Champion Version-hosted three-in-one experimental music gig Edition returns to London on 21st June, hosting the usual trio of acts.
Run Logan Run are Andrew Neil Hayes (saxophones and effects pedals) and Dan Johnson (drum kit and percussion): inspired by spiritual jazz and heavy experimental improv, they’re tagged as “a head-on collision of pounding tribal drums and screaming guttural saxophone” and “architects of intense contrast.” They popped up in here a couple of years ago supporting Iyabe in Bristol, when I described them as “navigat(ing) by the brassy light of Colin Stetson (to whom they’ve played support), Pharoah Sanders, Can, Sons of Kemet and Lightning Bolt”, and have made a name and an underground murmur for themselves as a unit with remarkable powers of synchronisation and improvisation, a strong compositional sense, and a mastery of circular breathing and sound processing.
Sardinian drummer and percussionist Nicola Serra works under the name of IlSantoBevitore and investigates “ethnomusicological research on ethnic electronics.” Drawing on ancient shamanic ritual and its modern-day equivalents in dance and avant-garde electronic cultures, his music merges deep grating power-electronic sound-buzzes and drones with vivacious, purposeful Latin rhythms – a kind of industrial trance-samba aiming to “blur the distance between practitioner and listener”.
Bassist Adam Barringer and percussionist Matt Pittori, a.k.a. Minus Pilots, last featured in this blog while playing at the More News From Nowhere all-dayer in March Gentle souls, their lustrous and open-ended post-rock approach is filled with shuffling, sliding dream rhythms and murmuring tidal-surface guitar echo as well as sheen-clouds of softly visionary noise. While jazz, drone and psychedelia have all had their part to play in Minus Pilot music, more recent work has also incorporated string parts and a connection to the holy minimalist feel of certain contemporary classical pieces.
As with all Edition events, an exclusive to-the-event 7″ single in a limited edition of five, featuring music by the performing artists, will be given away via random draw as part of the evening.
Champion Version presents:
Edition 3: Run Logan Run + Il Santo Bevitore + Minus Pilots IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 21st June 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
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I’ve not come across the regular Hackoustic evening before, which surprises me: its mixture of technology and body politics raises the kind of questions which interest me. It’s billed as “a night of hacked sound – experimental performances, instruments and installations featuring some of the most exciting makers, musicians and artists in London (with an) incredibly diverse array of artists performing and talking about their work, as well as some wonderful installations.”
Future-minded researcher, violinist and instrument builder Laurel Smith-Pardue (who made an appearance at IKLECTIK’s Augmented Instruments Lab last month) will be performing a set on augmented violin “using custom sensor arrangements to detect natural playing techniques and highlight musical and technical expression” while composer /electronics hobbyist/musical repurposer Lucia Naidu will be digging into her box of oddments and projects to play musical motors, computer fans, assorted sparking high voltage devices, and her work-in-progress as she builds towards a current ambition of creating a musical instrument based around neon oscillators.
“Psychosonographic” investigators and musicians Blanc Sceol (Hannah White & Stephen Shiell) “map spaces with sound” and improvise “performances of their experience of a place, using found objects and beautiful self-created acoustic instruments.”) For this Hackoustic evening, they’ll work as a improvising trio with sculptor/musician Richard Wilson, former founder member of ’80s performance ensemble Bow Gamelan (among Blanc Sceol’s spiritual precursors, thanks to their own yen for inventing and constructing their own instruments for use in their own sound/light/performance events).
There’ll be a talk by artist/coder Tim Murray-Browne about his own immersive/interactive work, which “often responds to the movement of the body and draws on embodied experience — preverbal sensations of place, significance and understanding (- and) looks for new contexts for human connection and creativity, places that challenge our assumptions of who we are and what we do.” Also on display will be ‘SoundObject’ by Random International collective member Shobhan Shah (a communication designer who also creates artworks) which “uses cameras, hands and colours for making different sounds”.
Probably the most challenging and unsettling performance (if you’re prepared to enter its world) is likely to be offered by genderfluid performer/enactor Laura/Frank Bowman – a.k.a. Mother Disorder – who creates live gestural compositions via “contact microphones incorporated onto the body, to merge performance art and improvised dark and ethereal electronic music”, often using crystals as a visual metaphor. Featuring themes and reflections on Laura/Frank’s own experiences of transsexuality, therapy and mental health disorders (and on the pressures to conform which they’ve undergone during the process), the Disorder set looks set to be ambiguous, painful and angry but with its own stubborn beauty. Current project ‘Crystalline’ (the most likely to be performed) involves attaching mics at “points of previous self harm” and acting out a process of rage, acceptance and re-formation; in the parallel (and dormant) project ‘Disoria’, Laura/Frank presents themselves as a crystalline avatar “drawing comparisons between the formation of crystals in the earth and the development of a mental disorder.”. Both projects form part of a literal body of work that aims to be “alien yet organic, pointed yet static, a subject of beauty and of horror… tying together the ephemeral and the visceral.”
In addition, instrument maker Tom Fox of Vulpestruments will be running a small pop-up workshop (allowing attendees to create something to take home with them and broaden the pool) and there’ll be a DJ set from #BarrysLounge.
Hackoustic presents:
Hackoustic: Tim Murray-Browne + Mother Disorder + Laurel Smith-Pardue + Blanc Sceol & Richard Wilson + Shobhan Shah + Lucia Naidu + Tom Fox workshop + DJ #BarrysLounge IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 23rd June 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
“Dictionary Pudding are hugely proud to welcome the long-awaited return of Kings Heath legends Pram. With a new album out shortly on Domino Recording Company – these are very exciting times for Pram, one of the most uniquely enthralling underground artists of the last 30 years – their return in these troubling times is extremely welcome!
“Birmingham’s Pram craft fairytales from concrete reality. The second city’s spin cycle of perpetual renovation, from the slum clearances to its current cosmetic upgrade, is etched in Pram’s restless groove, an endearing and gently refusenik mix encircling early Rough Trade innovators The Raincoats, astro jazz, sci-fi soundtracks, creepy Victoriana, tropical analogue and tumbledown funk.
“To say Pram have always ploughed their own furrow is to underestimate the breadth and scale of their music. To listen to this record is to hear a group who have learned to play together whilst teaching each other a new language. The Moving Frontier is Pram at their most widescreen, they’ve created a mysterious and wonderful landscape that’s sky-wide open.”
And here’s a slightly trimmed version of what I wrote for when they resurfaced quietly for their British comeback almost exactly a year ago, back in Birmingham with the park installation ‘Under the Blossom that Hangs on the Bough’…
“This isn’t quite the same Pram that charmed us and subverted pop for a surprisingly long stint in the ’90s and noughties across a string of albums which included ‘Dark Island’ and ‘Sargasso Sea’ and a sound that seemed to be part child’s murmur, part clinking post-kosmische stroll and part friendly haunted house. Most obviously, singer and lyricist Rosie Cuckston (she who used to mount her keyboard on an ironing board at concerts) is absent, having moved on into academia and a more direct form of the social activism which the band’s eclectic inclusiveness and tendency to take philosophical side roads only hinted. That said, the rest of the band’s original creative core (multi-instrumentalists Matt Eaton, Sam Owen and Max Simpson) are all present, having spent the interim years of Pram downtime working with wonky loops as Two Dogs, creating film and theatre sound and making sonic art out of books with the Sound Book Project.
“This also isn’t the first time that the post-Rosie Pram’s reappeared. Earlier in May they made an appearance at Imaginary Musics in Switzerland, playing a “music for Kopfkino” audio-visual set in a festival dedicated to “cinematic, recomposed and fictional musics”, and it seems as if losing Rosie’s quiet reflective voice and cocooned lyrics has shifted them further over into the areas suggested by Matt’s sound design and by Sam and Max’s live sound art. On-spec, it seems as if they’ve succeeded in becoming a kind of “post-band”, with a foot in their old live work, song-structures and performance coherence, but leaning towards something far more abstract and ego-free. ‘Under the Blossom That Hangs On The Bough’ sounds as if it will be something fascinating to be immersed in – an urban psychedelic afternoon stroll with the family, an aural refraction of Birmingham through leaves, greenery and company.”
Here’s a minute or so of the ‘…Blossom…’ project:
And here are some more moments of Pram past: rattle-pop, glows and musings…
A passing note that this is happening in Crouch End this coming Thursday, and that if you’re a listener or player of a progressive/experimental instrumental tinge in or around London that night who isn’t already headed to the Lost Crowns or Friends Serene events, this might be for you.
“An open mic with a difference. We are inviting musicians (and sound sculptors) to play but not the usual blues and classics you get in pubs but to experiment and explore. It’s a journey. Without judgement. All styles – jazz, prog-rock, fusion, folk, classical, avant-garde, electronic, sounds, welcome.
“üF-Beat is inspired by the German underground clubs that gave birth to the Krautrock music scene (Kraftwerk, Faust, Can, Tangerine Dream and inspired many British bands like Van Der Graaf Generator, Henry Cow, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, etc). As part of the Crouch End Festival Fringe (the more experimental part of the Festival), we are setting up an interesting musical adventure in the Committee Room in the Hornsey Town Hall with grand piano plus PA, mics, amps and psychedelic lighting. And a bar. It’s free too.
“Bring your instrument and an open mind.”
And that’s it. All else will depend on what you yourself bring to it either as audient or player, and on who else turns up…
üF-Beat Hornsey Town Hall, The Broadway, Crouch End, London, N8 9JJ, England
Thursday 14th June 2018, 8.30pm – information here
A couple of posts ago I was grumbling vaguely about ‘Misfit City’ getting too rarefied, cubbyholed and white. If I’m absolutely honest, that’s probably my default setting – the subcultural narrowness, that is, not the complaining. Part of the point of the blog is to expand my own musical education: it’s a process of broadening my outlook and involvement as a listener. Still, I’m well aware that I frequently travel and listen more like a toy fisherman in a novelty clock – rotating in a small circle around an established axis while flicking out a line for what must often seem more like show than anything else.
Gratifyingly, a new gig’s hoving into view at the end of the coming week involving two of the acts I’ve previously covered – one outright punk, the other convoluted RIO techprog – rubbing up against hip-hop, textured ‘tronica and avant-soul-pop. On the same day, an indie-slanted choral group duck the spell of Britpop-grunge covers by investigating David Axelrod alongside an Americana band and a showing by Gallo-Anglo lounge-pop queen Lætitia Sadier. Sometimes you don’t have to force or hanker after cross-pollination: sometimes it comes to you, unprompted.
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From promoters Multi-Storey:
“We’ve actually made it to our first birthday and it’s all down to the amazing people who have played, danced, and generally been friendly and encouraging at our shows! We’ve had an absolute pleasure meeting and listening to some of the most thrilling new bands both from London and further afield over the past 365 and a bit days, so we thought that a big monstrous party/gig/exhibition with some of our favourites would be the perfect way to round off a wonderful year. We want to say thanks to those who have been so helpful, say hi to some new friends, and toss ourselves around like a sentient salad. We’ll be joined at one of our favourite venues by an eclectic and spectacular line-up of our favourite and most exciting new acts, which we will be announcing over the next few weeks. Get yourself a ticket for a late night with unexpected levels to it, and some fantastic music that you never knew existed – stay tuned for announcements!”
Multi-Storey presents:
‘Multi-Storey’s 1st Birthday Party’ featuring Worst World Problems + Augustus + Tony Njoku + Elsa Hewitt + The Mantis Opera + Socket Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 42-46 Pollard Row, Bethnal Green, London, E2 6NB, England
Saturday 9th June 2018, 9.00pm – information here and here
Announcements have duly arrived. Up in the headliner slot, Worst World Problems are a new hip-hop collective. On the evidence of their mini-album ‘Tape One’ their sound’s a blend of chilly ‘80s synthpop nightscapes, data-bus drift and exhausted, hooded, sore-heeled rapping. Inevitable ‘Mezzanine’ and Drake comparisons ensue: there’s that same draggled, overcast feel in the sad ambient production billows and the flow, but WWP take it even further. Their raps feel like echoes around corners, anti-brags, collarbone murmurs from introspective three-quarters-broken boys feeling reamed out and deadened by romantic disintegrations. You feel that at some point they’re going to blow themselves out with a sigh.
Augustus is producer/drummer/keyboard player Gus Lobban, who for the past four years has mixed and dispensed cheery ice-cream-flavoured Anglo-J-pop with Kero Kero Bonito, more recently upping the fuzz-rock/stage-school urchin content. I’m not sure what he intends for this solo appearance, but here’s KKB’s recent Only Acting single: pick out his contributions if you can. Here, the breakdown sounds like a literal breakdown: he might still be surfing the shockwave.
Anglo/Nigerian/cosmic artiste Tony Njoku writes and sings eccentric, thread-fine, vulnerable electro/sort-of-soul, reflecting a young life spent mostly in “grey areas”. Beneath his papery falsetto, slide-clicking trap beats and silly-putty analogue synthwork align with lyrics about origami swans, seraphim and care-powered balloons. African tin-can beats are sideswiped by colossal dance drones and billowing symphonic modular-synth stackings. Pick-out piano fragments leans against rice-paper inserts of gospel tones. It’s psychedelic, but it’s a long way from the muscularity of P-Funk or The Temptations: Afrodelic in hue, it’s also untrammelled by cultural confines.
Imagine a set of constellatory echoes of David McAlmont and Arca; of Wayne Coyne and Frank Ocean; of Jackie Shane and Ahnoni; even bits of Jon Anderson and Arthur Russell. Gossamer and guts. As for Tony himself, his music comes with the feeling that he’s unhitching from as many enforced identities and narratives as he’s clambering onto: as if he’s escaping in plain sight.
“Electronic – lo-fi – avant garde – experimental – singer-songwriter – ambient – if there is one thing I am not, I know that it is pop… catchy nonetheless.” The releaser of a series of cassette albums (rising to a prolific swell in 2017), Elsa Hewitt creates assorted soft and mesmeric musical shapes on samplers, loopers, guitars or pianos; or on captured, folded sounds; or with banked and buried voices. It’s electronica of a kind, but without the matter-of-fact construction – this stuff sounds genuinely collaged and soft-sculptural, its cycles and processes and dream-pop sibilances ready for flexion or redeployment at any time. Some of her work is like chiming cartoon birdsongs, some of it like knitted cirrus or a cove-caught sea of whispering mouths. There are plenty of loopers and glitchers about, but few who can make their work sound so organic and subtly potent.
If you missed my original summary of The Mantis Opera late last month, I suggested that they “fused Henry Cow, Battles and early Scritti Politti…. Guitarist, singer and electronics meddler Allister Kellaway… delivers his stirring, challenging constructions via a full electro-experimental synth-rock band, voicing a collection of “avant-garde grumbles” via a multiplicity of synth sounds and colliding pop tones. If this sounds inaccessible and snooty, it isn’t. It’s just that the tunes arrive in complicated cascading splinters, many parts urging in parallel towards an out-of-sight coda, while a dreamily precise atmosphere prevails: avant-prog keeping watch from under a dream-pop veil.
“The pieces themselves display an ambitious, orchestral thinking – Reykjavik, for example, is less a guitar clang with lofty ambitions and more of a cerebral/visceral string quartet piece transposed for rock band. Allister’s winding, philosophical lyrics, meanwhile, are very reminiscent of Henry Cow and of Rock in Opposition preoccupations, dissecting as they do themes of resistance, logic, language and compliance with the air of a man trying to bring intellectual rigour to the pub, grabbing at the misty answers before the closing bell rings.”
As regards emergent punkers Socket, I’ve previously summed them up as “female-fronted firecrackers (who) don’t worry about anything like (angry, disenfranchised boredom and frustration), specialising in a hell-for-leather guitar pelt with capacious Lust For Life drumming and barely controlled chant-yelling.” That’s probably a bit reductive. For a start, they’re female-founded and female-focused as well as female-fronted (with unassuming, supportive drummer Morgan the only bloke in the lineup).
Read the ‘Beautiful Freaks’ interview here for more insight into the intertwining (or lack of it) of their band work with their assorted Fine Art and game music studies and the happy melding of schooled and unschooled musicality within the band. I suspect that you’ll get more out of that than you will out of this Bandcamp posting.
Adding to the texture, there’s offstage artwork, writings and chat from grassroots rock zines/nascent promoters ‘See You Mate – Yeah, See You Mate‘, and ‘Some Might Say‘, and from activist/theatre person Maya Harrison, with more to filter in in due course.
Their first project is a songbook version of David Axelrod’s 1970 jazz-funk cantata ‘Earth Rot’… and when I say jazz-funk, I’m not talking slap-grooves and plastic synth burbles, but the close-harmony vocalising in swagged cadenzas, twang-pocketed funk basslines, a pushing saxophone backed by a battery of brass. Strangely overlooked at the time of its original release on record (apparently down to it being too much of a leap out of Axelrod’s existing groove), it’s a vaulting, stained-glass show of an album: an early venture into pop-culture ecology drawing on Old Testament text and Navajo legend, celebrating the planet and chiding humans for the mess they’re making of it. The music’s now been transcribed for voice, by ear, by Arthur Sajas of Gabelt, ÉPÉE and Syd Kemp (who also serves as HAHA’s conductor).
This will be the work’s second performance, following its debut outing at Servant Jazz Quarters in February – yes, that slipped my notice too. This one doesn’t have to slip yours. Here’s a brief clip of HAHA Sounds Collective warming up, plus a taste of the original album.
Ostensibly an Americana band, Blueprint Blue actually use Americana’s moods, tones and characteristics to add coloration to what are otherwise very British songs about weather, walking and mild disappointments – the kind which might appear on the mimsier kind of folk-pop album, or which would have been half-smothered in noise or feedback on first-generation shoegazer records a quarter-century ago. Like a mixed bag of British players before them (including Gomez and Mark Knopfler, but more recently Acadian Driftwood and Horatio James) they’ve certainly mastered the sonic signifiers of American roads and roadhouses; but that’s not enough to fully inhabit the form.
The trouble with Americana is that the further you are from the situations which shaped its tones and subjects (and an ocean’s breadth doesn’t help with this), the more it starts sounding like a tinkle in a hollowed-out theatre. If you’ve got to pay tribute you’ve also got to pay dues, or fake it more convincingly. Songwise, at least, Blueprint Blue need some more grease on their axles; some more heartache and heartstring damage; some more blown-away shacks and more chances to sit dripping angry tears into their johnnycakes. Otherwise, it’s going to be a life of striving to be just a bit more like Mojave 3.
There may come a time when Lætitia Sadier isn’t associated, first and foremost, with Stereolab. I hope so. It’s not that there wasn’t, or isn’t, plenty to admire about her former band – just to pick out a few things, there was their unabashed musicality and willingness to draw on broad varieties of tone or reference; their matter-of-fact bilinguality and ready play of ideas; and the fact that they actually managed to revisit their varied roots and to somehow advance and transmute them (something of a holy grail achievement for many musical projects, but rarely achieved). But I, for one, am glad that her post-‘Lab work (with Source Ensemble and others) has unshackled her from that post-Velvets/post-motorik/brainiac-garage pulse: the rhythm cliche that blights so many otherwise promising acts; presses them out into two unforgiving dimensions; makes those who should be innovators and developers into enmired followers.
Lætitia’s set is either an evening opener or a middle-of-the-bill event, so I don’t know whether she’s brought along the Source Ensemble for accompaniment (for all I know, many of them may be in HAHA), or whether this is going to be a chance to hear her alone and independent/unencumbered. Either way, I hope it offers us the chance to hear her as she truly is now – a belatedly great French folk singer, although one neither bonded to the obligations of traditions or the past, nor restricted from broader conceptual and textual pallettes. In effect, an embodiment of a folk impulse reborn into the current age – with all of its opportunities for research and reflection and fresher global instincts – and let loose to create.
Despite their unfortunate no-show last month, cineastes and sonicnambulistic encouragers Colliding Lines bounce back with another evening of films and music, this time pairing the Edwardian fantasias of early French cinema with a variety of new accompaniments including Theremin-ery, object-scrabble, dry downtempo post-classical songcraft, Rhodes-and-sax jazz and screebling noise.
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Colliding Lines present:
‘Reanimation: Phantasmagoria’ – featuring Georges Kaplan Presents… + Hypnotique + Alexander Carson + Far Rainbow New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Wednesday 6th June 2018, 8.30pm – information here and here
“This month we explore the phantasmagoria of 1900’s sci-fi and fantasy films – the magic of hand-tinted films, retro futurism and early special effects, scored live by four different artists.
Films:
• ‘Voyage de la Luna’ (‘Trip to the Moon’), 1902.
• ‘Le Royaume des Fées’ (‘The Kingdom of the Fairies’), 1903.
• ‘L’Album Merveilleux’ (‘Wonderful Album’), 1905.
• ‘Les Tulipes’ (‘The Tulips’), 1907.
• ‘La Grenouille’ (‘The Frog’), 1908
• ‘Le Spectre Rouge’ (‘The Red Spectre’), 1907.
“The programme features the work of film pioneers and stage magicians Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón, whose innovations in narrative and visual filmmaking are considered among some of the most influential in film history.
“We are excited to introduce the following soundtrack artists:
“Georges Kaplan Presents… are a musical duo hailing from London’s gnarled and twisting streets, who in all things take their cue from their leader Georges Kaplan. A man of infinite mystery, very little is known about Georges’ true identity save for his love of a hot tempo and a predilection for strong bourbon. Forever on the run, with only his wits to keep him alive he always knows how to stay ahead of the game. A hustler? A master manipulator? A mere shadow? No one can say, although those who claim to know him best simply marvel at his impeccable taste and incalculable talent in outwitting any would-be detractors.
“Hypnotique is a thereministe, electronic musician and auteur based in London whose lyrical subjects range from the apocalypse, post-feminism, erotic narrative and allotments. She’s performed solo shows at Edinburgh Fringe, worked with Gong and The Heliocentrics, toured the Amazon and annoyed Simon Cowell. For this performance she collaborates with electronics and experimental legend Cos Chapman, founder of the Rude Mechanicals. His recent work has included a performance at Berlin Musitecfest and live sound design for dance-theatre in Taipei.
“Alexander Carson is a neoclassical downtempo composer and songwriter based in London. Carson has previously spent the better part of seven years as the lead singer, and songwriter for genre-fluid quintet Wooden Arms. His debut single ‘Lovers’ was released on the 4th of May via Round Table Records.
“Far Rainbow were formed in London in 2014 by Bobby Barry and Emily Barnett, two old friends from Brighton. Improvising using drums, electronics, and whatever random household objects they can extract a noise from, Far Rainbow approach their arsenal of intonarumori as if they were alien artefacts or ritual paraphernalia, operating according to recursive logics only partly comprehensible.”
Here are videoclip versions of the films being shown, with a variety of tintings and existing soundtracks (from classical to noise-rock and irritating French voiceovers…)
With the cake-crumbs and echoes just settling on the last of Daylight Music’s May shows, it’s time to look forward to their June ones – a treasure-trove of contemporary folk, pop, drones, chamber music, mambo, samplescapes, chanson, and classical and soul fusions. Dip deep.
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“The 2nd June show features Pieter Nooten, Moon Gangs and Blasio Kavuma.
“Pieter Nooten is a Dutch musician and composer best known for his work with the legendary Clan Of Xymox. Over the course of his varied career in music, he has produced numerous dance, ambient and avant garde records. He will perform songs from his long-awaited new album ‘Stem’.
“Moon Gangs is the solo project of BEAK>’s keyboardist William Young. His music mixes analogue synth loops with foreboding, cinematic drones, heavily influenced by teenage years spent playing Commodore 64 games and listening to film scores like ‘Terminator’.
“Blasio Kavuma is a London-based composer, arranger and curator. He has recently completed a collaboration with visual artist Gina Southgate involving live visual responses to his music, and he currently has a residency with dance company Wayward Thread. Drawing from a range of musical traditions, his music is full of rhythmic vitality and stylistic versatility, and is committed to championing forward-thinking music that is accessible to a wide audience.
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“The 16th June show features She Makes War, Garance & The Mitochondries and Chaouche.
“Making a welcome return to Daylight Music, She Makes War (a.k.a. multi-instrumentalist, producer and visual artist Laura Kidd, blending urgent indie rock with melancholy torch songs) previews new material from her fourth album, which is due for release in September 2018.
“Garance & The Mitochondries pairs Garance Louis (an extrovert, eccentric composer, singer and accordionist) with a band who mix Venezuelan mambo and psychedelic folk with the melancholy softness of post-musette songwriting. The result is a fresh, new way of interpreting the tradition of French chanson. Garance has busked her way across the world, travelling through New Orleans, Brazil, Portugal and Italy with her accordion in hand, and her adventures are documented in her songs.
“The music of Bristol-based singer/musician/producer Chaouche has been described as “heartbreaking and spine tingling hymns” by ‘Wonderland’ magazine. Her delicate piano playing features prominently and is bolstered by balanced production of her own massed vocals, programmed drums, sub-bass, cello, violin and an obsession with reverb and delay.
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“The 23rd June show features Sans Soucis Experience, Alisha Sufit and Malin Andersson.
“Sans Soucis Experience is a fusion soul collective of musicians based in London. Coming from different countries and meeting in the heart of Europe, they bring together a shared love for their own folk music, blending Central African and European influences and border interests in hip-hop, jazz and soul for this acoustic performance.
“Alisha Sufit was the singer/songwriter with the pioneering British psychedelic folk band Magic Carpet, who released an album of the same name in 1972 on the Mushroom label. The album is now highly sought after. British guitarist Davey Graham wrote “her voice, full of love, soars and swoops, her lyrics full of keen observation and tender comment.” Alisha also sang and recorded with Amorphous Androgynous, and has recorded four solo albums.
“Swedish singer-songwriter Malin Andersson grew up close to nature, and her songs reflect the sound of the wilderness and honest Scandinavian simplicity. Her style of gentle fingerpicking guitar playing, mixed with contemplative lyrics and evocative melodies, has gained considerable support outside her homeland.
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“The final June show, on the 29th, features Henning Fuchs, Takeo Toyama and Kate Ellis.
“Film composer Henning Fuchs will perform ‘A New Beginning’, a performance that combines live music and live sampling together with sound artist Patrick Muller and visual artist Sven Mücke. This bewitching performance celebrates silence and stillness of the mind. Silence is never solely the end. It is also always the beginning of something new. This idea is reflected throughout the composition.
“Discordant harmonies and fast-changing beats are the trademark of the sound variations of pianist Takeo Toyama. His innovative digital compositions for analogue instruments have attracted considerable attention. After recording five full-length albums, he has now started to arrange tracks for various artists, TV shows and animations. He is also in great demand as a composer for modern dance choreographies.
“Cellist Kate Ellis is dedicated to the performance and exploration of all things with the shiny label of new music. Kate is the Artistic Director of Crash Ensemble, and a member of the Taquin Experiments, Yurodny and Fovea Hex.”
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As usual, all gigs are at Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England and are free, though it’s good form to donate a fiver on the way in or out. Dates below:
Daylight Music 283: Pieter Nooten + Moon Gangs + Blasio Kavuma, Saturday 2nd June 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 284: She Makes War + Garance & The Mitochondries + Chaouche, Saturday 16th June 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 285: Sans Soucis Experience + Alisha Sufit + Malin Andersson, Saturday 23rd June 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 286: Henning Fuchs + Takeo Toyama + Kate Ellis, Saturday 30th June 2018, 12:00pm – information
Some interesting technological, electronic, sociological collisions are coming up in London this month and next month.
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If you’re fascinated by art and technology but find either or both too crowded by aggressive/patronizing male ownership and entitlement, or if you just like the idea of different viewpoints and identities being brought to bear on the world of geektech, you might find the following an interesting opportunity…
“WITCiH (Women In Technology Creative Industries Hub) is hosting a party to celebrate the making of its podcast pilot episode, featuring Irish composer/producer and “latterday Delia Derbyshire” Hannah Peel (whose work includes the Rebox musical box project, collaborations with John Foxx and membership of The Magnetic North, and whose analogue-synth-cum-brass-band project ‘Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia’ recently headlined at the newly refurbished Queen Elizabeth Hall). There will also be an interactive audio-visual performance with AV duo Output Arts and WITCiH co-founder Bishi, featuring the former’s immersive installation Storm, which “recreates the thrill and excitement of watching a storm as it moves from dark and foreboding to booming explosions of light as the gale approaches” and which was previously seen at Enchanted Parks in Gateshead.
“This is an ideal opportunity to get together with artists and professionals in the creative tech industries. Science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) have always had an intimate relationship with the arts; and WITCiH (Women In Technology Creative Industries Hub) aims to explore & expand our knowledge of women working at that intersection – past, present & future. WITCiH is female-focused but is gender inclusive, welcoming to all people throughout the spectrum of gender and identity.
“WITCiH aims to educate and inspire people through an understanding of women and non-binary people in tech, set in an historical context; and to highlight, celebrate and showcase women currently working in technology with a clear focus on creativity and the arts. Founded by interdisciplinary musician/artists and audio-visual performers Bishi and Matthew Hardern (a.k.a. Glamorre), WITCiH is an online and real world platform for ideas, research, performance, creation & networking.”
Previous WITCiH events in last year’s Winter Salon series have featured Bishi herself, Empress Stah (the aerial artist, cabaret performer, show producer/director and Peaches collaborator) and media artist Aphra Shemz, who “(seeks) to express herself through radical new technologies, abstraction, interactivity and light, (exploring) the way in which we might use these tools to imagine what the role of art could be in the future.” WITCiH are currently “looking for sponsorship to produce an entire series, so any ideas of how we could achieve this are very welcome.” If you’ve got any, get in touch and get stuck in.
WITCiH and Bishi present:
WITCiH Podcast Listening Party The Barge House, 46a De Beauvoir Crescent, De Beauvoir Town, London, N1 5RY, England
Wednesday 30th May 2018, 8.00pm – information here
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A week later, a group of people led by space designer Tuo Lin are decking out Bloomsbury’s house-of-weird The Horse Hospital for what organiser Rica Zhu is claiming will be “a unique synth/electronic music show with a stunning visual journey. We bet it’s gonna be a magic time of synth electronic music you have never experienced before! Three musicians are ready to refresh your ears by using some special instruments with multiple synthesisers to take you to a neo synth world! The venue is also installed like a light-reflecting crystal especially for the interaction of the synth music and full of interesting experimental elements. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s fly to the electronic galaxy!”
That may sound a little gushy, perhaps even a tad huāpíng, but the music itself suggests otherwise. Handling the noises, textures and tunes are Yoshiki Ichihara (maker of jittery, bubbling cave/chemical tank music), “relaxed bass-focussed dance” specialist Sam Hostettler (who also creates immersive sub-bass rollscapes) and Przemysław Trzaska (who makes wombadelic firework electronica as Crowstep). Given the Horse Hospital’s already trippy architecture – rooms which burst off a set of long ramped floorways, originally built to lead horses to the upstairs section, and sharing space with a collection of archive fashion costumes – plus the promise of crazed crystallinity, you can expect a delightfully disorientating evening.
Rica Zhu presents:
Synth 2.0: Yoshiki Ichihara + Sam Hostettler + Przemysław Trzaska The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Thursday 7th June 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
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In the middle of June, down at the DIY Space, they’re sketching out something broad and absorbing which will investigate and defy interconnectivity and its impact on art and music-making. So far, only the bare bones of the concept have been made public. Here they are:
“NowHere is an event series focusing on post-internet music and art. We invite emerging artists to collaborate together, creating one-off multimedia performances inspired by the internet but will not be shareable online. To do so, mobile phones won’t be allowed in this event.
“The Internet is a huge simulating machine through which everything is reproducible. Will the content of the performance and our experience still be original and valuable when it can be copied over and over again? We want to raise and discuss this question with our artists and audiences through this event. We want to create a commonplace in the middle of virtual and physical reality, bringing music and arts from nowhere on the internet to now here, a physical space where celebrating improvised performance emerged from the intimate connection between artists and audiences.”
No news on who’s creating and performing here yet – I’ll try to put up an update closer to the time. As with all DIY Space events, this is a members-and-guests only event, so if you’re going be sure to sign up for your two-quid annual membership deal here first.
Sadteabag Ltd. presents:
‘NowHere_0000000000000001’ (lineup t.b.c.) DIY Space For London, 96-108 Ormside Street, South Bermondsey, London, SE15 1TF, England
Sunday 17th June 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
I hate punk. No, scratch that. I hate what punk too often turns into – the institution of punk, the ossification of what ought to be immediate, the sense of discovery and an armful of bright options that stales and turns into an array of choking conservative forms; the way it all ages too quickly and turns into the faded favourite shirt you wear out of stubbornness.
It’s not supposed to be that way: it should always feel like a shot of energy into the moment, or a flare of wising up. I sometimes feel that it should only be a transient thing, but a transformative transient thing – a kind of liberating wind-tunnel which you hurtle through en route to finding who you are, so that you can be someone whom you’d never otherwise have had the imagination and purpose to become. Stretching out that moment, that process, somehow seems to stop the result. I get bored by most punk, energy or no energy. When it does get a grip on me, it’s when it drags me in to witness that firing of possibilities. I always wonder why, and how, it should last any longer.
Chinese punks Birdstriking have been together since 2009; some way off the sixteen active years of Fugazi, let alone the forty-two of UK Subs, but a span which, in terms of the early punk waves, would have practically rendered them elder statesmen. Despite this, they still sound as fresh as if they were in their first flush – a glorious, splintery, shimmery noise like an rotary engine made from flying gobbets of molten silver, topped with a stormtossed thrill of Sino-Anglo vocal. On their rare trips over here they’re the subject of documentaries, or are fêted in word-of-mouth samizdat as if they were princes from the East: their shows immediately garlanded as must-see events. It’s tempting, I guess, to treat them as something exotic – different from the Western malcontents we’re used to – and whenever you hear a thrilling echo of Chinese folk melody ringing through the smog of guitar bash or shaping a vocal line, it’s even more tempting to pursue that angle.
It’s also tempting to try to cast them as rebels against the suffocating monocultural paternalism of the latterday Chinese state, but that’s not easy to make stick. Having had their debut record banned due to a single, fairly unspecifically political song, Birdstriking have shrugged their shoulders, said a few things about anger being for people’s younger days, and are now opting for more innocent-sounding themes – sports enthusiasm, the thrill of personal energy, the mixed soothings and pain of family. You could, if you squinted, cast them as apologists for a kind of positive Chinese conformism. I’m guessing that that’s not true either. I suspect that a kind of subtlety is at work amongst the noise – discussions in the timbre of arguments, and in the implications of personal joy within a collective . They want to keep on doing what they do, to become something more. It’s not in the rhetoric, it’s in the sound.
Regardless, in each of the two London gigs they’re playing over the coming week, Birdstriking will be interfacing with a different Western counter-cultural mindset. At the Sebright show (where they’ll be at the bottom of the bill), the tone’s definitely leaning towards the psychedelic, the noise-surfy and the shaggy rebel-academic. Gnod-affiliated Dutch avant-garde music collective Radar Men From The Moon will be deconstructing psychedelia and acid house: part of the group curating the Eindhoven Psych Lab, they’re currently touring and touting ‘Subversive II’ (the last in a triple-run of themed albums). London psychedelic droners One Unique Signal (who also moonlight as the instrumental backing for The Telescopes) will also be joining in, continuing their sixteen-year voyage into noisy minimalist repetition with added layered impulses from space rock, post-rock and kosmische.
At the Windmill – where Birdstriking are headlining – expect a dip into the more stripped, loquacious end of post-punk smarts, since they’re being supported by The Wolfhounds. Post-punk veterans from the mid-’80s, currently thirteen years into a resurrection, the Wolfhounds are now grizzled smartarses in their early fifties. Smart enough to embrace their middle-agedness without succumbing to it (meaning that they’re in a place where they can sing about self-parody rather than just becoming one), they’re also armed with a lean, laser-guided wit and a deceptively sophisticated perspective. Although they’d hate the comparison, they’re proof positive of that old bastard P.J O’Rourke’s adage about age and guile beating youth, innocence and a bad haircut.
If The Wolfhounds are garage rock, theirs is an omnivorous man-cave of a garage. It’ll be rammed with books and time-tested music, and inside it they’ve honed a pitch-perfect blend of sarcasm and hidden sincerity, and a way of loading their snarling guitar chassis with bursts of soul, a capella political folk and digressions into the digital sound palette which frontman David Callahan mastered during his interim years with Moonshake. Though the songs on their current album ‘Untied Kingdom’ (one of 2016’s finest, sharpest records at the punkier end – perhaps a ‘Sandanista!’ without the sprawl) echo, and probably intentionally, Brecht, Blake and Shelley they’re never pompous or swotty. An equal template, at least in terms of directed smarts, are the wise, rowdy Mekons, whose own forty-one year career evolution is an example of how punk doesn’t have to tumble into the pickling jar; proof positive, as The Wolfhounds continue to prove, that those punky impulses don’t have to turn into flab and complacency.
One more thing – in case you thought the psychedelic-noise side of things had been left behind at the Sebright Arms, the interim DJ sets at the Windmill come from Sterling “Rosco” Rothwell, the onetime Spacemen 3 and Darkside drummer who’s sometimes resurfaced as himself (for 2004’s The Psychedelic Ubik) or as a guest performer with various acts from Sky Saxon to Geraint Watkins and Martin Belmont.
Dates:
Radar Men From The Moon + One Unique Signal + Birdstriking, The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England, Sunday 20th May 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Birdstriking + The Wolfhounds + DJ Rosco, The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, England, Tuesday 22nd May 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
Shatner’s Bassoon + Man From Uranus Stour Space, 7 Roach Road, Old Ford, London, E3 2PA, England
Saturday 26th May 2018, 8.00pm – information
Leeds jazz-punk quintet Shatner’s Bassoon are returning to London a couple of weeks later to play a gig at reclaimed Lea-side venue Stour Space.
A band who’ll happily admit to being “steeped in malfunctioning improvisation, passive-aggressive minimalism, surreal avant-punk and free jazz trances”, they’re touting their first new album for three years. ‘Disco Erosion’ features “intricate yet often evasive song structures, angular rhythms and anxiety inducing psychedelia. The distinct featured instrumentation includes circuit bent delay pedals for keyboard, a myriad of off-kilter sax, a slice of Theremin, clarinet, cowbell and a pinch of Transylvanian organ. The result is a glitchy and deranged carnival of paranoia, which blends influences from the likes of Mr. Bungle, Frank Zappa, Cardiacs, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Man From Uranus and Fred Frith.”
Speaking of Man From Uranus, he’s playing the support slot. An “experimental library musician” and rogue psychedelic improviser, he’s spent fifteen years on the fringe rampaging on analogue synths, theremin and assorted devices to create music reminiscent of fantastical backroom mind-voyages or antique afternoons of strange kid’s telly.
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A couple of days later, there’s “an evening of heavy electronics, innovative drone, ritual ambient doom and industrial music” courtesy of Chaos Theory in one of their more synthetic, swampy and cthonic moods.
Author & Punisher is “the solo project of Tristan Shone (hailed by ‘Noisey/VICE’ as a “staggering genius in (his) ability to transform the auditory pollution of industry into music”. A mechanical engineer who wandered from native Boston to California to pursue his artistic interests, he ended up using his scientific skills to build custom musical instruments, which give added depth to the term “industrial”. The mechanical processes that give life to the music aim to reproduce the rhythms of industrial machinery and its relationship to their human operators; a merging of the flesh and the steel.”
In support, growl-and-hiss “solo visionary”Trepaneringsritualen will be delving into “themes of religion, magick and the occult realms of consciousness, taking musical cues from the old school of ritual ambient and death industrial. Rhythmic and seething at times, oozing forward with a creeping sense of desolation, Trepaneringsritualen conjures forth bleak but mesmerising visions of the end-times.”
Opening the show is Berlin-and-London resistance siren Vera Bremerton, “a visionary vocalist, producer and composer, who weaves dark tales of the female experience under religion, the patriarchy and general cultural hatred, using superhuman screams, industrial beats and gritty lyrics… A harrowing, enlightening and extreme experience.” Her work crosses a gamut between dark, driving, angry protest-pop nuggets and extended swathe-y textural clouds of hanging noise and vocal lacerations – see below.
Broken beats/London bass act With Towards Collapse add to the overall stew with DJ sets throughout the evening.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to dive deeper into electronic technology – or just hone or diversify the skills you already have, Stevie Richards (a.k.a Cleaninglady is hosting a noontime open workshop at IKLECTIK in early June, based around a legendary West Coast “suitcase synth” – the Buchla Music Easel. Dating back to 1973 (and, in recent years, reincarnated as software emulations by Arturia) the Easel is part of a family of electronic instruments created by Don Buchla, who avoided the word “synthesizer” since he believed that it implied a cloning of existing instrumental sounds. Instead (in parallel with the more conventional creations of Moog, Korg and others) he evolved a line of devices dedicated to creating new sounds; sometimes – but not always – avoiding the use of a standard tempered-scale keyboard, and incorporating a much more complex method of tone generation than those of his rivals. This has led to his creations being the instrument of choice for certain electronic musicians who demand a deeper, more detailed control of tone and timbre as well as the different thinking patterns which the instruments encourage.
While the workshop will be performed on, and led from, the Buchla Music Easel, apparently everything being taught and communicated is “applicable to all hardware in the modular synthesis world, and will hopefully help give you confidence and a deeper understanding of your instrument and it’s application in recording and live performance contexts.” Here’s a Loopop guide to the Easel, plus a video of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith working her own Easel. I’ve also added a recording of Stevie running a modular synth set in New York four years ago.
Modular Synthesis Workshop using Buchla Music Easel IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 2nd June 2018, 11.00am – information here, here and here
Although they were a ‘Misfit City’ mainstay for a number of years, it’s been a while since I’ve put up any previews for Daylight Music‘s free Saturday noontime concerts at the Union Chapel. Blame this on the slapdashery that passes for “method”, back here at ‘Misfit City’ HQ; blame concentration or distraction by other things, but for goodness’ sake don’t blame Daylight Music themselves.
I suppose that it might be possible for a regular attender to sometimes feel as if you’ve had enough of Daylight’s particular cosiness – that warm wooly-sweatered whimsicality, the cake stall, or the feeling that you might just crack if you see another community choir singing alt.pop cover versions. But ultimately it’s churlish to take swipes at them for the side trappings when what really counts is the musing intelligence and the well-honed curatorial instincts underneath the family-friendly fuzz. In the end, there are precious few regular gigs in London that can match Daylight for unassuming stealth education: few that will host a baroque quartet alongside rustling sampledelia, set guileless acoustica off against arch indie, season your ears with sudden rushes of Baltic sound or pipe organ interludes; introduce you to musicians and songwriters who leave you astonished and blinking about the fact that you’ve never heard of them before; and all the while balancing the kiddie-friendly with the uncompromising and actually pulling it off. There are few gigs that are just so plain generous.
So, without more ado, here’s a quick signal-boost for the first few gigs of their imminent summer season…
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“The 12th May show features Green Seagull, respectfulchild and Twenty Three Hanging Trees. Green Seagull are the latest band to burst out of London’s burgeoning neo-psych scene. Their harmony-laden baroque/freakbeat sound draws upon influences such as the Left Banke, the Kinks and the Association. respectfulchild is the solo instrumental project of Gan from Saskatoon on Treaty 6 Territory. Their music is electronic in nature while being acoustically created, building experimental ambient soundscapes through slow progressions of meticulous improvisation. Their sound has been likened to Brian Eno, Nils Frahm and Owen Pallett.
“Twenty Three Hanging Trees is the meditative modular synth exploration project of Xavier Watkins (Fuzzy Lights/Violet Woods/Red Red Eyes.) The project’s progression from hazy guitar drones to electronic-based explorations with dusty, contemplative tonalities has been a transformative one. Learning to express himself with synthesis was like learning a new language, each step having to be carefully planned and executed so as to maintain the fragile equilibrium created. While 2016’s ‘Nocturne’, released on the Sacred Tapes label, had a contemplative, embryonic stillness, 2017’s ‘Prémonitions’ has a deeper, more emotional heart, tempered by subtle rhythmic buzzing, shimmering oceanic drones and solemn arcs of melody.
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“The 19th May show features Firestations, Seán Mac Erlaine and Hatchie. Firestations are an alt-pop band who write simple songs then paint over them with drones, vocal harmonies, electronica and unusual rhythms. Their second album ‘The Year Dot’ has recently released by Lost Map Records. Séan MacErlaine is a Dublin-based woodwind instrumentalist, composer and music producer, recognised as one of Ireland’s most forward-thinking creative musicians. His work intersects folk, free improvisation, jazz and traditional music.
Hatchie is the world of Harriette Pilbeam. To hear her music is to step inside her mind; a dreamy landscape where cascading synths, jangling guitars, propulsive rhythms and white noise undulate beneath undeniable and irresistible pop melodies. This will be a special acoustic set.
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“The 26th May show features Vesperados, Guastalla Quartet and Marcus Corbett. Award-winning composer and jazz musician James Brady first formed Vesperados in 2011, bringing together musicians to explore African, Caribbean and Latin American influences in jazz through original music. Formed in 2013, The Guastalla Quartet brings together musicians from the finest conservatoires in Europe to form a chamber music group dedicated to the exploration of the string quartet repertoire from its roots to as yet unwritten works. Between them, they have performed at world-famous venues including the Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Katara Opera House and the National Concert Hall of Taiwan.
“The Guastalla Quartet will also join Vesperados for an octet set during their performance: the use of strings will allow the full expression of rich jazz harmony alongside the rhythmic engine of Vesperados’ Latin-infused grooves.
“Completing the lineup, Marcus Corbett is a singer, acoustic guitarist and composer based between the UK and Pune, Maharashtra, India. He has been studying Indian classical music and working with musicians in India for over 10 years, skillfully combining the worlds of Indian classical and British folk music and producing a string of albums. He will perform with one of his key Indian collaborators, Tabla maestro Nitin Gaikwad.”
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As ever, all gigs are at Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England and are free, though it’s good form to donate a fiver on the way in or out. Dates below:
Daylight Music 280: Green Seagull, respectfulchild + Twenty-Three Hanging Trees, Saturday 12th May 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 281: Firestations, Seán Mac Erlaine + Hatchie, Saturday 19th May 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 282: Vesperados, Guastalla Quartet + Marcus Corbett, Saturday 26th May 2018, 12:00pm – information
Flagging up a few more experimental events in London and Worthing…
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Upset The Rhythm presents:
Matana Roberts + Kelly-Jayne Jones + Coby Sey Ghost Notes, Peckham Levels, 95a Rye Lane, Peckham, London, SE15 4ST, England
Wednesday 9th May 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
“Internationally renowned US composer, saxophonist, mixed-media practitioner, and sonic voyager Matana Roberts and British sound artist/improviser Kelly Jayne Jones will weave their own approaches into live collaborative works informed by deeply expressive playing, tactile electro-acoustic interplay and a broader shared politics of resistance/defiance. This Upset The Rhythm show is part of the first in a series of special live shows commissioned by Outlands, a new national experimental music touring network.
“Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist and mixed-media practitioner. Roberts works in many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theatre, and has released a diverse body of solo and ensemble work under her own name on Constellation Records and Central Control over the past decade.
“She is perhaps best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, ongoing and unfolding via Constellation Records: a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. Constellation began documenting the Coin Coin project in 2011 and has released the first three of a projected twelve album-length chapters to date.
“Kelly-Jayne Jones makes use of varying combinations of prepared recordings, text, rocks, found sounds and flute. Her work beckons a tussle with uncertainty, inviting exposure and vulnerability in performance, chasing experiences that open our chasms within, without restraint. Searching for humble principles of growth; physics; sound, connecting with others in the same space/moment, customary experimental play, with threads and beads of improvisation and interactivity.
“KJJ has had residencies at Arnolfini in Bristol UK and Kunstalle Bergen, Norway, and has produced commissioned works for Haris Epaminonda at dOCUMENTA13, Tate Modern, ICA London, Schirn Frankfurt, Point Centre Nicosia. She has performed, solo and with part wild horses mane on both sides, at CCA Glasgow, Trieze Gallery Paris, Borealis Festival, Tectonics Reykjavik, Hangar Bicocca in Milan and at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
“Coby Sey is a vocalist, musician and DJ, who, after years spent buzzing around the DIY artist circuitry of South East London, has developed a distinctive presence as a performer and producer offering a shifting, disorienting vision of club music. A long-time collaborator with Mica Levi, Tirzah, Babyfather, Klein and Kwes, Coby’s recorded work – as best evidenced on the ‘Whities 010: Transport for Lewisham’ 10” – spans the realms of live instrumentation, sample-based productions and experimental music, melding recognisable motifs of hip hop, drone, jazz, grime and more into a dubbed-out anaesthesia.
“Live, these dreamlike compositions are imbued with a heavy, uneasy dancefloor energy, often abetted by live vocals as well as saxophone interjections c/o regular cohorts Ben Vince and Calderwood. Coby’s open-door approach to sharing and making music stretches to his work with London collective Curl, who release records and host events with a collaborative, improvisatory approach, as well as a regular slot on NTS which offers a portal into his appealingly murky musical world.”
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A more bucolic experimental event happens down in Worthing the following evening, with a dusting of pop…
DisConcert & Third Kind Records present
Linden Pomeroy + Hattie Cooke The Cellar Arts Club, 70 Marine Parade (basement), Worthing, West Sussex, BN11 3QB, England
Thursday 10th May 2018, 8.00pm – information
“Linden Pomeroy is a musician and sound artist from West Sussex, building pastoral ambience via meditative guitar abstractions, tapes, voice and field recordings. Gathered from hours of home recordings, his latest album ‘Spirit Replica’ (released on 21st April on Brighton’s Third Kind Records on limited C-90 cassette) further explores his textural approach to the guitar with the injection of field recordings and digital processing. Vignettes of sound bleed through tape hiss, crickets chirping, wind between distant trees… Nothing is quite what it seems with an ambitious scope, from down tuned folk ballads to more expansive drone and psychedelia.
“Support comes from Brighton-based singer-songwriter Hattie Cooke, whose eponymous debut album (also available on Third Kind) coasts the twin poles of Sarah and vintage Factory Records bordering a tape that splits the difference between felt-patterned synths and tender, sitting-in-the-bay-window guitar songs.”
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Back in London, the same night sees the next in the sequence of Colliding LDN audio-visual events up at New River Studios…
“Our next event is ‘Arcade’: performances which traverse the physical and digital, inspired by videogame aesthetics and process. We invite you to join us for a one night special session staged at New River Studios, featuring both live acts and an arcade of interactive installations and experimental games.
“Polyop fuse organic and machine aesthetics with sci-fi mythologies to create an immersive audio-visual voyage. Enlist on their first cosmic pilgrimage to distant reaches of an alternate polyhedral universe, occupied by psychedelic soundscapes, rhythmical acid entities and uncharted electro artefacts. Fusing funk, jazz and electro with techno and modern sound design, their sound is graphically rendered through custom visual performance engine Hedron.
“Reuben Kyriakides and film artist Jules Leaño collaborate on a live audiovisual set-piece, a triad of video, sound and contemporary dance. Movements are filmed, manipulated, and re-projected live upon the performance as it happens. The dancer is torn between reality and it’s interface, her every move digitised, glitched and repurposed – a dark shadow glimpsed between raw data and its translation.
“With support from The Palace International Film Festival we present the following short films shot entirely in-game – Jonathan Vinel‘s 2017 work ‘Martin Pluere’ (Martin Cries), created in ‘Grand Theft Auto V’; and ‘Counter-Charge’ (Alex Hovet, 2016), created with ‘Leisure Suit Larry 3’.
“We are also pleased to welcome installations, inteventions and inventions from poets Abigail Parry and Jon Stone, and performance artist Campbell McConnell. More information to be announced.”
Colliding Lines present:
‘Colliding LDN: Arcade’ New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Thursday 10th May 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
First things first: the murmuring, brass-dappled Crayola Lectern trio are making their way up for a rare London gig in the middle of May, followed by a Brighton launch show for the new Crayola Lectern album, ‘Happy Endings’, at the start of June. The vehicle for Chris Anderson’s tidal, sometimes melancholic, often softly funny songs – low-key dramas of reflection, resignation and not-quite acceptance – they’re powered by his piano, Al Strachan’s sleepy cornet and percussion and Brighton uberdrummer Damo Waters’ parallel skills on keyboards.
It’s not been confirmed yet who’s joining in at Brighton, though the whispers are that it’ll be someone – or several someones – drawn from Chris’ Brighton psychedelic circles, which includes driving psych-rock ensemble ZOFFF, Kemper Norton (more on whom shortly), CLOWWNS and Spratleys Japs. However, the London bill has its two support acts.
Psych-pop journeyman Joss Cope, armed with his strongest project yet (last year’s ‘Unrequited Lullabies’) will be along for the ride. I recently described the album as “a luscious living-room tranche of psych-pop with a sharp wit; dappled with dextrous pop guitars, carousel prog, fake horns and laps of Mellotron”. Live, you may get a little less of the texturing, but you’ll still get the songs: chatty, wry commentaries on a world wobbling off the rails. The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Husband also happens to be Nick Howiantz, who otherwise divides his time between running Brixton Hill Studios and fronting sporadic, noisy Brighton psych-pop rompers Ham Legion. I’ve no idea about what’s behind the genderswapping ecclesiastical mask, but he/she/they are being tagged as a “veritable modern day Syd Barrett”, so come along and see whether that’s a claim worth claiming or whether it falls interestingly wide of the mark.
Dates:
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England, Wednesday 16th May 2018, 7:30pm (with Joss Cope + The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Husband) – information here, here and here
The Rose Hill, 70-71 Rosehill Terrace, Brighton, BN1 4JL, England, Friday 1st June 2018, 8.00pm (support t.b.c.) – information here
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I was talking about Crayola – and William D. Drake – only a few posts ago, as regards their Worthing fundraiser for Tim Smith on 19th May. A week before that, both of them (in various permutations) will be joining another Tim fundraiser – this one an all-dayer in Coombe Bissett, nestled in the Wiltshire chalk downs south-west of Salisbury.
‘A Spring Symposium’ is the brainchild – or heartchild – of onetime Cornish folkie Emily Jones, who’s now joined the cluster of Cardiacs family musicians living around Salisbury. Her own songs of seal-wives, haunted bungalows, witchery and other glimpses beyond the vale will be part of the event, alongside contributions from various other characters well-known to Cardiacs followers or to aficionados of certain weird-folk, Rock in Opposition and hauntological camps.
Emily’s near-neighbours, Craig and Sharron Fortnam of North Sea Radio Orchestra, will be taking part in various permutations. Craig will be bringing along his Arch Garrison duo with James Larcombe, singing soft songs (on gut-strung acoustic guitar and buzzing organs and monosynths) about long walks, lost brothers, ancient roads, dogs, death and bereavement and the various gentle tug-of-wars between family and necessary solitude, compromise and truthfulness, art and earning. Craig and Sharron will both be playing in a second reunion of Lake Of Puppies, the rollicking, affectionate acoustic-psychedelic folk-pop band they formed with avuncular ex-Cardiac and alternative keyboard virtuoso William D. Drake over twenty years ago. During the mid-‘90s they’d play regular small gigs around London; bobbing up with their bouncy songs of life, good humour and growing things, like a rosy apple in a tub. Sadly, they went their separate and amiable ways after only a few years and no more than a couple of rough demos. Having reconvened in the summer of 2013 (for a lovingly received appearance at the Alphabet Business Convention), they promptly disappeared again, but have been working out a long-delayed debut album on the quiet. Some of that ought to show up at this concert. See below for a couple of dashes of their particular flavour. Large Life might be billed as Bill’s, but it’s Puppies to the bone, and their 2013 set from Salisbury should give you an idea as to how they are now.
I’ve already mentioned the Crayola Lectern set; there’ll also be one from Bob Drake (the onetime 5uus and Thinking Plague guy currently bouncing around the country on a tour of his own). Sit at Uncle Bobby’s feet; listen to his electric guitar jangle, pop and change its mind every other mid-phrase; and take in some loveably bizarre constantly changing one-minute songs about sinister meerkats, experiments gone wrong, and the way in which assorted eldritch beasts from dark dimensions annoyingly disrupt your life, your shopping and your evening’s relaxation. If Ogden Nash, Fred Frith, Roald Dahl and Neil Young had all crept up to H.P. Lovecraft’s house one larky summer’s evening with a pint of moonshine and some tall tales – and really made him laugh – it would have sounded something like this.
While there may be a couple of extra guests showing up as a surprise, the Symposium roster is formally rounded off by Kemper Norton and by Libbertine Vale – the former an electro-acoustic folk-culture miner of music and landscapes, (armed with instruments, electronics and field recordings to remap both physical terrain and song terrains), the latter the Omnia Opera/7shades singer who’s revealed herself as a rebel Midlands folkie, digging deep into the more macabre corners of the folk-song catalogue and coming back with “uncomfortable songs about death, a capella sqwarking that will kill or heal your ears, dependent on your disposition.” It’s tough to track Libby down on the web, but here’s a bit of Kemper.
There’s only ten days to go ‘til the event, but there’s still time to arrange to get there. There’ll be cakes and ale, there’ll be vegetarian food; Tim Smith himself will probably be in attendance, and Emily’s suggested that you caravan-camp out on the chalk downs. If this English May makes its mind up (and settles for being a good springsummer), it all ought to be lovely.
Emily Jones presents:
A Spring Symposium: Lake of Puppies + Crayola Lectern + Arch Garrison + Bob Drake + Kemper Norton + Libbertine Vale + Emily Jones Coombe Bissett Village Hall, Shutts Lane, Homington Road, Coombe Bissett, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP5 4LU, England
Saturday 12th May 2018, 2.00pm – information here, here and here
I started mentioning upcoming Bob Drake shows a few posts ago, but wasn’t able to go further than that until they coalesced; now, like spits of mud hitting a wall, they’ve fallen into place.
Born in the American mid-West, forged and frustrated in Denver and Los Angeles, and now living happily in the south of France, Bob’s become an increasingly regular visitor to British shores, able to take advantage of a growing number of friendships and affinities which provide fertile space for his delightfully off-the-wall guitar-and-voice gigs. He’s built on a previous career in heavy avant-prog bands (such as Thinking Plague, 5uus and The Science Group) to kick off and develop his own very specific brand of American musical storytelling. Rather than sombre accounts of depressions and dustbowl, or frontier myths, or urban cowboy ditties, he creates crazy quilts of short-but-complicated songcraft drinking deep from the well of American pulp fiction – specifically, the weird end. Modern (or at least recent-antique) spieling and riffing on monsters and strangeness; never far away from horse-laughs and absurdity, but also a couple of dimensional rips away from the kind of spindle-fold-and-mutilate pocket universe which, one sometimes suspects, he feeds his music through.
These days, he’s variously described as “a pop alchemist”, “a multi-fingered, omnipotent, all-seeing instrumentalist”, “a peddlar of avant-garde, individual but always highly melodic tales of bears, skulls, meerkats, griffins and more” and as the player of songs about “anthropomorphic animals, haunted farmhouses, mystical reveries and inexplicable phenomena”. All of the descriptions fit. So does the one that suggests he’s actually a kid’s TV presenter who saw the fnords one day and happily went rogue.
Dates:
Le 108, 108 Rue de Bourgogne, 45000 Orléans, France, Friday 4th May 2018, 8.30pm – information
The Others, 6-8 Manor Road, Stoke Newington, London, N16 5SA, England, Sunday 6th May at 19:30–22:30 (with Bing Selfish & The Windors + IG Witzelsucht) – information here and here
The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England, Tuesday 8th May 2018, 7.00pm (with Moliné/Gagarin Summit and others t.b.c.) – information
The Cellar Arts Club, 70 Marine Parade (basement), Worthing, West Sussex, BN11 3QB, England, Wednesday 9th May 2018, 7.30pm (with Random Nature) – information
The Evening Star, 55-56 Surrey Street, Brighton, West Sussex, BN1 3PB, England, Thursday 10th May 2018, 8.00pm (with Kemper Norton) – free event – information
The Urban Bar, 176 Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel, London, E1 1BJ, England, Friday 11th May 2018, 8.00pm (with Bing Selfish & The Windsors + Kazumi Taguchi) – information
‘A Spring Symposium’ @ Coombe Bissett Village Hall, Shutts Lane, Homington Road, Coombe Bissett, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP5 4LU, England, Saturday 12th May 2018, 2.00pm – information here and here
While the Orléans event is Bob and Bob alone, it’s the only time (bar a quiet house gig along the way) that he’ll will be playing on his own.
Of the three shows in London, the one at the Harrison on the 8th should be of interest to Pere Ubu fans since it also features Moliné/Gagarin Summit, a fresh teaming of Keith Moliné and Graham “Gagarin” Dowdall, musical compadres for two decades who currently hold down/expand on the guitarist and synthesist roles within Ubu. Between them, they can also muster a history of stints with Frank Black, Nico, Roshi feat. Pars Radio, Ludus, Prescott and They Came From The Stars I Saw Them.
What’s likely to emerge may feature some of Ubu’s “avant-garage” touch; the factories, beasts and spill of Keith’s guitar noises; the blend of electronic grain and field recording in Gagarin-sound. Or perhaps none of these things. All they’re promising is “guitars that don’t sound like guitars and electronics that don’t sound electronic, presided over by intense, exploratory artists who have just as little idea where the music is heading as you do.” There should be other people alighting on the bill closer to the date, pulled from the intriguing contact book of organisers Westking Music & Performing Arts… meanwhile, I’ve just dug up something from Keith’n’Graham as a musical pointer.
Both of the other two London shows – on the 6th and 11th – see Bob reunited with a regular gig-sharing friend: sarcastic avant-garde underground pop star Bing Selfish, plus the experimental surf/garage-pop of his micro-lounge backing band The Windsors. Also in place are Rotterdam experimental music supergroup IG Witzelsucht featuring guitarist Lukas Simonis, drummer Cor Hoogerdijk and multi-instrumental/polydisciplinary flâneur Ergo Phizmiz, whose work includes singing, sound collage and opera as well as stop-motion animation and radio drama: at least a few of these skills will make their way into the set. The band’s been described as “a rapid-fire songwriting bonanza (with) tunes about mermaids, mistakes, compost manufacture, celebrity perverts, geometry, and so on”, so Bob’s songs will be in good company.
I don’t know about the rest of the Depresstivallians on offer. There’s some incomprehensible gargle about “Bill Oddie’s Goth Watch”, “data wrangling”, “an angrier and less prolific Joanna Newsom” and a possible guest slot for the mysterious “guy from the kebab shop”. The last is probably one of many absurdist Depresstival in-jokes; but I’m really hoping that some guy with a greasy apron saunters in and explodes into a sword dance with a pair of those giant doner slicers.
The gig on the 11th also features a set by Kazumi Taguchi. Once she was half of cult/spoof London-Japanese art-popsters Frank Chickens, who sang about ninjas, geishas, karaoke and other aspects of Japan-aphernalia, simultaneously entertaining, mocking, embracing and challenging their Western audience. These days, Kazumi presents and cross-fertilises her home culture more soberly: drawing on Okinawan folk and classical music, Noh theatre and Korean drumming, she performs art-gallery gigs and assorted musical teamups on Okinawan sanshin (a three-string proto-shamisen) and sanba (castanets) and Chinese guqin zither. I know no more than that. It’s quite a turnaround from the old days of pop culture gags, but then the separation between high and low art can be as thin as fine rice paper these days… or cheap bog-roll.
It’ll be a more conventional evening at Worthing on the 9th, when Bob shares his stage with the doubled acoustic guitars and easygoing songcraft of the Random Nature duo. He’s likely to make up for that the following night in Brighton, when he’s playing a free/donations-only gig with ambient landscape-folk singer Kemper Norton, a genial lyrical hauntologist with a love of folding noise and field recordings into his songs. Kemper rejoins Bob a couple of days later when both play the Tim Smith ‘Spring Symposium’ fundraiser just outside Salisbury. There, they’ll be joining a host of musicians who balance happily on multiple cusps: folk, punk, progressive rock, psychedelia, dashes of prog and kosmische, and a warm inclusive feel of roots they’ve crafted and grafted themselves. More on that later…
Quick news on a couple of experimental gigs – one featuring Cindytalk vocal/noise icon Gordon Sharp at the head of a surge of electrophonic noise, the other headed up by the computers-versus-early-music-instruments conflations of Stephan Mathieu…
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Chaos Theory Music Promotions presents:
Becoming///Animal + The Brain Center At Whipple’s + Mark Dicker Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Thursday 5th April 2018, 7.30 pm – information here, here and here
“We proudly present a special event at Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston, with the latest project by bassist Massimo Pupillo of Zu and vocalist Gordon Sharp of This Mortal Coil and Cindytalk, Becoming///Animal. Their first album ‘A Distant Hand Lifted’, is an intense, filtered orchestra that roars and hisses, becoming one with magnificent haunting vocals. It’s out now on Trost Records.
“The Brain Center At Whipple’s is an experimental semi-improvisational trio who use noise and electronics shamelessly. Last seen by us when they DJed at mouse on the keys, Mutiny on the Bounty and Strobes at Rich Mix London last year.
“Mark Dicker of Bruxa Maria and Palehorse will be performing his solo project, rife with heavy electronic sounds and audio experimentation.”
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Stephan Mathieu + Howlround IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 14th April 2018, 7.30 pm – information here and here
“Stephan Mathieu is a self taught composer and performer working in the field of electroacoustic music. His sound is largely based on early instruments and obsolete media, which are recorded and transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and dedicated software processes; it has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the work of Colorfield artists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.
“Stephan operates Schwebung Mastering, a high end service specialized in preparing audio for analog and digital products and runs the Schwebung label from the Rhine valley near Cologne.
“First coming to prominence with hugely-acclaimed 2012 LP ‘The Ghosts Of Bush’, Howlround is a quintet (four slightly battered machines, one operator in the shape of sound artist Robin The Fog) that creates recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden – a process that has seen their work compared to William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and even the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread.
“In an age where one can create all manner of electronic music with a simple swipe of a mouse, Howlround prove not only how much fun is to be had in making things complicated again, but conversely just how little effort is sometimes needed to create a genuinely uncanny and beguiling sound-world: the rough underbelly of our pristine, Pro-Tools universe. Their latest release, a split LP with Marta De Pascalis, recorded right here at IKLECTIK will be released shortly, with a 6th official LP following later this year.”
More News From Nowhere presents:
MNFN Good Friday All-Dayer (featuring Kodian Trio + Warren Schoenbright + V Ä L V E + Marlo Eggplant + Minus Pilots + Ow Te + Blick | Trio + Grave Threat + Red Team) New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Friday 30th March 2018, 3.00pm – information here and here
Walthamstow experimental evening More News From Nowhere hops the Lea again for another stint at the New River Studios in Harringay: this time an all-dayer.
A number of improvising threesomes are on hand. Kodian Trio (tagged as “meticulously disjointed free improv” by ‘Cyberinsekt’) unites saxophonist and Raw Tonk label head Colin Webster (who played at MNFN’s February event), Belgian dronetronic guitarist Dirk Serries (better known as Vidna Obmana or Fear Falls Burning) and Shatner’s Bassoon drummer Andrew Lisle. A more directly ambient-jazz approach is offered by Blick | Trio (comprising Blowpipe/Gyratory System veteran Robin Blick on assorted wind and brass, Andrew Moran on drums and James Weaver on bass, synth and programming). It’s a bit of a competition, but probably the least formal of the lot are Stoke-on-Trent-based “math-jazz wizards”Ow Te (featuring members of Stokie punks Amateur Assassins and Bong Idle, and citing a love of Karate, Codeine and The For Carnation, among others).
Another trio is being brought in by reedswoman and experimentalist Chlöe Herington: her increasingly industrious V Ä L V E project continues to build on its beginnings (synaesthesic graphic scores created and realised by Chlöe, bound in with specific memories and events) while simultaneously evolving into a R.I.O./Raincoats-friendly three-woman exploration vehicle via reeds, bass, concert harp and voices. Further female input into the all-dayer is provided by Marlo Eggplant (the Corpus Callosum label head, onetime Olympia punk and lead figure in the “Ladyz In Noyz” initiative), whose own dense drone improvisations are built with processed autoharp and contact mics.
As regards duos, there’s an appearance from Minus Pilots (percussionist Matt Pittori and bassist Adam Barringer, who “weave sparse textures, crumbling atmospheres and fractured drones with currents of gentle crackle”) and from slithering, thickety London drums-and-electronics pairing Warren Schoenbright (Daniel McClennan and Matthew Pastkewicz) who craft lengthy, ambitious and luminous experiments from poised near-silence to hammering viciousness.
A collaboration between two other projects (the “hard Brexit/funeral electronics” of Ashcircle and the effects-chain noise of MNFN’s own Tim Cowlishaw as Violence) was scheduled to lead to Cruciform Passage Grave: something slanting towards the New Weird Britain end of sinister occult soundcraft. In the event, this needed more rehearsal than time allowed; so instead, Tim’s bringing in Cowboy Flying Saucer drummer Dave Bamford to open up the evening with a reunion of their “kraut-psych-improv-noise” duo Red Team (while Ashcircle’s Tom Macarte and Ciaran Mackle reformat themselves as the siren-in-a-washing-machine screech of Grave Threat).
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.
IKLECTIK and Kate Carr present:
Hadi Bastani + Pouya Ehsaei IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Wednesday 14th March 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
For this event, London-based sound artist Kate Carr curates a showcase of Iranian experimental electronic music, centring on artists from Tehran: a scene mapped and logged by by sound artist and anthropologist Hadi Bastani (via the Digital Arts and Experimental Music Scene of Iran Facebook page from his own base in the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast).
For all of the focus on Tehran, everyone involved in the concert (from Kate on down) seems to be a diasporan: Hadi living and working in Belfast, gigmate Pouya Ehsaei based in London, and even Kate’s an emigre from Australia. As for originally scheduled third act and “chaotic worlds” envisioners 9T Antiope, in spite of their Iranian origins they’re actually based as nearby as France… and can’t make it as planned, since it seems that even pre-Brexit, visas can be as hard to get in Paris as they might be in Tehran. It all adds a slightly mournful sheen to the occasion. Tehran may have been the original testing ground, but it’s not sending any immediate representatives; and leaving it doesn’t always seem to have made things easier.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs too much. The scheduled appearances by Hadi and Pouya are still on track. In addition to his own sonic contributions, Hadi will be providing an introduction to (and discussion of) the Tehran scene; while Pouya (already a veteran collaborator with dancers, performers and filmmakers as well as other experimental musicians) will be displaying his mixture of “found sounds and folkloric music… focusing on their aesthetics and cultural significance and how these can be applied in modern experimental compositions”. Meanwhile, if you’re curious about what you’re missing due to the absence of 9T Antiope, see below:
Echo Trails + Djanan Turan The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 3BL, England
Saturday 10th March 2018, 7.30pm – information
This month, the roiling, thrilling, mostly-acoustic post-folk band Echo Trails resurface for a Clerkenwell gig in the vaults of the Betsey Trotwood. If you missed them a month ago (at the Magic Garden), here’s what I said about them back then:
“Selling Echo Trails as being some kind of hopeful mashup of “epic groove and post-rock” is a massive undersell. Just because they’ve got a little Godspeed string thunder in them on occasion (and know a thing or two about old-school jazz’n’R&B propulsion) doesn’t mean that they’re one of those bands that milk the juice out of other genres and feed it into papery approximations.
“A well-honed acoustic band is like a set of unhindered precision muscles, able to flex rhythms on the fly and dance in unexpected curves, and this is just such a band. Fronted by Dimitra Tzanakaki (a ballsy, smouldering Greek blend of Beth Gibbons, Tori Amos and Bette Midler) they’re a supple alliance of guitar, voluble double bass, viola and drumkit, the song undercarriage slipping easily from Mediterranean folk to psychobilly to a salsa set-to or to shedbashing Led Zeppelin thrills. Since their arrival in 2014 they’ve phased out keyboard and phased in pedalwork, enriching texture even as the instrumentation shrank: hence the post-rock tag, but there’s Schönberg, Piaf, Korn, Temper Trap, bebop and Hidden Orchestra tucked into their bag of influences along with Godspeed.”
In support is Turkish singer turned Egg collaborator and London bandleader Djanan Turan, who specializes in light, chatty near-acoustic party pop with a timeless perpetually-youthful feel. Into the pot – along with her own warm and garrulous vocal – go Turkish beats, cabaret pop, mellow synth riffs, raga, woody spiralling clarinet lines and slithering Romani/Med-jazz guitar (the latter courtesy of Funkshy’s Fatih Ebrem).
Djanan’s also known for organising one of London’s female artist platforms (the Anatolian/Middle-Eastern-flavoured Hura Nights). In keeping with this, her own songs always sound and feel as if she’s invited you back into her kitchen to keep you abreast of developments and to talk a friendly blue streak about whatever’s crossing her mind – world peace, personal disagreements and reconciliations, the position of women, youth recalled and put into deeper perspective. Despite the hints at New Age positivity (I suspect that that kitchen has a couple of crystals hanging in the window), underneath that loquacious flow is an accomplished songwriter with her dancing feet firmly in touch with the ground. There may be gush involved, but it’s never flippant.
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A few days earlier, Echo Trails are making another London appearance at New River Studios as part of a film evening. As well as closing the show with a full set of their own songs, they’re one of four artists/bands performing live soundtracks to existing silent films. More below…
Colliding Lines present:
‘Colliding LDN: Reanimation’ New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Thursday 8th March 2018, 8.30pm – information here and here
Live cross-disciplinary art promoters Colliding Lines begin “a new, bi-monthly night of live art, sound and vision, presenting experimental collaborations and post-label projects from select performers. ‘Reanimation’ (is) a live re-scoring of mostly Soviet-era cartoons and surrealist animations by four different artists).”
The programme features two shorts by veteran Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky (1968’s anti-bureaucratic musical fable ‘The Glass Harmonica‘ and 1972’s ‘The Butterfly‘), as well as alternative 1968 tellings of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (‘Rusalochka‘ by Ivan Aksenchuk) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (the National Institute of Mental Health’s polemical ‘Curious Alice‘, which took a somewhat counter-productive slap at the early ‘70s drug culture by making it look even more fascinating to children).
In addition to Echo Trails, live soundtracking will be performed by extended-voice improviser and soundshaper Ingrid Plum (who blends and savages her own glorious clear vocals with sound processing and field recordings, and stirs in influences from neo-classical and from Scottish and Nordic folk music) and by two different sets of electro-acoustic music-making brothers. In-demand collaborators for film, dance and installation work, Kyriakides (Reuben and Jacob, to their mother) build “expansive, enveloping soundworlds” from live instruments, field recordings and found objects across a wide spectrum of musical and stylistic options. Electro-acoustic fraternal drone duo Polbrone are an alternate workframe for Andrea and Simone Salvatici of Glasgow avant-folk minimalists Clorinde, who in this project loop and gradually destroy their own sonic textures (and on this occasion will be aided by improvising cellist Derek Yau).
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A little later on, inspired East Anglian “marginal musician” label Antigen are running a concert over in Ipswich…
Antigen Records present:
MacGillivray + Sealionwoman + Polly Preacher The Smokehouse, South Street Studios, 6 South Street, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP1 3NU, England
Friday 16th March 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
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’.
Like Kirsten, Colchester’s Ashleagh Claire Hurren immerses herself in a performance persona, although Polly Preacher‘s “wonky folk troubadour” act is a good deal more comfortable than MacGillivray’s harsher hauntology. That said, the original tag makes her sound a lot kookier than she is. You don’t get cute acoustic numbers about spice racks, paintings and milky heartbreaks. Instead you get a crepuscular, witty electric folk with a homemade feel and a few echoes of lo-fi indie rock. There are a few shades of Kristen Hersh, perhaps even a little Lupen Crook, but for the most part a Polly Preacher song follows its own pattern: cryptic feints into storytelling where the supernatural rubs shoulders with grit, and in which haunted cutlery drawers and fairy tales cross imperceptibly over into stories of how to navigate a female life… or at least how to begin the journey and begin mapping the hazards.
Sealionwoman slightly buck this gig’s tonal trend of “folk meets New Weird Britain”, being much more of a dark-dusk monochromed blues-and-jazz basement affair, albeit filtered through loops, noise and the canny restrictions of being an unorthodox duo. The bare bones and wizard’s brew of Tye McGivern’s effects-laden double bass steps in and out of the shadows with subtle changes of raiment, sometimes clean-limbed and sometimes masked; Kitty Whitelaw ‘s vocals stretch from distracted torch singer to ghostly and mischievous jazz acrobat, running deft arabesques around the shape of the song.
Bar occasional gig notifications, I’ve not encountered Sealionwoman much since getting very absorbed in a live performance of theirs in a Hackney shopwindow back in 2013. My negligence, not theirs. Go back and have a look at that review: I’ve just done so myself, and it captures the compelling sinewy distractions of their live presence, the transformative implications of their name and their thousand-shades-of-black-white-and-grey better than anything I could come up with right now.
There are still some tickets left for the rollicking, rampaging twentieth-anniversary concerts for venerable yet vital psychedelic noise label Rocket Recordings. These will be packing out the Garage and its sister venue Thousand Island in north London for three consecutive days over an early March weekend.
It’s not the first time that Highbury Corner’s been rammed with psychoactive weirdness and well-plumbing musical explorations. In its earlier incarnation as Upstairs at the Garage, the smaller Thousand Island saw hundreds of strange and wonderful leftfield acts pass through; to pick just one example, twenty years ago the building hosted occult ensemble Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels and their ‘Highbury Working’ “beat seance” in which Alan Moore and David J explored and mined the hidden histories of the Holloway Road from the horse goddess Epona to the rapidly poisoned utopianism of the Black House, from the schemata of Aleister Crowley to the madness of Joe Meek. So the Corner’s no stranger to strangeness… but it’s good, for a full weekend, to see strangeness rise so outrightly overground amongst the traffic fumes, creeping gentrification and salsa nights.
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The Rocket days kick off on Friday 9th. Fluxus-inspired Italian garage groove-band Julie’s Haircut mingle smearing, chuckling Ash Ra Tempel guitars and flutes with a Georgio Moroder wobble, while from Sweden there’s creamy-toned garage darlings Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation (whose more recent recordings pulse along on a fluting, closed-eyed Can patter) and the detailed anticipations of Flowers Must Die, who burst shining locked disco grooves through hanging tapestries of improvised “oriental-influenced” psychedelia (like an unexpected frug in a Tibetan temple). A couple of spinoff acts from Salford industrial/sociological alchemists Gnod are playing– the fleshy beats, brutual mechanisms and cellar drones of Chris Haslam’s electronica project Dwellings and the “slow burning vocal loops (and) devotional mindscapes” of A.P Macarte’s AHRKH. Also on the bill is the spontaneous, impulse/emotion-driven semi-improvised “dirty techno” of Coldnose, swilling in acid house, industrial, electro, drum and bass and distorted vocal snarls. For the after-show winddown, there’s DJ-ing from assorted Teeth Of The Sea members, but more on them later…
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Sorry, but it’s returns only for Saturday 10th. Although Hills (with their gruff and deafening meditational rock, like Joy Division trapped inside a raga) have had to pull out, their Swedish compatriots Goat (costumed acid/world fusioneers who’ve already made a big splash at Glastonbury) are still in play. So are Italian “kosmitronic” rockers Mamuthones – a delightful confection of slippery tinkling rhythms, chatterbox riffage explosions of lateral noise and sing-song babble, they’re what Dutch Uncles might have sounded like if they had less of a taste for arch Roxy-isms and had taken more of a liking to Pere Ubu. There are also slots for the onetime heavy doom-psych of Hey Colossus (who, like their spiritual forebears The Birthday Party, are evolving steadily out of the chaotic London murk they began in and starting to tell stories) and the bellowing, unreconstructed Tyneside sludge-acid of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. Minimalist Malmö trance-rockers Ved preview their imminent Rocket EP ‘DDTT’, and there are sets from amelodic No Wave revisitors Housewives, block-partying noise duo Gum Takes Tooth and the elasticated buzzing Russian “stargaze” band Gnoomes.
In addition, there’ll be a rare solo appearance by Teeth Of The Sea’s modular analogue synth guy Mike Bourne who – in parallel to his band work – has recently put out a couple of odds and ends on Bandcamp including the gradually-evolving ‘pætʃ’ album of electronic experiments (including black-and-white vampire music and harmonium/Harmonium-esque sketches with a dash of Geiger-counter, and the vast shadow-steeped minimalism of his soundtrack to Ben Lister’s horror short ‘Wine Dark Sea’). Opening the evening, the blipping electronics, kettle-banging, forceful ranting and rises to aggressive crescendos of Temple Ov BBV (a collaboration between Gnod and Dutch experimental psychedelicists Radar Men From The Moon) resemble a more spacious meeting between early Swans and cultural rhythmatist John Chernoff). DJ-ing for the evening comes from a four-strong squad of Cherrystones, Jamie Paton, Mike Keeling and Chris Reeder.
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The highlight of the Sunday show – at least as far as Rocket themselves are concerned – has been their success in securing the British live debut for the duo project by Polish reeds/keyboard player Wacław Zimpel and his compatriot, the “magic brutalist” Stara Rzeka guitarist/singer Kuba Ziołek, as Zimpel/Ziołek. They’ll be showcasing the psychoactive-minimalist jazz-folk stew of last year’s eponymous album.
That said, there’ll be pretty strong competition from trumpet-toting electronic rock partisans Teeth Of The Sea. Having DJ-ed on the first night, they’re returning at full band strength for what will presumably provide another exhilarating set and another chance for us all to slither around in a puddle of non-stick definitions (are they noise? are they rave? are they dream-metal? are they what you might’ve had if Miles Davis had rashly agreed to a Foetus production job?). Also returning are Gnod – this time in person, playing a “greatest hits” set, which you can vote for here).
There’s further Gnodness via yet another pair of spin-offs: Paddy Shine’s immersive “tantric vocal loop” project Ayn Sof and Marlene Ribeiro’s work as Negra Branca (around which circulates various splutters including “squashy analogue”, “temple goddess” and “dreamscape”). Veteran psych bass player Gareth Turner is making two appearance – one as a third of the Anthroprophh trio (in which he’s joined by Heads guitarist Paul Allen and drummer Jesse Webb to blend “garage-bound filth (with) wayward, abstract artistry”), and the other as half of Kuro (in which he grabs a double bass and joins forces with violinist Agathe Max for electrically-enhanced string-drones). Finally, there’s also space for Liverpudlian heavy-psychedelic noise-rockers Bonnacons Of Doom and shamanic ritual trio H.U.M. (Mark Wagner, Heloise Zamzam and Uiutna) whom I last described as “a kind of psychic cross-cultural art coven, citing “alchemical practice, incantation, chanting, drones, ritual drumming, French variété” as both inspiration and activity.”
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Further details and ticket/info links below… if you’re reading about this for the first time, you’re already stragglers, so get going…
Baba Yaga’s Hut & DHP present:
‘Rocket Recordings Twenty’ The Garage/Thousand Island, 20-22 Highbury Corner, Highbury, London, N5 1RD, England
Friday 9th March 2018, 7.30pm
Saturday 10th March 2018, 3.30pm
Sunday 11th March 2018, 7.30pm
– information here and here
Westking Music presents:
Roshi Featuring Pars Radio + KES + Ivan Bushbye + Euan Sutherland The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England
Tuesday 6th March 2018, 7.00pm– information here and here
Multiple influences come into play in the music of Roshi Nasehi – her Iranian heritage (embodied in her parents, their memories and their old cassettes), the folk songs and choirs in the Welsh milieu of her upbringing, the bleeding-in of tunes from 1980s British pop radio; piano and violin lessons and the jazz she studied at college in Cardiff; her early stint singing with Keith Tippett. All of these have settled somewhere in her current work, but none of them in a fixed and permanent location: they’re loose factors, like an office full of papers which can be picked up and whirled about by a fresh gust of wind from an open window.
During eighteen years in London Roshi has made a name for herself as performer, collaborator, workshopper, academic, installationeer and recorder of musical events. Her main song outlet is Roshi Featuring Pars Radio, a collaboration with Graham “Gagarin” Dowdall (prolific percussionist, producer, Pere Ubu-ist and John Cale/Nico collaborator). They describe it as “Welsh-Iranian folk pop”, with an electronic, experimentalist edge to it; a shuffleable span of folktronica strata which somehow captures the thinning links, the stubborn clingings and the disjunctive adaptations of the immigrant experience (whether circumstances have blown you into town from Alavicheh or from Gorseinon).
Some of Roshi’s ‘80s pop heritage manifests in its echos of Kate Bush – I don’t mean in Bronte-pop twirls or vocal lushnesses, but in beautiful cramped murmurs which recall the subvocal/sublingual keenings and chamberings of ‘The Dreaming’. The soundworld is deliberately intimate but obscure; Gagarin’s signature “sound-leakage” palette of finely-milled noises interpenetrating field recordings, Roshi’s keyboard parts questioning and unanchored; her language shifting between English and Pharsi, with versions of Iranian songs cut and rising up through the deck.
Also playing are the usual Westking gig-gaggle of emerging students, undergoing their solo live performance assessment by being hurled into support slots. This time round it’s lo-fi electronic pop/soul musician KES, “understated folk” performer Euan Sutherland and contemporary pianist Ivan Bushbye. All of them are too fresh on the scene to have much online to follow up on (Euan also shares his name with a Scottish clothing magnate who got tangled up with the Co-op a few years ago, and this doesn’t help either). However, I did find this video of Ivan playing Ryiuchi Sakamoto’s ‘Forbidden Colours’, so that will have to do for now.
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Back at the very start of May, there’s a summit of young female songwriters tucked away into the basement of Servant Jazz Quarters.
Sublime Music presents:
Bella Spinks + Laura Frances + Gillie Ione Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Thursday 1st March 2018, 7.30pm– information here and here
Brightonian Bella Spinks has been performing in public since she was twelve: not annoying R&B impressions on the top deck of the bus to Worthing, but a full-blown debut at the Concorde 2 round about 2006. Since then, she’s had plenty of time to broaden and hone her ideas, and has filled the interim years well, preparing her developing work and playing teenaged support slots to a range of performers from Martha Wainwright to Sea of Bees, Ellie Goulding to Ron Sexsmith, The Staves to Viv Albertine. As for herself, she’s already a mistress of the verbally and musically articulate solo piano ballad, a songwriter who can build a hooky and accessible pop single around Platonic philosophy, and a woman with a knack for sonorities (be it undulating basslines, hot-space gaps in the vocal lines or the woody rhythms of a struck’n’knocked piano frame).
The debut album isn’t due for another few months, but come along to celebrate the recent, aforementioned Platonic single ‘Noble Lie’, in which Bella muses and storytells across various forms of implied alchemy. Right now, she’s on a cusp – some idiot could talk her into smoothing everything down into mainstream kitchen-radio ballads, or she could hang onto her inquisitive nature and keep driving down the path of her subtle, slightly bookish originality. I really hope that she sticks with the latter.
She’s tagged as “a dark, baritone Joni Mitchell baring herself in her songs with a refreshing depth and brevity”, but rather than carrying out yet another sub-Joni confessional shtick Laura Frances wraps herself in the robes of yearning, classic dark-folk: the kind which I first heard on my mother’s Cynthia Gooding records from the 1950s folk revival – rich-voiced, majestic and ancient. It’s unsurprising to hear that her songwriting springs first and foremost from poetry, her stark modernity constantly slipping back towards mediaeval mystique. It’s also unsurprising to hear Mazzy Star and Leonard Cohen also mentioned in her train of influences. There’s a touch (just a touch, mind) of the urban-playing/rural-dreaming Gothic to her tunes: solemnly waltzing guitar, lonesome woodsaw string parts, and the abiding melancholy in her tone.
With a mini-album (2016’s ‘Misapprehension’) and a couple of standalone download singles behind her, Welshwoman-turned-Londoner Gillie Ione makes quick darts through self-produced restless talky songs, like well-made Tracy Chapman /Melissa Etheridge pieces with an experimental pop bent and bonus scurries of motormouthing. On record, she floats about between introspective guitar lines, spacious drum patter and strange ambients knocks and wanders; the scenery shifting behind her fluttery chatting, her glinting disparate observations being molded into a larger, broader picture of meaning.
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Society of Imaginary Friends presents:
SOIF Soiree: HARE !!! (the Musical) – Society Of Imaginary Friends + Hungry Dog Brand + Gisela Meyer & John Human + Outre Dan Steele (Darren & Isobel Hirst) + Tamara Canada + Blert Ademi + Global Warming Records + Cian Binchy Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Friday 2nd March 2018, 7.30pm – free event – information here
Greeting the alleged arrival of the English spring (I’ll believe it when I see it), Society Of Imaginary Friends are bringing another of their art-pop mini-musicals to the March event in their monthly Wood Green soirees. This time, it’s ‘HARE!’ about which they’re saying nothing yet, though you can pick up a few clues from the evening’s lead-in text – (“…we climb out of our warm dark burrows into the golden slanting sunlight, our hearts swell with joy, and we dance a manic tarantella – chase each other in crazy circles, play-box under the serene blue sky and, as the moon rises, the static electrical frenzy of fizzical freedom – it’s mating time!”)
All right – stand by for sex, violence and gratuitous crocuses. Meanwhile, here’s something they did earlier…
Making Soiree returns are pianist/composer Blert Ademi and regular-of-regulars Cian Binchy (actor, standup, spoken-worder and autism activist, just back from his Mexican tour). Fresh to the Soiree stage are emerging R&B singer Tamara Canada, post-apocalyptic ecologically-obsessed techno burster Global Warming Records (a.k.a. ‘Driftshift’ presenter Franziska Lantz from Resonance FM) and author/reviewer/punk-poet Martin Dowsing’s Hungry Dog Brand (providing “very English sounding fictional narrative-based songs in a new wave / garage rock style with a touch of seaside gothic” plus a touch of the abrasive wit of their “No Wankers Aloud” club nights from the much-missed original 12 Bar Club).
In typically diverse Soiree fashion, the evening’s rounded off (or thrown engagingly off course) by a turn from internationally acclaimed cellist and concert pianist Gisela Meyer (who, surprisingly, is dropping bow and abandoning keyboard in order to sing three Debussy love songs accompanied by Anglo-Indian classical/improv pianist John Human) and by what looks like a partially-exploded performance by the Outre Dan Steele duo, a.k.a. Darren and Isobel Hirst. Darren (who’s squeezed writing for the NME, working as a vicar, reviewing theatre and being a “professor of baseball” into his life so far), will be interrupting, or moonlighting from, the duo in order to deliver Shakespearean soliloquys. I’m presuming he means actual Shakespeare rather than anguished cod-Tudor monologues about the pains of being a twenty-first century Renaissance man…
The usual Soiree terms and conditions apply – free entry, but you pay for the fine vegan grub. As regards some advance listening, with music and sound for several of the acts wilfully obscure, stuck in the MySpace graveyard or mysteriously pulled from circulation, here’s what I could throw together. Apologies for the occasional bedroom/phone footage look…
A couple of quick dips into wider worlds, with minimal blather from me..
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This isn’t the first time I’ve featured the audio-visual collaborations of jeweller and live artist Poppy Porter and multilayering bass guitar maestro Steve Lawson, but if you haven’t heard of/seen either of them before, nor encountered their unusual duo approach, here’s an opportunity to go and immerse yourself at a new show in Steve’s current home town of Birmingham…
Steve Lawson/Poppy Porter: Illuminated Loops Tower of Song, 107 Pershore Road South, Kings Norton, Birmingham B30 3EL, England
Sunday 25th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here
“Steve Lawson and Poppy Porter bring their amazing music and live art show to Birmingham. Steve plays his textured bass guitar loops, Poppy draws what she sees. Poppy is synaesthetic – she “sees” sound, and as the images appear on the paper, Steve treats the emerging art as a graphic score, folding it back into the music in way that creates a glorious feedback loop of art influencing art. It’s an immersive experience, to watch the art take shape before your eyes, to hear the music morph and twist as it is improvised in response to the art.”
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Back in London, the Nest Collective (in collaboration with internationally-minded arts inspirers Dash Arts) have been broadening their commitment to presenting and celebrating the breadth and ongoing relevance of folk music by staging Queer As Folk, “an ongoing series of events celebrating the work of LGBTQ+ artists working in folk, world, and roots music”.
I don’t feel well-equipped to dig into this topic in depth yet. Most straight blokes such as myself who start digging – even with the best intentions – into LGBTQ+ history and culture tend to find it rapidly and explosively unfolding into our faces like a long-compressed jack-in-the-box… or, more accurately, as if someone’s abruptly whisked our blinkers away and we find ourselves in the heart of a bustling, previously invisible party (with its own long-running stories of love and loss, inspiration and pain, quarrels and solidarity, bullying and resistance). It’s quite jolting – although often inspiring – to be confronted with one’s own ignorance.
During my own lifetime, while lesbian women have had an long-established presence in the singer-songwriter field (the redoubtable Holly Near and Joan Armatrading in the ’70s, Melissa Etheridge and Judy Small in the ’80s, the Indigo Girls in the ’90s, to name just the obvious few), it’s been more difficult to identify other aspects of the queer spectrum within folk unless you were already deep in the scene or privileged with word-of-mouth knowledge. Still, all of that is there – as, indeed, it’s everywhere – and this gig, while first and foremost an occasion for good music, should help any fresh attendees to open up a new perspective (and perhaps offer some new interpretations of folk traditions with their shifting tales of love, lust, disguise and transformations).
Enough of me and my vagueness. Here’s Nest Collective’s matter-of-fact briefing for the evening: the rest can just be learned in time…
“Born and raised in southwest Virginia, Sam Gleaves performs innovative mountain music with a sense of history. Sam carries on the ballads, dance music and storytelling he learned from numerous mentors in the Appalachian tradition including multi-instrumentalist Jim Lloyd and ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams. He tours extensively in the U.S. and, in 2016, toured the UK supporting Peggy Seeger.
In 2015, Sam collaborated with producer Cathy Fink and released a debut record of original songs, titled Ain’t We Brothers. In 2017, he appeared at the Cambridge Folk Festival and brought forth a new eponymous record with his singing partner Tyler Hughes, a fellow southwest Virginian steeped in the region’s musical traditions, which has received glowing reviews… Appalachian novelist Lee Smith has heralded Sam as “the best young songwriter around… courageous as hell and country to the bone.”
“Landless are Ruth Clinton, Meabh Meir, Sinead Lynch and Lily Power. They sing unaccompanied traditional songs from Irish, Scottish, English and American traditions in close four-part harmony. Their repertoire features songs of love, death and lamentation, as well as work songs, shape-note hymns and more recently penned folk songs. They’ve performed in a variety of settings, both in Ireland and abroad, and are closely involved with traditional singing sessions in Dublin and Belfast.”
With eight years of noisy, complicated, wallpushing music under the bonnet, London happening-makers Chaos Theory are celebrating with a two-pm-to-two-am alldayer at the start of February, featuring the pick of their past few years of concerts.
Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
‘8 Years of Chaos: Celebrating Eight Years of Music for Open Minds’ The Brewhouse @ London Fields Brewery, 369-370 Helmsley Place, South Hackney, London, E8 3SB, England
Saturday 3rd February 2018, 2.00pm – information here, here and here
As a foundation, expect plenty of of time-signature-skipping, dynamic shifts and steely guitar work from a mass of loud experimental-progressive rock bands, mostly sandwiched between eight-wheeled prog/garage roarers The Fierce & The Dead and cunning tales-of-the-unexpected heavy post-proggers Thumpermonkey. Predominantly (if not entirely) instrumental, these include revitalised Brighton math-metallers Poly-Math, jumpy slammers Flies Are Spies From Hell and the epic goth-toned Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster, plus grand grunge/prog/metal heavies Sümer.
The earlier part of the day will see classical fusion and more experimental, free-floating performers. Mystical avant-cello darling Jo Quail will be playing a set, as will electro-acoustic post-classicalist Lucy Claire. Oliver Barrett’s devotional-drone project Petrels will make an appearance in full band format, while the festival’s opening slot goes to Prometheus & The Satyrs: a new permutation of the work of Spyros Giasafakis and Evi Stergiou (who, as Daemonia Nymphe, have been reworking ancient Greek instruments and music into new part-improvised dark-blurred pieces like an Athenian Dead Can Dance).
As the day wears on, though, things will get hairier and the music gradually heavier and more ritualistic via slots from baleful screaming sludge-metallers Wren, Kentish metalcore men Harrowed, head-against-the-wah-pedal psychedelic noise-metallers Casual Nun and hot-rodding motorik chanters Taman Shud. Towards the end, the infamous Sly & The Family Drone squad will be simultaneously on and offstage. A free-play shufflezone of border-crashing electronics, feedback and occasional horns, they hand out their drums to the audience as part of a mutual meld of inspiration and noisemaking. Drones, blares, convulsions and fragments usually ensue.
The electronics-and-drums duo who are playing as the closing act used to rejoice in the pretty hideous provocateur name of Shitwife. Since then (and post-Pussygate) they’ve grown up a bit, have opted to represent heart and community over nose-tweaking and nihilistic offence, and have been blazing on since June last year as Big Lad. From the early days as an “astonishingly brutal drums/laptop/electronics juggernaut fusing rave, death metal, noise and post-hardcore”, they’re now sleekening into a sunnier, more ecstatic outfit: still slopping out welters of in-your-face noise, but now letting their rave ethics flush through in a setful of “high octane party bangers” and in their desire to become “the band that brings the biggest, rudest party to as many people as possible… we want you to be able to meet awesome new people at the shows and hopefully start sharing important ideas about how we can combat the fuckers that are causing real damage!” It should be an ideal Chaos Theory signoff: blitzing noise meets communal joy.
While there’s a powerful taste of CT’s Facemelter and Whispers & Hurricanes nights here (the metal and the woods) there’s not quite so much from their Jazz Market side to hand. Never mind: there’s only so many hours available – and there’ll be more of everything in the coming year. There’s also a plentiful supply of live-at-Chaos-Theory event clips below, (plus a few borrowings from elsewhere) to get you in the mood…
As Christmas approaches I find myself in a tearing hurry; so don’t be too surprised if the remaining gig posts for the year rely even more on text ripped straight off Facebook or other gig notifications. I’m just here to boost the signals and blend the options for the month, though I’ll also patch in any missing information as I go.
Now – December news on various Essex sonic artists coming together out on the Thames estuary, and on a Homerton gathering of atmosphere-guitar, homemade instruments and film…
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Courier Sound presents:
Alien + Adrian Lane + Stuart Bowditch Phuse Media, Polar House, 103 Rectory Grove, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, SS9 2HW, England
Thursday 14th December 2017, 8.00pm – information
“Courier Sound invite you to a launch party celebrating the release of Alien‘s ‘Perimeter’. Al Johnson’s long form piece, made with a bass guitar and a variety of electronics, is presented on a super-limited edition (30) mini CD in a bespoke arigato pack (designed by Machindo, cut by Damien Robinson), with two inserts, a sticker and a decal on the CD. In the small and intimate setting of his own office, Al will be playing a live improvised set, alongside live sets from Adrian Lane and Stuart Bowditch. Entry is free and early arrival is advised. Bring some booze.”
An intermittent surfacer, Alien has previously released work on labels including Southend’s Hottwerk; but here’s some very recent material (uploaded to Soundcloud yesterday!) plus a video swiped from Facebook…
Adrian Lane – who’s also recorded as Calicoade and (in collaboration with Guido Lusetti), as That Faint Light – is a man of mutually superimposed talents. He’s a visual artist as well as a musician, or perhaps he’s better described as a simultaneously visual and musical artist: his music integrating acoustic and electronic elements, struggling in a dreamy web of neoclassical/mediaeval folk inspirations and textural ambient foggings. Adrian’s newest album, ‘Playing With Ghosts’, uses cut-up and re-ordered samples of hundred-year-old wax cylinder recordings as its main sound source (something Adrian goes into in greater depth in this interview with his record company Preserved Sounds.
The work of Stuart Bowditch (who also records under the names of Hybernation, USRNM and Furrows) is primarily based in sound design and field recordings. As his biog puts it, he’s mostly “inspired by location and the people and experiences he encounters there. He is interested primarily in the sounds of everyday life and those who create them, making work that is inclusive and accessible.His music, sound tracks and art installations are often site-responsive and developed with community groups, the public or people who would not consider themselves interested in ‘art’. In this way of working he tries to make sense of the world he lives in and his place within it. Simultaneously, the creations and experiences of others end up intrinsically embedded in his work, creating a rich texture of layers, representing his life and those he has encountered along the way.”
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The Old Dentist presents:
Dean McPhee + Sam McLoughlin & David Chatton Barker + Amy Cutler & Sylvia Hallett The Old Dentist, 33 Chatsworth Road, Homerton, London, E5 0LH, England
Saturday 16th December 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
“A night of deep audio-visual sorcery in three acts to mark the release of solo electric guitarist Dean McPhee’s much anticipated third album ‘Four Stones’ – featuring Dean’s hypnotic drone-folk guitar work and the visual feedback footage of Barry Hale, the homemade instrument/OHP séance shadow-puppetry of Folklore Tapes duo Sam McLoughlin & David Chatton Baker and the films and musical improvisations of Amy Cutler and Sylvia Hallett.
“Dean McPhee is a solo electric guitarist who combines fluid, chiming melodic lines with shimmering drones and deep layers of decaying delay and echo. He has a unique style of playing which draws together influences from British folk, dub, kosmische, post-rock and Mali blues, and his music has a hypnotic and dreamlike quality. His latest album ‘Four Stones’ is due to be released on Hood Faire (a label run collectively by Dean, Sam McLoughlin and David Chatton-Barker) in January 2018… For this gig Dean will be playing to footage of video artist Barry Hale‘s Intraference visual feedback films.
“Sam McLoughlin plays homemade instruments and contraptions along with guitar, analog synths, harmonium and pump organ. Sometimes he sings songs; at other times he combines handmade Moondog-like percussion with microphone feedback, synth drones and unpredictable bowed textures to produce improvised music with magical and shamanic overtones. Sam recently released the album ‘Flaming Liar’ on Them There Records and has previously released music on Andy Votel’s Twisted Nerve as well as Folklore Tapes, Pre Cert Entertainment and Hood Faire.
“David Chatton-Barker is the co-founder and captain of the highly regarded Folklore Tapes label which was recently described by Brainwashed.com as “possibly the most unique and fascinating label around”. As well as being a visual artist and film-maker, David also specialises in playful and atmospheric collages of sound, dictaphone recordings and live improvisation. Like Sam, he also builds his own very inventive and visually striking homemade instruments and sound-making devices, which he uses to perform live (along with projections and ritualistic interventions).
“As a new duo, geographer-poet Amy Cutler and multi-instrumentalist Sylvia Hallett draw on the dark sides of nature: from sea parasites to forensic botany to elegies based on Arctic bird migrations. They perform live improvisatory settings of pieces drawing on natural history, such as ‘you, the stingbearers’, based on Jean-Henri Fabre’s nineteenth-century chronicle of human desolation, ‘The Life of the Fly’. Instruments include the viola, the musical saw, and Sylvia’s Russian garden vines. Amy’s projections include kaleidoscopes of tree rot and insect forms in nature documentaries, and she will also screen some of her short music videos inspired by drone music and experimental landscape cinema.” (See below for Sylvia at work on a bicycle wheel, plus Amy’s short film ‘Incantations From Yin Valley’ – made this year with experimental drone musician Bridget Hayden, previously of Vibracathedral Orchestra).
I keep missing Gaelynn Lea’s shows… and missing the opportunity to post about them. With her return to London for another gig this season, I’ve got a chance to catch up.
Blow the Fuse presents:
Gaelynn Lea The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England
Wednesday 6th December, 2017, 8.30pm – information here and here
A classically-trained twenty-year veteran of violin playing whose limbs have been shortened from birth by osteogenesis imperfecta, Gaelynn plays her fiddle like a cello and sings original songs drawing from the well of traditional American, Irish, Scottish and English folk sources and blending them with her own ideas and experience. Her wistful honey-gravelled singing, her songwriting artistry and her textured playing (supplemented by improvisation and loop-pedal) is powerful and universal enough to have won NPR Music’s 2016 Tiny Desk Contest, seeing off competition from around six thousand other American songwriters and performers.
Meanwhile, her performance presence and physical courage have moved audiences to tears and applause in her native Minnesota and across American and Europe (and have won her both admiration and a shared stage from Low’s Alan Sparhawk, country bluesman Charlie Parr, and New Acoustic touchstyle guitar star Billy McLaughlin). In addition to her musicality, Gaelynn is a powerful disability community advocate – speaking and blogging forthrightly and fearlessly about iniquities and the need for social change to accommodate and support disabled people, and covering subjects from everyday practical challenges to the expression and enjoyment of sexuality. Come for the music, stay for the strength; maybe leave with the encouragement to help make things better.
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Over in Homerton, the brilliantly ramshackle Old Dentist venue continues its rewarding partnership with Muckle Mouth, hosting yet another enthralling fringe-folk gig (although this one’s of a more traditional bent)…
Muckle Mouth and The Old Dentist present:
Tartine de Clous, Alasdair Roberts & Neil McDermott, plus Ivor Kallin & Sholto Dobie (11th)/The London Hardingfelelag (12th) The Old Dentist, 33 Chatsworth Road, Homerton, London, E5 0LH, England
Monday 11th December 2017, 7.30pm – information here, here and here Tuesday 12th December 2017, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
“We are honoured to host a very special collaboration between French harmony-singing trio Tartine de Clous, legendary Scottish guitarist and folk singer Alasdair Roberts and fellow Glasgwegian fiddler Neil McDermott over two nights at The Old Dentist following their residency at Cube Microplex in Bristol.
“Tartine de Clous (Geoffroy Dudouit, Thomas Georget and Guillaume Maupin) are a singing trio originally from the department of Charente in western France. Following in the footsteps of some of the great French groups of the late twentieth century folk revival (such as Mélusine and La Bamboche), they sing largely unaccompanied three-part harmony arrangements of the traditional songs of their native land.
“In an echo of The Auld Alliance, Tartine de Clous will perform in collaboration with the Scottish songwriter, guitarist and folk singer Alasdair Roberts and his fellow Glaswegian, fiddler Neil McDermott over two nights at The Old Dentist. Alasdair has worked with Drag City Records for some twenty years, releasing records featuring both interpretations of traditional songs and those featuring his own songwriting. In addition to being a fine fiddler in the Scottish traditional style, Neil McDermott is currently researching the musical and political engagement of the 1960s Scottish folk scene with the anti-nuclear movement.
“They are joined on the 11th by veteran improviser Ivor Kallin (onetime co-curator of the 2:13 improvisation club, once rather unpleasantly described by The Times as “a bearded Scotsman given to stream-of-consciousness spew”) and Muckle Mouth curator Sholto Dobie (on viola and diatonic symphony hurdy gurdy respectively), and on the 12th by The London Hardingfelelag playing Norwegian tunes for Hardanger fiddle.”
There’s not much out there on the London Hardingfelelag (though I did find out that their ranks include Sylvia Hallett, Catherine Martin of the Gabrieli Players, Clare Salaman, Tania Simon, Clifford Rowe and until a few years ago, the late Wilf Gibson of ELO/’Spirit of Eden’ fame), but I did turn up a couple of videos of Ivor and Sholto, supplemented by one of the Hardanger fiddle in action…
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I caught up with the Collage Nights shows in Wood Green last month, just in time to learn about the final two gigs in their season. The last one rolls around mid-month, featuring Dutch-English singer-songwriter Gitta de Ridder and Balkan-styled party band The Balkanoes.
Collage Nights presents:
Gitta de Ridder + The Balkanoes Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Wednesday 13th December 2017, 7.00pm – information here and here
Gitta’s debut album ‘Feathers’ came out last year. With its songs of family, friends and lovers (as opposed to hill gods, surreal landscapes or twisted urban short stories) it has a conventional tinge for the current time, but the delight is in the detail and the musicality. She’s a Joni Mitchell disciple less in the sense of pursuing the confessional or the coffee-table mope, more in the delightful flowering of orchestral chords and cats-cradle harmonies (as well as in her domestic wit).
As for the Balkanoes, they provide the standard pellmell Eastern European spaghetti-junction of Greek, Ottoman, Slavic and Romani musical threads, but have been known to career off into ‘Star Wars’ covers as well.
There’s also a special guest, but they’re keeping quiet about who that might be.
Kammer Klang presents:
Kammer Klang: Ashley Paul & Ensemble (performing Mary Jane Leach) + Mette Rasmussen & Sofia Jernberg + Dawn Scarfe Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 5th December 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
The coming month’s Kammer Klang has only a tenuous relationship with contemporary classical, concentrating as it does on musicians who espouse either free improvisation or natural resonance.
The evening centres on an ensemble led by clattering, free-form multi-instrumentalist and composer Ashley Paul (who recently supported Powerdove further north at the Old Dentist) and featuring Hyperion Ensemble bass clarinettist/utility person Yoni Silver, cellist/Kammer Klang organiser Lucy Railton, onetime Sonic Youth guitarist-turned-ubiquitous London art musician Thurston Moore and Charcoal Owls’ multi-instrumentalist Tom James Scott on piano (a man who generally brings a specifically Cumbrian twist to his playing, gizmo fiddling and use of field recordings). They’ll be playing ‘Wolff Tones E-Tude’, a cellular Christian-Wolff-inspired piece by American composer Mary Jane Leach (example performance below).
Much of Mary Jane’s work focusses on acoustic properties and how sound environments form in specific spaces with particular resonances and opportunities for difference, combination, and interference tones; in addition, how these may be manipulated by a performer, composer or editor (or by someone who’s a combination of all or some of those things). She herself will be present for the performance, which also includes a stereo-diffused playback of her 1992 radio sound piece/hörspiel ‘Kirchtraum’ (about which she says “Have you ever walked into a church, and it seems as if there is sound rolling around the space that’s been there for a long time? I created ‘Kirchtraum’ to create a sound dreamscape to create that kind of feeling. It uses the phases of a dream, going progressively further back into the past and becoming more chaotic with each phase. I used nightingales to punctuate the different phases of the dream, to differentiate between the dream and the environment…”). In addition, she’ll be present for a pre-concert workshop on Sunday 3rd December from noon until 5.00pm (giving a lecture and offering feedback on pieces any composers care to bring in) and, prior to the concert on the Tuesday, participating in a public talk with Frances Morgan at 7.00pm.
Opening in the Fresh Klang slot is Dawn Scarfe, a sound artist preoccupied with “things that seem to sound themselves, such as resonating glasses, Aeolian wires and self-opening swell boxes”, and who’s brought this preoccupation to sound installations between Cumbria and London, Exeter and Estonia, Brussels and Seoul. Her projects include the livestreamed ‘Reveil‘ “an annual crowdsourced live broadcast which “tracks the sound of the sunrise around the world for twenty-four hours” using open microphones provided by streamers around the world: she’s described it as intending “to open a space for listening to something else – especially from places where humans and not humans meet – and in the course of one earth day to provide a sketch of this emerging field.” 2017’s edition included contributions from Maputo, Tehran, New York, Kolkata, Santiago de Cali, nature reserves in Cumbria’s Walney Island and Australia’s Noosa Biosphere Reserve, and even the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. On this occasion, Dawn will be performing ‘Tuning to Spheres’, written for wine glasses, sine tone generators and turntables.
Closing the evening out will be a free experimental duet between raw Danish Trio Riot saxophonist Mette Rasmussen (who works with both plain and prepared instruments) and Swedish/Norwegian singer/composer Sofia Jernberg (who works with a twisting barrage of vocal techniques including split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing)
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Fresh from some well-publicised collaborations with avant-rock godfathers Faust, countercultural Salford sound wizards Gnod are returning to their ongoing “R&D” tour. For more on their London weekender from last year, click here; at the moment, they’re stripped back down to their core duo of Chris Haslam and Paddy Shine in order to explore the next, as-yet-undecided developments from last year’s seethe of slow, dirty riffage on their bed of dub, urban discontent, psychic reportage and ritual. As part of that development, they’re throwing the stage open to volunteer collaborators on the night, “be it singing , shouting, dancing, bringing an instrument/device to the table or just simply tuning in and coming along for the ride.” Dust off your home-made Azimuth Co-ordinator or pocket Tettix Wave Accumulator; grab that Aztec death whistle from the back of the kitchen drawer; head down and dive in.
Following the Italian/Slovenian leg in November (in which they toured with Italian noise-rock guitar/voice/drums duo OvO and Godspeed-associated Montreal wallcrashers Big ‡ Brave), the British tour will see a blurring of support slot and Gnod expansion. The band’s ranks will be pre-swollen in Glasgow by drummer and oscillator king Julian Dicken (from Glaswegian psych-rockers The Cosmic Dead) and in Bristol by murky industral-technoist Tony Child (a.k.a. Surgeon) and drummer Dan Johnson (from jazz-punkers Run Logan Run). In London, they’ll be augmented by a five-strong gang of John Doran (head ‘Quietus‘ ranter), heavy electronicist Mark Dicker (ex-Trencher, Palehorse, Bruxa Maria), Mark O. Pilkington and Michael J. York of synth-and-bagpipe psychonauts Teleplasmiste and Teeth Of The Sea trumpeter Sam Barton. In addition, the London gig has a clearly defined support act in the shape of URUK, a teamup of bass player Massimo Pupillo (of expansive no-wave trio Zu) and synthesist/multi-instrumentalist Thighpaulsandra (Coil, Spiritualized, various Julian Cope bands). URUK originates from 2016 when mutual fans Massimo and Thipe finally got together; the resulting music, debuted on this year’s ‘I Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness’ album, references both Coil and Zu but sinks deeper into the world of highly textured dark-ambient drones.
Dates:
Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, Elephant & Castle, London, SE17 1LB, England, Thursday 7th December 2017, 8.00pm – information
Broadcast, 427 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3LG, Scotland, Friday 8th December 2017, 7.00pm – information
Exchange, 72-73 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EJ, England, Sunday 10 December 2017, 7.30pm – information
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Just time, too, to mention another Xposed Club incident over in Cheltenham, in which there’ll be a meet-up duo of pianist Alexander Hawkins and saxophonist Raymond MacDonald (who between them have notched up work and/or leadership duties with Convergence Quartet, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Decoy and more – we also recently saw Raymond exploring the art of the graphic score in London). Also on the bill is well-respected London experimental vocalist/Resonance FM founder Sharon Gal, engaging in duo work with Ghost Mind percussionist (and Xposed host) Stuart Wilding; and a solo set from avant-garde bass clarinet virtuoso Chris Cundy who, as mentioned here some time back, “dips into everything from the philosophical experiments of Cornelius Cardew and John Cage to out-and-out improv to theatre work.”
Various tasters below:
Xposed Club presents:
Alexander Hawkins & Raymond MacDonald + Sharon Gal & Stuart Wilding + Chris Cundy The Xposed Club @ Francis Close Hall, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, GL50 4AZ, England
Friday 8th December 2017, 8.00pm – information
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Misfit City 