Release #200 of our live digital series! After over a decade and so many incredible sets, we knew that the 200th release had to be something special, and it really doesn't get much more special than this. Where to start? Joe and John have provided so many incredible moments at OTO from the beginning that it's an impossible task to summarise them all. Some of these performances have been released on the label before - whether with Decoy or Joe and John's quartet alongside Lol Coxhill and Chris Corsano - but remarkably this is the first time that we've ever hosted a duo performance from them. Boy oh boy was it worth the wait. This first duo performance from these two took place in the Austrian mountains at the festival Artacts in Tirol, in the afternoon with snowy mountains glimmering through the windows. One of those magical moments in music, where the audience sat there completely moved - with tears in the eyes, tears of happiness. You might be thinking that a response like that might be hard to top. Well, dig in... -- Recorded by Billy SteigerMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

LP is out-of-printCD includes two short duo sets originally available as digital-only bonus tracks. Download available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC. This recording gathers all of the music from the final night of Otomo and Sachiko's first residency in 2009 which saw the pair joined by the long running trio of Evan Parker, John Edwards and Tony Marsh and special guest John Butcher. Butcher played duos with both Otomo and Sachiko and joined the quintet for a rousing sextet: stunning twin saxophone interplay, the unparalleled open-ness of the Marsh/Edwards rhythm pairing, Sachiko's deft high frequency interventions and Otomo's guitar at the centre - moving between abrasive textural invention and suggestive single note runs of ever-shifting melody. REVIEWS "As for indicating a place in the curiously sculpted bridges between improvised music and sound art, well, the simple singularity of these daring and committed performances should bear out their significance." Clifford Allen, Tiny Mix Tapes "This Quintet/Sextet album is recorded beautifully and it needed to be to capture all the nuance involved ... These are musicians at the top of their craft." Free Jazz Blog "...fresh and inspired. The recording stands as a finely-honed classic of classically approached free improvisation: the players dance and flow smoothly and effortlessly with and around the sounds of their partners." - Henry Kuntz Point of Departure Review

Tracklisting: 1. Aoshi 2. Dany Boya 3. Ankotsubaki Gaiden 4. Taria 5. Kamome 6. Furusato 7. Narayamabushiko 8. Maronie 9. Shiroi Inu"Japanese bluesman Kan Mikami is nothing less than an unalloyed force of nature. A skin-shredding blast of frozen wind from the poor, rural north of Japan that he calls home. In the late 1960s, like thousands of other Japanese young people Mikami made his way to Tokyo in search of a life different from that of his parents. Since then he has forcefully carved out a space for himself in the culture as a modernist poet, a raging folk singer, an author, a actor, an engaging TV personality, and one of Japan’s most uniquely powerful performers. For most of Mikami’s career as a singer, he has performed solo. Just him and his electric guitar against the world, creating jagged A-minor vamps to drive along the surreal wisdom of his lyrics. But he’s equally at home in more demanding improvisational contexts such as those provided here by John Edwards on bass and Alex Neilson on drums. Their dense propulsive textures seem to spur on Mikami, his voice arcing powerfully into fragmented spaces, his guitar darting, colliding, shedding jagged and angular splinters of sound. A pulsing, raging maelstrom of serrated-edged energy. Gruff, rough, honest and very, very real." - Alan Cummings --- Kan Mikami / vocals, guitar John Edwards / bass Alex Neilson / percussion --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on 3rd April 2013 by James Dunn. Mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

New band from three UK masters of contemporary improvised music – they released a trio cd under this title on Relativ Pitch (NYC) in 2017, now choosing it for their bandname for continuing activities.  Crucial Anatomy is their follow-up album which was recorded live at Cafe OTO in 2018. "With players of this calibre - all working at the very pinnacle of European improv -- it hardly matters: the level of rapport and collective virtuosity is astonishing." - Jazzwise "A lucid exposition of how the concept of musical chiefs and leaders becomes an irrelevance to this trio, so much are they as one with a sonic unity, a metaphor for a different kind of society expressed with so much clarity in the realms of free jazz." – Morning Star" --- John Butcher / tenor and soprano saxophones John Edwards / double bass Mark Sanders / percussion. --- Recorded by Shaun Crook, live at Cafe Oto, London on August 8, 2018. Mixed and Mastered by John Butcher.