this week: 2013/09/16 - 2013/09/22

2013/09/16 | boat-ting: steve beresford & orphy robinson – viv corringham & jan hendrickse – benedict taylor & tom jackson – ronnie mcgrath | bar & co | 8pm | £4 £6

2013/09/19 | tim hecker - pete swanson - vessel | london st john at hackney church | 7:30pm | £14

2013/09/20 | otomo yoshihide with john butcher, john edwards, mark sanders & mats gustafsson | cafe oto | 8pm | £10 £12 £18

2013/09/20 | otomo yoshihide piano solo + quartet with guillaume viltard, daichi yoshikawa & rie nakajima | cafe oto | 8pm | £10 £12 £18

2013/09/21 | comus – shirley collins – hladowski & jones | Islington assembly hall | 7:30pm | £17

"For anyone with an interest in British outsider music, COMUS are amongst the most vivid, intoxicating, threatening and – as yet – unreplicable propositions that these Isles have ever produced. Their rare London appearances are a mesmerising delight – doubly so on this occasion, as they will perform their mesmerising 1971 masterpiece First Utterance in its entirety.

A wild synthesis of British Folk’s visionary extremities (Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Mr Fox et al) and the transatlantic progressive tendency (King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Holy Modal Rounders), they link traditional music’s bloodthirsty seasonal/pagan undercurrents to the spiritual questing of Blake and Milton; they also strongly recall the nightmare pastoralism of contemporaneous films like ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘Witchfinder General’ and ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’. Accordingly, Comus occupy a unique and disorienting liminal space – between village green and witches’ grotto, pulpit and stone circle, maypole and gallows.

Formed in the late 60s by the core duo of singer Roger Wooton and guitarist Glenn Goring, and offered early patronage by David Bowie at his ‘Growth’ arts lab in Beckenham, Comus released their astonishing debut LP ‘First Utterance’ in 1971. They followed this with ‘To Keep from Crying’ in 1974, before falling dormant."

2013/09/22 | manuel mota & neil davidson | cafe oto | 8pm | £7 £8

"You can hear exactly why Derek Bailey spoke so highly of Mota : the guitarist has quite simply created a world of his own."
Dan Warburton, The Wire

"The inevitable thing when writing about Manuel Mota’s work is that the usual list of comparisons is pulled out. So, Derek Bailey, Taku Sugimoto, Loren Connors, Tetuzi Akiyama, John Fahey etc… That’s those out of the way first. The thing is, these comparisons are inevitable because of how clear the lineage is here. Mota improvises, plays generally quite quietly and intimately, and plays the guitar, nothing else. So yes, all of those comparisons are valid, though for me it is the first of them, Derek Bailey that stands out the clearest. The link to Bailey however feels closer to the spirit of exploration and freedom I hear in Mota’s music, even if aesthetically it is early Akiyama and particularly Opposite period Sugimoto that initially spring to mind." The Watchfull Hear