Thursday 12 September 2019, 7.30pm
Animal Sounds is a night of performances, talks, and interviews centred around the themes of human & non-human animal relationships, extinction, conservation, sound art and listening.
The night will include contributions from Neil Campbell & Julian Bradley, Conny Prantera, Oaken Palace Records trustee Owen Coggins and researcher Angus Carlyle. Animal Sounds is organised by Robbie Judkins and part of the Cafe Oto series, Music and Other Living Creatures.
Music and Other Living Creatures is a series at Cafe OTO (curated by OTO Projects) dedicated to music about, with, or by other living creatures. Birds, tigers, chickens, insects and many other living creatures are explored through sound-walks, listening sessions, commissioned performances, live responses and discussions.
Before they became 2/5 of Vibracathedral Orchestra over 20 years ago, Julian Bradley and Neil Campbell had been playing as a duo, with a series of cassette releases, a few live performances and a vinyl LP on John Olson's American Tapes label. During this time they laid the foundations for the more elaborate constructions they'd later inhabit with Vibracathedral, cranking out long-form phasing drones that mixed guitars, feedback and electronics with violins and all manner of acoustic bric-a-brac. Since the formation of the band, duo sightings have been fleeting - a few gigs, a festival appearance at Colour Out of Space and the 2016 "FOR LILA O" album - so this will be a rare opportunity to hear these long-term collaborators in a stripped-back form.
https://julianbradleyandneilcampbell.bandcamp.com/track/how-to-wear-a-new-watch
Oaken Palace Records offers bands the opportunity to release their output in a way that actively supports their vision of a better world for all beings. Being 100% charitable, the label functions as a social enterprise that donates all its profits to environmental organizations of the bands’ choice. In addition, bands dedicate their releases to an endangered animal of their choice, which further increases the arising of environmental awareness by focusing on specific species and their story. Last but not least, customers are left with the feeling of having contributed to a good cause and consuming responsibly. Bands and artists include Merzbow, Phurpa, Louise Landes Levi, Woven Skull, Blown Out, Eternal Tapestry, Vibracathedral Orchestra and more.
Oaken Palace Records trustee Owen Coggins will be in conversation with Robbie Judkins.
Owen Coggins researches intersections of extreme music with mysticism, paganism and ritual. In 2015 he completed a PhD in Music & Religion, an ethnographic study of drone metal focusing on how audiences understood their listening experiences in relation to religion. A book which extended this project, Mysticism Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) won the 2019 Book Prize of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Other academic chapters and articles have been published on noise, industrial music, gospel blues and drone, with more experimental work on drone music appearing in the edited collection Sustain//Decay (with James Harris). Owen was a Researcher for two years at music therapy charity Nordoff Robbins, and in September 2019 will begin a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Brunel University London, working on a three-year project about politics, ambiguity and paganism in black metal. Owen has
contributed to The Wire and writes regularly for the website Echoes & Dust, and since 2015 has been a trustee of Oaken Palace, an environmental charity and drone record label.
Anecdotes, extracts and conjectures for listening encounters with a fading wild: presbycusis and the disappearance of audible animal atmospheres, prosthesis as a means to recover them; extinction as heard and as unheard, the wild itself reverberating as messy and entangled, rather than pure and pristine.
Angus Carlyle is a member of CRiSAP at University of the Arts London. His experimental documentaries of place have been both collaborative and individual and have involved different combinations of text, image and sound, sometimes simultaneous, sometimes separated.
Hannah White and Stephen Shiell (Blanc Sceol), and Conny Prantera (The SeeR/WorldZero) will create a new choral piece based on the hypothetical phenomenon of the 100th Monkey Effect to explore the theme of animal extinction and human responsibility. Using the human voice as a tool to gain access to a liminal space, the Animal Choir will provide a simple exercise in grounding while seeking a shift of consciousness from human to non-human animal.
