Thursday 7 January 2027, 7.30pm
To celebrate the launch of his debut album 60BPM 33RPM + new book Stereo Pair, Phil Coy brings his acclaimed sound installation sixty beats per minute to Cafe OTO.
sixty beats per minute transforms Cafe OTO into a live musical instrument and time machine. An array of microphones and CCTV amplify a dripping tap within the building alongside the live ambient soundscape of Dalston Junction. The installation records and reverses time sequentially, creating a live feedback loop between digital and analogue time. Tuned to the architecture of OTO and matching the tempo of our heart at rest, sixty beats per minute uses a beat known to raise consciousness to create a deep listening experience that reflects on the physical experience of time.
The event includes films and outtakes from Coy's back catalogue being routed through the time bending installation, from the recent film Organ (2026) to one of his earliest Sound Mirror (1999). Also, courtesy of the BFI a rare screening of the first ever stereo films by the inventor of stereo sound reproduction Alan Blumlein. Phil Coy is joined by the writers Lee Mackinnon and Gareth Evans for an in conversation.
“The sculptor's installations realise connections between sound and the environment as they plug into histories of science and technology” – Phil Coy profiled by Robert Barry in The Wire. Aug 2026
"There’s never been a better way to go off the clock" – Best field recordings on Bandcamp, June 2026"
“a temporally profound release from the Flaming Pines imprint" – Electronic Sound Magazine, July 2026
After six minutes, time flips into reverse. The sounds of Ramsgate start running backwards. Cackles of seagulls are sucked back into tiny throats, while the distant yelps of school playtime turn giddy and abrupt, doubtless punctuating games of backward hopscotch. Central to the piece is the steady tick of the steam-age turret clock at St George’s Church, which was installed almost two centuries ago. When ticking runs forward, it seems to gift a divine guarantee to the formidable flow of time; an assurance that, amidst the throes of an increasingly erratic and precarious world, our reality is bedrocked by a fundamental metronomic consistency. The beat of the clock sounds like a metallic dripping in its forward iteration yet transforms into the sweep of an ultra-sharp knife when flipped into reverse. When the clock switches direction, the last six minutes are methodically undone. Invisible hands scramble to unravel the links of causation, excising the recent ripples of change, putting everything back as it was just six minutes prior. That moment of transition is pure whiplash, like being dragged backward through water – limbs and organs jolted, inner ears swept momentarily out of calibration.
https://flamingpines.bandcamp.com/album/60bpm-33rpm
Stereo Pair documents the making of the permanent site sensitive sound sculpture Stereo Pair. Both a photo-essay and user-manual, the publication makes visible the hidden narratives that ran alongside the work’s production between 2019 and 2021.
The book collates working drawings, maquettes, archive images, photographs, film stills and installation shots. One sequence sees rubble retrieved from the demolition of The Mathematics Building, a location used for the filming of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), being cast into the foundations of Stereo Pair, followed by photographs of HMV record company executives witnessing the exhumation of Nipper the dog, the subject of the nearby record factory’s ubiquitous gramophone logo.
Essays by Jennifer Lucy Allen, Lee Mackinnon and Will Self further explore the rich geographical and cultural context that informed Stereo Pair’s development, including the invention of stereo reproduction made near to its site, alongside the extraordinary history and contemporary resonance of pre-radar technology, sound mirrors and early listening devices.
https://www.slimvolume.org/phil-coy
