Friday 17 November 2023, 7.30pm
Pleased to host a collaborative event between OTO and Rotterdam based non-profit foundation and a multi-media alternative cultural centre, WORM - which focuses on experimental, new media art, avant-garde and underground art - featuring various groupings of some exceptional improvising musicians from the UK and the Netherlands.
Ecka Mordecai is a London based artist working with sound, scent and performance.
Her mode is improvisational and driven by a desire to explore the feel of things, be it through touch: making and preparing instruments (cello, horsehair harp, psaltery, eggflute, Bluetooth speakers), or emotionally: exploring the way different sounds, scents and gestures feel and produce feeling.
Notable projects include her solo album Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), Sound perfumes (Aequill, 2022), soundtrack and voiceover for filmmaker Kamila Kuc’s I was there (plus a written passage in accompanying book published 2025, Delere Press), and musical composition for Voyage Through the Diamond Realm (De Beers at Frieze Art Fair, 2025/2026).
Her viral Instagram project Cable Queen is an ongoing spite-piece inspired by the grind of her job working as a sound technician in a male-dominated industry/world, in which she silently coils audio cables whilst looking into the camera. The comments, written by strangers, expose the conditions of her labour.
She has performed and released music with David Toop & Christian Kobi, Valerio Tricoli (as Mordecoli), Andrew Chalk & Tom James Scott (as Circaea), and as a cellist with Vanishing, Thurston Moore and Alexander Tucker. She has performed the works of Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Antoine Beuger, Yoni Silver and Taku Sugimoto.
Duncan Harrison, poet and sound maker, is one of the strong holders within the South English Weird Noise scene. His music displays a broad array of cut-up sound poetry, improvisational strategies and audio collages with sonic left-overs abstracted from daily environments. No surprise he regularly collaborates with the likes of Dylan Nyoukis, Karen Constance, Pascal Nichols, Ali Robertson and many more.
vo ezn -- sound && infrastructure artist, working on server-side tensions and introverted interfaces ][ figuring out tools for-to knowledge-sharing / opting-out / autonomy ][ --to-for-by-with on my own terms. brewing a monthly radio transmission -- non-zero exit at radio worm. part of feminist server collectives/networks systerserver / anarchaserver / minadoraserver ///// infrastructure caretaker at hackers & designers [sound] ————– field recordings _ configure / reconfigure / split-splice in anti-gravity.Blood’s boiling waters [lever burns.
Jacco Weener is a performance/visual/audio artist from Rotterdam. Besides his solo performances (which are about the intersection of pop culture and religion/spirituallity mostly) he also sings in the bands Cantos Deus (a religious no wave band) and Buurtbeheer (a social housing punk band). With both band and solo he has released a multiple of records on CD, Vinyl and Cassette.
www.jaccoweener.nl
Reinier van Houdt started working with taperecorders, radio's, objects and various string-instruments at a young age. He studied piano at the Liszt-Akademie in Budapest & the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He developed a fascination for matters that escape notation: sound, timing, space, physicality, memory, noise, environment - points beyond interpretation and improvisation. He has built himself an unusual repertoire that consistently resulted from personal quests; be it from collaborations with composers & musicians, from research in archives, from the composing and staging of music-performances or from unorthodox studies of classical music.
He premiered music by Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Francisco López, Charlemagne Palestine, Yannis Kyriakides, Maria de Alvear, Jerry Hunt, Michael Pisaro, Walter Marchetti. He has also worked with John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Luc Ferrari, Olivier Messiaen and Christian Marclay. Reinier van Houdt plays in Current 93, recently releasing an album with contributions by Nick Cave, John Zorn and Antony Hegarty. He is also one of the moving forces behind the experimental music outfit MAE/MAZE.
https://www.reiniervanhoudt.nl/
Lia Mazzari is a sound artist and researcher working with open-source sound transmission technologies in environmental research as unique tools for alternative ‘live’ models of listening, responding to, and composing with more-than-human environments. Her solo and collaborative works span activist radio labs, cryospheric sound transmissions, whip cracking performances and experimental cello concerts. Winner of an Oram Award in 2022, Lia has developed works for Tate Modern/Britain (UK), Biennale Gherdeina (IT), Zone2Source Gallery (NL), South London Gallery (UK), V&A Dundee (UK), Q-02 (BE), and Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts (IN). She is currently an AHRC/Techne-funded PhD candidate at the Centre for GeoHumanities/Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Ash Kilmartin is a visual artist, writer and radiomaker from Aotearoa New Zealand who lives in Rotterdam. Her work is concerned with the speaking voice as a tool for finding and making public space, as the hinge between the physical material of the body, and the social fabric of language. She is interested in historical characterizations of the speaking body; in non-linguistic vocalisations as communication; and in how the voice can be translated into orthography, texture, or space. With Linus Bonduelle she is co-host of weekly radio show Ever Widening Circles on Radio WORM.
