Counterflows: Michael Hurley + Josephine Foster

Event information

Welcoming the return to OTO of one of our favourite singers - Josephine Foster - for a full set of songs at the OTO baby grand and we're honoured to present for the first time, singer, songwriter, artist, folk hobo Michael Hurley aka Doc Snock - a true American iconoclast and one of that country's songwriting greats.

MICHAEL HURLEY

Tracing the lineage and citing the fore-bearers of the New Weird America, one can’t help but mention the music of bizarre folk singer/guitarist/artist Michael Hurley. If you haven’t been following his career since the 1970’s (when he was collaborating with the likes of the Holy Modal Rounders and Jesse Colin Young) then you probably discovered him in the past couple of years via Devendra Banhart’s & Andy Cabic’s label Gnomonsong, who have released Hurley’s recent recordings.

Hurley’s debut album, First Songs, was recorded for Folkways Records in 1965 on the same reel-to-reel machine that taped Lead Belly’s Last Sessions. He was discovered by blues and jazz historian Frederick Ramsey III, and subsequently championed by boyhood friend Jesse Colin Young, who released Hurley’s next two album on The Youngbloods’ Warner Brother’s imprint, Raccoon. How’s that for cred?

In the 1970s, Hurley made three albums for Rounder Records; Have Moicy! (1975), Long Journey (1976), and Snockgrass (1980) which after being out of print for decades are now being reissued on Light In The Attic Records.

In recent years, tours with Son Volt and high praise from younger performers like Lucinda Williams, Vic Chesnutt, Calexico, and Cat Power, have increased Hurley’s legend. (Light in The Attic Records)

JOSEPHINE FOSTER

Hailing from Colorado, Josephine Foster began to sing publicly at age 15, singing operatic hymns in the services of a Rocky Mountain log cabin church. After studies in classical music she moved to Chicago, where she abandoned the idea of dedicating herself to opera and returned to her love of writing songs. Since then, Josephine has traveled around the world sharing her music. She is married to Spanish composer Victor Herrero.

"You might call Ms. Foster’s eerie warbling old-fashioned, except that is evokes a scrambled past that exists only in her own vision: mountain songs that never were, spaced-out hybrids that never will be." -Sanneh / THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Fosters vocal style draws on a clutch of contradictory modes. It combines a facility for expressive extremes comparable to Patty Waters with the precise comportment of folk singers like Karen Dalton and Shirley Collins, and the kind of fast vibrato most associated with the flapper style of early Tin Pan Alley. Fosters recorded work draws much of its unusual power from a dialectic that reconciles a feel informed by the experimental underground with a more mainstream tradition as transmitted by artists as disparate as Josephine Baker and the McGarrigles. As such, her music exists in the same kind of liminal space as anachronistic counter-cultural figures like Tiny Tim, The Incredible String Band and R Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders." - D Keenan / THE WIRE

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Counterflows

Counterflows is a new series of festivals exploring international networks of underground music. This first festival takes place across London, Berlin and Glasgow from 6th-15th April. Produced by OTOProjects in Berlin and London and AC Projects in Glasgow the festival was made possible with support from Sound and Music, The British Council, Creative Scotland, The PRS for Music Foundation and The Goethe Institut.