Monday 4 September 2023, 7.30pm
Excited to welcome Time Trout - the singular quartet of Viv Corringham, Marcus Cummins, Dave Mandl and Stephen Moses - following the release of the debut album, Stuck Like Jane Austen, on our OTOroku label earlier this year!
Seemingly summoned out of the ether, the songs on Stuck Like Jane Austen arrive fully-formed, with an awkward, jagged personality that moves, all knees and elbows, with a bristling, roiling, unstoppable momentum. It’s a constant high-wire performance, with all four participants looking relentlessly forward lest a glimpse below causes the whole thing to drop. Thankfully, the balance is never in doubt.
From the off, drummer Stephen Moses and bass guitarist Dave Mandl create a series of hypnotic locked grooves, that simultaneously draw you in and subtly pull the rug out from underneath you all at once; like repeatedly stumbling down the last couple of steps to the dance floor. Over this hypnotic ouroboros of a rhythm section, Marcus Cummins’ saxophone deftly feints and weaves between the cracks, running the gamut from tentative, staccato stabs to giddily whirling lyricism.
The three instrumentalists constantly trade emphases in such an assured way that you quickly stop trying to focus in on one part and give yourself over to the single, intricate whole; running through which, like a bright red thread through the labyrinth, is Viv Corringham’s astonishing spoken word vocal performance. A restless stream of consciousness that seems to have the primal urgency of a message delivered in a dream, Corringham mixes Delphic abstractions with bracingly lucid implorations, the whole performance delivered with such seamlessness that it’s hard to tell whether the lyrics are channeling the music or vice versa. The answer, of course, is both.
- Viv Corringham / voice
- Marcus Cummins / soprano and alto saxophones, ocarina, bells, shruti box
- Dave Mandl / bass guitar
- Stephen Moses / drums, percussion
Viv Corringham is a US-based British vocalist and sound artist, described as “a vital force in improvised music since the late 1970s” (Corey Mwamba, BBC Radio 3). She has worked with many musicians including Pauline Oliveros, Charles Hayward, Mike Cooper, Elliott Sharp, and Maggie Nicols. She has done concerts and sound work in twenty-six countries in venues such as Hong Kong Arts Centre, Fonoteca Nacional de Mexico, Issue Project Room New York, and Institute of Contemporary Art London. “From cool Brion Gysin–esque wordplay to looped and multilayered operatic wails” (The Wire).
Marcus Cummins is a British saxophonist who has worked extensively throughout Europe, the US, and Canada in various groups and as a solo artist, but is perhaps best known internationally for performing with Trevor Watts’ Celebration Band. He currently lives in NYC and continues to collaborate with Indian musician Nivedita ShivRaj and the Ethio jazz group Arki Sound.
Dave Mandl plays bass in the roots-rock group Girls on Grass, the baroque-pop group Eljin Marbles, the electronic/noise duo Cultural Fit (with Dave Knapik), and radio station WFMU’s house band the Hoof and Mouth Sinfonia, as well as his own “group,” Tone Poets. He’s been producing a show at WFMU for eons and writes for The Wire magazine and other publications.
Stephen Moses is best known for his playing with Alice Donut, but it started way before that—the Peter Borno quintet, Giant Metal Insects, Noise R Us, Percy Jones, James Chance (before the Contortions), Rasputina, and Gary Windo, to name a few. Stephen is currently playing with Mustafina (Alice Donut peeps), Percy Jones and MJ12, Estos Gritos, and of course Time Trout.
