Saturday 4 June 2022, 8pm
'Syphon' album launch, released on AD 93. With Jo Hellier.
Syphon is the second instalment of an ‘alchemical’ trilogy which started with The Funnel on Akashic records. The record consists of speculative medieval and renaissance music, imagined composed in the future, where it is reconstructed from the ashes of the past, via incomplete fragments.
"In a future where the old semantic systems don’t apply anymore, what we are left with is some kind of delirium."
The album features 3D printed instruments, multilayered bagpipe chanters, double recorders and other hybrids.
With additional voices of soprano Eden Girma and Emmy Broughton.
To open the event, bassist Otto Willberg will perform Hanne Darboven's 'Opus 17A'.
Wojciech Rusin is a Polish-born audio visual artist based in London. He draws inspiration from alchemical and gnostic texts, early renaissance choral music and Eastern European mythologies. He released The Funnel LP on Akashic Records in April 2019. He designs and makes 3D-printed reed instruments, reworking ancient designs with contemporary 3D modelling technologies. In 2020 he released Meat for the Guard Dogs on Cafe OTO’s Takuroku digital imprint, and the Rufus Orbis cassette for Boomkat Editions / Documenting Sound series. His music has been featured on BBC Four and he has worked for The National Theatre, The Southbank Centre and National Theatre Wales.
Otto Willberg plays various bass instruments and lives in London. Live, Otto performs unashamedly melodic improvisational workouts created almost entirely with heavily filtered bass harmonica and electric bass. Strangely abstracted funk and fusion, a blend of the abstruse and immediate. silky smooth, luxurious, odd and compelling, "like listening to Eberhard Weber through a drainpipe”.
Otto is often heard on acoustic and electric bass with Laurie Tompkins (Yes Indeed) and Charles Hayward (Abstract Concrete//This Heat), as well as the fractured No Wave unit Historically Fucked. His previous solo releases have ranged from extended technique double bass to explorations of the acoustics of a 19th century artillery fort.
He has a solo record called ’The Leisure Principle’ out on Oren Ambarchi's the Black Truffle label. 6 unashamedly melodic & profoundly strange workouts for heavily filtered bass harmonica & electric bass!
