Wednesday 22nd September
8pm
£10 ADV / £12 OTD
Re–Ghoster are a trio of pianist Thomas Florin, drummer Nicolas Field and Revox tape maestro Valerio Tricoli. The acoustic instruments are fed to tape, magnetised, digested, re-eaten, reworked and regurgitated again by the machine.
For the release tour of their amazing new record 'Or not all', they have invited the renowned New York experimental trumpeter Nate Wooley to join them. Listen here
Mordecoli is a new duo of Ecka Mordecai on cello (Takuroku Records) and Valerio Tricoli on Revox and electronics. They had an excellent residency recording at Cafe Oto last year, and we're very excited to hearing them play together.
A Review : In spring of 2010 I find myself making a midnight roadstop with Valerio Tricoli, Antoine Chessex and Gilles Aubry at San Luis Obispo’s vaunted Madonna Inn motel complex. We’re still a couple of hours out of L.A. on Highway 1, on a long drive down from San Francisco that would conclude with our destination hotel being taped off and labeled a murder scene.
For now we’re chomping on dreary, cardboard-like burgers - the only customers in the Inn's gruesome Mattel-meets-Facteur Cheval diner, whose all-pink interiors wear heavy on us as an icy strand of Muzak bears down, seemingly in cahoots with the air-conditioning’s arctic ooze. Dead meat, frozen air, and disjointed time push us towards the adjoining ballroom, where another scene awaits. In the cavernous interior, a high school reunion is taking place - graduation year circa 1943. The revelers are sauntering across the dark-lit space to the frenzy of a bullet-proof bass-drum-piano trio of shared vintage, delivering lethal hard bop blows. The moment is not unlike David Lynch’s purple-screen dancer cut-outs opening “Mullholland Drive” come to life. We’re helplessly pulled in and back out, the grip of the diner’s ambient soundtrack still felt on our necks.
Fast forward some nine years to a January night in Lausanne, one that would also go long and wrong, and the same sense of displacement hits. Valerio is present again, but he’s one of three spooky agents of dilution this time: his Revox tape recorders share the stage with a snarling drums and piano pair, Nicolas Field and Thomas Florin. Snare hits and chord vamps scatter and rattle off the walls. They’re sucked into the tape and spilled out in a disjointed chronology.
The gig is hellish cauldron and cold-storage freeze. Its protagonists blur the nature of the events at the core of the music - this is lightning fast, but it’s not a typical improv impulse; it’s heavily edited, but in the moment of a performance with no prior script. It’s not written, but its instinctual drive is venomously skewed. It’s ghostly, because its elements wander unmoored from their actual place in time, in search of new meters to anchor their meaning on. It’s re-ghosted, because authorship becomes frazzled across accelerated spins and crawling rewinds. The performance is that demented Californian ballroom come back to haunt us. It’s also the record you're about to subject your ears to. Luc Meier
Re–Ghoster are:
Nate Wooley (USA) / trumpet
Valerio Tricoli (IT) / Revox tape recorder & electronics
Nicolas Field (UK/CH) / drums & electronics
Thomas Florin (CH) / piano