When I was involved with college radio, there were a few labels I could reliably count on for providing interesting music. One of those was Otoroku, a label I initially wrote off because I found out about them through their reissue of The Topography of the Lungs, which I had head described as “the worst album ever.” But I gave it a second chance when Rachel picked it out from the library for a show, and I ended up digging into everything they had to offer, particularly some of the live shows featuring performers like Alexander Hawkins and Akira Sakata backed with the Turkish free jazz outfit Konstrukt. These were recorded at the label’s venue, Café Oto.
Thanet Tape Centre, meanwhile, I knew about through the label’s founder Benedict Drew, who makes agitprop-ish visual art—politically obvious, but gaudy and sickly enough to be surreal and compelling. He also put out one of my favorite albums of 2017, Crawling Through Tory Slime. Which, again, is politically obvious, but surreal and compelling.
So a show by Thanet Tape Centre at Café Oto was something I sought out for my weekend in London, naturally.
The venue is a moderately-sized space in Dalston, a neighborhood, like many immigrant or working-class neighborhoods in London, which is in the process of gentrifying. There’s still an open-air West Indian and African Market a couple blocks away, but it’s quote-unquote hip enough that members of The Community heard that Italian Vogue had called it London’s “coolest venue” a decade ago, which I thought they were joking about until I looked it up. (“That was a while ago. It’s probably not cool anymore.”)
Said Stuart Lee (who is allegedly a regular, at least around 2012) in a Guardian article about it: “The vibe is functional and no-frills … rather than the ersatz no-frills vibe that tossers with too much money aim for in trendy spaces. It’s what Yanks tell you downtown NY is like but actually isn’t. It’s what I dreamed London would be like, and what it was a bit like in the 80s.”
The show was a much delayed celebration of the label’s first release, Jem Finer’s Hrdy-Grdy, but we opened with an invocation from Arianne Churchman. She performed on a harp which featured a horse head protruding out of it. The horse’s mane covered the strings, and she spent the first several minutes of her performance singing a cappella while she tied scraps of paper into the mane.
Finer, when he took the stage alone with his hurdy-gurdy, began with what sounded like a folk song. It was slightly rough hewn, not always perfectly in time, but was ultimately intended to set the scene, to envelop the audience in the instrument’s incantatory drone. For the rest of his set, he explored the sonic possibilities of his instrument, warping the sustained ringing of the strings by twisting the tuning pegs or manipulating elements normally tucked away under a wooden cover. (I’m not familiar with the instrument, but he often did things with it that it didn’t seem like you were “supposed” to do. I could be entirely wrong.) For other parts of the set he would loop fragments of sound or filter the instrument through a series of small electronics to give it an otherworldly quality.
By the time he was finished, the audience was primed for the strangeness that was to follow. Up next was Rebecca Lee, who performs under the name Bredbeddle, making music out of the stuttering fragments of sound captured live on a couple of turntables. The raw audio is fed into into her laptop, which is then manipulated and layered into a complex collage of skips, crackles, and fragmented audio, particularly from English folk or classical records. Every now and then she allowed a sample to play out for a minute or two, a lone voice singing or a conversation between two people, which would float eerily on top of everything else until it was cut off mid phrase. The samples were largely generated by Lee nudging the needle of a turntable with the eraser end of a pencil. For the rest of the time, she kept the pencil balanced between her lips and looked with concentration at her laptop screen. People like to complain about artists who perform like this—it’s not visually interesting the way a virtuosic rock band or jazz ensemble is—but the result of her work was spontaneous and enveloping.
The concluding act was Plastique Fantastique, an ensemble of musicians all wearing termite masks. Behind them was a screen of blaring strobe effects, convenience store chyrons, and stock photos from a late capitalist hellscape. The music itself, mostly composed of electronics, moved at a slow, building pace, with heavily distorted vocals on top of it. The singer’s voice had been digitally manipulated to such a high register that it was often difficult to make out about what she was saying most of the time. It seemed like most of it had to do with the collective efforts of these termites. While the musicians performed, one of the members of the group gathered up stalks of wheat that had been placed around the audience. For the finale, the audience was served slices of a vegan cake.
Very apropos of what I’m working on. Lots to think about.
Frequently We Sort the World Out 