Wednesday 2 June 2021, 7.30pm
OTO hosts a special screening of two films that we're very proud to be able to release on our TakuRoku label next week!
'The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released' is a new work from Sunik Kim, following Zero Chime (First Terrace, 2019), presented in film format. Featuring new music, as well as text from George Jackson, Kim San, Danièle Huillet, Xu Lizhi, Rosa Luxemburg, V.I. Lenin, Lee Jae-eui, and many more.
This will also be the first public screening of Four Dances, an animated film made by Billy Steiger and Zara Joan Miller for TakuRoku. The film features four 'movement-drawings', or dances, each accompanied by piano recorded at Cafe OTO. Following the screening, Billy and Zara will re-imagine the film's score live.
Zara Joan Miller is a British/Iranian artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her writing often situates itself in communal time(keeping) and space before taking root in the private body. BLUE MONDAY was published by JOAN Publishing in 2022 and her second book of poetry Year of the Dragon is forthcoming with TACO. She has performed or screened work recently at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Barbican Centre, Maximilian William Gallery, Les Atelier Claus, In Vitro, Default Den Haag. Her writing has appeared in motor dance journal, Fieldnotes journal, Hotel, Another Gaze and Worms. Blue Monday was also released as a duo LP with Ute Kanngießer on New York label Reading Group in 2023.
Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Sunik Kim is a musician, writer and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. Her recent work attempts to unfold problems of perceptual and temporal distortion through computer-generated sound. Her writing on subjects ranging from Korean communism to Conlon Nancarrow has been featured in The Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, Tone Glow and elsewhere. Her latest album, Formenverwandler, was released in 2025.
Drawing from her extensive research on composer Conlon Nancarrow, Formenverwandler sees Kim exploring the time or tempo canon, which can pull and project the listener's senses, melting the temporal and spatial perception of presented sounds. As in previous works such as 2022’s Raid on the White Tiger Regiment and 2023’s Potential, Kim deploys patches and tools she has designed for SuperCollider, which take raw, utilitarian General MIDI notes and multiply and spray them into frenetic webs and networks of spiraling sound.
