Saturday 22 April 2023, 8pm
O YAMA O – the group of Rie Nakajima, Keiko Yamamoto, Billy Steiger and Marie Roux – celebrate the release of their new album Galo, forthcoming on bison in April. Support comes from Ailie Ormston, who will debut new work for solo guitar.
Formed of musician and artist Rie Nakajima, Cafe OTO co-founder Keiko Yamamoto, percussionist and photographer Marie Roux and violin player Billy Steiger, O Yama O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. They move between pop and the philosophical, defined by the overall space afforded to texture and movement. In small, delicate sound an intimate musical climate is established that reflects on life, telling stories of improvised clockwork, whispered dreams, small movements of the hand and the rhythm to be found in the shuffle of a deck of cards.
The group have performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as noshowspace, Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, and allEars Festival.
Ailie Ormston is a music maker who makes acoustic and electronic music, sometimes together and sometimes separately. Ormston’s work is primarily constructed through improvisation and assemblage and has musical interests in motivic development and timbral abstraction as well as hifi and lofi sounds, repetition, microtonality and song.
Ormston has released albums with bison, 33-33, 50% Pure and Domino Recording Co., and has presented works at Tectonics Festival, Cryptic Nights and Counterflows Festival. Their work has been broadcast across BBC Radio 1, 3 and 6, as well as online radio stations NTS, Resonance FM, RTM and LYL Radio. Ormston's works have been featured and reviewed in The Wire, Loud & Quiet and Tiny Mix Tapes.
