cafe OTO (cafeoto.co.uk), located at 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, Nothern London. Here a Smeraldina-Rima Label Night on 4th of October 2013, with Alex Monk, Jack Allett, Joachim Badenhorst and Sheldon Siegel. It is here too that vinyl smeraldina-rima22/crox002 has its first public presentation. Far from being the first coproductive action, as croxhapox and Smeraldina-Rima started a partnership late 2007, the Throw Down Your Hammer And Sing & Sheldon Siegel vinyl, with artwork of Hannelore Van Dijck, is the first object-focused result of this partnership.
The crox line-up of these productions, formulated as such by Luc Derycke, MER/audioMER, is to proceed from the artwork. The first crox-vinyl, a coproduction of audioMER and croxhapox, and for years the only one, offers music by Japanese sound artist Sachiko (which later offered a Smeraldina-Rima/croxhapox concert coproduction) and artwork by Johan De Wilde. The 2nd one, in a rather enigmatic way combined with Smeraldina-Rima's 22nd, adds a vinyl product with excellent performances of, on A. Throw Down Your Hammer And Sing, featuring Nate Wooley trumpet, Fred Lonberg-Holm cello and electronics and Jason Roebke bass, and on B. a live performance of Sheldon Siegel at Les Ateliers Claus. To my knowledge Wooley by far is one of the more intriguing talents, as musician and as composer, in contemporary free jazz and experimental (see, apart from the vinyl introduced here, his (Sit in) The Throne of Friendship, a 2013 release, available on Instantjazz). Sheldon Siegel adds a wilde range of excentric sound experiment and, as I've been told, a major live experience for everyone who attended Les Ateliers Claus that very night. I recall a cool performance of Sheldon Siegel at Netwerk (Aalst) during an event of het balanseer, a well-brushed publishing firm focusing on both experimental litterature and music.
The label night at Cafe OTO, early October 2013,
photos: laura ward
was without me. The Eurostar ticket and the hotel reservation messed up. I had no intention at all to drive to London, as Levi and Marijke and some of the regulars did. Acts at croxhapox restricted it to a straight two direction with sleeping facilities near Ashwin Street. I had been in Dalston, in 2007, recalled its shabby metro station on groundlevel and the market with food and spices and many other things. I remembered Dalston Market to be an exceptional event. Without the hotel reservation it had no use to go there.