Saturday 7 February 2026, 7.30pm
Very excited to welcome back the duo of Rian Treanor and Cara Tolmie to OTO, following their release of one of our favourite albums of 2025, Body Lapse.
Body Lapse is a highly kinetic and playful work where body-centric vocal explorations meet intricate rhythmic systems. Their sound forms a disorienting, hypersurreal space of semantic modulations, concrete poetry, cut-up beats and mimicked samples. It’s dissociative dance music: contorting vocal lines and knotting biomechanics in a mesh of computer music, voice, and speculative storytelling.
The duo first worked together on a Counterflows Festival commission. Glasgow-born, Stockholm-based Tolmie brought her Internal Singing technique - a vocal method exploring breath, movement and touch - while Treanor’s radical, rave-infused structures bent and reshaped around her voice. The album grew from a series of charged, improvisational performances and was recorded between Stockholm and Rotherham in 2024. Their recordings capture the raw presence of performance, translating it into something tactile and immediate.
British artist Rian Treanor's music is complex yet highly kinetic, reflecting equal interest in club culture and experimental sound design. He has released records on Planet Mu, Nyege Nyege Tapes, The Death of Rave and Warp sub-label Arcola. Using the programming language Max/MSP he develops bespoke software to explore extended rhythmic techniques and algorithmic processes, building devices that enable spontaneous pattern modulation within various collaborations, workshops, live performances and installations.
He has presented work at multiple leading arts festivals and residencies internationally inducing: Aphex Twin Curated Warehouse Project (UK), Nyege Nyege Festival (UG), WWW (JP), Bergen Electronic Kunsthall (NO), Le Guess Who? (NL) Unsound (PL), Mira Festival (SP), GES-2 (RU), Serralves (PT), Berghain (DE), CTM (DE), Rewire (NL), No Bounds (UK), Geometry of Now (PL), Cafe Oto (UK), Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts (UK), Empty Gallery (HK), Irish Museum of Modern Art (IRL), Summerhall (UK) among others. He has also taken part in artists residencies at yU+co[lab] in Hong Kong, Counterflows in India and Shape Platform 2020.
Cara Tolmie (born Glasgow, 1984, based in Stockholm) spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely and internationally at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space – both as solo presentations and collaborative projects.
Her practice at large centres itself upon the singing voice, the body, and the complex ties between the two. All at once subjective as well as socially determined, she explores voice and body as two co-dependent entities able to confirm as well as contradict one another. Within this she often explores performative techniques that disorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of the defamiliarised, uncanny and sampled singing voice.
Cara is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.
