Friday 23 August 2019, 7.30pm
Kevin Richard Martin makes his OTO debut, playing through our new D&B PA systems.
Kevin Richard Martin is the man behind The Bug, King Midas Sound, Techno Animal, Zonal and a host of other uncompromisingly heavy projects he has instigated since the 90s.
Sirens (released on Lawrence English's Room40 imprint in June 2019), is his first record under his own name. Written as a therapeutic response to critical operations his newborn son endured in the first month of life, it is his most intensely personal work to date.
The album traces out a sound world that is both tender and caustic. Within each piece, microcosms of sensation unfold, seconds become hours, and hours become seconds as Martin creates a sense of time that is without anchor and is foggy in a way that is profoundly unique. This is a life journey transposed into sound that is truly personal, but effortlessly universal and unfolds with cinematic dynamics.
'Sirens, Kevin Richard Martin’s first release under his own name, combines body-crushing bass, phantom tone assemblages and high, lonesome feedback in a way that makes mincemeat of terms like drone, minimalism, sound art and electro-concrète: this is a deeply personal re-imaging of trauma, tenderness, and the tectonic energies of birth and fatherhood that blurs the lines between the biologic and the electronic.' – David Keenan
'In 2015, Kevin and I book-ended a series of concerts at Berghain for CTM festival. For his performance, Kevin debuted a new work I’d heard very little about called Sirens. I remember two things distinctly about the performance. The first thing is he opened the set with a blazing passage of bass and dub sirens that instantly transported me back to those initial moments of encountering his work. The second was the feeling of absolute, crushing bass. Not before, or since, have I felt a sense of sound pressure like this. Unlike his other work with The Bug for example, the consistent bass carrying in the space was literally breathtaking and there were moments when it seemed difficult to see clearly as my eye sockets were vibrating in a way I’d never experienced.' – Lawrence English
Coby Sey is a vocalist, musician and DJ from South East London who offers a shifting, disorienting vision of club music.
A long-time collaborator with Mica Levi, Tirzah, Babyfather, Klein and Kwes, Coby’s recorded work – as best evidenced on the Whities 010: Transport for Lewisham 10″ – spans the realms of live instrumentation, sample-based productions and experimental music, melding recognisable motifs of hip hop, drone, techno, post-punk, fusion and more into a dubbed-out anaesthesia. Live, these dreamlike compositions are imbued with a heavy, uneasy dancefloor energy, often abetted by live vocals as well as saxophone interjections c/o regular cohorts Ben Vince and Calderwood.
Coby’s open-door approach to sharing and making music stretches to his work with London collective Curl, who release records and host events with a collaborative, improvisatory approach, as well as a regular slot on NTS which offers a portal into his appealingly murky musical world.
