Tipping the scales on an already brilliant run over the last year or so, OTOROKU delivers one of their most singular and creatively striking releases to date: ‘SLIP’, the first widely available full-length from the London based percussionist and musician Paul Abbott (XT, OWLLL, X Ray Hex Tet, yPLO, etc.). Issued in two distinct physical editions - X2LP and X2CD - each meticulously crafted for the characteristics of their respective formats, ‘SLIP’ encounters Abbott interweaving a palette of bristling electronics / synthetic sonorities, percussive elements, and other sound sources, entirely defying expectation at every turn, balancing rigorous conceptualism with raw and immediate physicality. Far and away one of the most distinct, challenging, and exciting records we’ve encountered so far this year and one of the best full-lengths that OTOROKU has ever dropped, this one came out of left-field and has totally blown us away.

Since its founding in 2012, OTOROKU - the in-house label for the London venue, Cafe Oto - has become a vital platform for documenting the activities of contemporary experimental music, working with artists both local and from abroad. The last year or so has witnessed the imprint steadily picking up the pace of its output. In addition to their recent release of Sophie Agnel’s brilliant LP, ‘Learning’, the imprint has delivered amazing full-lengths by Loren Connors & Alan Licht, the Peter Brötzmann Quartet, Incapacitants, Sven-Åke Johansson, Pat Thomas, and Evan Parker & Bill Nace, among others. Much in the spirit of many of its previous releases, OTOROKU’s latest, ‘SLIP’, by the London based artist, musician, and percussionist, Paul Abbott, hones in on a creative voice working within the intimate orbit of the venue and its associated scene. Operating within a singular field of creative exploration that reconfigures the relation of sonic elements to body, environment, and self, propelled by a complex network of concepts and ideas - ‘SLIP’ presents percussion, texture, and tone as a living force, well beyond where notions of the rhythmical typically come to rest.

While Paul Abbott has drifted throughout Europe in recent years - moving between Portugal and Belgium, before returning home to the UK - he has been a steadfast member of the community centered in and around London’s Cafe OTO since the venue’s earliest days, garnering high regard for both his solo efforts, as well as numerous collaborations: notably XT with the saxophonist Seymour Wright, OWLLL with the cellist Ute Kanngießer, X Ray Hex Tet, yPLO with the artist and musician Michael Speers, and various other configurations with artists like Pat Thomas and Anne Gillis. A markedly humble and thoughtful personality, Abbott stands among the most unique and forward-thinking voices within the contemporary UK scene, possessed by a profound suspicion of both fixed or limited sonorities or ideas, while presenting work that emerges in live and recorded contexts with an often jarring and disconcerting force. Much like Derek Bailey before him, there is a sense that Abbott relentlessly resists repeating himself and considers every utterance with intensive consideration and care, while offering them an expressive vehicle that is both non-idiomatic and from the heart.

‘SLIP’, Abbott’s first widely available solo release, is a direct response to a three day residency staged at Cafe OTO during 2023, further developing a “cast of characters” - crystal, lleaf, reiy.F, reiy.C, strike, nee, qosel, sphu and aahn - that guided those performances, each signifying different kinds of movement and drum kit/s. These characters were choreographed as “dances” based on different feelings, or a variety of frameworks that suggest forms of movement, be they connected to the body, drums, or sounds themselves, and arranged into compositions. Illuminating this process and the ideas behind it further, Abbott states: “I wanted a way to 'persuade' or guide the possibility of something happening - my activity or the events of an algorithmic composition - for example, but without certainty or formalism. It felt to me, during playing, that certain ideas had a particular sort of shape, but more than the form of a line. I began to write alongside (before/after) playing the drums, and ‘characters’ began to enter the scene as a more wobbly, and therefore appropriate option [to notation]. Working with these characters allowed me to simultaneously approach body, imagination, language and music: without dividing things up or separating these aspects from each other. It allowed me to leave things messy and entangled, whilst trying to deal with form and specificity: wanting to have some things feel or respond differently to other things at other times.”

The evenings of Abbott’s aforementioned residency generated an incredible 9 hours of recordings, split into up to 28 multitrack channels for each day. It is this material, reorganized and recomposed, that lies at the root of the multiple versions of ‘SLIP’. From a distance, it is easy to focus upon the more analytical and syntactic aspects of Abbott’s work. It is, after all, highly conceptual, a truth echoed by the (pointedly?) confounding textual and graphical overload of the album’s cover, which interweaves nearly impenetrable absurdism via fragments, associations, semi-opaque insights, quotes, a sprawling text by Edward George, designed together by the artist Will Holder, in what almost feels like a dare to try and make sense of it all. However, what quickly becomes apparent across the album’s movements - as is equally the case when encountering Abbott live - is that his sound palette, like the compositions that result from it, draws upon a careful balance and interplay between the physicality of the body and various dimensions of the mind: as though rigorous thinking sets up the perimeters and approach, before the sounds are allowed to unfurl through immediacy, responsiveness, and intuition, in real time. Even more strikingly, Abbott is a pointedly untechnical player in his display, configuring something sonically akin to the visual idiom of Art Brut: complexity manifested in a form that seeks the most direct, raw, and emotive expression of itself: “the generative silence of an error, and orchestrated falling away from the seductively insistent continuum of the history of syncopation”. The multiplicity of meanings activated by the single word taken as the album’s title reveals almost enough: a “slip” being as much an allusion to error, a fall, or a movement off of the meticulousness of a metronomic grid.

As arrhythmic strikes, bounces, and rattles work and interweave into a range of electronic sonorities, Abbott’s dancing “cast of characters” move beyond the notion of performative event, sculpting a fascinating free-standing landscape of pointillist sonic artifacts of unpredictable happening and detail - like a zoomed in, magnified, and amplified, furiously paced symphony of unpalatable creatures - that somehow never fully dissociates from the body of its creator. It’s almost as though we’re simultaneously hearing Abbott’s frenetic biorhythms as he plays the drums, intermingled - malleably and responsively - with the sounds of the instruments themselves.

Resting at the juncture of free-improvisation; noise; electroacoustic practice; sonic Art Brut; and rigorous, conceptually driven scientific research, ‘SLIP’ is a stunning piece of work, created with a clear and palpable sense of meticulous rigor that belies the direct and matter of factness of its structures and sounds. Endlessly surprising and filled with bristling life, while unquestionably demanding and challenging, perhaps even to the most seasoned ear, Abbott’s first widely available solo full-length is one of the most rewarding listens we’ve encountered in some time, continuing to reveal further dimensions with every subsequent return. It’s a masterstroke by an artist encountered (to date) by far too few.