MacGillivray + The Doomed Bird of Providence + Harpoon Group
The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Tuesday 20th March 2018, 8:00pm – information here and here
For anyone who missed MacGillivray‘s performance at the Antigen evening in Ipswich last night, she’s headlining again in London on March 20th, formally launching ‘Watermarked in Flame’ (her latest mini-album of scarily reworked traditional folk songs via “sea-wrecked electrics and salt-luck vocals”). For anyone who missed my summary prior to the Antigen show, here it is again.
“When she’s out and about playing music, writing or committing performance art, Kirsten Norrie goes by her ancestral Scottish name MacGillivray, pulling her matrilineal Highland heritage over her head like a mask. With many wannabe artists, this kind of method ends up as no more than an affectation: people short on colour, scraping at the bottom of the pot of history in a vain attempt to garner the last scraps of savour. With Kirsten, it’s different: if it’s a mask, it’s the kind that renders everyday matters and habits transparent, allowing her to express deeper and stranger ideas and fancies fervently. What emerges is startling. MacGillivray it is, then.
“Discovering her is a little like being startled by a slow-motion jack-in-the-box: she’s already got eight albums behind her, a couple of soundtracks and poetry collections, and a collaborator roster which bags a list of left-field folk musicians of all strands and odd definitions, including The Fall (yes, folk, really), The Pogues’ Jem Finer, Dead Rat Orchestra, Trembling Bells and Current 93. Her performance art involves powerful weird rituals – furiously smoking cigars in Sigmund Freud’s garden; conflating mediaeval stocks and death metal; eating chandelier glass in an abandoned shopping centre; carrying a dead sheep on a pilgrimage. As a musician (both recorder and performer), she’s similarly unnerving: experimenting with loudness and quietness via folk drones, piano, savagely distorted electric autoharp and vocal wails, but refusing to hide behind them. Slender, still and intense, she rules a stage, dragging up distressed ghosts and the aftermath of harsh laws and bare beliefs. On this occasion, she’ll be performing tracks from her forthcoming mini-album, ‘Watermarked in Flame’.”
Since I wrote that, ‘Watermarked in Flame’ has surfaced on Bandcamp and revealed itself as a superb live document (akin in certain respects – technological approach, transformative preoccupations and feminist undercurrents – to Kerry Andrew’s similar reinventions as You Are Wolf), in a variety of voicings from softly accessible to eldritch croons and stifled screeches, all filigreed by sparse and singular piano, lap steel guitar, harmonium or electric autoharp (plus some electric guitar apparitions from Primal Scream’s Henry Olsen).
Support comes from The Doomed Bird Of Providence (replacing Mark O’Pilkington & Michael J. York’s Strange Attractor/Coil spinoff, Teleplasmiste) and from Dead Rat Orchestra’s Robin Alderton ( under his Harpoon Group alias.
The Doomed Bird Of Providence was initially the vehicle for the dark songs of Australian émigré Mark Kluzek, who lurched from memories of baked red soil and the bleakest of Aussie colonial Gothic in 2011 with ‘Will Ever Pray’: comically grim and overwrought, it was enough to make Nick Cave sound as cuddly as Burl Ives, and was a furrowed coffin-moan too far, even for me. A second album, ‘Blind Mouths Eat’, arrived in 2013, in which Mark honed and solidified his compulsion to tell stark, painful accounts of cruelties and injustices at the ruthless edge of Victorian Empire.
Following a relocation from London to Manchester, ‘Burrowed Into The Soft Sky’ arrived in September 2017, displaying a shift from songs into twenty-minutes instrumental narratives. Rather than using words, Mark currently bears harsh witness to Australian history via the sifting, blaring reeds of his accordion and a shifting band including percussionist Ian Hothersall, Current 93 violinist Joolie Wood, Extreme Noise Terror bassist Stafford Glover and SOUP/Croft’s Drew Barker; its folk-drone rattle and far-adrift traditional melodies creating a subtly nightmarish, primeval, post-Godspeed depiction of hot sun, hard deeds and fraying roots.
As Harpoon Group, Robin Alderton performs in an arc of creaky audio technology – “Dansettes spinning dubplates, reel-to-reel recorders flailing, dictaphones dying, overdubbed cassettes and bust samplers”. Drawing on found sounds and fragmented antique recordings filtered through or played on these contraptions (and processing them his fine arts background), he endeavours to craft new collaged compositions in a spirit of benevolent, sympathetic audio necromancy, via “ideas of sound recording technology, nostalgia, memory and place – the processes of deterioration, and of the failure of (or grasp for) memory.” There’s not much on him so far, but I did dig up these two brief phone-filmed fragments from gigs in recent years.
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Nest Collective presents:
India Electric Company
The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, St Pancras, London, WC1N 1AZ, England
Friday 23rd March 2018, 6.30pm – information here, here and here
Coming from an altogether less murky zone, singing multi-instrumental duo India Electric Company (Cole Stacey and Joseph O’Keefe) perform at the Foundling Museum as part of their promotional jaunt for their ‘Seven Sisters’ album. Expect explosively emotive folk-pop, weaving in Irish and Eastern European content to spin out and enrich their songs.
Misfit City 
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