Sunday 26 February 2017, 7pm, OTO Project Space
After the fantastic Silver Road venue were sadly forced to close their doors this month – due to London's usual short-sighted approach to development – OTO are proud to welcome them for a one-off show in the Project Space.
During their short tenure in South London, Silver Road have made a distinctive impact on the capital's new music scene, with a thrillingly varied and forward-thinking programme making use of the unique acoustics of a converted water tank in Lewisham. Tonight sees a great line-up of some of the most exciting exponents of new music from London and further afield.
Bertrand Gauguet plays alto saxophone in contexts of solo and group improvisation - many festivals in recent years in France and abroad - his approach to the saxophone is involved in research on technical areas of the instrument, whether acoustic or related to amplification - composes electronic music : works with film, dance, visual arts and radio - focuses on learning processes related to sound and music - music and non music - sound as support for meditation - breath - the very relationships that sound and music have with image and body - still learning to play shakuhashi after recent trip to Japan ... Collaborations with : Sophie Agnel & Andrea Neumann ; Franz Hautzinger & Thomas Lehn ; X Brane ; Rhodri Davies & Christoph Schiller ; Andy Guhl & Mike T. Bullock ; Martine Altenburger & Frédéric Blondy ; Xavier Charles ; Pascal Battus ; Insub Meta Orchestra. Meetings with : Tetuzi Akiyama, John Butcher, Eric La Casa, Michel Doneda, Axel Dörner, Isabelle Duthoit, Robin Hayward, Tomas Korber, Urs Leimgruber, Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetsu Saïtoh, Roger Turner and Michaël Vorfeld.
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.
“The relationship between acoustic instruments and technology is historically awkward - everything is compromise or imitation. I want to turn that upside down. Instead of reproduction or expansion of a notional acoustic ideal, I’m interested in what happens when the parts are viewed as equals, and serve each other's potential.”
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. He has also worked with fashion designer Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy label, and in Cast-On with Ilana Blumberg, a duo that collaborated with a revolving cast of practitioners across music, fashion, set design, photography and theatre to build critical environments. Their last project was Dresser Music, a film for Cafe Oto. Set at the margins of a photoshoot for Blumberg’s 2021 knitwear collection, it investigates both the unseen layers of performance that make a photograph, and the unheard undercarriage of background music, a piano rambling through incomplete references.
He also works with Sarah Hartnett (Ghostlore of Britain), as Vesta Payne. They released mlybdmncy on Doyenne Books in 2023, a project that manifested as an EP and a limited run of metal objects. Molten pewter was cast directly into water, and the process was meticulously recorded. The sounds were then gathered and “recast” into the accompanying EP.
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.
Seth Cooke describes most of his practice as “filling noise with space”, adopting an accidental turn of phrase coined by his daughter. This side of his work attempts to say something useful about “place” by snookering himself via broadband noise, scavenged data, media artefacts, graph theory, or his flimsy strawman arguments about other artists. The other side of his work involves snookering himself in performance through bloody-minded rules-based adherence to feedback, resonance, routing or mathematical processes that he can barely control, if he can control them at all. Sometimes he escapes through luck, sometimes it’s all just excruciatingly high effort/low reward.
“I saw Seth Cooke play tonight and he did something I’ve been trying to capture for a while. Completely pure music that does one thing but that one thing does everything. Whole, super-nutritious music in one tone-stew.” – Matt Loveridge (MXLX, Knife Library, Gnar Hest, Fairhorns)
“… richly investigated, purposeful work looking into the sonic artifacts of the unresolved dissonances in constellations of history, politics, and media. Through his no-input field recording technique, Cooke brings into consideration the materiality of the inscription devices, a sort of sonic ghost hunting that rewards investigative listening.” – Derek Baron (Reading Group)
Sound artist, improviser, composer, Pascal Battus has developed a practice which is more concerned with sonic gestures, listening and the situation which determines them rather than with any particular instrument. Among other sound sources, he uses guitar pick-ups, rotating surfaces, ‘environmental guitar’ (table-top electric guitar with contact microphone, various objects and electronics), percussion (amplified objects, or not).
He has played throughout Europe and in the USA, Canada, Asia, the Middle East, Australia… both solo and more frequently with other musicians. He often works with dancers and with performers from the plastic arts (video, lighting, sculpture…) He has published drawings and was co-inventer of Sonic Massages (les Massages Sonores). His discs have been released by Potlatch, Corpus Hermeticum, Amor Fati, Another Timbre, Cathnor, Organized Music From Thessaloniki, Herbal Internationa.
