Cyclobe traverse a unique landscape in contemporary hallucinatory music, mixing heavily synthesized sounds with acoustic arrangements for a variety of instruments such as hurdy-gurdy, border pipes, strings, percussion and woodwind.
Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower formed Cyclobe in the late 1990s and released their first album ‘Luminous Darkness’ in 1999. Thrower had previously worked with the group Coil between 1984-1992; Brown also joined Coil, in 2000, and remained in the band until their demise in 2004.
Their recorded works include ‘The Visitors’ (2001), ‘Paraparaparallelogrammatica’ (2004) and ‘Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window’ (2011). The centerpiece of the latter, ‘The Woods are Alive with The Smell of His Coming’, was the result of a commission by the Tate Gallery St. Ives for the 2010 exhibition ‘Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art’. Cyclobe’s 2014 album ‘Sulphur-Tarot-Garden’ featured newly composed soundtracks for three silent Super-8 films by the late Derek Jarman, for whom Thrower had composed the soundtrack to ‘The Angelic Conversation’ (1985) while a member of Coil. More recently, Cyclobe’s music was featured in the Lucile Hadžihalilović film ‘Evolution’ (2015).
Despite Brown and Thrower having played together for over a decade, their live performances have been rare. Their debut London performance was held at Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the 2012 Meltdown Festival curated by Anohni, who also performed with Cyclobe onstage. Later that year they performed at the Punkt Festival in Norway, curated by Brian Eno.
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