Sealionwoman + Raimund Wong & Suren Seneviratne
Schedule
Wed, 10 Sep, 2025 at 07:30 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Café OTO | London, EN
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Baba Yaga's Hut Presents:Sept 10th- Cafe Oto
Sealionwoman + Raimund Wong & Suren Seneviratne
Tickets £15 / 7:30
Following on from their acclaimed second record Nothing will Grow in the Soil and wonderful show at The Old Church in September we welcome Sealionwoman for their first Oto headline in September.
This show has been rescheduled from June 1st to Sept 10th.
“Sealionwoman’s music flips folk music on its head, taking traditional Scottish music and moving it into a darker, more atmospheric direction...” - The Quietus
“Björk, Billie Holiday and The Anchoress come to mind while listening to Kitty Whitelaw’s exquisite vocals… It’s Mercury Prize bait, this – haunting, monolithic soundscapes…” - Prog Magazine
In 2018, Kitty Whitelaw of jazz duo Sealionwoman had just completed the dark, atmospheric debut album ‘Siren’ with double bass player Tye McGivern, inspired by the Scottish folk tale of the selkie – a creature that can shapeshift between the forms of human and seal. That was an oceanic album, but Whitelaw’s growing fascination with yew trees – and a visit of her own to Crowhurst – saw them return to the land. Five years on, their astonishing second album ‘Nothing Will Grow In The Soil’ arrives: exploring the role these ancient, strange trees occupy in our culture, spirituality and imaginations.
Kitty Whitelaw’s forays into the deeper end of her register and the dark churns of McGivern’s double bass – strengthened by a raft of digital effects – build a crushing, nightmarish landscape.
At its heart, this album is an enquiry into how these strange long-living, perennial plants relate to our culture and history. “There’s discussion about their role in pagan worship, which was adopted into early Christianity,” Whitelaw notes. This forms the basis for ‘It Rides A Horse’, on which she intones: “Bark is the flesh / Heart wood is blood,” echoing the consecration of bread and wine in Catholicism. “In my mind, when we were creating the track I wasn’t singing as a human being,” she says, “but perhaps from the tree’s point of view.”
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Audio-visual artist Raimund Wong (Floating World Pictures) and unboundaried composer Suren Seneviratne (My Panda Shall Fly / Soundway) released their debut album on London's ever experimental Kit Records in June 2025. Interweaving folk, ambient and free improvisation, 𝑨 𝑹𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝑳𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑩𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 playfully confronts traditional instrumentation (khæn, shakuhachi, voice, taishogoto, cello) with live tape processing and esoteric '90s software. Taking cues from the cross-cultural subversion of Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Geinoh Yamashirogumi's score for "Akira", which augmented large gamelan and choral ensembles with midi computation, 𝑨 𝑹𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝑳𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑩𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 documents a borderless ensemble spinning dialogues around 'otherness' and the fracturing of cultural and personal identity.
Laying the foundations for free expression, alongside collaborators such as Clive Bell (Jah Wobble), Yoshino Shigihara (Yama Warashi), Maxwell Hallett (The Comet is Coming) and Dominic Kennedy (uh), the pair threaded a narrative between instruments with magnetic tape, dub manipulation and Suren's vast collection of rare / obsolete Macintosh music software from the '90s and early 2000s. Like the radio shows they grew from, these results are optimistic and convivial; a primitive quilt of real and imagined memories, voices and futures, converging to harmonise in humid space.
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Where is it happening?
Café OTO, Fitzroy House, Ashwin Street, London, E8 2, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
