IRM x R$N bring Trystero’s live show & Philipp Otterbach to Peckham this April

Music

Inner Rhythm Mysticism and the good ship Ransom Note are joining forces for a new series of intimate London parties. The first one lands at Vespers Club on April 18th with its opening statement.

Trystero, if you don’t know them, are a band that may or may not exist – named after the fictional underground postal conspiracy in Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’, a secret society whose reality the novel never quite confirms. It’s an apt name for a group who operate in the margins between cities, genres, and waking life: a teacher in France, a boat captain, a graphic designer in Strasbourg juggling three other bands, a sound artist in Berlin. They converge, they conjure something raw and electric, and then they dissolve back into separate lives.

What they’ve conjured on ‘Humming Fuzz’ — their second album, out on Knekelhuis last year – is one of the most exciting records to come out of the European ‘underground’ in recent memory. Recorded for a second time on the repurposed canal barge that band member Alexia captains in northern France, the album crackles with what we described as “acid-drenched, kraut-propelled energy that suggests Psychic TV commandeering a narrowboat and getting lost somewhere between Weatherall’s record collection and a Spacemen 3 practice session.” One guy in Bristol apparently told them it sounds like a European Happy Mondays meeting Spacemen 3. Low Bat, for his part, offered “a slowed-up version of Heaven 17’s Fascist Groove Thang” as a reference point. You can feel all of it.

Now expanded to a four-piece with Alexia on vocals and Kelly Placard on bass, the live show has taken on what Alexia calls the quality of a ceremony – “invoking I don’t know what.”

That live show comes to London for the first time since ‘Humming Fuzz’ dropped, and Vespers Club on Rye Lane feels like exactly the right room for it: intimate, serious, south of the river.

You want to read more about them do you? Well, you’d best read the interview they did for us at the end of last year here.

Joining them is Philipp Otterbach, Salon des Amateurs affiliate, one half of the legendary Substance nights alongside Vladimir Ivkovic, and a name whose discography reads like a guided tour through the more shadowed corners of contemporary electronic music: Knekelhuis, R.i.O., Music From Memory, Offen. His sets move between ambient drift and slow, noirish club music, with a patience that comes only from decades of deep listening. The perfect foil.