experiments through free-form improvisation to audio visual projects, it brings together artists that are pushing the boundaries of music.
Since 2015 NEXT Festival is bringing to Cafe OTO artists from East Europe and those who performed at previous editions. This year the NEXT festival is taking place from the 22nd to 28th November, featuring Thurston Moore, Rie Nakajima, Gravetemple, Faust, Punctum (Carlo Maria and Caterina Barbieri), and many more.
This year the festival takes places in London, Bratislava, and online. We open the festival in Cafe OTO on 22nd of November with two concerts - David Toop with Avsluta, and Valentina Magaletti with Isama Zing. We welcome you to experience the rest of the festival in Bratislava. For more information about the festival, please visit: www.nextfestival.sk
David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed in 2012.
"Avsluta (Lucie Stepankova) is a sound artist, electro-acoustic composer and performer, free-improviser and lecturer of improvisation and performative practice at London College of Communication. Inquiry about our being in, experiencing and interacting with the world through the lens of deep ecology and new materialist theories is at the core of her practice.
Lucie works with objects and natural materials, field recordings, electronics and digital processing to embody speculative narratives challenging our understanding of reality and in so doing seeks to unlock its potential for transformation. The general aim of her practice is to encourage audiences to engage in listening as an active-creative practice, reconnect with and embody emotions, and discover new approaches towards solidarity as understood within the framework of deep ecology."
Valentina Magaletti, drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist, returns to the stage for A Colourful Storm, following La Tempesta Colorata (2023), a compilation appearance on Soon I'll Run Out of Air (2024) and a multitude of solo and collaborative releases.
Magaletti's versatile technique, which can incorporate anything from vibes and marimba to contact microphones and found objects, results in a style that is forever evolving. Feeling just as comfortable performing behind a delicate ceramic kit as she does hammering out motorik rhythms, her creative take on percussion has resulted in an extremely diverse discography.
As a drummer, Magaletti moves effortlessly between the seemingly disparate worlds of alternative and mainstream music. She has played with artists such as Jandek, Pat Thomas, Deb Googe, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Steve Beresford, Steve Shelley, Lafawndah, Mica Levi, Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Nicolas Jaar to name a few. In addition to collaborating with the gamelan Ensemble Nist-Nah and drummers Malcom Catto, Julian Sartorius and Charles Hayward, she has played with stalwarts of the experimental underground scene like Gnod’s Marlene Ribeiro, Wire’s Graham Lewis, and Thighpaulsandra (Coil). In 2017, Valentina participated in The Can Project, standing in for the late Jaki Liebezeit, at London’s Barbican Centre.
Magaletti’s compositional credits are just as elaborate: with Tom Relleen, she was one half of Tomaga; with Al Wootton, she creates irresistible claustrophobic dub as Holy Tongue; with Pino Montecalvo, under the Avvitagalli alias, Valentina improvises intricate sonic collages; alongside percussionist João Pais Filipe, as CZN, she constructs hallucinatory rhythmic worlds, which are as fragile as they are eternal; with Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, she plays as Moin.
Isama Zing is Bratislava based producer, DJ, member of Mäss micro-collective and SHAPE platform affiliate. After turning to cello, voice and electronics in the early age of 15 he later moved to experimenting with the Warp-esque side of the 10s electronics to eventually arrive at a crossroads of club-deconstructions and experimental pop production.
Even though his Isama Zing alias is renowned for more post-club, industrial aesthetics, at this concert he will present a completely new musical iteration of this project: improvisations on cello and electronics. At NEXT Festival's London edition hosted at Café OTO Valentina Magaletti & Isama Zing will perform an improvisational set.
https://isamazing.bandcamp.com/track/chaos-rave
