THE TAPEWORM'S BUNCH OF FIVES - CM VON HAUSSWOLFF / DALE CORNISH & PHIL JULIAN / ANDREW POPPY

Event information

On the 16th September, we warmly welcome you to Dalston’s finest, Café Oto, for our fifth birthday concert, ‘The Tapeworm’s Bunch of Fives’. CM von Hausswolff, Osman Arabi and Autodigest are flying in from far-flung places, especially for you. Andrew Poppy will finger the ivories; our interim minstrel Zerocrop will sing for you a lullaby or two; straight outta Croydon, Messrs Cornish and Julian will début a duet set. Surprise guests? Possibly, yes!


CM VON HAUSSWOLFF

CM von Hausswolff lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Since the end of the 70s, von Hausswolff has worked as a composer using recording technology as his main instrument and as a visual artist using video and still photography as well as other media. His music may be heard through labels such as Touch, iDeal, RasterNoton and Firework Editions. His visual artworks and installations have been seen at various biennials such as Venice, Istanbul, Liverpool, Moscow and Pusan and numerous other places. He currently curates the sound-installation FREQ_OUT and collaborates with artist Leif Elggren, film-maker Thomas Nordanstad, EVP re-searcher Michael Esposito and author Leslie Winer.

PHIL JULIAN & DALE CORNISH

The donation by Kevin Drumm to Phil Julian of a Hewlett Packard test tone generator (to avoid excess baggage charges) caught the curiosity of Dale Cornish. With Cornish and Julian renowned for their own releases, for a variety of labels including The Tapeworm, this chance bonding over former NASA technical equipment has led to their first collaboration. This is their first live performance, and their first album (naturally on cassette) will follow on The Tapeworm.

ANDREW POPPY

Andrew Poppy is a Post-Minimalist composer, musician, writer and record producer with a unique body of work and a long history of collaboration. He studied with John Cage before releasing three albums on Trevor Horn’s Zang Tuum Tumb label in the 1980s. The first, ‘The Beating of Wings’, was praised by critics as a successor to the Art Of Noise. Poppy recently presented his work ‘12 Thoughts’ as part of the London Contemporary Music Festival’s ‘New History of Song’ evening, and his ‘Almost the Same Shame’ was performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, with Poppy as soloist, as part of the festival ‘The Rest Is Noise’ at the South Bank.

OSMAN ARABI

A unique figure in the international noise and industrial music scenes, Osman Arabi is a composer, producer and sound designer from Tripoli, Lebanon. His work elicits images of desolate industrial landscapes and shamanistic rites. From his beginnings in black metal, Arabi has progressed through such genres as dark ambient, industrial, tribal, psychedelic, electro-acoustic, power electronics and noise. His many projects have included Seeker, Kafan, Veinen, Shamanic Death Trance, The Ritual Inclusion of Code, harsh electronics outfit 20.SV, as well as nihilist Dutch collective Stalaggh. In 2000 Arabi stopped performing live - vanishing into the underground, not resurfacing until 2009… For the past decade, Arabi has been developing – in complete secrecy – his ‘occult guitar’ playing, based on the sigil work of Austin Osman Spare. This new thread to his work was only recently unveiled, in late 2013, and is set to become the backbone of his live rituals hereon in.

AUTODIGEST

Autodigest was conceived [as in ‘concept’] in a hotel lobby on 26th May 2001, at approximately 9am, after a night of excess and euphoria (a lot milder than you may think, actually). Hotel muzak acted as the trigger for a quick rêverie on the state of music at the beginning of the 21st Century. Through a series of unplanned events and actions, coincidences and convergences, Autodigest became the focus for an ‘apocalyptic’ perception of contemporary culture, dedicated to developing and sharing a critical eye within a culture that is quickly becoming synonymous with ‘pure entertainment’. Autodigest has made live appearances since 2002, establishing the world record by performing the shortest concert ever (one-second-long concert in Stockholm, May 24, 2002), and beating its own record in June 2004 (half-a-second-long gig in Porto, Portugal). Autodigest has meanwhile released sound documents via Touch, Ash International, KREV, The Tapeworm, Crónica Electronica, The Gulbenkian Foundation, Rádio Manobras and various blogs. Though not secretive, Autodigest remains anonymous. It means to walk the tightrope between the complexity of the issues addressed and a hyperconformist approach to cultural resistance, placing itself right in the middle of the syndromes it analyses and critiques. For all we know, one of these days it might surface as a reality show… In the meantime, keep on cheering!

ZEROCROP

London-based singer/musician Parker has been recording as Zerocrop since 2000. “ees vurry complicatedurr”.