Members

\ t e.o.twɑ.ki \

“Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the ‘devil box’. And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons.

“Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.”

— Captain Beefheart 

Composer and guitarist Kevin O’Neil has been developing {teotwawki} since 2012. Originally, Kevin adopted {teotwawki} as a pseudonym for his solo performances at the legendary "drone nights" at the now-defunct loft La Plante. Kevin's vision was to expand the project to also include an ensemble. Thanks to the support of Code d'accès, the newly formed {teotwawki} quartet presented its very first concert on October 6, 2021. In 2022 it performed as part of the Instruments of Happiness / Bradyworks Planète Bonheur festival and in 2024 it will release its debut album.

Kevin explains that "with {teotwawki}, I seek to exalt the physicality of the electric guitar - the tactility of skin on metal and wood, the chaotic non-linearity of amplified electrical signals - while subverting the classical tropes associated with the instrument. It's this tension that drives me: between finding an essence of ‘guitar-ness’ and creating music that doesn't sound at all like it comes from a guitar." Quoting the French composer Éliane Radigue, he says that the aesthetic project is to search for "this flavour of the intangible, the immaterial, something that is made from the fundamental character of the instrument but which is very elusive by nature." This search nourishes a sense of dilation of time and space; it invites a mode of listening - of being - that is both contemplative and ecstatic.”

TEOTWAWKI is the acronym for The End Of The World As We Know It. Survivalist and doomsday preppers use the acronym to denote some imminent and catastrophic event that destroys the existing institutions and norms of society. “If I am leery of such extremists and their paranoid, zero-sum fantasies, I can’t deny—as we are constantly inundated with news of, say, the climate emergency, or the rise of inequality and fascism—that there is something apocalyptic lurking at the edges of the zeitgeist,” explains Kevin.

“My response as an artist has been to appropriate teotwawki in its lower-case form, in an attempt to to provide both a cosmic and personal perspective. On the one hand, there is our fate as mortal beings: it’s always, for someone, the end of the world. But beyond this: the Taoist realisation that it is always and everywhere the end of the world as we knew it. A new world is created now. And now. And now.”

“The problems are real. We can and must strive to be a light in the dark. Art itself is one such light. Art can help us understand, cope, and heal. {teotwawki} gives me a space to acknowledge and work with the bad and heavy feelings. To sculpt with the inherently transient and immaterial ‘material’ of sound — momentary vibrations of air and touch — is to feel alive in the river of time.”