We're thrilled to present two longform pieces from Yorkshire-based sound artist, Sophie Cooper. Composed during a week-long residency in the OTO Project Space in February 2022, Lean In was originally written for an 8-speaker surround set-up, here distilled into an equally expansive stereo version. Over 25 minutes, Cooper weaves fragments of on-site found radio sounds, processed trombone, electronics and voice to explore themes of broken family structures and the unspoken estrangement issue. We release this alongside the newly remastered companion piece, Intact, commissioned by hcmf// in 2019 and for which Cooper was nominated for an Ivor Novello Composer Award in 2020. Together, the pieces build upon each other in a way that uncovers new insights with each listen, revealing a multi-faceted work at once intimate and far-reaching in its emotional and sonic impact. "This release is a double A side of accompanying pieces both written during residencies for spatial audio systems namely the HISS (Huddersfield Immersive Sound System) for hcmf// and the set up at Café Oto project space. These versions have been designed to be listened to on stereo set ups. Both of the pieces deal with the topic of family estrangement using verbatim sourced with permission and support from a UK based charity called Stand Alone who support adults in this situation. Intact was the first piece made of the two in 2019 and Lean In was written in early 2022 so you’ll hear references to how people’s lock down experiences impacted on their estrangements in the second piece. It was really interesting to come back to this topic after a break and reflect on changes between the texts in both years." – Sophie Cooper, February 2023 -- Enormous thanks to: Everyone involved with the HISS, hcmf//, Cafe Oto, Arts Council England, Kathy Hinde and Matthew Olden for the support with these pieces. -- Cover photography by Maryanne RoyleMastered by Oli Barrett

As OTO approaches it's 16th year, The Uncertain Man continues his journey holding on to the shadow of a hot air balloon.These are the sounds that guide him along. Where will he land next?  Free to download one and all and you can get a copy of the full comic here. If you're a member neither download will remove a credit. Happy birthday to us.   

Monumental and blistering X5 CD box via Fönstret - the publishing arm of John Chantler’s, Stockholm based Edition festival - capturin  أحمد [Ahmed] - the (not so) best kept secret in the landscape of contemporary free improvistation, over the course of five consecutive nights during the summer of 2022. [Ahmed] is the quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (double bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums) and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone). Together, the group re-arrange and re-imagine in real time the music of composer, bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1927-1993). Listening, learning. In the summer of 2022 they played five nights in a row at the fifth edition festival for other music. Fylkingen sweltering under a rare Stockholm heatwave. A different tune each night. Nights on Saturn Oud Blues African Bossa Nova Rooh (The Soul) El Haris (Anxious) Five discs in a big box. Giant Beauty. Wrapped in excavated photographic detail from Stockholm’s legendary Golden Circle club. “Every night the quartet brings a new song, takes it apart, puts it back together again, follows the music on unknown paths, sometimes back, sometimes not, but always remains in motion, flowing like a river in flood.” — Silvia Tarozzi [Ahmed] have played some of the tunes on Giant Beauty multiple times before, and revisit them here, ‘versioning’. Antonin Gerbal kicks things straight into high gear with the propulsive snap of Nights on Saturn’s opening beat (a then recent, now out of print LP on Astral Spirits) and they close out on the fifth day with El Haris (Anxious), the tune they played and recorded at their first public performance in a rural Swedish barn for Joel Grip’s Hagen-fest in 2016 (and later released as the now out of print LP New Jazz Imagination on Umlaut). The second night they played Oud Blues. A tune they’d done just the one time before but under radically different circumstances — a heaving, 600 strong dancefloor for Glasgow’s spirited Counterflows festival. That recording is also coming out now on a double LP via Astral Spirits as Wood Blues — but here they trade the raucous, ragged energy there for something more chiselled and focussed. Traces linger (a perfume) of the spare concentration in Éliane Radigue and Magnus Granberg’s music heard earlier that night. We also hear two new tunes that appear on record for the first time — the vibrant swing of African Bossa Nova giving way to the zoned in drone of Rooh (The Soul) the following night. Rooh opens with Joel Grip’s bass channelling cellist Abdul Wadud who died the same week and the performance is dedicated to him. No discussion. No plan. No solos. The end goal for [Ahmed] is an open, ongoing learning. An ongoing excavation of the past and re-imagination of a future music. It’s jazz but also not (only) jazz, forged through a deep commitment to a variety of musical methods and an appreciation of how the context of the music’s making informs, shapes and becomes what it is. It always comes back to time and space. The five-night residency as idea, history and lived reality provides further cause for investigation, food for thought and prompts for action. You can read Seymour Wright talking through these implications in the extended interview with Edition festival director John Chantler in the accompanying book. The images that appear on the outer covers of the box, discs and book are details of photographs taken at the Golden Circle, Stockholm in the mid 1960s: the outer cover by Christer Landergren, and the others by Leif Wigh during a Dexter Gordon residency in 1965. Looking back into these images of Stockholm-space that the music [Ahmed] made at Fylkingen seemed rooted or seeded in, we discovered that, fascinatingly, plants — rubber (Ficus elastica) and Swiss-cheese (Monstera deliciosa) — were resident in the Golden Circle’s very modern concrete-curtained-glass-and-metal space. They lived on-stage and in-audience as the music took place and grew across nights, days and weeks around, and about them. This unusual and unexpected (to us) organic, holistic musical, architectural, botanical, volatile balance seems to resonate with something that Abdul-Malik told Bill Coss in a 1963 interview for Downbeat: Really, a musician should be in excellent condition, physically, mentally, professionally and scientifically […] I have studied all the elements: animals, insects, plants, space - the universe - old and new jazz but most importantly the Creator. How can you play beauty without knowing what beauty is, what it really is? Understanding the Creator leads to understanding the creations, and better understanding of what you play comes from this. How can you understand fully without knowing the start, the continuation, and the ending? 

Sholto Dobie puts forth ‘23’ on Infant Tree, his debut solo LP. A wildly accomplished document of practice. After many years spent working with pipes and air, ‘23’ offers us his current developments. Recorded in a year in which the artist worked in Lithuania, Vietnam and Sweden, the record distills a broad approach to sound, using a wide net to gather recordings from performances, gatherings, walks and personal life. Sholto carefully leads the listener between distinct environments and the intimately documented network of compressed air, tubes, reeds, flutes and timers which he works with. In these recordings, life is welcomed in, interiors are heard and felt, obscured voices, insects, forests drift in and out of focus, as we are transported through an unfamiliar landscape.Sholto Dobie was born in Edinburgh and lives in Vilnius, he performs with self-constructed wind instruments, using a frankenstein-like set up which has evolved over many years. An air pump is attached to a series of reeded and metal pipes from various sources - organs, bagpipes and khene - which are brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules, valves and swinging microphones. ‘23’ captures the rich world of pulses, beatings and breaths that have emerged from Sholto’s performance settings, whilst weaving them into a distinct and unique audio work.For anyone more familiar with Sholto’s work you will no doubt be warmed by recognisably delicate and evocative styles reminiscent of previous solo recordings such as ‘Nevery’ and ‘The Ringer’ as well as influences from friends and collaborators such as Judith Hamann, Malvern Brume, Ahti & Ahti, Rie Nakajima and Shakeeb Abu Hamdan.The 12” LP comes with beautifully matched artwork by Zoë Annesley and printed on reverse board, pressed by Monotype Pressing. Limited to 300 copies. 

*60 copies limited edition* Infinite Expanse follows up their first two LPs with a return to the cassette format, diving deep into the world of the underground cassette network with a focus on SoundImage, a label founded by Martin Franklin and active in Slough between 1989-91. Presented is a compilation of two compilations – Premonitions (1989) and Spiritual (1990) – featuring stalwarts from the scene, including The Vitamin B12, M.Nomized, Konrad Kraft and Hybryds, as well as a host of ungoogleable artists, such as The Happy Citizen, Omega Ensemble and The Time Flies. Birthed through the space provided by the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, a UK government initiative introduced in the mid-80s which assisted unemployed people who set up their own business, SoundImage set out to uncover and present new electronic music which captured a certain sense of magic and mystery. The label operated within the cassette network, though also sought to bring the music to local audiences and stage live events. This included Omega Onsemble, a set of improvisers from Southampton, performing in a small backstreet gallery during the Windsor Fringe Festival in 1990, as well as Richard Leake’s The Butterfly Effect and Peter Appleton, a creator of sonic sculptures, combining for a live show at the Windsor Arts Centre in September 1991. The label even helped them get a feature on Southern TV and connected them with some researchers at the nearby EMI R&D lab in Hayes who recorded the performance with experimental 3D audio equipment. Distribution of SoundImage releases grew to a network of small mail order outlets and tape stalls, with duplication eventually handled by small-run commercial tape duplicators. Some of the artists who featured on releases also had their own outlets for sales, so between them they managed to form a self-contained sphere of underground production and distribution. Listening now, what distinguishes the music is that it sits at the cusp of the  DAW revolution, with the tracks made using the innovative Tascam 244, or similar 4-track cassette recorders, which had just revolutionised affordable music recording. The pumping hiss of its built-in noise reduction, in retrospect, becoming a distinctive feature of the productions. The music also pre-dates samplers, and whilst some of the music makes use of synthesisers, there is still a sense of performance and hand-made sound textures from tape loops, collages, effects and manipulated media, as well as traditional instruments. It sits at a point where abstract music still lived in our imaginations. There were no screens confining the compositions into lanes or grids, no software instruments. Instead, there were cables and cabinets, speakers and effect pedals, radio and tape….reels and reels of tape.

'Solos for _ _ _ _ spaces' is the debut release from London-based percussionist and sound artist Regan Bowering. Her music is created by placing snare drum, amplifiers and microphones in configurations which trigger volatile yet malleable flows of sound. Across these four tracks, percussion and amplifier feedback are carved into crescendos and diminuendos where coarse textures move in intricate constellations. The album charts this process travelling through different contexts, moving from live improvisations in a large, reverberant hall to micro-edited versions on a laptop. Bowering’s interest in feedback is an extension of research into how, historically, technology (such as mics, amplification, instrumentation, and recording processes) have affected the ways improvisers approach rhythm. “I wanted to explore ways to use the drums that extended beyond typical rhythmic gestures or the need to hit the drums to generate sound,” Bowering explains. “To create a continuous texture which doesn’t need continuous input. The unpredictability of feedback is what draws me to it. It’s similar to playing with another musician. Things can happen unexpectedly, just like in a group improvisation.” To our ears, touchstones for Bowering’s use of space and feedback could be Alvin Lucier, or perhaps even Ryosuke Kiyasu’s radical approach to percussion, amplification and setting. However, there are fluctuations between frenzy and gentleness, a sensitivity to mood and affect on 'Solos for _ _ _ _ spaces' which are uniquely hers. This is far more intricate than a simple bridging of minimalism, free-improvisation and electro-acoustic techniques. This is perhaps explained by some of the musicians that Bowering mentions having a long-running impact on her practice, from percussionist Seijiro Murayama to saxophonist, composer and Art Ensemble of Chicago founder Roscoe Mitchell. While their influence may not be explicitly audible in these four tracks, their unique approaches to texture, space and improvisation are undoubtedly present. Bowering treats what might typically be cacophonous – drums and feedback – with subtlety and nuance. “I like exploring the possibilities in feedback beyond just harshness, and drums beyond being loud and rhythmically dense,” she reflects. “The detail that’s possible. The emotional intensity you can get from different sounds. The feelings that come when you move between extremes, such as from loud and abrasive to almost silent. The feedback gives me a different set of colours to work with, a different material to carve as part of my sonic and rhythmic pallet as a percussionist.” System, organism, ecosystem – there’s a litany of metaphors which could be used to describe how her music is produced. All make sense, and all feel slightly inadequate. Her music originates in processes, but its realisation comes through liveness and response. Bowering manipulates the sound by bending drum skins to change pitch, moving mics to alter intensity. Striking the snare to trigger dramatic upheavals in the circuit. But her music is a balancing act, a compromise between her own actions and the context they’re happening in. “It’s a system I improvise within, but it’s also always affected by the space I’m playing in. The acoustics, the number of people in a room and if they move. How I’m feeling at the time. These subtle dynamics all affect the sound.” This variation is highlighted throughout the album. The recordings here document performances in vastly different settings. A reverberant hall at Goldsmith’s University. An intimate gig at Avalon Café where the audience enclosed Bowering, and on track 3, an empty studio. For the final track, a DAW is used to rearrange components from the preceding three into a new composition. Here feedback and drums enter the possibilities of another space, a computer, and the different means of response it offers. More than a live album, this tape charts a consistent practice applied to inconsistent contexts, capturing in real time how the outcomes are determined by the player, the moment and the situation. credits -- Mastered by Billy SteigerAll sounds by Regan Bowering.