A police car’s blue lights flows through the venues windows from outside. A random moment that dances the back wall to Phew's sleek slivers. Blurring fragments that compass a faint fœtal heart’s beat that’s reverbed to boom outwards, as subtle injections of Japanese leak on through pinched-in reversed glints.
Café OTO
19 posts
Roedelius is now eighty-eight years old and has had a fifty-four-year career in music, starting with the formation of Kluster in 1969 (who later changed their name to Cluster). He then ventured in to the more soporific tones of slightly more ambient sounds with Harmonia, which then lead him to recording three albums with Brian Eno in the mid-seventies. Since then, he has released dozens of solo albums and many collaborations, including one with former Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri.
London 14 July 2018 Ah, those summer OTO nights. It’s so hot in here that I can almost feel the electrolytes leeching from my body. With my dotage rapidly approaching, this is one of those sauna-with-the-clothes-on experiences which I really wouldn’t put myself through anymore were it not for the […]
London 21 April 2018 A rather windswept Mark Pilkington (head honcho of Strange Attractor and one half of the esoteric surfing Téléplasmiste) is up first, treating us to a rare solo performance under guise of The Asterism. Getting jiggy with the interwebs reveals an asterism to be a pattern of […]
London 11 May 2017 There’s a scene towards the end of John Carpenter’s turbo-charged 1982 creature feature The Thing when the titular metamorph – just before being blown to shit by Kurt Russell’s vengeful sticks of dynamite – writhes and transmutes in all its slimy, gory glory.
London 25 January 2017 Charles Bullen of This Heat fame was up first, ricocheting a rich stream of bubbling metallics from a specially adapted lap-steel contraption. A set of gamboling percussives and deep Balinese-like bounces drawn through a shanty town of effects. All very fragmented, his sparse trajectories sped off […]
London 17 October 2016 It’s going to be very difficult to describe Senyawa in words. What follows will probably contain muddled metaphors, chaotic similes, idiotic expostulations, expletives, wild imagery, desperate comparisons, upholstery by Zachery, knick-knackery by Thackery, Terpsichore by Dickery and dickery by Dock. Younger readers – or those of […]
London 20 May 2016 Tonight, Matthew, Café OTO will be a smoky jazz club, only without the smoke due to it being 2016. It’s Ellroy for vapers, a healthier Lynch movie. Because tonight Little Annie is here delivering the latest instalment of her nearly forty-year career of eclectic awesomeness, on the back […]
London 24 March 2016 I think about what Bonnie “Prince” Billy has been to me the last few years since I began listening to him. I was late to the party, obviously, but caught up very fast and developed my obsession in earnest.
London 13 February 2016 I suppose it would be prudent to start off with something of a disclaimer – it’s going to be very difficult to get much critical distance from this evening. Like no other gig I can think of, I was nervous when I thought I wouldn’t be […]
London 3 February 2016 It’s all very restful really, sitting around at the front of OTO, bathed in the soft orange glow of the tea-lights scattered around the stage and sipping a cranberry juice. I’m trying to get my head around Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent tome on anti-fragility whilst awaiting […]
London 10 September 2015 Café Oto, a place that seems to be shorthand for Bobos to some people. However, tonight there were far more middle-aged music nerds than craft-ale and pulled pork enthusiasts (as there seems to be every time I’m at the venue, yet it has this reputation as […]
London 16 June 2015 There is a German proverb which reads, “Jede Leiter fängt mit der untersten Sprosse an und nach der obersten kommt nur noch freier Fall.” We might possibly translate this as, ‘Every ladder begins at the lowest rung, but after the highest the only way is down’. […]
London 7 August 2014 Probably the best way to imagine this gig is to picture the Newtonian Laws of Motion resolving themselves inside a packed Turkish sauna. If Car A is driving down a road at 100mph, whilst Car B is driving at 100mph in the opposite direction, if they […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps tackles a trio of recorded documents from London’s Café Oto released for wider consumption on the ever-expanding Otoroku label… Decoy with Joe McPhee – Spontaneous Combustion This one grabs my attention first, the gritty screen-printed abstracts go well with first half of this tasty double, recorded back in […]
25 August 2013 en-coun-ter (en-koun-ter): To come upon or meet with. (Origin: 1250–1300; Middle English encountren < Anglo-French enco ( u ) ntrer; Old French < Vulgar Latin *incontrāre, equivalent to in- in-1 + –contrāre, derivative of contrā against) Hynekian System of Classification: ‘Close encounter of the third kind’ – […]
London 13 April 2013 Slipping quietly into the performance area, arch-noisemonger Russell Haswell opens his set with a slow build of spluttering sharp attacks, crawling eventually into chaos wrapped in shards of broken glass spat bloody and still sizzling into the ears of the willing victims in the crowd. Haswell […]
Harry Wheeler of Harmonic Rooms spends a week in November in the company of some of the current greats of the acoustic guitar, and reflects on the enduring legacy of John Fahey and Robbie Basho. Last November, I spent over a week in and out of the recording studio with […]
Café Oto, London 19 February 2012 71 years old, and with the gravitas of a Prussian general contemplating one final glorious attack on Paris, free jazz saxophone legend Peter Brötzmann swings into Old London Town for a two night stand at Dalston’s Café Oto, E8’s achingly hip home of improvisation, […]