Sunday 8 March 2026, 7.30pm
"Another year at Cafe OTO, another portal. A queer room to dance, cry and laugh with the musicians I love. This year I slip into Dyke Dub, into shifting sounds and strange weather, with the UK debut from the incredible Violence Gratuite, a duo with Xexa, Damsel Elysium, Maria Bertel and much more. New records, new forms. Come celebrate life with us." – Valentina Magaletti
Valentina Magaletti moves where rhythm is both pulse and possibility, a drummer and composer tracing lines between experimental shadowlands and open-stage light. She has played with Jandek, Thurston Moore, Mica Levi, Sampha, Upsammy, Nídia, Nicolas Jaar, Steve Shelley, Malcolm Mooney, Marta Salogni, Phew, Hania Rani, Cate Me Bin, Alpha Maid, Fred Frith, Maria Chavez, and Mariam Rezaei, and alongside underground visionaries such as Marlene Ribeiro (Gnod), Graham Lewis (Wire) and Thighpaulsandra (Coil). At London’s Barbican, she stood in for the late Jaki Liebezeit in The Can Project, letting rhythm inhabit absence, and has shaped countless orchestral and improvised performances.
One third of MOIN, and a vital presence in constellations like YPY (Goat), Shackleton, and Vanishing Twin, she sculpts music that drifts between dub, electronics, and free improvisation. In projects such as Tomaga (with Tom Relleen), Holy Tongue (with Al Wootton) and CZN (with João Pais Filipe), her rhythms become landscapes, narratives, and reveries—spaces where sound itself learns to breathe.
Damsel Elysium (they/them) is the solo project of UK based multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist and composer Djenaba Davis-Eyo.
An alchemist of body, space, object and the metaphysical, Damsel is a holistic world builder using sound, video, performance and other artistic mediums whose deeply intuitive practice crosses the boundary between experimental sound art, avant-pop, performance art, contemporary classical, analog and electronics, blurring the lines of genre, discipline and expectation. Their work explores anticolonial and neurodivergent practice, paradoxes of the manmade and natural world. Working almost entirely with improvisation somatic techniques, subtle energy, ancestral knowledge and the subconscious, They are an architect of hypnagogic activation to draw attention to quantum details and initiate alternative realities. Their multi-medium approach explores site-specific non-performance spaces of history and sacredness. Inspired by contemporary and Fluxus movements, performance becomes ritual and the stage an altar. Damsel’s work has appeared in Tate Modern, Southbank centre, V&A museum and Fondation Beyeler to name a few. Their first record released on AD 93, earning them recognition across a multitude of creative spaces; music, fashion, art, design and even film scoring, they are an avant garde artist on the rise collaborating with FKA twigs, Celeste, CKTRL and working with brands and art spaces such as Gucci, IITTALA and Simone Rocha.
'THERE ARE THOSE WHO CONFORM AND THOSE WHO CONFRONT AND NEVER STOP TRANSFORMING'.
From the child with the marching drum grew an unconventional drummer, percussionist, composer, and musician.
Karen Willems is active in various fields. Her expressive, physical drum and percussion technique brought her to Yuko, Zita Swoon Group, Mauro, Zwerm among others.
With her project Inwolves she took the first steps towards the discovery of the essence of her own music. Her solo project ‘Terre Sol’ elaborates on this.
Her aim is to find music in which she could find herself as a spiritual being as well as a creative artist. She is concerned with the essence of her own work, the perception of her own personality and the further development of sound as an art of fusing different aesthetics and genres.
We need smaller, more intimate moments together. That’s what drives her, to truly connect. Far from the industry, close to the essence of music.
For the Belgian, jazz is also a communicative form of music that seeks dialog and discourse in order to discover new things and explore the unknown, For that reason, Willems has added a "Four" to her "Terre Sol" in order to set out as a quartet of four in search of the essence of contemporary, improvised music and to move sure-footedly along the borderline between jazz and improvised music, pop and rock, experimental music and musical avant-garde.
Words reach for something in the image. Sounds reach for something in the word.
Accents of Hilda Doolittle and Barbara Guest find felicitous fellow travellers in other loosely referenced artists, including Richard Tuttle and June Felter. *Absorbed by the image, the viewer speaks in poetic fragments. These develop their own associative logics, in a surreal realisation of Ouyang Yu’s notion of the life cycle of a poem. Here the subject is between states, living through superposition and transparency. One thing becomes another. *Christine and Lucy illustrate the reality that lies in relationships, the reality that is endlessly mutable.
From Aude’s perspective, there were keywords written and pronounced by Lucy which triggered themes to explore for her: auditory device, anaphora, stance, or this sentence "in the next room someone is calling"... those mentions of the listening itself, the machine, the prosthesis to help listening, the tension to hear through a wall, this representation, the quote of the technique of writing itself... they were all bringing to an obsessive question: how to picture someone's listening in a sound piece? How to make the listener understand they are actually listening to someone else's perception? In other words, how to reproduce a space and a point of hearing in music? [more]
