Launch of Keston Sutherland's The Odes to TL61P

Event information

Celebrate the launch of Keston Sutherland's The Odes to TL61P with Enitharmon Press at Cafe OTO, joined by electro-acoustic improvising sextet Bolide. A reading or two will be bookended by musical performances.

Tickets £4 waged / £2 unwaged. We hope you will treat yourself to a copy or two of the book, which will be available for the special price of £7.

The Odes to TL61P is a suite of five massive, turbulent, tender and satirical odes written and revised from 2010-13. It is the explicit history of the author's sexual development from early infancy; a commentary on the social and political history of the UK since the election of the coalition government; a philosophical account of the common meaning of secrecy in the most intimate, private experiences and in international diplomacy; a wild work of revolutionary theory that investigates in minute detail the difference between commodities and human lives; a record of a thousand revisions, deletions and metamorphoses; an attempt to radically extend and reimagine the very possibility of the ode form; a monstrous accumulation of techniques and mimeses, from the strictest and most perfected metrical verse to the most delirious and cacophonous noise music; and a devoted love song to the now obsolete product ordering code for a bygone Hotpoint washer-dryer, "TL61P". It is the longest poetical work yet written by Keston Sutherland and his most comprehensive effort yet to transform the grammar of human existence.

Keston will be joined by Cafe OTO favourite Bolide:
“As a launching pad to tomorrow, free jazz remains one of the most potent, if hermetic, of conceptual formulas due to its foregrounding of the spontaneous, its focus on exploration as opposed to mere tourism. In recent years players from the more traditionally omnivorous disciplines of drone, psychedelia and noise music have combined to broker a rapprochement with the form, mostly focussed on its harnessing of energy as a structural solvent – groups like Michigan’s Graveyards, New York’s Owl Xounds, Brighton’s Bolide.” David Keenan, The Wire