Wednesday 23 March 2022, 8pm
Toby Driver is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who navigates between genres. He is “a tirelessly inventive recording artist” (PopMatters) with a prolific career of over 20 years. His work––impressionistic, architectural and emotionally vulnerable––has been described as “unlike any other” (The Quietus), displaying “A greater vision of how music can evoke feelings both grandiose and devastatingly intimate.” (Vice/Noisey). His multifarious projects share a sensitive and detail oriented composition ranging from the metaphysical to the avant-garde, and an insatiable search for the new: there’s “absolutely nothing to compare it against.” (Echoes and Dust)
Alora Crucible, his most recent musical identity, explores transcendental instrumental music with Driver on guitar and hammered dulcimer in collaboration with violinist Timba Harris (Secret Chiefs 3, Amanda Palmer, Igorrr) and keyboardist Ana Cristina Pérez. With their autumn 2021 debut, Thymiamatascension (released on the enigmatic and elite House of Mythology label in the company of titans Ulver and Current 93) Alora Crucible has made a strong and immediate statement about this music’s exalted place in Driver’s diverse body of work. Simultaneously, Driver’s long-running outfit Kayo Dot, “one of the greatest and most exciting contemporary progressive/experimental/avant-garde bands going,” (Treblezine) released their tenth album Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike to outstanding critical praise, landing on many year-end lists and showing that his reputation as “one of the most endlessly creative and thrilling band leaders” (Treblezine) is a well-earned one.
"The music of Daniel O'Sullivan plays like a haunted jukebox." - Wire
"A multi-dimensional artist that successfully soundtracks our profoundly confusing 21st century" - Prog
"O'Sullivan's dreampop mantras casually open up portals into other dimensions" - Uncut
Daniel O'Sullivan is a composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer living and working in London and has been contributing a vibrant, chameleonic brew to the music landscape since the late 1990's. He has achieved international acclaim writing, recording and performing both solo and with a myriad of celebrated groups including Grumbling Fur, Ulver, Sunn O))), Guapo, Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses, Laniakea, Miracle, Æthenor and This Is Not This Heat.
DOS collages a wide range of musical disciplines and has collaborated with a number of artists including several live performances and recordings with 'continuous music' pioneer Charlemagne Palestine and large scale surround sound/AV installations with Turner prize-nominee Mark Titchner. As well as playing and recording several albums with Norwegian experimental metal group Ulver and occasionally donning the robe with Sunn O))), O'Sullivan has been at the core of the wildly successful reincarnation of This Heat as a live entity.
Whether solo or in his varied collaborative projects, O’Sullivan’s work is strikingly dense and allusive, alive with enticing sonic diversions, hypnotic syncopation and highly ornamented song-craft. Both lyrically and within the intricately knitted arrangements, traditional forms are reshaped into transcendent pocket symphonies. Both intimate and alien, archetypal and atypical, joyous and melancholic, the aperture of O’Sullivan’s music is wide open and light streams in.
