Abstract
To celebrate our 17th birthday, we're delighted to offer a free recording of the phenomenal first meeting between Theodora Laird (voice), John McGrath (guitar) and Douglas Benford (harmonium). Recorded at OTO as part of Phil Durrant's 'Combinations' event in January 2025, the set may only be 10 minutes long, but contains so many layers that we'll be unravelling it for a long time to come.
Laird's remarkable voice swoops and flutters with a stark, intimate quality that feels almost confessional, conjuring an atmosphere all its own. McGrath's guitar blurs the lines between acoustic and synthetic as clusters of notes fizz and sputter, refracting and evolving with a granular intensity as distinctive as it is complex. Ebbing and flowing through the fragments, Benford's juddering, yearning reeds pitch and yaw, sometimes swelling like a spring tide, sometimes sharp and fractured like splinters of ice.
All too soon, the myriad swirling strands settle, but their reverberations linger for a long while. Representing three great improvising musicians fully in the moment, and embodying so much of what we want OTO to provide a home for, this is something very special indeed.