We're very pleased to welcome Reines d'Angleterre to OTO for their first ever London show. Made up of Ghédalia Tazartes - who needs no introduction - and a couple of hyperactive electronic botanists, Jo and Èlg. Both of these humans are steeped in unsavory operations covering grounds of pop, electronic hallucinations and damaged pyramids (Èlg) and the Tanzprocesz label and Fusiller solo project (Jo ). They also both perform under the moniker of Opéra Mort.

The music of Reines D'Angleterre's feasts on duality: chaos and order, narrative and anti narrative, erection and destruction, dread and comedy. The voice rides alongside electronics: cracked beaten, weathered and bruised.

To the public, they first surfaced playing a live set at the esteemed Colour out of Space festival in Brighton, a welcoming bed for all idiophonics. Reines D'Angleterre made friends with a damaged conglomeration of live concrete, sound poetry, faux ethnicity and sincere eccentricity. Subsequent shows allowed the outfit to explore and refine their discovered terrain as it unfolded. A recording session resulted in the unique concoction of 'Les Comores' released on the great UK label Bo' Weavil recordings.

In 2009 they've been recorded by Rashad Becker in Berlin for their second album: "Globe et Dynastie" (Bo' Weavil recordings). This time a thoroughly studio affair. This LP covers more of the wild ground the band started with on “Les Comores” but going further into a musical terrain that defies definite description…a slow trip into wizards intimacy, synthetic jungles, underseas zoos and tibetan-industrial complexes. It feels like one has stumbled into disturbing dreams from a different realm. A quality of mystery, trickery and halucinatory movements slip and shift across the recording. This is out there music, experimental music with no fixed abode with a unique quality that defies most things today.


NICOLA RATTI

Born in Milan in 1978. Began his musical career as guitar player. Lately his approach is more focused on beat-analog experimentation and sound installation. He is currently working with: Giuseppe Ielasi with whom he formed the project entitled Bellows, Attila Faravelli as Faravelliratti, ~Tilde, a trio with Enrico Malatesta and Attila Faravelli. He played guitar from 2007 to 2013 in the desertic soundtrack-band Ronin. He has performed live in Europe and North America, and his albums had been released by Anticipate, Preservation, Die Schachtel, Entr’acte, Senufo Editions, Megaplomb, Musica Moderna, Boring Machines, Coriolis Sounds, Zymogen, Holidays Rec.



www.nicolaratti.com/


HUMAN HEADS

'Sheffield's Singing Knives Records have been quietly releasing some of the most enlightened music to come out of the UK underground for the past decade. That they are more readily associated with the kind of dilated folk forms of Harappian Nights Recordings, Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides and Stephanie Hladowski only tells part of the story, having also released sound poetry albums by Dylan Nyoukis and Ludo Mich. With its crude drones and warped topographical sketches, Human Heads' debut cassette goes some way to aligning these approaches by colliding folk tropes with concrete poetry. The Beauticinist is the first release by former Helhesten compadres Ben Knight and Hannah Ellul, and sees them veer away from the kind of ecstatic drone based improvisation typical of post-Vibracathedral Orchestra bedroom experimentalists and forage into murkier territory, casting manipulated field recordings as a drizzly backdrop over which are placed the colloquial tics of everyday exchanges. It's equally funny and unsettling, with Knight on "400 Boys" repeating in slurred excitement: "She once said to me, 'You want to get yourself some experience, son'" over the whir and bleep of a Korg synth, like someone bragging into their lager while thumbing coins into a fruit machine in a Northern Working Men's Club. This exact same dialogue, in a different voice, also crops up on "Utopian Nails", but rather than a boozy anecdote it resembles more a forlorn admission of social alienation, before being interrupted by high, chirruping electronics and a stuttering drum machine. The combination of cheap analogue keyboards played at invasive pitches, primitive percussion presets and cut-up vocals blurting private anxieties allies Human Heads to Industrial revolutionaries like Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle. There is something of the transgressive humour and ineffable melancholy of those groups on "Swil Impotency" when, out of a horizon line of searing drones and wind-damaged dictaphones, an anonymous lady asks in a sullen Yorkshire drawl: "Are you all right? Do you know where you're going?".' - Alex Neilson, Wire Magazine, 2013