Friday 6 February 2015, 8pm
Debut show at OTO for a trio comprising Dirty Beaches/Last Lizard's Alex Zhang Hungtai plus David Maranha and RED Trio's Gabriel Ferrandini. Support comes from North-West England-based instrumentalist, composer and improviser, Tom James Scott.
The project of Alex Zhang Hungtai, Dirty Beaches' spanned low-slung, lo-fi, post-rockabilly to ambient instrumentals. Hungtai's music is equally familiar-sounding and surreal, mixing a croon worthy of Elvis or Roy Orbison with Suicide-like drum machines and a fondness for found sounds and hypnotic loops. He moved to Zoo Records for his official debut album, Badlands, which was released in early 2011. Hungtai remained busy, issuing singles on Suicide Squeeze and a split with Xiu Xiu in 2011 and 2012. He released the Water Park soundtrack on A Records in March 2013 and the double album Drifters/Love Is the Devil that May. In 2014, Hungtai announced that his album Stateless would be his last under the Dirty Beaches name. Featuring viola courtesy of Italian composer Vittorio Demarin and mixing by Dean Hurley, Stateless was released in November 2014.
His work encompasses sculpture, music and architecture. In 1986 he started to develop his work as a musician both as a solo artist and with several bands and has since released more than 30 albums. He has formed “osso exótico” in 1989. He has worked with musicians such as Z’EV, Emmanuel Holterbach, Helena Espvall, Phill Niblock, David Grubbs, Akio Suzuki, Will Guthrie, Stephan Mathieu, Andrea Belfi, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Jochen Arbeit, Minit, Pete Simonelli, Arnold Dreyblatt, Jacob Kirkegaard, Carla Bozulich, Chris Cutler, Werner Durand, Robert Rutman, Ben Frost, Helge Sten and more. His collaborative projects, include: Organ Eye, Bowline, Curia.
Tom James Scott is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser who currently lives on the North-West coast of England. Since 2007 he has published music through a number of labels including Students of Decay, Where To Now?, Bo'Weavil Recordings, Carnivals, and his own Skire imprint (established in 2013).
Scott's early interest in music was informed as much by a fascination with sound and improvisation as it was by traditional musical training, and his work continues to explore both lyrical and abstract means of sound making and composition. Since 2007's 'Red Deer', Scott's solo releases to date have seen a switch between guitar, piano and keyboard as their focal point (often with the addition of bowed objects and strings, field recording and electronics). United by a preoccupation with modern composition, traditional music, improvisation and song, Scott's recorded work also draws inspiration from visual and literary sources, with certain titles often citing a now largely archaic form of dialect particular to Scott's home county of Cumbria.
Scott is currently working on a collaboration with the filmmaker Laurence Campbell and continues to perform and record with Ashley Paul, Andrew Chalk, Ecka Mordecai, Timo van Luijk and Russell Walker (primarily as Charcoal Owls).
