CHARALAMBIDES @ Cafe Oto, 19/20 May, w/Mick Flower, Dean McPhee & more

2-night residency at Cafe Oto, with the Kranky duo's first London shows since 2006.

Saturday 19 May sees CHARALAMBIDES supported by MICK FLOWER BAND, DEAN MCPHEE and HITODAMA.

On Sunday 20 May, CHRISTINA and TOM CARTER will play solo sets, with PADANG FOOD TIGERS opening the bill.

Full details below!

OTOprojects and Miles of Smiles present…

Saturday 19 May 2012

CHARALAMBIDES
THE MICHAEL FLOWER BAND
DEAN MCPHEE
HITODAMA

Cafe Oto
18 - 22 Ashwin St, Dalston, London E8 3DL
Doors 8pm

£8 advance / £10 on the door
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/163562

£14 weekend pass
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/163564

Dedicated to a vision of spiritual music (in all its forms) as transformative force, as CHARALAMBIDES Tom Carter and Christina Carter create a sound is uniquely personal and consistent, even through some outwardly extreme shifts in tactics - song-as-mantra, interstellar voids full of silence, or howling, ecstatically-received gnosis.

This 2-night residency at Cafe Oto sees the duo’s first UK shows since 2006, promoting the extrapolated desert folk of their latest double LP Exile (Kranky).

"Charalambides are among the most beautiful and mysterious groups to have emerged from the American desert. ...They have created a glowing template of humanist/mystical improvisation that has kneaded brain muscles from here to Kokomo." The Wire

"...musically, through two decades of working together, they've created a world apart. Though they've played with many like-minded artists and floated through a number of "scenes" ... their work feels wholly self-contained, never seeming to refer to anything but itself." Pitchfork

http://www.kranky.net/artists/charalambides.html

"Biker psych for the third eye rider" - A key member of legendary Leeds freak-out collective Vibracathedral Orchestra, MICHAEL FLOWER's fearless explorations of sound have established him as something of a benchmark in the world of experimental transcendental music - both solo and as one half of one the intense psych/improv drenched Flower-Corsano Duo. He has also played with Jandek, Spectre Folk, MV&EE and Sunburned Hand of the Man, among others.
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Michael+Flower+Band

DEAN McPHEE is a Lancastrian finger-picking electric guitarist now based in West Yorkshire, whose gorgeously liquid, pure-toned playing is supremely evocative of the small splendours and grand transitions of the natural environment. His magnificent debut album proper ‘Son of the Black Peace’ has cemented the reputation won by debut EP Brown Bear.
http://www.deanmcphee.com

HITODAMA is the solo guise of Wigan-reared, Tokyo-dwelling drone obsessive Dave McMahon. Also known for the fun-size power-grind spasms of Shigai (with Narcosis Guitarist Chris Catterall) and the barbaric basement-bar noise of Jahiliyyah (with Tetragrammaton’s Cal Lyall), as Hitodama Dave coaxes serene yet seething marsh-light howl from a cluttered menagerie of analogue and digital FX. An especial treat for fans of Concern and Double Leopards.
http://www.myspace.com/onryoudrone

Sunday 20 May 2012

CHRISTINA CARTER
TOM CARTER
PADANG FOOD TIGERS

Cafe Oto
18 - 22 Ashwin St, Dalston, London E8 3DL
Doors 8pm

£8 advance / £10 on the door
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/163577

£14 weekend pass
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/163564

CHRISTINA CARTER was born in the bayou city of Houston, Texas in November of 1968, and co-founded the group Charalambides there in December of 1991. Ever since then, she has deeply mined her own vein of sound-as-music with voice, guitar (both electric and acoustic), piano, and keys. For the past several years, Christina has utilized extended improvisational guitar passages within and without song-medley structures; re-contextualized certain Charalambides songs within the spare single guitar/voice form that birthed much of the group's music; and recently, investigated 'the song' as a thing unto itself, specifically concentrating on 'the word'- both in her own lyric writing and her interpretations of the work of other lyricists.

Christina currently resides in Austin, Texas. Her latest albums are the Charalambides album Exile (Kranky), the double LP reissue Texas Blues Working (Blackest Rainbow), and two solo CDRs: Trickster Who Is Like God (Many Breaths) and a reissue of Future In Past (Many Breaths), originally released on the Wholly Other imprint in 2002.

"Christina has a beautiful voice, clear and bell-like. I've heard her influence on lots of women in the experimental underground music scene. I never heard anyone quite as vulnerable and as strong. It's kind of magical. I never get tired of listening to it. It's fresh every time I put it on." Kim Gordon, New York Times

http://www.last.fm/music/Christina+Carter

TOM CARTER's solo electric guitar work sculpts a richly varied landscape of immensely-stacked grit and beauty, weaving interlocking strands of visceral melody into towering (and often high-volume) long-form drones.

Born barely south of the Mason-Dixon line, and just in time for the Summer of Love, Tom Carter led a decidedly non-hippy existence being shuffled around various farm and mining towns in Maryland and Ohio by his newspaperman father, before finally making his way to Texas in 1985, just in time to watch all the good hardcore bands die. Already obsessed with American pre-punk and British post-punk, Carter dove into the lysergically spiked musical waters of Texas with both feet, augmenting his guitar skills with unreliable instruments, cranky analog electronics, and disintegrating practice amps. Over the ensuing decades, he managed to forge his evolving ideas of complete tonal immersion (and the quest for the perfect fuzz tone) into a layered sonic toolkit of rough beauty and unrefined proficiency.

"Carter shows he has no boundaries as he pierces the atmosphere and heads into deep space." Foxy Digitalis

http://www.last.fm/music/Tom+Carter

In PADANG FOOD TIGERS, Spencer Grady and Steve Lewis diverge from the stately electronic texture-scapes of their Rameses III project, crafting cobwebbed, organic miniatures with the beguilingly irreconcilable air of Sublime Frequencies field recordings faintly echoing through the halls of a haunted vicarage. Fans of Tetuzi Akiyama, C Joynes and Harappian Night Recordings will find much to admire here, but an oddly concrete-ish, microtonally composed resonance running throughout connects the listener back to the duo’s technological roots.
http://www.myspace.com/padangfoodtigers