Duet Emmo announce their first ever live performance at the ICA
Duet Emmo – Daniel Miller, Edvard Graham Lewis and B.C. Gilbert – play their first ever live show at London’s ICA on 27 October 2026, in the round.
Photo: Angela Conway
Duet Emmo, the one-off collaboration between Daniel Miller of The Normal and Silicon Teens and Wire members Edvard Graham Lewis and B.C. Gilbert, will play live for the first time on Tuesday 27 October 2026 at the ICA in London. The show forms part of the venue’s In The Round series and comes nearly 45 years after the three musicians first met at Blackwing Studio to record “Or So It Seems”, their only album together. Tickets go on sale at 10am UK time on Friday 28 August through DICE, priced at £32.71 including booking fees and the venue levy.
The performance takes place on the ICA’s Stage at 7:30pm and uses d&b Soundscape, the venue’s 360-degree spatial soundsystem, with the audience seated around the musicians. The ICA describes the booking in its own announcement: “In association with Mute we’re pleased to announce that Duet Emmo will join ICA’s October In the Round series for a world premiere performance.”
Duet Emmo live at the ICA on 27 October
- Tuesday 27 October 2026 – London, United Kingdom – ICA, The Mall (Stage, 7:30pm)
The In The Round programme is curated by the ICA’s Jacob Silkin and runs across the autumn with a separate line-up of electronic and experimental artists. Duet Emmo’s date is presented by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in association with Mute.
What ‘Or So It Seems’ is
Miller, Lewis and Gilbert recorded the album at Blackwing Studio in London in the gaps between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day in 1981 and 1982, with Eric Radcliffe and John Fryer engineering. All three had other commitments running at the time, and the sessions produced the only record they made together. Mute issued it in August 1983.
The project name is an anagram of Mute and Dome, the Lewis and Gilbert duo that ran alongside Wire in the early 1980s. The original sleeve is a collage by the Brothers Quay, the animators and filmmakers, and it was redesigned by Bart van Damme for the reissue.
Mute reissued “Or So It Seems” on 19 August 2022, remastered from the original analogue tapes by Stefan Betke at Scape Mastering and expanded to double vinyl, alongside CD and digital editions. Side-Line covered that campaign at the time, first when the reissue was announced and again when the trio shared the remastered “Heart Of Hearts (Or So It Seems)”. The remastered edition runs: “Hill Of Men”, “Or So It Seems”, “Friano”, “The First Person”, “A.N.C”, “Long Sledge”, “Gatemmo”, “Last’s Card” and “Heart Of Hearts (Or So It Seems)”. It is available on Bandcamp and through Mute’s own retail channels.
About Duet Emmo
Duet Emmo brought together three musicians who already moved through the same London scene. Daniel Miller had released “T.V.O.D.” / “Warm Leatherette” as The Normal in 1978 on the first Mute single, founded the label around it, and followed with the Silicon Teens project. Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis were two quarters of Wire, whose first three albums appeared on Harvest between 1977 and 1979, and after the band’s first pause they worked as the duo Dome, releasing four albums under that name between 1980 and 1981 on their own Dome imprint.
The three convened at Blackwing Studio in London over the Christmas and New Year periods of 1981 and 1982, with Eric Radcliffe and John Fryer engineering. The resulting album, “Or So It Seems”, appeared on Mute in August 1983, credited to Duet Emmo. A 12-inch of the title track was issued in March 1983, with “Heart Of Hearts” on the B-side; that track later became a bonus cut on CD editions. The record combined electronic sound collage, drone and abstract pop, and it remained the trio’s only release together.
Gilbert and Lewis continued as Dome and under further aliases, and both returned to Wire, which reformed in 1985 and again in 2000 and has released studio albums into the 2020s. Miller built Mute into the label behind Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Erasure and Laibach, and has more recently recorded as Sunroof with Gareth Jones. In 2022 Mute returned to the Duet Emmo album, with Stefan Betke remastering it from the original tapes for a double-vinyl edition released on 19 August that year.
The ICA date on 27 October 2026 is the first time the three have taken the project to a stage.
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