Head down to Cafe OTO for a night of absurdist machinations with Ted Milton’s legendary post-punk, pogo-jazz trio Blurt, and the time-travelling anarchic-skronk quartet of James Allsop, Alex Bonney, Tim Giles and Isambard Khroustaliov …
Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London E8 3DL
Wednesday 9th September7:30pm Doors
8:30pm Scarla O’Horror
9:20pm Blurt£16 on the door, £14 advance, £8 members
“During the pandemic, I took a chance and sent Rudi a laptop with some software on it for him to perform with … it got trashed in the post, but Rudi managed to record some improvisations with it before it died. Here they are, a kind of elegy to a computer that I also wrote my PhD on … its damaged hallucinations live on!”
“Leverton Fox are improvisational trio Alex Bonney (trumpet), Tim Giles (drums) and Isambard Khroustaliov (electronics).
‘In The Flicker’ found the group challenging themselves by recording in a Sussex wood, and you can hear chance encounters with the landscape on ‘Amethyst Deceiver’, where a sparseness reveals birdsong and gentle breezes.
In contrast to such delicate moments, the robust ‘LIDAR Hailing UFOs’ is dominated by faltering drum machines, echoing percussion, drone-like swells and unpredictable electronics.
Grounded and naturalistic, yet brilliantly adventurous and otherworldly.”
Electronic Sound Magazine, November 2022.
“Upon initial examination, the latest album from Isambard Khroustaliov (Sam Britton) is a sprawling, incoherent, fundamentally unnavigable mess of wavering sounds, tense discordancy and angry pulses.
Even after a few listens, Shanzhai Acid is nigh on impenetrable, enveloping you in a sticky latticework of cross-crossing sounds and faltering non-melodies that bounce, spin and agitate uncontrollably from ear to ear. I played this on a walk through London’s rush-hour streets and somehow the chaos of the ten pieces here felt like the perfect accompaniment to the rabid, focused, bloodthirsty commitment of thousands of commuters trying to get home.
These observations are not criticisms. Shanzhai Acid is intentionally presented thus. Britton’s latest work takes two disparate inputs as the basis for what is essentially a conceptually auditory study: the inventive Chinese manufacture of cheaply-produced electronic devices, and the cultural hyper-legacy left behind by acid house music.
Not that you will hear any metronomic beats or aggressively-filtered 303s here. What can be detected, on ‘The Hand Of Mutt’ or ‘Quixotic Algorithmic Hubris’, is a freneticism and restlessness, expressed through algorithms, homegrown artificial intelligence and overlapping parameters. If you squint, you can feel the loved-up embrace of late-80s club music atomised into splinters of uncompromising electronics, assembled together like a badly-soldered printed circuit board. Those sounds rapidly cluster like Instagram ‘likes’ on an advert for a piece of hotly-tipped electronic gadgetry from a brand that you’ve never heard of; they then fall away as quickly after said device arrives in the mail, doesn’t work, and is promptly discarded. Like, buy, receive, replace; like, buy, receive, replace.
This is not an album for those with a nervous disposition. It is an intense listen from the opening gestures of ‘A History Of Cybernetics’ to the sudden stop of ‘Meanwhile Cephalopods’. It reflects back the manic world we live in, our increasing device dependency and the twitchy, restless state of mind that comes with pixelated overstimulation. Another fine release from Britton which casts electronic sound as the only obvious vehicle for his anthropological observations. ”
Words: Mat Smith @ www.further.com
Berliners! Check out Der Dritte Stand’s 5 day programme at Au Topsi Pohl starting Tuesday:
DER DRITTE STAND
MATTHIAS MÜLLER / MATTHIAS BAUER / RUDI FISCHERLEHNER
& FRIENDS
5 DAYS AT AU TOPSI POHL Berlin
12.7.2022
ALCHIMIA ORGANICA – Matthias Bauer & Maria Lucchese
DER DRITTE STAND
13.7.2022
DUO Matthias Bauer & Anna Kaluza
DER DRITTE STAND
14.7.2022
XENOFOX – Rudi Fischerlehner & Olaf Rupp
DER DRITTE STAND
15.7.2022
ZSOLT SORES solo
DER DRITTE STAND
16.7.2022
FOILS – Matthias Müller & Frank Paul Schubert
DER DRITTE STAND
With an art exhibition by Maria Lucchese
Concerts start at 20:30
Au Topsi Pohl, Pohlstraße 64, Berlin
