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The Cube's Downtown Lights presents

Led Bib & Omega Institute

Motorik, prog and punk charged jazz & electronic pulse

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Tue 16 September // 19:00

Tickets: £12 / £10 concession / more OTD

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With 11 albums & countless international tours across 22 years, including a Mercury Prize-nomination, Led Bib re-emerge as a quartet with brilliant new record, Hotel Pupik & a UK tour. The new album begins with the suitably titled Iron Ore, a ‘strike up the band’ marching drum roll shuffle announces the band’s arrival before immediate descent into the hot industrial furnace of a throbbing & snaking dance pulse bass line underpinning the growling, guttural overlaps of two sparring saxophones.

In search of reconnection & a new musical language after the departure of their keyboardist, drummer & composer Mark Holub describes an atmosphere of seeking purpose & identity, casting back over the life of the band - as musicians & friends - and how this experience has shaped their musical expression as individuals. Renewed by a group residency on the estate of a ruined castle in Austria, Led Bib have forged forward with an evolving commitment to their wild concoction of filmic noir menace and restless suspense, an ever quickening surge across jazz, rock & collective improvised music.

Alongside peers such as Sons of Kemet & saxophonist Chris Williams’s Let Spin, Led Bib are a vital voice in the musical landscape of contemporary British jazz.

“a riotously melodic set…the sound of the group has matured and become deeper…incorporating influences from other cultures and weaving them into their Motorik, prog and punky DNA.” - Jazzwise

Omega Institute

Aidan Searle - drums / Jeff Green - bass / Nigel Bryant - oscillator/effects

Formed in 2019, Omega Institute's output sits somewhere in the wildness of free jazz and experimental dub. The trio conjure an absorbing motorik surge with influences from Can, Teo Macero & Merzbow with their radiophonic & library music electronic wig outs bringing to mind the futurist soundtrack work of Tristram Cary’s disturbing 1967 sci-fi horror 'Quartermass And The Pit’, electric period Miles Davis & wouldn’t be out of place jamming in Star Wars’ Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine.