Two days from two great labels Penultimate Press (UK) and Kye (USA) who've put out some fantastic releases from the likes of Graham Lambkin, Henning Christiansen, Stefan Jaworzyn, Jacques Brodier and Matthew P. Hopkins in recent years.

On the Friday, OTO hosts Tim Goss' macabre pop art project Call Back The Giants - who has carved out a unique musical vision over his past four LPs, composer/violinist/performer/audio artist Moniek Darge - who specialises in both soundscapes and live-art performances in which visual and musical aspects are combined and in interactional improvisation on violin, and Matthew P. Hopkins - whose solo work is characterised by processed voice, crude electronics, tape manipulation and found sounds.

On the Saturday, NY-based multidisciplinary artist and KYE label curator Graham Lambkin returns to OTO, alongside Irish artist Vicky Lanagan - whose vulnerable, emotionally charged performances envelop audiences in an often troublingly intense aura of dark intimacy, and Mark Harwood's project Astor - whose works encompass a wide variety of sources and techniques as a means of exploring audio that rubs shoulders with narrative, the visual and the hallucinogenic.


MATTHEW P. HOPKINS

Matthew P. Hopkins may be familiar courtesy of a diverse range of projects including Half High, Vincent Over the Sink and the Bowles. Hopkins's solo work is characterised by processed voice, crude electronics, tape manipulation and found sounds. This hybrid cocktail populates spacious planes of unsettling drone based orbits. Employing a somewhat crumpled logic, Hopkins' maps out a place somewhere between the ambient and the uncanny.




MONIEK DARGE

Moniek Darge is active as composer, violinist, performer and audio artist. She has built light- and soundsculptures, installations, musical instruments and for many years has been constructing a series of alternative music boxes, with which she also performs. Darge has specialised in both soundscapes and live-art performances in which visual and musical aspects are combined and in interactional improvisation on violin. Since 1970 she has performed around the world and has been active on stage, first with the Logos Ensemble, then with Logos Duo, and more recently with the M&M robot ensemble. She also founded Logos Women, a small group specialised in intermedia improvisations performing their own compositions for various instruments, voices and music boxes.




CALL BACK THE GIANTS

Call Back The Giants is the current project of Tim Goss. Goss began his musical career as the electronics / keyboardist for the influential underground group, ‘The Shadow Ring’. As ‘Call Back The Giants’, Goss, along with some times collaborator (& step daughter) Chloë Mutter, has continued to carve a unique musical vision over three LP’s. His forth LP, the forthcoming double album ‘Goldsmith’ is an original piece of musical theatre, distinctive and expansive in both tone and vision. Call Back The Giants exist in their own macabre pop art environment, unsettling yet familiar.




ASTOR

Mark Harwood is a writer, publisher and musician recording as Astor. His works encompass a wide variety of sources and techniques as a means of exploring audio that rubs shoulders with narrative, the visual and the hallucinogenic. Astor has two LP’s out, ‘Alcor’ and ‘Inland’ on Kye records (USA). He also runs Penultimate Press which has released Dennis Johnson’s ‘lost’ minimalist masterpiece ‘November’ alongside four books by Graham Lambkin and records by Henning Christiansen, Jacques Brodier, Matthew P.Hopkins and others.




VICKY LANGAN

Vicky Langan is an Irish artist whose vulnerable, emotionally charged performances envelop audiences in an often troublingly intense aura of dark intimacy. Her performance practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly performance, sound, and film. She has performed widely, both solo and in collaboration with experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain, Paul Hegarty (La Société des Amis du Crime), Meitheal (with David Colohan and Pelt’s Mike Gangloff), United Bible Studies, the Quiet Club, and many more. As a curator & promoter she is best known for Black Sun, her regular weirdo/outer limits music night, through which she invited renowned makers of strange sounds from around the world to play for the first time in Ireland. Langan co-organises the Avant, an annual festival for Contemporary Arts in Cork, Ireland.

“Through her solo work as Wölflinge, Irish artist Vicky Langan has gained a reputation for raw and intense performances that are as likely to leave audiences feeling deeply unsettled as profoundly moved. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate physical theatre loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art.” - The WIRE

GRAHAM LAMBKIN

Graham Lambkin is a multidisciplinary artist, currently based in Upstate New York, who first came to prominence in the early 90′s through the formation of his music group The Shadow Ring. Combining a D.I.Y. post-punk ethic with folk music, cracked electronics, and surreal wordplay, The Shadow Ring created a unique hybrid sound that set them apart from their peers and continues to show as an influence today.

Following the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a series of striking and highly original solo releases, including ‘Salmon Run’ (2007) and ‘Amateur Doubles’ (2012), a critically acclaimed trilogy with experimental tape music artist Jason Lescalleet:’The Breadwinner’ (2007), ‘Air Supply’ (2010) and ‘Photographs’ (2013), and ‘Making A’ (2013) a collaboration with legendary table-top guitarist and founding member of AMM, Keith Rowe.

Since 2001 Lambkin has also curated the Kye label, releasing work by contemporary sound artists such as Vanessa Rossetto, Rushford & Talia, and Astor, as well as archival collections from the likes of Henning Christiansen, Moniek Darge and Anton Heyboer.