Wednesday 26 February 2025, 7.30pm
Delighted to welcome back the great Japanese artist, Sachiko M, for her first headline shows at OTO in nearly a decade!
An internationally active improvisational musician utilizing electronic instruments which generate signals of testing noise (sinewaves), Sachiko M has been active as a sampler player since 1994. Early in her career she was involved in the cut-up and "plunderphonic" (or "plagiaristic") sampling movements. In 1998, in a drastic departure from those approaches, she originated the revolutionary method she uses to this day - manipulating the sampler's internal test tones.
With the 2000 release of Sine Wave Solo, her extreme solo recording consisting entirely of sine waves, Sachiko M suddenly became the focus of intense interest on the international scene, including European music festivals and Britain's Wire magazine. Since then she's been active on an irregular basis in a number of projects - including the experimental electronic music duo Filament, the electronics trio I.S.O., a duo with Toshimaru Nakamura, and the duo Cosmos with Ami Yoshida, in addition to collaborating with various musicians from other countries.
Li Song is a London-based musician and computer programmer. He performs improvised music with his computer and composes music using electronics and acoustic instruments. His collaborative project with Zhu Wenbo, No Performance, focuses on compositions using environment sounds, acoustic instruments, computer algorithms, and random sequence. He is also a member of computer network music ensemble and research group, [ _ _ _ ], focusing on algorithmic collaboration. Recent works include Two Snare Drums (Infant Tree 2022), [ _ _ _ ] (with Jia Liu and Shuoxin Tan, SUPERPANG 2022) and Text (with Zhu Wenbo, Zoomin' Night 2021).
For this evening, Li Song will be presenting his work Slow Software.
https://lisong.bandcamp.com/
https://notimportant.org/
https://zoominnight.com/artists/li-song/
Tom Wheatley (b. 1991, London) is a composer and improviser, operating in the fractious and fertile interfaces of acoustic and digital sound, extending instruments via technique and technology. Beginning with the double bass, he also works with synthetic sound and processing, and plays a wide selection of instruments in collaboration with a broad range of performers and instrumentalists, from long-standing duos to one-off improvisations.
His score as composer for Giulio Bertelli’s striking debut feature film Agon (2025) was released in 2026 on PAN records. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize (International Federation of Film Critics), the film is a triptych of three female athletes preparing for a fictional Olympic games. Straddling fiction and documentary, the score reflects the film’s hyper-focus on the gesture of sports performances, each protagonist mirrored by an instrumentalist: fencing with cellist Ute Kanngiesser; rifle shooting with saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet, and judo with percussionist Seijiro Murayama, with his bandmate Grundik Kasyansky on electronics and Harry Gorskí-Brown on bagpipes completing the chamber group.
Prior to Agon he worked on scores with award-winning composer Daniel Blumberg, including the Oscar and BAFTA winning score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), as well as director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come (2020), and The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), for which he played viola da gamba and other early European string instruments.
His active projects as a musician centre around the duo Tennota with Grundik Kasyansky, formed in 2019. Once described as ‘half techno, half free jazz’, the project is about the generative friction between physical and digital arenas. They take primary materials – gut strings, sine waves, tree sap, feedback – and engage them with contemporary technologies, towards a taut and nebulous rhythmic language. They have released albums on Accidental Meetings, Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku, and most recently a collaboration with artist and musician Rosa Anschútz on Meakusma.
Other projects include an ongoing collaboration with Italian fashion project GR10K. Among their collaborations was Stringent Manners, a performance at Auditorium San Fedele for the launch of GR10K SS25: Nine Pounds of Dead Landscape. Wheatley worked on musical direction, performance, and co-composition with Andrea Slaviero, choreographing students from the Milan Conservatory as both models and instrumentalists for this ambitious six hour piece, which harnessed the students boredom and frustration to shape the performance.
Growing up in a multi-generational family of musicians, he is a seasoned instrumentalist. Over the years, he has collaborated and performed with stalwarts and luminaries of contemporary music, including Eddie Prévost, Billy Steiger, Ute Kanngiesser, Adam Christensen, Jim White, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker, Ilan Volkov, Steve Noble, Sachiko M, and John Edwards, with releases on OtoRoku, Matchless and Earshots.
Caius Williams is a musician from London who plays the double bass, guitar, and bass guitar. He works in collaboration with others, alongside an ongoing solo project, and often works with improvisation.
Some projects include ‘Crosspiece’ (with Theodora Laird), a duo with guitarist Tara Cunningham, alongside recent performances or collaborations with
Lifetones (Charles Bullen of This Heat), Steve Noble, feeo, Daniel O’Sullivan, Mark Sanders, Sachiko M, Tom Challenger, Maggie Nicols, Mark Wastell, amongst others.
Caius has been running the GRAIN series at Avalon Cafe in Bermondsey for the last 3 years, which is focussed on programming new and adventurous music and nurturing a growing community with cross-scene and cross-generational collaboration.
https://caiuswilliams.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.instagram.com/caiuswilliams_
https://www.youtube.com/@GrainResidency
