Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.  Celebrating thirty years of collaboration, Loren Connors and Alan Licht performed for two nights at OTO on May 5 and 6th, 2023. On the second night, with the stage lit in blue, Connors took up a seat on the piano stool whilst Licht picked up the guitar. What followed was the duo’s first ever set with Connors on piano - one of only a few times Connors has played piano live at all - here captured and issued as The Blue Hour. Its spacious warmth came as a total surprise live, but makes complete sense for a duo whose dedicated expressionism takes inspiration from a vast spectrum of emotion. Both opening with single notes to start, it doesn't take long before a surface rises and begins to shimmer. A run up the keys, the drop of a feedback layer on a sustained and bent note. The two begin to exchange notes in tandem and brief touches of melody and chord hover. After a while, Connors picks up the guitar, stands it in his lap and sweeps a wash of colour across Licht’s guitar. Sharp, glassy edges begin to form, open strings and barred frets darkening the space. When his two pedals begin to merge, Licht finds a dramatic organ-like feedback and it’s hard not to imagine Rothko’s Chapel, its varying shades of blue black ascending and descending in the room. When Connors goes back to the piano for the second side, the pair quickly lock into a refrain and light pours in. It’s a kind of sound that Licht says reminds him of what he and Connors would do when the duo first started playing together 30 years ago. It’s certainly more melodic than some of their more recent shows, and the atonal shards of At The Top of the Stairs seem to totally dissolve. What is always remarkable about Licht is that his enormous frame of reference doesn't seem to weigh him down, and instead here he is able to delicately place fractures of a Jackson C Frank song (“Just Like Anything”,) amongst the vast sea of Connors’ blues. Perhaps it's the pleasure of playing two nights in a row together, or the nature of Connor’s piano playing combined with Licht’s careful listening, but the improvisation on The Blue Hour feels remarkably calm and unafraid. There’s nothing to prove and no agenda except the joy of sounding colour together. Totally beautiful.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Saturday 6th May 2023 by Billy SteigerMixed by Oli BarrettMastered by Sean McCannArtwork by Loren Connors Layout by Oli BarrettScreenprint by Tartaruga Manufactured in the UK by Vinyl Press.  Edition of 300 standard LPs, 100 LPs with screenprinted artwork by Loren Connors printed as inserts. Also available on a limted run of 200 CDs. 

Gloriously psychoactive set from Joke Lanz (turntable) and Ute Wassermann (voice + objects), recorded as part of a stellar line-up alongside Charmaine Lee and Jackson Burton at OTO in May 2025. From the outset, there's a real sense of playfulness here, but the technical skill on display from both artists here is truly jaw dropping. They both wear it lightly though, allowing the listener to sit back and bask in the generosity of a rare gift, freely given. Ute's voice covers a scarcely believable range, not so much speaking in tongues as channeling an entire other realm. Guttural growls and avian trills mix with half-swallowed breaths and Clangerish whistles; gulps and gasps and overtones spin around each other, all interspersed with a whole array of bird whistles, noisemakers and found objects. Through Ute's vocalisations, Joke weaves snatches and snippets of sound from the turntables, crafting a surreal, absurdist collage of orchestras and oratorios, clattering percussion and stammering preachers, low brass and penny whistles and much, much more. Both artists move with a remarkable dexterity, and, even more than this, a vitality, a sense of always being fully in the moment, even if that moment is restlessly hurtling ever forward at several hundred miles an hour. There's such an uncanny symbiosis to the duo's interactions - clearly hard-earned - that it's genuinely hard in some places to tell which sound is coming from which performer, or how such a intricate, multilayered sounds could be coming from just two performers at all. All of this races along at a breakneck pace, barely ever giving the audience time to settle. But why would you want to? The sonic landscape keeps flashing by in an ever-brilliant sugar-rush of kaleidoscopic colour, and it's no hardship at all to just give yourself over to it. -- Recorded by Rory SalterMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

"Monasunne is the duo of composers Lara Agar and Louis d'Heudières. The album Fields Become Sky is the band’s debut. Starting from their shared experience of growing up in East Anglia in the UK, the duo dug into the history of the region, finding myths and poems written at a time when it was an independent kingdom. The Anglo-Saxon poetry - dealing with questions of death, mortality and spirituality - forms the textual backdrop of the record and is sung in its original Old English. The duo treat the language as a sonic artefact and voice it through ‘the musical contemporary’ autotune, giving the music a wonderfully unsettling temporality. Rather than embalm a buried past, Monasunne re-imagine the historical geographies as a myth. The sonic worlding that results is a journeying across distanced times. Fields Become Sky was developed over multiple recording and listening sessions from 2020-2023, using a mixture of self-programmed synths, violin textures, field recordings and autotuned vocals. Musically adjacent to a hybrid of Under Byen, Björk and Felicia Atkinson, the album traverses an emotional landscape of ritualistic chanting, cavernous spaces and subterranean kicks. From the primordial phonographic vocal folds emerge alternative lullabies in a lost mothertongue."

“Chwalfa” (Welsh for “dispersal, rout, upheaval, upset, or a confused or chaotic state”) documents the first return of Incapacitants to the UK since 2016. With the windows boarded up and the subs doubled, two ordinary looking blokes Toshiji Mikawa's and Fumio Kosaka obliterate OTO’s usual whisper hush with clipped out, scorched earth tape loops and pedal chains - creating such an excoriating din it transports the room to the planet’s furnace core and back again. It’s all music, all at once -  a whorling vortex delivered at time bending velocity.  For Vymethoxy Redspiders, who writes the release’s extensive liners, “[the music] is a transcendental outpouring of raw consciousness and firmamental emotion, more in line with the “fire music” of free jazz players like Albert Ayler and Dave Burrell or Sun Ra in his most apocalyptic moments of Moog sorcery than most of the things I long came to associate with the practice of Noise. Incapacitants’ unholy racket morphs from vista of tormented glitch shimmer to crater of obliterated tape loop to deafening light pouring down on disaster fathoms. I'm struck by how Modal or Raga-like it sounds at points, where a deep tremor drone burrs like a wide open plain; for a “pure” noise that is often considered “not musical” it sure hits me where music hits most affectingly and more so than most sounds daring to call themselves music!”  “Chwalfa” contains two tracks, one from each night of the residency. It arrives as a glass mastered CD in a digipak. Edition of 500 with liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on the 6th and 7th of September, 2024 by Billy Steiger. Mixed by Oli Barrett. Deemed best left unmastered. Cover photo by Paul Watson. Layout by Abby Thomas. 

Octavia M Sheffner is an Almaty, Kazakhstan-based producer, writer and visual artist. Their music is a kaleidoscopic collage, hypnotic while perpetually reformatting, longform with a hook focused immediacy. Previous releases have appeared on labels including Suite 309 and Blorpus Editions, alongside a sprawling catalogue of self-released albums and aliases. With 'Shivering;' their new tape on Bezirk, this approach steps into a darker zone without losing the vibrant energy that makes their work so crucial. The tracks on 'Shivering;' were recorded in November 2022, which contributed to their murkier tone. “For me, November is a cursed month. It has a sour, dour aura to it. A time of transition when the weather won’t make up its mind. I was going through November fever, a sense of uneasiness and unreality. And that’s partly why I made this really melancholy, distant, voidy record,” Octavia explains. When listening to these tracks, you get sucked into a hypnagogic netherworld. There’s a feeling of descent, but no despair. An acquiescence perhaps, to slipping into the darkness and taking in its trippy scenery. The first track, ‘Eris & Aneris...’ comes from Sheffner recycling an older recording from another project. Propelled by a chugging metallic pulse, snippets of vocals and other sound blend into a blur over the perpetual motion groove. Things deepen on ‘Insomnie a deux’, compiled from a bank of Youtube vinyl rips of everything from church chorals to old folk songs. “Vinyl rips to Youtube have all this annoying high end to them,” Octavia explains. “These clicks that I really can’t stand. I spent so long trying to filter them out, and that’s how the track ended up sounding so washed out.” Like so much of Octavia M Sheffner’s music, each track acts as a nexus point, an intersection of strands from the online archive somehow wrestled into, if not harmony, a peculiar equilibrium. “I think of the album as being two spiral staircases eating each other, like an ouroboros,” they explain. The ominous tone is matched in the artwork. Like all the visuals for their releases, it was done by Octavia themselves. Intrinsically tied to the sounds, this time they took inspiration from the heavy negative space found in Daguerreotypes. The power that comes from washes of black. It taps a deep rooted fixation. “The ‘Alone’ episode of Spongebob changed my sensibilities forever,” they explain. “Speech bubbles in the void. It’s psychological horror in a kids cartoon. I love it deeply, it ruined my life. It resonates with this album.” It's not all darkness though. On the closing track, a gorgeous mesh of overlapping strings underpins a spoken word sample of someone going through the mundane practice of tuning up an instrument. “It’s to bring the record back from the dark world. To lure you back into physicality with recognizable sound or space. Rather than an abstract realm where rainbow lights flash in the dark periodically. “

‘Harmonium II’ is the new album from London-based artist Zheng Hao. Across two side long pieces, she manipulates feedback into clumps of pure tone and interruptions of chirping, chirruping high frequencies. It follows her recent album for Krim Kram, "Breaks", and more directly, "Harmonium", released on Hard Return in 2022. With her duo, Oishi (alongside Ren Shang), she released "once upon a time there was a mountain" on Bezirk in 2023. As Hao explains, Harmonium II should not be viewed as a follow-up to the first Harmonium but a parallel exploration of the same ideas and themes: “’Harmonium’ refers to a type of balanced feedback, more specifically, a resonance,” she says. Where the first Harmonium involved controlling tones from a harmonica, no traditional acoustic instruments are present on this installment. Instead, Hao explores loops of recording devices and listening technology fed into a modular synth. On the first side, 'I', she turns a Zoom recorder – a tool used by field recordists to capture sound - into an instrument. Placing headphones close to the Zoom’s microphones, she tuned the feedback tones generated into sine waves from her modular synth. In a poetic twist, this approach creates an electronic world with the verdancy of a soundscape. Low, rumbling tones give the impression of an aircraft passing overhead. Squeaking high frequencies sound like voluble wildlife. Hypnotic pulses and beating tones emerge as her movements shift the system. Through recursion and gesture comes a tentative approximation of organic life. “I’m moving the headphones around so that it feels a bit like insects coming in and out,” Hao explains. “There’s also a low frequency feedback from the Zoom recorder itself, and I’m fading that feedback into a modular generated low sine wave as a transition, and then gradually fade the modular sound to a phantom rhythm. Then again and again.” For the second side Hao uses a reverb pedal and a mixing desk. Opening with a bed of stridulating bleeps and buzzes, human gestures can be heard in the system once more, gentle sweeps and waves eventually held in a suspended drone. Equilibrium arrives as humming tones bend, curve and fold into each other. It’s a more meditative piece than the first side, a bed of sounds that could be coarse and jarring frequencies coalesced into something utterly other, and utterly compelling. In Hao’s practice, conventional relations between performer and sound sources are twisted. Sound becomes malleable. Graspable without the obstructions and limitations of a conventional instrument or a DAW. Reference points for her music could be the visceral sound explorations of Maryanne Amacher, the haptic feedback sculpting of Rafael Torral, and the no-input mixing board experiments of Toshimaru Nakamura. It undoubtedly also chimes with the recent release on Bezirk by Regan Bowering. Although using different tools and reaching different outcomes, for both, signal paths are hacked and rearranged, feedback is embraced, and gestures are translated into sonic phenomena. Sounds that are typically discarded or avoided are held onto for their affective, textural and interactive possibilities. The unfamiliar sensations residing in unconventional sound sources are embraced. “Feedback- for me, is less about the sound output and more about enjoying the 'control' during the performance process,” Hao explains. “It’s like a tug-of-war between me and the feedback, listening very intently to the sounds in the speakers, my fingers tightly pressing on the mixer knobs cautiously to prevent any distortions. I enjoy the feeling of this back-and-forth and the vibrations that occur when feedback happens, which feels warm to me, or maybe it’s because I’m usually sweating when I’m playing with feedback…” Zheng Hao is a sound artist and experimental musician, born in Wuhan, China, currently based in London, United Kingdom. She is a member of the duos Oishi (with Ren Shang) and ecm (with Joseph Khan). Her solo works explore electronic and electro-acoustic instruments, including modular synthesis and feedback. She has released music on Otoroku, Falt, Molt Fluid, Krim Kram, and Research Laboratories.