Morphogenesis (UK)

Since their formation in 1985 as an offshoot of a 'New Music' class taught by '60s Scratch Orchestra member Roger Sutherland, Morphogenesis have maintained the semi-stable membership of Adam Bohman, Ron Briefel, Clive Graham, Clive Hall and Michael Prime (alas sadly no more Sutherland).

Their half dozen tapes, albums and CDs are incredible group mind recordings based on sessions which employ live electronics, unconventional instrumentation (radios, amplified springs, water-machine, Bohman's prepared violin) and draw additional inspiration from its members own experiments/experience   (biologist Primes recordings of botanical biofeedback for example). Rarely performing outside of London, they aim to integrate any combination of circumstances - social and environmental - into their work, each performance an unrepeatable expression of the acoustic and social ecology of a given time and place.

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Damion Romero (USA)

Damion Romero is a Los Angeles based practitioner of power acoustics and intense low-level sound manipulation who has recorded as Speculum Fight, and collaborated with MSBR, Astro, Spencer Yeh, and many more. Romero's live work explores the physicality of sound and how it behaves in specific spaces 'Romero specialises in noise...it's relentless, but not abusive or overly aggressive. It's a looming mechanical Goliath with the strength to destroy everything in sight, but instead of lashing outwards it remains restrained and self-contained.... it manages to hold a subtle austere beauty that beams out from its core and warps everything that it touches...' James Clarke

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Kodama (JP/USA)

Kodama is the remarkable, exploratory ongoing recording project of two visual and sound artists - Hitoshi Kojo and Michael Northam. Their first release 'Turning Leaf Migrations' (2009) was recorded in various improbable locations whenever they crossed paths over the course of several years, its crisp psychedelic aura finally realized, edited and assembled in a cluttered garage in the west side of Indianapolis. 'Using found objects to seduce voices from unlikely sources as well as traditional instruments of wind, wires and wood. Kodama weaves between emotional poetry and dynamic forces of noises. Our recordings have a strong atmosphere of each location -- the top of a mountain in Switzerland, a campground in Ohio, Lofoten Island in Norway, the Arctic Circle in Finland, Niagara Falls, etc. It includes a lot of the dirts of the raw recordings, but also incredibly beautiful moments such as the session with an owl in a Slovenian forest, an alpine summit singing meditation under the vast galaxy...." H

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Duncan Harrison & Ian Murphy (UK)

Duncan Harrison is is a member of epic psych drone collective Plurals and floor clearing noise-core louts Horse Vomit, his work is often a brooding and/or uplifting mix of ecstatic tones, disembodied voices and claustrophobic noise. Ian Murphy (Hobo Sonn) was inspired as a teenager by the surreal magic to be found in home recording. His sound is based around spontaneously manipulated audio from his battered MPC-2000 sampler.

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Films from Fabio Roberti

Fabio Roberti is host of 'Strength Through Failure' on the long running non-commercial radio station WFMU, and a founder Directart Productions - a media collective that produces films, videos and records. He'll screen two films

Avant Garde Showcase.
(Jim Sharpe & Fabio Roberti 1994/2006 22 Minutes)

Rare television archives/restoration, music & performance.

Robot Movie.
(Jim Sharpe / 1986/2005 / 16mm 2.5 minutes)

An unfinished document of a presentation recorded in the 1986. Twenty years later, a reexamination of the incomplete film revealed new information previously unrecognized. To extract some of this information we employed a new soundtrack and re-edited parts of the film. What remains is a statement on pop culture gone awry.

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Friday Gallery

Nuslux (FI)

Nuslux is the solo project of Roope Eronen, mainstay of Finland's collectivist Avarus Orchestra and founding member of the excellent experimental label (and festival) Lal Lal Lal. 'There's an home-made oscillator and an old bontemp which has been tuned....All the instruments have been built for me by my friend Tomas...Whether you are playing alone or with others the music deconstruct and reconstruct all the time on different levels. [I]t's not a totally chaotic process, we are interested in figuring out what happens when we play... but in the moment of playing nothing matters...' RE

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Buffle (BE)

Buffle have been playing together for almost ten years, spreading their positive-vibed, broken kraut pop jams on labels like Lal Lal Lal, Ultra Eczema, Bread and Animals. Floating guitars, prehistoric mini rhythms, Alga Marghen sound poetry, electronic trance music, sunny Congolese melodies entwined and colliding in visionary, clumsy ways that shouldn't work - but never cease to....

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Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson (IS)

Icelandic musician Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson has been a longtime member of Stilluppsteypa, who, during their tumultuous existence, have released over a dozen recordings laced with subversion, blackhumour, and horror while retaining   'a compulsion for a glacial beauty through their intoxicated visions of the sublime'. As a solo artist he investigates the absurd at a microcosmic level, his sparsely populated compositions shifting back and forth between the objectivity of controlled electro-acoustic minimalism and a volatile subjective nihilism that manifests as random sonic detritus streaming through DSP filters. 'If this one thing doesn't add up, then nothing should. ' SBS

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Sunshine Variety (UK)

The solo project of Rowan Forestier-Walker, a mixture of acoustmatic, tape manipulation, broken and doctored instruments, creating perfectly crystallized psychedelic drone and repetition. Formally a member of Leopard Leg, she now plays in Walpurgis Night, Weirding Vessel and other various collectives about the town of Brighton.

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HereHareHere (UK)  

'Brighton duo Hereharehereís multi-tracked male and female voices start as unnerving chants emanating from dark shadows, rising into unhinged glossolalia and cresting in a threatening purr, like a wild cat driven insane with fear.' Daniel Spicer The Wire

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Saturday Theatre

Bill Orcutt & Paul Hession

Underground filmmaker and prodigiously talented instrumentalist Orcutt formed Harry Pussy in 1992. Harry Pussy were the most extreme hardcore group of the post-punk era - their hyper-fast, hyper-free, hyper-dexterous onslaught fueled by wife/drummer Adris Hoyos' freeform, unrestrained vocals and Orcutt's atonal, breakneck, four string, de-tuned guitar. By the time they imploded in 1997 Orcutt had released his first solo recording, aided by contributions from drummer Danny Arad and saxman Joe Cohen, it cementing his reputation as one of the most gifted, innovative, and sonically wayward of players.

Orcutt's return has been rumoured for some time, and as we go to press - out of nowhere - a new full length solo LP described by David Keenan   / Volcanic Tongue as ' The ultimate solo guitar record from the greatest rock guitarist of the 'noise' era. A no-brainer for album of the year...' ...it's a pleasure to welcome Bill Orcutt to COOS!

Born in Leeds in 1956, Hession took up drumming at the age of 15 and has since played and recorded worldwide. His torrential polyrhythmic style and his ability to raise the stakes in formidable company has seen him collaborate with many of the major figures on the free music scene - Peter Brotzmann, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nichols, Phil Minton, Otomo Yoshihide amongst many others. 'Hession isn't hammering out a beat, he's shaping a music from snare rolls, bass-drum accents and cymbal strokes. His touch is super-sensitive, but girded by a steely understanding of metrical logic. The pleasure Hession derives from his ability to bend, fondle and overlap time is palpable...' Andrew Cyrille

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Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Baer (DE)

Intimate, absurd, feral and aggressive in its homemade weirdness, Hjuler & Bär have self-published their dadaesque sound poetry experiments on small-edition lathe-cut LPs, tapes, and CDRs for years, usually adorning them with elaborate junk sculptures and profane paintings. The husband and wife duo uses deceptively simple means - typically just their voices, a cassette-tape recorder and a microphone - to create astonishing suburban dramas that are somehow both sweetly charming and staggeringly psychotic, sometimes simultaneously. In their recordings join Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Bär as they perform acts of banal heroics, like exploring the basement... taking their son for a bicycle ride... walking with a red shirt into a field of cattle... or pondering reforms made to the Danish police system. They are painters, sculptors, filmmakers and musicians based in Flensberg, Germany, near the Danish border. Their artwork has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals around the world.

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Edwards/Noble/Wilkinson trio (UK)

The trio take avant-garde jazz back to its roots, a virtuoso stream of consciousness, momentum, rhythm and drive, delivered by three of the London's most experienced and hardest working musicians.

Wilkinson's tone, beginning with a high dying-animal shriek and encompassing torrents of rough-edged sound, is aptly matched by Noble's assaults on the stripped-down kit, provide a shifting-sand ground of hurricane snare-rolls, cymbal flurries and alien tamped sounds. Edwards' position as the go-to man of British bass is reinforced by his performance here, forceful bowing and precision plucks underlining Wilkinson's explorations perfectly, and, on his brief solo spots, showing a mastery of colour, shading, contrast and an ear for the sheer weirdness of sounds.' Live at Café OTO: End Times Quarterly

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Justice Yeldham (AU)

What's been described as 'a trumpet player trapped in a two dimensional universe' is in fact the unique audio work of Justice Yeldham, a maverick musician with an unhealthy obsession with sheets of broken glass. By pressing his face and lips against the glass whist employing various vocal techniques ranging from throat singing to raspberries, he turns discarded household windows into crude musical instruments, resulting in a wide variety of cacophonous noises that are strangely controlled and oddly musical.

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Simon Whetham

Described by Rinus Van Alebeek, organiser of Das Kleine Field Recording Festival in Berlin, as 'a novelist', Whetham produces episodic and dramatic works, composed from field recordings he has gathered during numerous projects and international travels. From the Icelandic waterfalls, footsteps in snow, ice cracking and whaling ships of his debut 'Dark Light Audio Tracks' to 'ascension suspensions' minimally-processed recordings of cable cars in the French Alps, his work has taken him to countries that include Mongolia, Brazil and Estonia. His work has been released by Entr'acte, Trente Oiseaux, Gruenrekorder and Lens Records.

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Chora (UK)

Along with emerging kindred spirits, Helhesten, PWHMOBS, The Hunter Gracchus & Ben Nash, Chora's represent a fresh triangulation of the northern free music family. After a formative stint in Sheffield, the core duo of Ben Morris and Rob Lye have taken their kaleidoscopic drone mantras, extended percussive techniques, found-sound manipulation, kitchen sink gamelan and elephantine vocal swoops south to the streets of Peckham. For tonight's performance they'll be joined by Pascal Nichols, Ben Nash and Karl Brummer.

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Saturday Gallery

UFO Antler Band (UK)

'Conceived in the mid eighties as the black veined whites making home made lo fi budget off the radar psych junk never playing a show or learning how to play. 20 years on nothings changed fed on witchcraft lsd films jack kirby comics druid green fuzz'

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City Hands (NL)  

The intrinsic solo explorations of Manuel Padding - The Hague's Helbaard initiator / organizer and Silver Ghost tape label mogul . 'Psychedelic improv music that fits just as creepy as the best John Carpenter soundtrack '. Early collaborations include Mik Quantius of the German Krautrock legend Embryo

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Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides (UK)

The duo of Kelly Jayne Jones (of Cooper-Jones) and Pascal Nichols (Stuckometer, Neon Tempal) have been performing together as PWHMOBS since early 2007. Originally from Manchester they've forged a worthy improvisational methodology based around Kelly's celestial flute and Pascal's kinetic drumming. 'Fantastic, out of nowhere free jazz/punk primitive higher-mind zone out...the mode is full on tranced Don Cherry plays Holy Mountain-style improvised psych with nods to Taj Mahal Travellers, Arthur Doyle, Sun City Girls...One of the best UK underground sides/groups in an age' David Keenan Volcanic Tongue

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Eli Keszler

Using drums, along with crotales, bowed metal, strings, and amplification, Eli creates a unique whirlwind of sound that balances sparse and piercing harmonics with intense, fast, free rhythm and sustain. He has performed, recorded or collaborated with artists such as Jandek, Phill Niblock (performing a new work of for bowed crotales and saxophone along with Ashley Paul), Roscoe Mitchell, Loren Connors, Anthony Coleman, Howard Stelzer, Aki Onda, and Greg Kelley amongst others.

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Cotopaxi (DE)

Germans born but Amsterdam based, Johann and Hannah have been making a distinct and inspiring impact on the Dutch experimental scene by organizing concerts and art-shows, and releasing a multitude of homespun books, prints, tapes and cds on their Stenze Quo label. Cotopaxi is their own sound project - a playful interaction of like-minds that uses found sounds, modified (toy) instruments, tapes and electronics all with a great sensitivity for dynamics and balance. Their approach is warm and positive.

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Sunday Theatre

Ju Suk Reet Meate & Oblivia (USA)

Oblivia (Rock'n'Roll Jackie) began working with sound in the late 70s, soon finding like-minded cohorts in the LA Free Music Society and Portland's crossover free-noise/psych/jazz pioneers Smegma - both loose knit collectives of outsider musicians vaguely united by a shared commitment to DIY art actions. After experiments with guitar and voice she found her focus creatively plundering found sounds through modified and weighted turntables. ' My visual art medium is assemblage or collage. So it comes naturally to assemble sounds. I enjoy hearing how beautiful or humourous mixing can be, just like I love the way things come together visually when assembling 'cut ups'...' O

Reet Meate is a founder member of Smegma, a multi-instrumentalist who, for nearly 40 years, has been conjuring up incredible multi-layered, free-spirited deconstructions of popular music - from splicing primal garage rock with cartoon sound effects and speech clips, to coaxing unworldly sounds out of his strings, to wild vocalizations, to freeform improvisations with trumpet. Meate's influence is not to be underestimated...

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Sten Hanson (SE)

Born in Klövsjö, Sweden in 1936, Sten Hanson first came to prominence in the early '60s as an experimental poet and composer. He pioneered the use of tape-recording techniques in the renewal and development of poetry, and as a means to expand the limitations of language. One of the forerunners in the field of multi-media art, Hanson's combined his theories of 'Text-sound-visual image' with intensely personal live performances. From his earliest pieces consisting of rough cut-and-paste tape collages, through to the later use of computer to apply effects, Hanson 's voice remains the focus throughout.

An influential figure in the Swedish art scene his varied productions includes instrumental and electronic music, and work for dance, theatre, radio and television.

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Joseph Hammer (USA)

Hammer has been active on LA's sound-art scene for over twenty-five years, his performances creating live 'phonomontages' with vintage audio gear, tape loops and sound sources abstracted by hand with magnets. Rejecting the sequential, Hammer embraces chance as central to his creativity, his work drawing on the complexities of listening and playing, memory and time. His primary influences are simultaneous AM radio stations and an episode of the '70s sci-fi 'Land of the Giants' in which aliens are thwarted by cut and spliced audio warfare. Alongside numerous collaborations he's worked extensively with LA Free Music Society co-founder Rick Potts in projects like Points of Friction, Dinosaurs with Horns and Solid Eye.

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