Hot Snakes is a devotional performance project conceived by artist Chloe Langlois. It takes as its starting point the artist's attempt to interact and communicate with a Holy Guardian Angel from her childhood - the eponymous ‘Hot Snakes’. Chloe’s attempts take the form of monthly broadcasts, live-to-air performance events, and bar takeovers undertaken as part of an ongoing residency at TACO!

Kate Mahoney creates and curates live performance and moving image works that embrace ‘DIY’ ways of making. Mahoney also delivers workshops that consider how to perform or 'un-sing' with a 'Hysterical Voice'.

Hot snakes is curated by Dinosaur Kilby in collaboration with TACO!

Asking performers to risk betrayal, it disrupts the license of gendered power roles, the language of access and refusal, the totem of what we are able and unwilling to find permissible. Where do we find beauty, safety and recovery? In times of extremity and catastrophe, what are we willing to transgress or sacrifice for love, for grief, for injustice?

air sign was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

NO is an experimental research project, spoken-word choir and theatre group run by artist and writer Jamie Lee. They employ polyphony, gendered speech and exhaustion to explore the personal and political implications of silence and rage, and the relationship between legality, morality and the sacred. NO is composed of bella aleksandrova, bhāvinī j, dan rhys wakefield, sidney jones, sydney radclyffe, svetlana rakočević, hal hockney and jamie lee.

runway was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

runway was performed by Alan Fielden, Jemima Yong, Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter-Sweet, and Nat Norland,

Alan Fielden is a Korean-British writer, performance maker, and poet. Winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award for Marathon, with JAMS, co-produced by the Barbican. His writing has been published by Prototype, If A Leaf Falls, Monitor Books, Minor Literatures, Broken Sleep Press. Associate lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UAL, and Worcester University. He co-runs event series 'Feature' at Cafe Oto.

No Internal Thing was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

Flo Ray is an artist whose work is broadly concerned with expressions of multiplicity: fragmentations in thought and feeling that complicate dominant cultural narratives of the singular, cohering subject. Through video, sculpture, writing, drawing and audio, she explores everyday antagonisms within, and between, what we call selves.

Double Entry was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

Hugo Hagger is an artist and writer living in London. He writes about narrative, assemblage, and the politics of legibility. His work has been published in Pilot Press, Sticky Fingers, Coven Magazine - Berlin, and Deleuzine, he has exhibited at Alice Black Gallery, and Arusha Collection, London.

Evelyn Wh-ell is a writer and artist. They write about disappearing acts, doom, the empty promise of self-actualisation, and deferred endings. Their work has been presented at Kaunas Artists' House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project Space, and Kingsgate Project Space. They are the author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, published in 2022 by Sticky Fingers Publishing, and their criticism has been published by Art Monthly, World Picture Journal, and Cambridge Literary Review amongst others.

Performed by Evelyn Wh-ell & Hugo Hagger. Music by Haroun Yamou.

Have you found yourself shopping during the pandemic just to feel alive? Have you ever realised you've got 20 tabs open and you've been looking at Latvian cardigans for 3 hours? Have you felt deep-seated shame at your consumerist behaviour? Have you drunkenly purchased a pair of KFC sweatpants with the Colonel's face on the crotch?

The Retail Therapist a consumerist agony aunt offers retail therapy for a world obsessed with shopping. Impulse buying, compulsive buying, comfort buying, susceptibility to advertising and scams, shoplifting addiction …

In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other. The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.

Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.

Track Listing Part 2:

Miserere, with additional embellishments by Deborah Roberts (Excerpt),Gregorio Allegri, c.1630. Performed The Tallis Scholars & Peter Phillips

E.T., the extra-terrestrial (Main Title), John Williams, 1982

2 Men Meet, Each Presuming the Other to Be from a Distant Planet (Opening), James Wood, 1995. Performed by Steven Schick, Critical Band & James Wood, 2012

Heptapod B, Jóhann Jóhannsson & Joan La Barbara, 2016

The Harmonics of Real Strings (I), John Lely. 2006/2013. Performed by Anton Lukoszevieze, 2014

Játékok (Games), Harangok (bells), Hoquetis (hocquets) and Sirató (weeping), György Kurtág, 1973. Performed by Márta & György Kurtág. 1997

Toccata in G Minor, BMV 915, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1710. Performed by Glenn Gould, 1980

Clapping Music, Steve Reich, 1972. Performed live by Collin Currie & Steve Reich, 2019

Living for the City, Stevie Wonder, 1973

In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other. The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.

Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.

Track Listing:

Hocket

Meredith Monk, 1992

Performed by Meredith Monk and Robert Een, 1992

Penumbra

Sam Belinfante, 2010-11

Performed by Lore Lixenberg, 2011

L’Orfeo (excerpts)

Claudio Monteverdi, 1607

Performed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Orpheus), Julianne Baird (Euridice), John Eliot Gardiner & English Baroque Soloists, 1987

Difficulties putting it into practice, for 2 musicians

Simon Steen-Andersen, 2007

Performed by HYPER DUO (Gilles Grimaître & Julien Mégroz) for YouTube, 2018

Counting Duet #1

Tom Johnson, 1982

Performed by Sam Belinfante & Joseph Kohlmaier on Zoom, 2020

Love Song (two violins)

Alvin Lucier, 2016

Performed by String Noise (Conrad Harris & Pauline Kim), 2020

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpt)

Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Mark Tucker (The Wall), Sir Colin Davis & London Symphony Orchestra, 1996

Ursonate (excerpt)

Kurt Schwitters, 1935

Performed by Adam de la Cour & Neil Luck, 2018/20

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpts) Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Robert Lloyd (Pyramus) & Ian Bostridge (Thisbe)

Touch,

Little Mix, 2017

Performed by Little Mix as part of One World: Together at Home, 2020

With special thanks to Joe Bedell-Brill, George Cooke, Selali Fiamanya, Lois Graham, Natasha Heliotis, Anna Ploszajski, Ajay Ratan, Raj Savjani, and Barnaby Wynter for their contributions.

Pouya Ehsaei is an Iranian musician, producer and artist currently residing in London. Beside his solo experimental sound projects, he is involved in various collaborations with dancers, performers and other musicians. He is the founder and the leader of the band "Ariwo" and founder of "Parasang" where he collaborates with musicians from around the world to perform spontaneous, dark and hypnotic live shows. He has performed at Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre, Village Underground and the Royal Academy of Arts in London as well as several festivals of music and performance including Womex, Womad, Line Check, Boomtown and SPILL.

A series of fictional interviews with Bush and Powell about the production of the album. The imagined responses are based on what Clarice Lispector described as the most desirable state of invention, ‘to be intelligent and to not understand’. Interjections of semi-sculptural texts revealing cavernous internal spaces, an outside within an inside, a travelogue of not knowing. Taking the listener through the album ‘Jeer at Industry, Scorn Facility’ via the centre of the earth back to the surface.

‘How We made ‘The Kick Inside’’ is read by Alice McCreadie

First broadcast on 11/04/2020