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June 2017 – upcoming London classical/experimental gigs – Kammer Klang double event – ‘Soarings: A Salon on Else Marie Pade’ (5th June); Apartment House and Jacob Kirkegaard play Pade and Henning Christiansen, plus Vitalija Glovackyte (6th June)

The June Kammer Klang is a double event centred loosely around Danish composers Else Marie Pade and Henning Christiansen, who variously pioneered mid-twentieth century electronic music and cross-genre intermedia Fluxus experiments.

Kammer Klang presents:
‘Soarings: A Salon on Else Marie Pade’
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Monday 5th June 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
and
Apartment House (performing Henning Christiansen) + Jacob Kierkegaard (presenting Else Marie Pade) + Vitalija Glovackyte + Aguirre DJs
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 6th June 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here

“The sounds outside became concrete music, and in the evening I could imagine that the stars and the moon and the sky uttered sounds and those turned into electronic music.” – Else Marie Pade.

Increasingly recognised as Denmark’s first composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade imagined “aural pictures” during a childhood afflicted by illness, and later learned jazz piano. Operating within the Danish resistance in the Second World War while still a teenager, she was captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in the Frøslevlejren internment: an experience which must have had a long-lasting and damaging effect since it undermined her post-war attempts to train as a classical pianist. Undaunted, she concentrated on composing instead: finding her particular niche after hearing a 1952 Danmarks Radio programme on Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète and realising that he’d given aural shape to the same ideas she’d had as a child. From the mid-1950s she was in at the start of art programmes on Danish television, establishing a lifelong position for herself both as a Danmarks Radio producer and as a pre-eminent radio and television composer (at a time when that strand of musical work offered as much genuine creative opportunity as anything in the avant-garde).

Over the course of her lifetime Pade produced a wide variety of sensuous, stimulating electronic compositions to entwine with various broadcast work: avant-garde documentary work, audiovisual ballet and more. Having studied with Schaeffer during the 1950s, she also attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt during the 1960s and early 1970s, studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti (and impressing Stockhausen enough that he’d use her own ‘Glass Bead Game’ piece as a lecture topic). Apparently taken for granted in her home country, Pade’s reputation was greater abroad – her work was eventually compiled in a three-LP retrospective on Important Records (‘Electronic Works 1958-1995’) in 2014, two years before her death.

Regarding the ‘Soarings’ salon:

“…”Soarings” is a rough translation of the Danish word “svævninger” – a word coined by Pade to encompass both the phenomenon of different frequencies colliding to make an interference beat, and the more poetic image of soaring through the air. The ‘Soarings’ salon event is a special opportunity to hear more about her work via talks, film screening and discussion.

“The evening begins with a talk from artist and composer Jacob Kirkegaard, a long-time friend and colleague of Pade’s. Jacob will speak about Pade’s life and work from his unique perspective, having both produced her three-LP retrospective and collaborated with her on their joint composition ‘Svævninger’ (released by Important Records in 2012, and from which the evening takes its name). His presentation will include new images (including recently digitised scores) never previously shown in public.

“The evening will include the UK premiere of Pade’s extraordinary audiovisual piece ‘En dag på Dyrehavsbakken’: one of her very earliest works, which was first broadcast in 1955 by DR (the Danish Broadcasting Corporation). It consists of pictures and sounds recorded over two summers at Dyrehavsbakken, near Klampenborg in Denmark, and also includes electronically-produced sine tones and echo effects. This makes it the first piece of musique concrete and electronic music made by a Danish composer.

“The salon will conclude with a panel discussion with diverse contributions and reflections on Pade’s work and its wider context from Danish musicologist (and ‘Seismograf‘ editor) Sanne Krogh Groth, sound designer/studio manager Jo Langton and ‘Wire’/’Sight & Sound’ writer Frances Morgan. There’ll also be a reading by sound artist Ain Bailey (whose work includes sonic autobiographies and investigations of both architectural acoustics and the role of sound in the formation of identity).”

Jacob Kierkegaard returns for the full Kammer Klang show the following night, where he’ll be presenting Pade’s 1962 work ‘Faust Suite’, generally considered her masterpiece and described by Jennifer Hor of ‘The Sound Projector’ as “beautiful and mysterious, elegant and eerie music that can express deep solitude or wonder… a secret three-dimensional universe where the most amazing experiences may be had.” Over half an hour of sensually chiming oscillator churn (with nimble, challenging digressions of timbre, tone and emphasis), it places Pade’s work in parallel to the electrophonic imaginings of Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram – similarly thoughtful, similarly detailed and discursive; part of a wave of highly individual and original female composers and sonic réalisatrices with much of their work taking place within broadcast media, dancing apart yet in step.

Opening the show is composer/performer Vitalija Glovackyte, who “creates deep-felt chirpy music, bringing together conventional and homemade instruments, electronics, lo-fi devices and visuals. Her works span intimate solo sets and large-scale multimedia performances. Aside from her solo work, Vitalija co-runs the Almost Credible Music Ensemble and is one-half of the experimental pop duo Kinder Meccano.”

The track above stems from an eighteen month residency Vitalija spent with modern chamber ensemble Apartment House, who are also contributing to the evening in a seven-piece formation of Gordon MacKay (violin), Lucy Railton (cello), Frank Gratkowski (bass clarinet), Simon Limbrick (percussion), Kerry Yong (keyboard/piano), Loré Lixenberg (voice) and AH founder Anton Lukoszevieze as conceptualizer and director. They’ll be presenting the UK premiere of Anton’s adaptation of ‘Requiem of Art (NYC) – Fluxorum Organum’, a Henning Christiansen piece originally performed in 1967 (and reworked three years ago by Anton for an Ultima New York performance).

An adherent to the Fluxus art movement, Christiansen spent his artistic life rejecting standard distinctions of stylistic boundaries (including those between nominally different art forms) and the concept of the lone genius. Instead, much of his work was based on direct, implied or encouraged collaboration, whether he was encouraging others to freely interpret his ideas or whether he was actually working in equalized tandem with another artist. In its original form, ‘Fluxorum Organum’ is an example of the latter situation (having been created as the soundtrack portion to a film collaboration between Christiansen and conceptual art godfather Joseph Beuys) while its Lukoszevieze reinterpretation brings it back under the first method. You can view the original Beuys/Christiansen collaboration below:

The month’s Kammer Klang DJ slot is taken care of by representatives of Belgian record label/mail order distributors Aguirre who release and/or stock a wide range of electronic, ambient, experimental to rock, jazz, new wave and reggae. (including Pade and Christiansen recordings plus reissues from the revered French avant-garde record label Shandar. They’ll be playing various selections both from their catalogue and from their enthusiasms.

Programme:

Fresh Klang: Vitalija Glovackyte
Henning Christiansen – ‘Requiem of Art (NYC) – Fluxorum Organum’ (1967-68) adapted by Anton Lukoszevieze for Ultima New York at Issue Project Room, 2014 (UK premiere) – performed by Apartment House
Else Marie Pade – ‘Faust Suite’ (1962) performed by Jacob Kirkegaard
DJs: Aguirre

Tags: Aguirre (record label), Ain Bailey, Anton Lukoszevieze, Apartment House, Café Oto (promoter/venue), Else Marie Pade, ensemble music, Fluxus, Frances Morgan, Frank Gratkowski, Gordon MacKay, György Ligeti, Henning Christiansen, Jacob Kirkegaard, Jo Langton, Joseph Beuys, Kammer Klang (event), Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kerry Yong, Kinder Meccano, listening to women, London (England), Lore Lixenberg, Lucy Railton, music from Denmark, Pierre Boulez, Pierre Schaeffer, Sanne Krogh Groth, Shandar (record label), Simon Limbrick, Vitalija Glovackyte, women of heart and mind

June 2017 – upcoming English gigs – the return of Pram with the immersive ‘Under the Blossom That Hangs On The Bough’ event in Birmingham (June 3rd); Zarjaz Baby and Jon Slade/Night of the Comet in London (June 3rd); Arthur Russell’s ‘Calling Out Of Context’ revisited in London (June 7th)

23 May

Some shows and events to start June off. In Birmingham, experimental dream pop/post rock band Pram (one of the most original and charming groups ever to work in either genre) have resurfaced and are taking over an Edgbaston park for a very different kind of performance. Back in London there are opportunities to catch up with Zarjaz Baby (one of the wilder characters from the original wave of British post-punk) an acoustic set from Jon Slade (who’s navigated his way through a heap of scenes from art-punk to Riot Grrl to a thousand indie DJ nights); and a recreation of the cello/pop songs of Arthur Russell, one of the darlings of the 1980s New York loft music scene.

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for-Wards, MAC Birmingham and Pram present:
Pram: ‘Under the Blossom That Hangs On The Bough’
Martineau Gardens, 27 Priory Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B5 7UG, England
Saturday 3rd June 2017, 4:30pm – free event – information here, here and here

“Composers and sonic artists Pram have been exploring south Birmingham with the help of local community groups to uncover the sounds of the locality. The results are both familiar and surprising.

“Let Pram take you on a journey through the city, a sound trail through the four wards of Birmingham’s Edgbaston district. Hear the world from the perspective of a bee as it flutters and forages. The snuffles of a tiny baby become the snores of a lion, the gurgle of a stream a mighty cataract. Come along and follow the woodland trail, bring a picnic and settle down for a performance inspired by the sound of the city as you’ve never heard it before.

“Set in the magical surroundings of Martineau Gardens, ‘Under the Blossom that Hangs on the Bough’ is an installation and performance by Pram, celebrating the sounds of Edgbaston. It will take place at Martineau Gardens on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd June, concluding at 6.30pm with a Pram performance inspired by sound recordings made in the wards of Quinton, Harborne, Edgbaston and Bartley Green. Free admission if you register at Eventbrite…”

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.

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Zarjaz Baby + Jon Slade
The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Saturday 3rd June 2017, 7.00pm – information

“An existentialist extravaganza featuring a solo acoustic set from Zarjaz Baby (Freakapuss and former Tronics). Zarjaz will be performing dark atmospheric songs, full of imagery, with jazz, blues, early ’60s beat and pop influences, with live performance artists, in a style not seen since the basement and candles days of Beatniks.

“Also featured on the night is a solo acoustic Love-Rock revival set from Jon Slade/Knight Of The Comet, incorporating songs from his former bands Huggy Bear and Comet Gain, plus a Fire Department number, some Electric Bull re-workings, as well as songs he wrote with Wolfy Jones.

“’60s European pop music in between sets, Francoise Hardy, Brigitte Bardot, Gillian Hills. Expect sombre girls dressed in black and boys in Breton shirts.”
For more information contact incoming@freakapuss.com

For more on Zarjaz’s chequered life and career, have a read of this interview he did with ‘The Quietus’ three years ago, featuring accounts of brushes with mental illness, of releasing surreal post-punk songs with titles like Shark Fucks, of arguing with ‘2000AD’ over his stage name, and of having his image ripped off by Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

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XOYO Live and Milestones present:
‘Arthur Russell – A Classic Reinterpreted’
XOYO, 32-37 Cowper Street, St Lukes, London, EC2A 4AP, England
Wednesday 7th June 2017, 7.00pm – information here and here

“It’s been said that “Arthur’s songs were so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music.”

“Twenty-five years after Arthur Russell‘s death, some of the most exciting, forward-thinking faces in music are set to present a unique rendition of Arthur Russell’s timeless album ‘Calling Out Of Context’. A posthumous album that brought together twelve incredible tracks from across two previously unreleased LPs, ‘Calling Out Of Context’ represents Arthur in his prime. Two decades later and the music sounds as contemporary as ever – a huge inspiration for those performing on the night. We’re very excited to hear this new rendition.”

Bringing together elements of electropop, classical minimalism, post-disco, hip hop and singer-songwriter work, the ‘Calling Out Of Context’ songs span twenty years of Arthur’s composing and creative history while he was battling to fuse the parallel New York worlds of dance culture and art music between the late ’70s and the early ’90s – a pioneer of the freewheeling musical eclectism which today we pretty much take for granted. Take a look at this salvaged 1987 interview feature from the ‘Melody Maker’ for more on the topic, featuring reflections from Arthur and others on Indian music, the pulse shared by formal minimalism and New York dance clubs, and the social and cultural challenges of the time regarding blending “high” and “low” cultures.

The band for this London performance consists of Ashley Henry (keyboards), Midori Jaeger (cello), Alica Higgins (vocals), Sam Gardner (drums) and Joe Downard (bass).

Tags: Arthur Russell, Ashley Henry, Birmingham (England), Comet Gain, Freakapuss, Huggy Bear, Joe Downard, Jon Slade, Knight Of The Comet, London (England), Midori Jaeger, Pram, Sam Gardner, Tronics, Zarjaz Baby

May 2017 – upcoming London classical gigs – polygender opera with ‘Binary Optional’ at CPT (May 25th & 26th)

21 May

One of the month’s more interesting London opera events…

Oedipa & Lucia Lucas present:
‘Binary Optional’
Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, Euston, London, NW1 2PY, England
Thurday 25th & Friday 26th May 2017, 9.00pm – information

From the press release, spliced with a little more research:

“Oedipa collaborates with the extraordinary female baritone Lucia Lucas (Wuppertaler Bühnen, Deutsche Oper, Chicago Opera Theatre) on an evening of song in transition: from masc to femme, classical to queer and oppression to freedom.

“A freelance opera singer based in Germany (who has previously held full-time contracts with the Badisches Staatstheater, Kalsruhe, Theater und Orchester Heidelberg and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin), Lucia Lucas is a strong dramatic baritone specializing in Verdi roles, and has sung roles including Ford in ‘Falstaff’, Iago in ‘Otello’, Escamillo in ‘Carmen’, Le Grand-Prêtre in ‘Samson et Dalilah’, Jochanaan in ‘Salome’, Alberich in ‘Das Rheingold’, Thoas in ‘Iphigenie en Tauride’, Figaro in ‘Le nozze di Figaro’, Leporello and Giovanni in ‘Don Giovanni’, Mephistopheles in ‘Faust’, Don Pizzaro in ‘Fidelio’ and Nick Shadow in ‘The Rake’s Progress’.

“Beyond this, Lucia is one of the small but growing number of transgender woman performing significant operatic roles (a list of singers which includes Breanna Sinclairé and Emily De Salvo, whose own unusual range covers baritone to soprano). As Lucia commented in an interview in ‘Slipped Disc’ a couple of years ago, “I am performing all of the same things. Still singing angry old men on stage, but fringe projects have also started appearing as possibilities”. ‘Binary Optional’ is one such project – singing Bizet, Britten, Wagner, Purcell and Adams, flirting with Sarah Vaughan and ‘Rocky Horror’, Lucia draws on her experience singing classical repertoire across the world to tell her incredible story and celebrate the fluidity and plurality of gender in opera.

“Oedipa is the alter ego of writer/director Finn Beames (who’s dedicated himself to working “against the male perspective”) and a diverse range of varying collaborators. As Oedipa, groups of artists create and produce live performances in theatre, opera and related forms, often with an emphasis on music.

“Based in London and working internationally, Finn won the 2015 Genesis Future Directors Award at the Young Vic for his production of Man: 3 Plays by Tennessee Williams in the Clare theatre. He also holds the 2015 Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship, granted by the British Council for research into the eponymous Brazilian architect and the creation of a piece of theatre. For his own company, bodycorps, he recently directed a sold-out run of a new opera about depression, funded by The Wellcome Trust and ACE. Finn has commissioned further new work for bodycorps, including a musical based on The Sorrows of Young Werther. In 2014 Finn wrote, directed and designed a new music theatre work for the London Sinfonietta with composer Gavin Higgins, which they are currently expanding into a triptych. Finn is a director/librettist on the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme at Aldeburgh Music, and a member of the Young Vic Directors Network and Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in New York.”

Tags: ‘The Rocky Horror Show’, baritone (vocal), Benjamin Britten, Breanna Sinclairé, Emily de Salvo, Finn Beames, Georges Bizet, Henry Purcell, John Adams, London (England), Lucia Lucas, Oedipa (theatre company), Richard Wagner, Sarah Vaughan, transgender musicians

May 2017 – upcoming London gigs – I’m This I’m That play Moondog, plus Ed Dowie (19th May); Trembling Bells spinoff Alex Rex plus The Left Outsides and Plague Dogs (20th May)

14 May

It’s always good to hear that Homerton’s 33 Chatworth Road – a.k.a. “The Dentist” – is hosting another of its gig-cum-house-parties. I’ve still got fond memories of the first concert I ever went to there: a mixture of jazz atmospheres, experimental folk and mythic New York chamber pop from Sealionwoman, Foxout! and Liam Singer (which you can read all about here.)

I’ve been out of the loop regarding their activities for too long, but here’s quick news on another couple of imminent shows there in collaboration, one in collaboration with folk promoter Muckle Mouth and the other with the Tin Label. (There are another two coming in the following week…).

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Muckle Mouth and 33 Chatsworth Road present:
I’m This, I’m That (playing the songs of Moondog) + Ed Dowie
33 Chatsworth Road/The Dentist, 33 Chatsworth Road, Homerton, London, E5 0LH, England
Friday 19th May 2017, 7.00 pm – information here, here and here

Assembled rapidly from the gig publicity, and from Wikipedia:

“Louis Thomas Hardin, better known as Moondog, was an American composer, musician and poet. His music took inspiration from street sounds, such as the subway or a foghorn. It was characterized by what he called “snaketime” and described as “a slithery rhythm, in times that are not ordinary […] I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time.” Many of his works were highly contrapuntal, and he worked hard on perfecting his counterpoint. He was also the inventor of several musical instruments (including a small triangular-shaped harp known as the “oo”, another which he named the “ooo-ya-tsu”, and a triangular stringed instrument played with a bow that he called the “hüs” (after the Norwegian, “hus”, meaning “house”). Perhaps his best known creation is the “trimba”, a triangular percussion instrument that the composer invented in the late 40s..

“Moondog was blind from the age of sixteen. In New York from the late 1940s, until he left in 1972, he could often be found on 6th Avenue between 52nd and 55th Street wearing a cloak and Viking-style helmet, sometimes busking or selling music, but often just standing silent and still. He was widely recognized as “the Viking of 6th Avenue” by thousands of passersby and residents who weren’t aware of his musical career.

“Dedicated Moondog interpreters I’m This, I’m That return to The Dentist performing their own arrangements/transcriptions of Moondog compositions with support from Ed Dowie (a Daylight Music favourite – there’s more about him here). Due to massive demand, there will be a double performance – an early show and a late show, with the one you see depending on when you’ve bought your ticket. Doors open at 7.00pm for fire/drinks/chat…”

Schedule:

7.30pm – first Ed Dowie set
8.15pm – first I’m This I’m That set
9.15pm – second Ed Dowie set
10:00pm -second I’m This I’m That set

Here are a couple of clips from the previous I’m This I’m That Moondog show back in July 2015, plus a taste of Ed Dowie:

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33 Chatsworth Rd and Tin Angel Records present:
Alex Rex + The Left Outsides + Plague Dogs
33 Chatsworth Road/The Dentist, 33 Chatsworth Road, Homerton, London, E5 0LH, England
Saturday 20th May 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here

“This is the one and only live outing with full band for Vermillion – Alex Neilson (of Trembling Bells)’ solo record as Alex Rex. Aside from a Cerys Matthews session the following morning, the material from this fantastic record will never be performed again.”

From ‘The Guardian‘:

“His debut solo album Vermilion presents him as a provocative, poetic lothario with the alter ego Alex Rex. On record, rose thorns grow in Rex’s throat and he sleeps with girls for their minds as well as their bodies… Written during a “particularly self-destructive” period in his life in late 2015, Vermilion begins with the Gregorian chant-inspired blues of The Screaming Cathedral, with a chorus telling of “horror heaped on horror”. Please God Make Me Good (But Not Yet) features a girl sticking pins into a voodoo sex doll of him, before he has a “hit on myself.”

“Getting the worst bits of himself out there was therapeutic and necessary for Neilson. “I wanted songs that spilt out of themselves. The records I cherish most are asymmetrical things, full of blemishes,” he says. But there’s plenty of perky, almost poppy moments too. Neilson wrote the skronky psych-blues of Song for Dora while reading “lots of Ovid and taking MDMA”, while Postcards from a dream has a remarkably radio-friendly, West Coast-brightened Hammond organ intro before it kills its A-list potential with lyrics about “a necklace of bungee cord” and Adam “cup[ping] his nuts behind the tree.” Sex is everywhere, but this shouldn’t surprising for a folk musician, Neilson laughs. “The oldest folk songs are lusty and carnal. And I like having sex! People do!”

This in from the promoters: “The Left Outsides have joined the bill, playing in an Alison/Mark guitar duo formation.” If you remember, these are further Daylight Music favourites, so I’ll just steal the blurb from a previous DM show I posted about – “Mark Nicholas and Alison Cotton (are) a London-based husband and wife duo whose atmospheric, hypnotic songs echo Nico’s icy European folk, pastoral psychedelia and chilly English fields at dawn.”

The third act is Plague Dogs, about whom I’ve been able to find out precisely nothing: but they must have impressed Muckle Mouth, since they’re also playing at the Family Élan gig the following. Maybe when I get around to posting about that I’ll have found out more…

Tags: Alex Rex (Alex Neilson), Ed Dowie, I'm This I'm That, London (England), Moondog, Muckle Mouth (event/promoter), Plague Dogs, The Left Outsides, Trembling Bells

May 2017 – upcoming London gigs – Beatrix Players + King Of The Opera (May 11th); Cosmo Sheldrake + A House In The Trees (May 12th)

2 May

A few more warmly off-kilter London gigs coming up in early May: Beatrix Players‘ elegant chamber-pop, King Of The Opera‘s rough-edged alternative folk, Cosmo Sheldrake‘s poly-instrumental Edward Lear-inspired busk whimsy, A House In The Trees‘ oblique chillout…

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Beatrix Players present:
Beatrix Players + King Of The Opera
Hoxton Hall, 130 Hoxton Street, Hoxton, London, N1 6SH, England
Thursday 11th May 2017, 7:30pm – information

“Through their enchantingly dark and evocative melodies, expansive arrangements and empowered orchestral sound Beatrix Players tell stories of real life and fantasy. Citing influences as diverse as Michael Nyman and Regina Spektor and drawing comparisons to the likes of Kate Bush and Einaudi Ludovico, this London-based, all-female trio combine elements of folk, jazz, progressive and classical music.

“In 2015 the band took their unique sound – a beautiful combination of vocals, piano and cello – into the studio to record their self-produced debut album, which has been mixed by two-time BBC Folk Award winner, Jim Moray. That album, titled ‘Magnified’, is now brought to you in an evening with musicians from the album: Robyn Hemmings on double bass, Maria Kroon on violin, Emanuela Monni on percussion, Jez Houghton on French horn. Pop/soul/funk choir Sound will also be joining in.”

King Of The Opera (formerly known as Samuel Katarro) is the musical project of Alberto Mariotti – a songwriter from Tuscany, Italy – first introduced to the public at the renowned Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona in the Spring of 2012. The project’s strength lies in its continuous search of the meeting points between seemingly irreconcilable genres: distorted punk-blues, bewildered (and bewildering) folk ballads and digressions into the acid realm of psychedelia.

“In 2016 King Of The Opera released his new album ‘Pangos Sessions’, ten songs that summarize his musical career in a pretty original way, alternating acoustic reinterpretations from the King Of The Opera/Samuel Katarro songbook and five cover songs (originally released in Mariotti’s birth year, 1985), by The Cure, The Waterboys, The Replacements, Tom Waits and Sonic Youth. The collection also includes the unreleased alt-folk-ballad By The Shore.”

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Rockfeedback presents:
Cosmo Sheldrake + A House In The Trees
The Moth Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette Street, Hackney, London, E9 6NU, England
Friday 12th May 2017, 7.00pm – information here and here

“Cosmo Sheldrake is a twenty-five-year-old multi-instrumentalist musician, composer and producer. He regularly performs on banjo, loop station, keyboards, double bass, drums, penny whistle, sousaphone, accordion and many more. He is an inspirational singer and improviser, and much of his work is concerned with play, nonsense and the sonorous environment.

“Cosmo composes music for film and theatre and tours internationally, performing solo and with several bands including Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit and the Gentle Mystics. He ran a community choir until 2013, teaches in schools and privately and has facilitated music workshops and youth empowerment and nature awareness camps across Europe and North America.”

Support comes from smooth and hallucinatory dark-pop/trip hop act A House In The Trees, the core of New Cross’ Rising Sun Collective.

Tags: A House In The Trees, Beatrix Players, Cosmo Sheldrake, Emanuela Monni, Jez Houghton, King Of The Opera (Samuel Katarro), London (England), Maria Kroon, multi-instrumentalists, Rising Sun Collective, Robyn Hemmings, Rockfeedback (promoter), Sonic Youth, Sound (choir), The Cure, The Replacements, The Waterboys, Tom Waits, trio music

April 2017 – upcoming jazz & improv instrumental gigs, Midlands, West and East – Theo Travis’ Double Talk in Essex (21st); Birmingham Bass Night with Steve Lawson, Dave Clarke, Russ Sargeant and Kevin Buckland (24th); improv in Cheltenham with Trevor Watts/Veryan Weston/Hannah Marshall Improvising Trio, Han Bennink & Pat Thomas, plus Chris Cundy (28th)

9 Apr

I focus too much on London with these news posts, so it’s refreshing to get a chance to look further afield now and again. Two of the regular gig-engines that I keep an eye on are Cheltenham’s friendly and broadminded improve evening Xposed Club, and Birmingham’s self-propelled compulsive bass collaborator Steve Lawson – so it’s good to be able to feature a gig by each of them here, plus news on the only 2017 gig planned (so far) for Theo Travis’s Double Talk quartet.

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With Double Talk, saxophonist Theo Travis pulls together his diverse influences and drives – his lyrical Stan Getz-ish jazz approach, his taste for ambient experimentalism, and the push-pull strands of his beloved English art rock and prog strands (spanning the likes of King Crimson, Gong and Porcupine Tree through to the influence of Theo’s other main gig as a member of Soft Machine) – more successfully than with any of his other projects. Allying Theo with drummer Nic France, Hammond organist Pete Whitaker and the extraordinarily malleable guitar of Mike Outram, Double Talk produce a warm, thoughtful, textured and propulsive jazz – managing their fusion leanings without falling into the trap of electric sterility, expressing their irreverent Englishness without drowning in soapy tweeness; an exhibition of subtle, graceful and reflective muscle.

At this Fleece Jazz gig, they’ll be mainly (though not exclusively) concentrating on music from their 2015 album ‘Transgression’.

Fleece Jazz presents:
Theo Travis’ Double Talk
Stoke by Nayland Hotel, Keepers Lane, Leavenheath, Colchester, Essex, CO6 4PZ, England
Friday 21 April 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here

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Birmingham Bass Night: Local Heroes! (featuring Steve Lawson, Dave Clarke, Russ Sargeant & Kevin Buckland)
Tower of Song, 107 Pershore Road South, Kings Norton, Birmingham B30 3EL, England
Sunday 23rd April 2017, 6.30pm – information

Another of Steve Lawson’s hometown low-end gigs-with-pals is coming up in the shape of this “all-West Midlands solo bass extravaganza” – more details below.

“Steve Lawson is the UK leading solo bassist – a former Bass Guitar Magazine cover star, Steve has been playing solo for 20 years, everywhere from The Royal Albert Hall to the Knitting Factory in LA. His solo work has also lead to numerous collaborations, most recently with Divinity Roxx, Reeves Gabrels, Tanya Donelly and Beardyman amongst many others. He’s released somewhere in the region of 45 solo and collaborative albums, but lost count some time in 2012…

“Midlands bass legend Dave Clarke has been a regular on the scene for twenty-five years, touring with Surinder Sandhu, Alvin Stardust, The Contours and Chairman Of The Board, and gigging in pretty much every pop style imaginable. Dave returns to Birmingham Bass Night with his much-loved looping piano/bass experimental duo, the Rowberry/Clarke Project.

“UK bassist Russ Sargeant uses his instruments, along with technology and effects, to create beautiful, layered music. His work has been described as “wonderfully immersive” and “subtle layers of sound that emerge gracefully like cinematic soundtracks”.

“Solo bassist and soundscapist Kevin Buckland – a.k.a. An Ending Ascend – brings his beautiful laptop-powered, eBow-laden ambient textures to Birmingham Bass Night. Currently studying for a Masters in experimental composition and sound art, Kevin’s musical journey takes the listener on a rich and rewarding ride through a world of mellow organic electronica.”

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A rather longer entry now for the latest Xposed Club show, featuring as it does a stack of coalescing musicians with long solo pedigrees…

Xposed Club presents:
Trevor Watts/Veryan Weston/Hannah Marshall Improvising Trio + Han Bennink & Pat Thomas + Chris Cundy (bass clarinet solo)
The Xposed Club @ Francis Close Hall, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, GL50 4AZ, England
Friday 28th April 2017, 8.00pm – information here and here

Friends and collaborators for more than forty years (since meeting in Trevor’s Moiré Music Group, which pursued a unique combination of African rhythmic structures with the European musical tradition) saxophonist Trevor Watts and pianist Veryan Weston have been at the forefront of many innovations and developments within the jazz/world and improvisational areas of music.

Trevor is the only surving founder member of The Spontaneous Music Ensemble, began the Amalgam group in 1967 (with bassist Barry Guy and trombonist Paul Rutherford), and was a founder member of Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra. He also founded The Drum Orchestra which, over a seventeen-year span from 1980, combined the talents of musicians from North and South Africa and Latin America. Initially a collaborator with Lol Coxhill and Eddie Prévost in the early ‘80s, Veryan reveals new aspects of an ever-changing improvised music identity depending on who he is playing with: he spent much of the ’90 working with vocalist extraordinaire Phil Minton, and other collaborations have included Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill, John Zorn’s Cobra and (more recently) Sol6 and the 2014 Lindsay Cooper memorial project. His work with Jon Rose on the ‘Temperament Project’ uses assorted acoustic keyboards and violins with “selected tunings derived from science, history and the imagination”, and his formal composition work with the ‘Tessellations’ project produces pentatonic pieces for choir, piano, string quartet and other formats.

Sharing musical interests (particularly in rhythmic ideas), the two have maintained a long standing improvisation-focussed duo, highly acclaimed for their recordings and worldwide live appearances. Having previously joined forces with drummer Terry Day and bassist Dominic Lash, they’re currently operating as a trio with the involvement of free improvising cellist Hannah Marshall – a force on the UK scene and beyond who continues to “extract and invent as many sounds and emotional qualities from her instrument as she can… influenced by environmental sounds, western classical music, jazz, noise, traditional songs and blues amongst many things…” As well as work with Veryan on the Tuning Out Tour, the Trio of Uncertainty and Haste (and with others including Rachel Musson, Julie Kjaer, and Tim Hodgkinson), Hannah collaborates on and scores many other performing-arts works within theatre, dance, storytelling, film and live art.

Last time he played at Xposed Club (nine years ago) Han Bennink packed the place out. At the age of seventy-five, the onetime hard-swing drummer retains the lifelong energy that’s made him a linchpin of the Dutch improvisational scene. From backing various American stars on their visits to Holland in the 1960s, Han went on to co-found the musicians collective Instant Composers Pool in 1967 with pianist Misha Mengelberg and saxophonist Willem Breuker. With additional skills on clarinet, violin, trombone, piano, soprano saxophone and banjo (and a parallel career as a visual artist) he’s one of Europe’s most diverse improvisers, working with Derek Bailey, Misha Mengelberg and John Tchicai, amongst others.

Han’s also been in a number of trios, including the sax-cello-drums Clusone 3 (with Michael Moore and Ernst Reijseger, creating a “free-wheeling mix of swinging jazz standards, wide-open improvising, and tender ballads”) and a sax-piano-drums arrangement with Peter Brötzmann and Fred van Hove. His current main trios are his own Han Bennink Trio (with Joachim Badenhorst on clarinet and Simon Toldam on piano) and a piano-bass-drums alliance with Cor Fuhler and Wilbert de Joode. He remains a member of Mengelberg’s ICP Orchestra and the Tobias Delius Quartet. Throughout all of this, he’s also kept up his interest in non-standard/found object percussion, something which dates back to his first experiments with a kitchen chair at the start of his playing career (he still plays one whenever he had the opportunity).

Han also retains an active fondness for the spontaneous duo gig, and for this Xposed appearance he’s joined by pianist Pat Thomas. An improv festival veteran, Pat’s own history is one of mingling organic musical influences (jazz, reggae, classical) with electro-acoustic experimentation – when not playing piano, he’s working with programmable keyboards and with found-sound created by taping and editing random soundtracks from TV broadcasts. In the mid-’80s he played in Ghosts with percussionist Matt Lewis and wind/EWI player Pete McPhail, the latter of whom would also be a member of Pat’s experimental tentet Monads (which specialised in running a gamut of improvisational possibilities from saxophone-led pieces to others which foregrounded turntables, drum machines and computers). During the ‘90s Pat was a member of the intermittent quartet Scatter (with Phil Minton, Roger Turner and Dave Tucker). He’s also played extensively with Tony Oxley, Mike Cooper. Derek Bailey and Lol Coxhill, has a keyboard-and-percussion duo with Mark Sanders, and a trio with Steve Beresford and Francine Luce.

The opening act on the bill is extended-technique reedsman Chris Cundy: an Xposed Club regular and favourite with roots in Medway busking, a roving Cheltenham/Canada base, and a history that includes work with Fyfe Dangerfield (exploring both art pop with Guillemots and more avant-garde improvising terrain with Gannets), freak-folkers Timbre Timbre, doom-soul singer Cold Specks, florid transgender romantic Baby Dee, acclaimed indie/jazz/folk artist Devon Sproule and others. The master of a range of approaches (multi-phonics, circular breathing and microtonality) and of assorted standard and unusual woodwind and reed instruments, Chris dips into everything from the philosophical experiments of Cornelius Cardew and John Cage to out-and-out improv to theatre work. For this particular gig, he’ll be concentrating on his bass clarinet work.

Tags: Birmingham (England), Cheltenham (England), Chris Cundy, Colchester (England), Dave Clarke, Double Talk, duo music, Han Bennink, Hannah Marshall, Kevin Buckland, Leavenheath (England), Mike Outram, Nic France, Pat Thomas, Pete Whittaker, Russ Sargeant, Steve Lawson, Theo Travis, Trevor Watts, trio music, Veryan Weston

April 2017 – upcoming London jazz gigs – Ella Hohnen-Ford Quartet (8th), The Delegation (22nd), TEXTURE (28th)

3 Apr

Three upcoming jazz gigs this month – shimmering vibes-and-voice-led songwork; large-scale and purposeful big-band abstractions like a collapsing city; cartoon-coloured Weather Report-ish synth and drum grooves…

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MAP Studio Café presents:
Ella Hohnen-Ford Quartet
MAP Studio Café, 46 Grafton Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3DU, England
Saturday 8th April 2017, 7.30pm – information

“The unusual line up of bass, drums, voice and vibraphone adds to the unique sound created by the Ella Hohnen-Ford Quartet, a vibrant jazz/cross-genre quartet of passionate young players, currently studying at the Royal Academy of Music and Guildhall. With influences ranging from the jazz greats (such as Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Horn), to modern composers (including Kenny Wheeler and Marius Neset) and singer-songwriters such as Nora Jones and James Taylor, the group have a truly individual and confident sound. A debut performance not to missed, featuring arrangements of songs we love and compositions written by and for this specific line up.

“The band features Ella Hohnen-Ford (currently the only singer studying at the Royal Academy of Music’s jazz course), vibraphonist/composer Jonny Mansfield, drummer Boz Martin-Jones and bassist Will Sach (who currently holds the world record for playing the highest altitude bass line, at 40,000 feet). Ella and Boz also play in Johnny’s hotly-tipped Elftet band.”

I couldn’t find anything by the whole band, let alone any sneak previews of their original tunes, but here’s what sounds like Jonny and Ella at work on an old standard:

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MAP Studio Café presents:
The Delegation
MAP Studio Café, 46 Grafton Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3DU, England
Saturday 22nd April 2017, 7.30pm – information

“Gabriel Zucker’s indie jazz orchestra The Delegation was founded in 2013, and has already broken new ground in New York’s dynamic music scene. Combining an array of disparate influences into a unique and emotionally immediate sound, The Delegation has performed throughout the Northeast and Canada, and Zucker’s compositions for the group have received awards from ASCAP and the American Composers Forum JFund grant. The group’s singular musical philosophy has been profiled at length by the Ottawa Citizen, Jazz Gallery, and the American Composers Forum.

“Last autumn, The Delegation brought its unique concept to life with the release of ‘Evergreen (Canceled World)’, Zucker’s maximalist 12-movement composition that serves as the band’s sprawlingly ambitious debut record. In ‘World Music Report’, Raul da Gama wrote “in Zucker’s almost confrontational writing I find the vision of one who is hugely expressive. Here is a young man with a profound sense of tone and colour and how it can be wrought from diverse instrumentation to be affectingly “cantorial”, expressive and hugely symphonic too.”

“‘Evergreen’ also received 4.5 stars in ‘Downbeat’ and 4 stars in ‘All About Jazz’. With protean production by Zucker and pop producer Chris Connors, the nearly-two-hour record features everything from angular rhythmic grooves to Radiohead-inspired soundscapes to jarring electronics-infused chamber music to enigmatic lullabies, and is one of the year’s only contemporary releases on the prestigious ESP-Disk label.

“Support comes from Introspection, a new seven-piece contemporary modal jazz and jazz-rock ensemble, soon to release their eponymous debut EP. The group plays the original compositions and arrangements of its bandleader and guitarist Julian Woods, which explore colourful modal harmony, open improvisation, dense textures, contemporary through-composition, and rock-like timbres.”

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IKLECTIK Art Lab presents:
TEXTURE
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Friday 28th April 2017, 8:00 pm – information

“TEXTURE is an original drums/keyboards duo project of drummer, percussionist and composer Adam Teixeira, featuring Chris Pruden on analogue keyboards and synthesizers. Based in South London and Berlin, the two musicians began playing together in Toronto, Canada in 2012 and have since performed across North America and Europe collaborating with a variety of international musicians.

“Adam has recently released this music on his debut album (also called ‘TEXTURE’), which features hypnotic and infectious drumset grooves, kalimba melodies, atmospheric synth landscapes; exploring a unique blend of folkloric rhythmic traditions stemming from African, Caribbean and Indian classical roots with modern jazz and electronic influences, and providing the perfect setting for the musicians to launch into energetic improvisations.”

Tags: Adam Teixeira, Boz Martin-Jones, Chris Pruden, Ella Hohnen-Ford, Gabriel Zucker, Introspection, Jonny Mansfield, Julian Woods, MAP Studio Cafe (promoters), music for jazz orchestra, TEXTURE, The Delegation, Will Sach

April 2017 – upcoming gigs – performance of Tim Smith/Cardiacs pieces in Amsterdam by jazz ensemble, for free (6th)

31 Mar

Tim Smith (photo © Sarah Mather)

Just heard this heartening news from INKT/Theater M-Lab/Palmen & Reijmerink bassist Rita Kárpáti, in Amsterdam:

“Tim Smith‘s previously-unheard composition ‘Pod, my my look my Pod’ (1983) is going to be performed in the Amsterdam Conservatory during the Jazz Ensemble Festival in the Blue Note hall – alongside with two other classic songs by Cardiacs… The ensemble is going to be rather extended, I don’t even remember the exact number of members – around ten or eleven people on stage, so it’s going to be loud! So if you are around in the Netherlands and want to hear ‘Pod…’ for the first time, performed by the wonkiest of students and alumni of the CvA, conducted by prog-rock professor Jos Zwaanenburg – for free – you know where to find us.”

This is taking part as part of the Conservatorium Jazz Ensemble festival, which runs between 3rd and 6th April this year and features performances from many of the Conservatorium’s budding jazz and cross-disciplinary musicians, mostly for free. If you’re interested in the whole festival programme you can get it here, but if you’re specifically hoping to catch the set of Smith pieces then you need to look out for Alex Brajkovic‘s electric/acoustic ensemble performing on the evening of 6th April…

3rd Jazz Ensemble Festival @ Conservatorium von Amsterdam presents:
Alex Brajkovic (MA)’s Student Ensemble play Tim Smith
Blue Note Zaal @ Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Oosterdokseiland, 1011 DL Amsterdam, Netherlands
Thursday 6th April 2017, 6:30pm – free event

More from Rita regarding the background to this:

“I got Timfected by my teacher at the Amsterdam Conservatory about two years ago. His name is Jos Zwaanenburg, a prog rock flautist who dedicates a whole class to teaching the music of Frank Zappa and related artists. The year I joined that class he decided to throw in a Cardiacs piece for us to learn (we can say he is a big Patient Zero). It was Jibber And Twitch. I still remember the childish joy of playing something so punky in a respected music institution and how impossible those fast quintuplets seemed to play. (I play the bass and I deeply adore Jim (Smith, Cardiacs bassist) for his elaborate basslines and his ability to endure fierce domestic brutality).

“A few years of vigorous Cardiacs listening passed and I graduated. Fast forward to this November, 2016. Jos writes us an e-mail that he finally got the chance to make his trip to England. A trip he had been organizing for years with the help of a mutual friend. He was about to visit Tim Smith and ask him geeky musical questions! He said that during their e-mailing he had been requested to show what he had been doing with his students, but since all the exam recordings sounded crappy we had to make a new, proper home recording of Jibber And Twitch. I couldn’t have been happier to play it again! We rehearsed and made the new version. (It still sounded very lo-fi, but our heart was in it I’d like to think.)

“So Jos went to England, and yes, he actually met Tim. (He is going to cover the details of that absolutely touching encounter in an article soon, so I’m not going into details about how they communicated or what else happened there. I don’t want to take Jos’ credits.) Only my side of the story. After some friendly drinking and whatnot Jos played our silly little recording to Tim. And the anecdote says he looked impressed and he gave it a thumbs up when the song arrived to a part with overdubbed vocals. Even though I wasn’t there (only in a form of an under-mixed bassline) I’m always going to remember this as the most epic ‘Like’ in my life.

“We also got permission to study and record any of his music, including the ones that have never been recorded. We got all the sheet music we need. That’s what kind of a guy Tim Smith is.”

I’m not sure about which three Cardiacs pieces will be played alongside ‘Pod…’ but from hints dropped in various discussions I wouldn’t be surprised if they included Jibber And Twitch and The Duck And Roger The Horse. Below are Cardiacs performances of each of these, plus the English Rose Orchestrations variant on ‘The Duck…’ showing how the original hectic art/prog/punk piece has yielded a set of contemporary classical variations.

Tags: Alex Brajkovic, Amsterdam (Netherlands), Cardiacs, Conservatorium von Amsterdam Jazz Ensemble Festival (event), English Rose Orchestrations, INKT, Jos Zwaanenburg, Justin Rose, Palmen & Reijmerink, Rita Kárpáti, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, Theater M-Lab, Tim Smith

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Categories 2017, acoustic music, art punk, big-band jazz, chamber music, cover versions, cross-cultural music, crossover, experimental music, festivals, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, jazz fusion, previews, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, rock

April 2017 – upcoming London gigs – “wonk rock” with The Display Team + A Sweet Niche + Ham Legion (3rd); Patricia Hammond & Matt Redman’s Edwardian pop (3rd); SOIF Soiree with Society Of Imaginary Friends, David Skinner, The Support Stockings, Cian Binchy, Millie George, I Am Her, Martin Wakefield, Jed Demochowski, Anne Corrigan etc. (7th)

27 Mar

I was moved to jam these three early April gigs together for a preview. On the Wednesday, it’s up to you whether you go for the tangled electric loom of wonky pop/jazz/punk noise or for the hundred-year-old pop hits with the Keep Calm And Carry On teatowels. Either way, you still get to attend the latest mixed-music-and-poetry SOIF cabaret on the following Friday…

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Bad Hedge presents:
The Display Team + A Sweet Niche + Ham Legion
The Birds Nest, 32 Deptford Church Street, Deptford, London, SE8 4RZ, England
Monday 3rd April 2017, 7.00pm – information

“A repulsive onstage three-way shocker! For one night in April, three heavyweights of the widely ignored wonk rock scene will spill off the stage in one of London’s best (and cheapest) small venues. And all for free! The Display Team: nob-bothering high-octave brutalitarians; like a small orchestra with big balls. A Sweet Niche: skronky honkies that bring an ominous twistin’ y’all can’t be resistin’. Ham Legion: kaleidoscopic power-pop rompers with more dinner ideas than you’ve had hot.”

For a little more on these people from back in the ‘Misfit City’ archives, have a peek here, here and here. Meanwhile, here’s the obligatory fistful of tunes.

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Wiltons Music Hall presents:
Monday Night Music: Patricia Hammond with Matt Redman
The Mahogany Bar @ Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, Whitechapel, London, E1 8JB, England
Monday 3rd April 2017, 8.00pm – free event – information here and here

“An evening of rousing Edwardian pop! Patricia Hammond and Matt Redman, world-renowned specialists in authentic historical performance, will play an assortment of pop songs from the Edwardian era, including some of the first songs ever written about motorised transport: Willie Had A Motor-Boat, In My Merry Oldsmobile, My Rickenbacker Car, Wait Till You Get Them Up In The Air, Boys, and many, many more delights. If you’re very nice to them, Patricia and Matt also promise some rousing singalongs to gems such as If You Were The Only Girl In The World and, for the WW1 Centenary’s sake, Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag.

Matt will be performing on piano, guitar, banjo and accordion, and will treat people to instrumentals of some of the new dance crazes of the 1900s and 1910s, such as tango, chorinho, ragtime, Hawaiian and blues. Of course, this being Wilton’s, songs of the great music hall era will also feature. All together now!”

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Society Of Imaginary Friends present:
Society of Imaginary Friends Soiree: “For Absent Friends” (featuring Society Of Imaginary Friends + David Skinner + The Support Stockings + Cian Binchy + Millie George + I Am Her + Martin Wakefield + Evie + Jed Demochowski + Anne Corrigan + Dj Onjdrew + others t.b.c.)
Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Friday 7th April 2017, 8.00pm – free event – information

The latest in Society of Imaginary Friends’ ongoing series of grab-bag gigs, featuring a number of faces which ought to be familiar from recent performances:

“A sunny spring park comes to life crowded with absent friends, friends turned imaginary, walking with the sun, singing and humming, playing rounders, turning summersaults, laughing with the children,climbing trees, smiling into the breeze and as the sun sets we gather round a bandstand at the centre of a green. Vegan ma-nah is brought out by sensual peace-loving Daleks… a gorgeous offering of sound and light a celebration of friendship.

“Performing on 7th is the virtuosic guitarist and velvety voiced singer David Skinner; harmonious vocal stylings from our choir The Support Stockings; fresh from his sold-out national tour, Cian Binchy; the fabulous young poet and star of the Round House and Young Vic Millie George; urban punk from the mighty Julie Riley‘s I Am Her; Martin Wakefield and Evie with inspiring poetry, music and verse; Jed Demochowski (of the VIPs) and his new band; Anne Corrigan delighting us with her poems; DJ Onjdrew, and a couple of super amazing surprise star guests. Plus us, theSociety Of Imaginary Friends.

“Please come and bring a memory, a line or two about your absent friend to say on the night. Looking forward to seeing you there. Don’t forget it is free entry and there is amazing vegan food and award-winning beverages to purchase.”

https://youtu.be/q66yOwa9fi0

Tags: A Sweet Niche, Anne Corrigan, Cian Binchey, David Skinner, DJ Ontjdrew, Evie (poet), Ham Legion, Her (Julie D. Riley), Jed Demochowski, Kabaret @ Karamel (event), London (England), Martin Wakefield, Matt Redman, Millie George, Patricia Hammond, Society of Imaginary Friends, Society of Imaginary Friends Soiree (event), The Display Team, The Support Stockings, The VIPs, Wilton's Music Hall

December 2016 – upcoming gigs – ‘Staggerlee Wonders’ with Robert Mitchell, Debbie Sanders, Corey Mwamba, John Edwards, Elaine Michener, Mark Sanders and others (London, 8th); Trio Generations with Maggie Nichols/Lisa Ullén/Matilda Rolfsson (Cheltenham and London, 9th & 11th)

5 Dec

StaggerLee Wonders
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 8th December 2016, 8.00pm – information here and here

Billed as “an evening of radical poetry and prose fused with free improvised music”, this event’s title is taken from James Baldwin’s blazingly scornful, almost conversational poem – itself named for the black outlaw/hoodlum who flits and thunders through a set of conflicting American tales and songs, taking on the roles of murderer, proud badass, pimp and more.

In all cases, Stagger Lee’s become a byword and signifier for transgressive black resistance to cultural pressure and norms. A lengthy lope in a thickly jazzy, declamatory style, Baldwin’s version takes up the final, revolutionary Stagger Lee position, setting aside the thuggery, choosing instead to weigh up the protests, delusions and not-so-secret wickednesses of white hegemony in one Afro-American palm (seamed with exile, scepticism and righteous ire) before firing up his sardonic, acidic tongue to flay and spit the flesh right off their bones. It’s not clear whether Baldwin’s take will be performed as the evening’s centrepiece, or whether it simply serves as an inspiration; but it certainly sets the bar high, both artistically and politically.

Various performers, both black and white, are confirmed to attend. Hopefully, they’ll all rise to the explicit challenge. Reknowned for his weighty slowhand approach, jazz pianist Robert Mitchell has worked with Epiphany3, F-ire Collective and Panacea. Jazz/folktronicist Corey Mwamba plays small instruments, dulcimer and electronics across assorted projects but is best known for his highly dynamic, hammers-to-humming vibraphone playing and for the ongoing questioning spirit which he explores in both live music and academia (and any intersections he can make between the two). Voices come from restless, movement performer and polygenre singer Elaine Michener (recently seen at the Cockpit Theatre in a quartet with Alexander Hawkins) and from storytelling singer/composer Debbie Sanders (currently heading up Mina Minou Productions, previously embedded in proto-acid-jazz, trip-hop and British R&B via work with Skylab and Chapter & The Verse).

Bass and drums are provided by two stunning soloists who also happen to make up one of London music’s most formidable rhythm partnerships. Both double bass player John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders are capable of a breadth of sound and attack on their respective instruments, running across an orchestral breadth from whisper to hailstone attack (via conversation or monologue, from growling belligerence to kidding conversation or querying patter).

More people may be showing up to play, but that’s already a pretty thrilling loose sextet to work with and to choose from.

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Trio Generations is an intermittent name for a convocation of three top European improvisers, Maggie Nichols, Lisa Ullén and Matilda Rolfsson. Formed last year, they’re playing a couple of English shows to bookend the upcoming weekend. Outlines below, mostly from the Café Oto pages:

Trio Generations, 2016

“Maggie Nicols joined London’s legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist. She then became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the group Centipede, led by Keith and Julie Tippets and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the remarkable Feminist Improvising Group. She lives in Wales and continues performing and recording challenging and beautiful work, in music and theatre, either in collaborations with a range of artists (Irene Schweitzer, Joelle Leandre, Ken Hyder, Caroline Kraabel) as well as solo.

“Matilda Rolfsson is a Swedish percussionist and free improviser, based in Trondheim, Norway. During the spring of 2015 she was temporarily based in London where she finished her masters in free improvisation and the relationship between improvised music and dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. During her London stay Matilda got the chance to meet and play with some of Londons most efficient improvisers: Phil Minton, Sylvia Hallett and London Improvisers Orchestra with Maggie Nichols. With her 20” vintage Gretsch bass drum, Tibetan bowls, gongs, bells and plastic isolations, sticks, fingers and brushes, Matilda explores the free improvisation and the instant compositions shaped in the moment: dynamics, orchestrations – structure and chaos. To make rules and break rules, always with the question: where’s the music going, and where’s the freedom?

“Pianist Lisa Ullén grew up in the northern part of Sweden, and is based in Stockholm. A versatile player with a singular musical vision, Lisa has repeatedly proven her ability to imprint her absolute sense for tonal texture on whatever musical context she appears in. Besides working as a soloist and leader of her own groups, Lisa has collaborated extensively with many well-known Swedish artists and dancers, and has also scored several dramatic productions. She’s also performed and recorded music by contemporary composers.”

To provide a sense of what might be coming, here’s the full half-hour set from their debut performance at IKLECTIK in 2015: a fractured, prolonged collective improvisation which swaps mood, pace and suggestions like a game of speed poker, with passing shreds of blues. Although Lisa and Matilda match her with lethally-aimed flinders of explosive, challenging percussion and piano, Maggie remains the centre of attention via a performance that’s as much stand-up comedy or theatre piece as it is free jazz. She produces not only the clucks, hisses, pants and operatics of free-voice improv but a bewildering spiky cavalcade of female voices and archetypes (hopeful chitterer, wise sly crone, mother in labour, put-upon wailer, deft gossiper) while including fleeting lyrics from jazz, blues or music hall and assorted Dada twists (including a phase which sounds like a demonic toothbrushing session).

This month’s Trio Generations dates:

Xposed Club @ Francis Close Hall, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, GL50 4AZ, England, Friday 9th December 2016, 8.00pm (with Chris Cundy) – information
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England, Monday 11th December 2016, 8.00pm – information

At the Café Oto show, John Edwards will be joining in to make the group a quartet. While there’s no support act at Oto, at the Xposed Club Cheltenham reedsman/multi-instrumentalist Chris Cundy will be providing a solo slot on bass clarinet and saxophone. A tactile extended-technique player, Chris began as a self-taught Medway busker coming into his own under the combined influence of Eric Dolphy (on record) and Billy Childish (in the flesh and in the kitchen). Following a relocation to Cheltenham to pursue fine art, Chris has broadened his scope into a world of other collaborations in film, electronica, free improvisation and pop. He’s worked extensively with Fyfe Dangerfield (as part of the Guillemots horn section and as an integral member of Gannets), with Canadian freak-folkers Timbre Timbre and a succession of left-field singer-songwriters. His extended techniques (including multi-phonics, circular breathing and microtonality) have also led him into exploring the works of Cage and Cardew and those of contemporary avant-garde composers such as Thanos Chrysakis and Pete M Wyer, as well as producing a growing number of albums of his own work.

Tags: bass clarinet music, Cheltenham (England), Chris Cundy, Corey Mwamba, Debbie Sanders, Elaine Michener, IKLECTIK Art Lab (promoters), James Baldwin, John Edwards, Lisa Ullén, listening to women, Maggie Nichols, Mark Sanders, Matilda Rolfsson, Robert Mitchell, saxophone music, The Xposed Club (event/promoter), women of heart and mind

November 2016 – upcoming London gigs – a dash through the weekend (26th, 27th) – various adventures in international folk music, experimental music, hip hop and underground rock via Tuesdays Post, Daylight Music, Laura Cannell, Nest Collective Baba Yaga’s Hut and others…

23 Nov

This week finds me ill, exhausted, busy and needing to catch up with things outside the blog – and hence unable to go into the usual detail. Consequently, the usual semi-coherent stammering of recommendations is being cut short. I’m just going to offer a few quick notes and pointers to my picks from this London weekend’s explosion of interesting concerts, and will let you catch up with them yourselves.

On Saturday, Laura Cannell‘s hosting her ‘Memory Mapping’ afternoon at Daylight Music, including an improvised duet between herself and fellow alt.violinist Angharad Davies, the coastline sound creations of former ‘Wire’ writer Jennifer Lucy Allan and what looks like a Charles Hayward piano piece which may or may not be a song cycle. I’ve already previewed that here a few weeks ago (complete with sounds and visions), so go back and have a look.

At the same time, an incredible wealth of acoustic, folk and international-indigenous music talent will be riding into east London for two twinned and overlapping Nest Collective events at the same impressive Dalston venue – St Mark Church, a grand Early English Gothic Revival pile sometimes described as “the East End’s cathedral”.

Beginning in the morning, the Song Collectors Collective Gathering celebrates and presents the people who conserve rare oral culture within their communities in Britain, Ireland and beyond; and explores ideas spinning off from that. This year it features (among others) storyteller Hugh Lupton, tireless folk archivists Doc Rowe and Paul Wilson, ethnomusicologists Angela Impey and Shzr Ee Tan, and ethnobotanist Sarah Edwards. Topics explored will include song collecting in South Sudan and Taiwan, Doc’s vast archive of unseen videos of Britain’s great traditional singers, political-musical activism on the internet, and “plant knowledge collected with the Songman”.

Starting up in the afternoon is Unamplifire – a jaw-dropping seven-hour assemblage of international folk talent which, at a better time, would warrant a whole post to itself. Traditional and curated music from England, Ireland, Eastern Europe and West Africa, Okinawa and Taiwan, both pure and cross-pollinated; with encompassed styles including griot, London psych-folk and deep-probing acoustic pop and instrumentation including kora, whistles, violins, acoustic guitars, electronics and – above all – the human voice in all of its diversity. For the full list of Unamplifire players, take a look at the details below.

Having successfully transferred from north-east London to west London, Tuesdays Post are staging another gig of electronic-slanted progressive/improvisational music on Saturday evening. This week, founder/regular Georgina Brett picks up her voiceloops to engage in a pair of superbly cluttered duets. One of these will be with Jono Podmore (the theremin, delay and ring modulator–wielding Metamono member and Kumo mastermind, who’s promising to bring along an extra selection of intriguing technological gizmos), and another with electro-acoustic instrument inventor Tom Fox (creator of the Springything, the Multi-Dronemachine and the Twitter-triggered Hummingbird). Tom will also be appearing as one-third of improvising experimental textural noise trio YOAF (the other two thirds being Jon Saunders and Tim Yates). Interactive visuals will be provided by Hanzo.

Baba Yaga’s Hut (who haven’t featured in ‘Misfit City’ for a while, thanks to buggered-up mailing list problems) are also doing the honours with two interesting sounding gigs over the weekend. Each of them features what’s becoming a regular Baba Yaga format: an intriguing well-known underground import plus a home-grown Baba regular.

The first of these is an electro/beat fest with long-lived New Jersey hip-hoppers Dälek (whose dense, industrially-slanted noise-stew has annoyed purists and thrilled listeners since 1998) and edge-of-the-seat electronicists Necro Deathmort whose tangled fusion of doom metal, droning dystopian science-fiction synth noise and free-jazz echoes sees them flit like plague mosquitoes from genre to genre. The second is a free showcase for all-female Finnish trio Olimpia Splendid (whose Can-like psychedelic grooves, dogged dour-skew riffing and growly babydoll vocals have been gathering them plenty of attention over the last couple of years) and London pagan “aggrocultural punktronicist” trio Snapped Ankles (the ones who dress up in striking topiary costumes as wild woodwoses, swaying behind various customised instruments like giant hedge carvings while picking out noisy ritual rhythms and post-rural, post-industrial chanting).

All of this going on… and I’m too knackered to drag myself to any of it. The story of my year, really.

Addresses, links, times etc below.

The Nest Collective presents:
Song Collectors Collective Gathering 2016
St Mark Church Dalston, St Mark’s Rise/Colveston Crescent, Dalston, London, E8 2LJ, England
Saturday 26th November 2016, 10.30am to 6pm – information

Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 240: Laura Cannell presents “Memory Mapping”: Laura Cannell + Charles Hayward + Mythos Of Violins + Jennifer Lucy Allan
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 26th November 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

The Nest Collective presents:
Unamplifire 2
St Mark Church Dalston, St Mark’s Rise/Colveston Crescent, Dalston, London, E8 2LJ, England
Saturday 26th November 2016, 4.00pm to 11.00pm – information

Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Dälek + Necro Deathmort
Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, Elephant & Castle, London, SE17 1LB, England
Saturday 26th November 2016, 7.00pm – information here and here

Tuesdays Post present:
YOAF + Jono Podmore + Tom Fox & Georgina Brett
The Muse Gallery, 269 Portobello Road, Ladbroke Grove, London, W11 1LR, England
Saturday 26th November 2016, 7.30pm – information here and here

Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Olimpia Splendid + Snapped Ankles
Birthdays, 33-35 Stoke Newington Road, Stoke Newington, London N16 8BJ – free event (but sign up for tickets) – information here and here

Tags: Angela Impey, Angharad Davies, Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Charles Hayward, Cosmo Sheldrake, Daudi Matsiko, Davies & Daughters, Dälek, Doc Rowe, Flats & Sharps, Fran Foote, Georgina Brett, Green Gartside, Hugh Lupton, Island Sisters, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Jon Saunders, Jono Podmore (Kumo), Laura Cannell, London (England), London Bulgarian Choir, Martin Carthy, Men Diamler, Metamono, Mythos Of Violins, Necro Deathmort, Noemie Ducimetiere, Olimpia Splendid, Paul Wilson, Riognach Connolly, Samantha Whates, Sarah Edwards, Seckou Keita, Shzr Ee Tan, Snapped Ankles, Snufkin, Song Collectors Collective (event/organisation), Stick In The Wheel, The Nest Collective (event/promoter), The Nightjar, Tim Yates, Tom Fox, Unamplifire (festival), YOAF

November 2016 – upcoming gigs – Spratleys Japs recreated live in Brighton, co-starring Stephen Evens, Emily Jones and sundry Brighton psychedelic talent (19th November)

16 Nov

Though it’s long sold out (Facebook and local word-of-mouth rendering any blog efforts unnecessary), I thought I’d tip the hat to Saturday’s Brighton revival-cum-recreation of the obscure and short-lived Spratleys Japs, the first full live outing that the project’s songs have ever had.

Nominally a band, one which first wormed its way out into the light back in 1999, Spratleys Japs were one of the more enigmatic branches of the Cardiacs family. Head Cardiac Tim Smith composed the cryptic bulk of it, played bass guitar and organ, and added scratchy vocals; his then-girlfriend Jo Spratley sang bright and artless (like an urchin sparrow) and dabbled in theremin and flugelhorn. Tone and shape was inspired by a gloriously malfunctioning Mellotron keyboard on loan from ‘Tron historian Andy Thompson – its antique tape-replay system disrupted; its brass and string sounds invaded and polluted by grand staggers, stammers and dark blarts.

The rest of the instrumental roles were filled by the Rev-Ups, a Mexican desert band transplanted across the Atlantic and camping out in the New Forest. Dibbling around in Spratleys history brings you more information, albeit in baffling crepuscular fashion. There are stories of cutlery-hoarding obsessives hunched over humming home-made electronics; of a dilapidated old valve-tech recording studio buried deep in the Hampshire woods (“a bit rotten and a bit covered in leaves and rats, and rats spiders… ‘Doctor Who’ stylee control room… wiring swung between olden telegraph poles…”); and of vocals recorded “at dusk, in the drizzle”, bounced off the surface of a stagnant pond.

All very interesting, but probably spurious. It’s true about the ailing ‘Tron (and some elements of the dank forest sessions story might even be based on reality) but Spratleys were, in all likelihood, a Jo and Tim duo project: something cooked up through Smith production wizardry and swathed with the usual Cardiacs thicket of playful disinformation and purposefully eccentric mythology. In the decade following the album release, there was occasional talk about taking Spratleys to the stage, none of which came to anything: Tim’s near-fatal stroke and heart attack in 2008 finally put paid even to the talk.

What was left was the music – one album, one single with extra scraps – and very interesting it was too, be it the twinkling, seething, termite’s-nets funk of Fanny, the nursery piano and Wagnerian choir of Sparrows or Tim whispering an endless meandering verse over a strummed bass in Oh. Half of Cardiacs’ songbook had always been weirdly Arcadian, yearning out and away from regimented urban suburbia into a half-imagined clotted English greenwood full of growing things. Spratleys suggests what might have happened if Cardiacs had escaped there only to find out that it was a swamp, vegetation, trash and identity alike inexorably decaying into fertile sludge.

The grand, precarious staircases of extended harmony are pure Smith: parkour chord progressions racing on to destination unknown, delighting in the unpredictable terrain underfoot. The glue and ingredients which surround them are different, or at the very least repurpose and re-examine previous Smithian influences. Looking back at it now, it resembles nothing so much as various Cardiacs urges bumping up against the make-do, repurpose-and-discover influence of Faust, recoiling a little dazed and reconsidering. Creatures rustle; flashes of crude bayou guitar and ’50s rock’n’roll lick set up home with spluttering electronics. Vinyl pops; lyrics torn from malfunctioning phrasebooks float and spin in the eddies; all of the vocals sound as if they’ve been transposed from worn vellum. Jo, too, leaves her mark on proceedings – tugging Tim’s obsessive tendencies into more abstract, wandering territories, her childlike voice and delivery a perfect foil for his.

Regards this weekend’s recreation, Jo is the only original Spratley left standing. Though he’s recovered sufficiently to recently disinter and prepare a long-shelved Sea Nymphs album for release, Tim is still a long, long, unlikely way from playing live again. The Rev-Ups have long since dispersed and disappeared (probably back into the realms of Tim’s imagination); and as for the crumbling Mellotron, Andy Thompson (the entirely entitled bastard) has long since callously repaired it without a thought to history. There have been efforts to keep the project in the family, one way or another: Jo’s son Jesse Cutts (of Heavy Lamb) is backing her on guitar, and remaining roles are filled by sundry Brighton multi-instrumentalists and Cardiacs sympathisers. In the bag for the band are Étienne Rodes of Clowwns, his brother Adrien Rodes (once of Rect.angle, now playing with Étienne in Brother Twain) and the frighteningly busy Damo Waters (drummer for Clowwns, ZOFFF, Brother Twain and Slug; organist for Crayola Lectern; sessioneer for Field Music, British Sea Power, Chris T-T and plenty of others; everything-ist for his own project Muddy Suzuki when he has a spare moment).

At the moment, it’s not yet clear whether all of this is going to be a one-off amplified and extended celebration; or whether it’s going to become part of that eagerly growing body of post-Cardiacs musical life, joining the massing bands and solo artists which throng the increasingly regular Tim Smith fundraisers. Meanwhile, some indication as to what’s coming on the night could be found here – a kind of dry run, as Jo and Heavy Lamb take a rockier, punkified crack at the Spratleys song Vine at last year’s Alphabet Business Convention.

‘Spratleys Japs Performed Live’ (featuring members of Spratleys Japs, Crayola Lectern, Clowwns, Brother Twain, Muddy Suzuki) + Stephen Evens + Emily Jones
The Green Door Store, 2-4 Trafalgar Arches, Lower Goods Yard, Brighton Train Station, Brighton BN1 4FQ, England
Saturday 19th November 2016, 7.30pm – information here and here

In support are Stephen EvEns (the current solo project by thoughtfully-hangdog drummer and multi-instrumental songwriter Steve Gilchrist – that’s Jo playing the therapist in his video below) and Cornish psychedelic folkie Emily Jones, whose own work shows a (possibly accidental) affinity with the softer end of Smithiana both in its occasional odd-corner harmonies and changeability, and in its occasional fascination with small, obscurely significant things.

If you’re not discouraged by that “sold-old” sign, see links above for the tickets that might become available… or just show up on the door with some cash on the night and hope for the best. If the Green Door Store has windows, crane up against them; fog them with sorry breath; make the kind of forest-creature creeling noises which you’d suspect might be just out of earshot on the Spratleys Japs album. They might take pity on you, and let you in.

Tags: Adrien Rodes, Étienne Rodes (E Rodes), Brighton (England), Brother Twain, CLOWWNS, Crayola Lectern, Damo Waters, Emily Jones, gone too soon, Heavy Lamb, Jesse Cutts, Jo Spratley, Muddy Suzuki, Stephen Evens, Stephen Gilchrist, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, Tim Smith, Tim Smith's Spratleys Rats (Spratleys Japs)

November 2016 – upcoming London jazz gigs – FuMar at Map Studio Café (17th); Laura Jurd’s Dinosaur + Daniel Herskedal Trio meet the BBC Concert Orchestra at the RFH (19th)

15 Nov

Two more London jazz gigs, from two very different generations of musician, in two very different venues…

* * * * * * * *

FuMar
MAP Studio Café, 46 Grafton Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3DU, England
Thursday 17th November 2016, 8.00pm– information

“FuMar is a saxophone and piano duo based in Paris. Phil Furneaux and Krys Markowski have been friends for over forty years (meeting on their first day at Manchester University) and started playing together in 2010, using Skype and Ohmstudio for remote collaborations. After performing their first concerts in 2012, the duo released their debut album ‘Lanercost Sessions’ in 2015, followed by a tour of France. The FuMar repertoire is rooted in jazz (and, more recently, classical) but stays bluesy, funky and mellow with a constant dialogue between piano and sax. The band has the philosophy that “music is a transmission of emotion” and attempts to develop pieces that journey between melancholic and happy, comforting and unexpected, allowing the audience to experience a range of emotions during their concerts.

“FuMar’s second album, ‘The Lanercost Sessions 2’ (recorded, like its predecessor, in the fourteenth-century Priory at Lanercost in Cumbria) was released a few months ago, back in September. FuMar use this venue due to its acoustic qualities, which make the notes played “hang in the air.” Moving on from the first all-covers set of the first ‘Lanercost Sessions’, this album is a mixture of FuMar’s own compositions and some interpretations of emotive classical tunes – Satie’s ‘Gymnopédie No 1’, Gabriel Fauré’s ‘Après un rêve’ – and a couple of Latin-American Cuban classics (Antonio Jobim’s Bach Meets Bossa and Mongo Santamaría’s Afro Blue). It also features the duo’s own free adaptation of Beethoven’s final string quartet (Op. 131), based on a study and extrapolation of the first eight bars extended into floating chordal improvisations.”

* * * * * * * *

As I type this up, guitarist Alex Roth’s London gig at IKLECTIK (with his Future Currents avant-guitar trio) is taking place. His bandmate in Blue Eyed Hawk, trumpeter-composer Laura Jurd – herself in the middle of a tour with her electric quartet Dinosaur – plays a date at the end of the week. As with the Future Currents gig, it’s part of the ten-day EFG London Jazz Festival, but this particular gig – at the Royal Festival Hall – is on a much larger scale (certainly ensemble-wise)…

EFG London Jazz Festival presents:
BBC Concert Orchestra/Keith Lockhart + Laura Jurd + Daniel Herskedal Trio
Royal Festival Hall @ Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, Waterloo, London, SE1 8XX, England
Saturday 19th November 2016, 4.30pm – information here, here and here

“Formerly known as the Laura Jurd Quartet, a new band awakens from the jaws of extinction. They are Dinosaur and they join the BBC Concert Orchestra tonight to give you an evening of fiery sonic experimentation and abstraction.

Dinosaur, 2016
“Trumpeter, composer, bandleader and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Laura Jurd has a passion for “making things up” and today’s concert opens with her new “Work for orchestra & Dinosaur”, combining influences from both classical and jazz music.

“We also hear a new work by Norwegian Tuba player Daniel Herskedal who defies the conventions of his instrument. He pushes the boundaries both technically and sonically, creating spellbinding and mesmerising sounds. He’ll be performing with his trio (also featuring pianist Eyolf Dale and percussionist Gard Nilsen)

“Keith Lockhart conducts.”

Here’s footage of both acts, minus the orchestra…

https://youtu.be/m5qCRWR4kTw

Tags: Alex Roth, Blue-Eyed Hawk, Daniel Herskedal, Dinosaur, duo music, FuMar, Future Currents, Krys Markowski, Laura Jurd, London (England), MAP Studio Cafe (promoters), percussion music, Phil Furneaux, quartet music, saxophone music, trio music, trumpet music, tuba music

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Categories 2016, acoustic music, chamber jazz, classical fusion, cover versions, festivals, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, orchestral jazz, orchestral music, previews

November/December 2016 – upcoming music theatre – sounds from Billy Bottle & The Multiple’s ‘The Other Place’ and a rundown of the other shows in the All The Right Notes multi-media music theatre festival (15th November to 3rd December)

15 Nov

This just in – Lee Fletcher, touring soundwizard for Billy Bottle & The Multiple, just tipped me off about this Bandcamp montage he’s just made of their currently touring show ‘The Other Place’.

There should be a YouTube version shortly, which I’ll paste in when it’s available. Meanwhile, there’s more on the show in general here, and more on its current dates here.

* * * * * * * *

One of the ‘Other Place’ dates is in London this weekend – taking place at Camden People’s Theatre, as part of their ‘All The Right Notes’ “gig-theatre” festival exploring the interaction, interweaving and intersectionality of theatre and music on the fringes. While on the subject, I should post up a little more about the festival, since it’s starting today.

So here’s a rapid rundown of what’s on offer in ‘All The Right Notes’ between 15th November and 3rd December. Most of the text is stripped and compressed from the homepage (where there’s full dates, times and details if you want to pursue the shows in depth). I’ve added or rearranged a few things where necessary, including some personal impressions. Because performance artists aren’t the only people who can mash up texts… oh yeah… (postures)…

Some of the shows are pretty much straight musical gigs, with the theatre inherent in the performance rather than explicitly mounted as part of the staging. Digifolk musicians and quixotic archivists The Memory Band (who, in their own words, “navigate a dream landscape of fading identity, dredging up forgotten histories from old maps” and “the ghost-lit back-roads of British traditional music where digital machinery and acoustic musicians congregate to make old music from the future”) offer a performance previewing their upcoming fifth album ‘A Fair Field’, which spans a world of folk word and song from the fourteenth-century narrative epic ‘Piers Plowman’ to the generation of unaccompanied English folk singers who passed in the mid-twentieth century to Northumbrian modernist poet Basil Bunting. It’s best to let them map out their own album description too – “the music was fed by stories of magical hares and the recollections of ballad sellers bearing placards at the great fairs of times past, the fields of which now lie buried beneath leisure centres, electricity substations and retail parks. It traces the connection between the headstone of a man killed in Norfolk by the sails of a windmill, the first observations of solar flares, incendiarism, council estates and an old man’s recollection of ploughing the land by starlight in another time.” Later in the season, Daniel Marcus Clark‘s ‘Between’ looks for “the story in every song and the song in every story” in a solo set delivered by beat-up old voice and a pair of guitars via a mood and method compared variously to Marc Ribot, Mississipi John Hurt and Vincent Price.

As you’d expect from a theatre space preoccupied with fringe activity and political art, there’s a strong representation of standalone and intersectional aspects within the broad church of contemporary dance music and the cultures which make it up, taking in hot and fluid topics of race, feminism, class, communality and chosen ways of self-expression. Accompanied by beatboxer/vocalists Kate & Nate (from Battersea Arts Centre’s Beatbox Academy), actor-writer Lauren Gauge will present her raw feminist comedy-with-music ‘The Unmarried’, a drama of raucous, brassy, party-friendly resistance to patriarchy, rhythmically underscored by a live mix of beat-boxing, ‘90s dance hits and old-school UK garage tunes – “gig theatre… theatre you can rave to.” Earlier in the season, reknowned London grime MC Flowdan will present a special performance of his lyrics (stripped from their soundsystem context and performed with voice alone under a spotlight), while the festival will close with musician-performer Will Dickie’s live-art DJ set ‘The Rave Space’ (a staged rave which explores the ideals and situation of unity through dance culture, and which overlaps the boundaries of dance party communion and theatre-space performance, although Will’s keeping schtum about precisely how this occurs…)

https://vimeo.com/188428171

Several pieces operate within the publically settled, privately fragile area of contemporary early adulthood and its codes of faith,behaviour and expectations which end up being kicked around by our own doubts and insecurities and by the challenges and occasional perversities of our individual drives and experiences. Songwriter, actress and theatre maker Isobel Rogers performs her open-mic drama ‘Elsa’, about a woman working in a coffee shop while pursuing her dreams on the side. As she drifts in and out of the characters who come into the cafe, Elsa is confronted with different characters from both literature and reality and begins to lead the lives of Nina, Miranda, Lillian and Grace in her own head. Keeping a part of herself elsewhere through song, Elsa plays a trick on a world that keeps telling her how to “be”.

Heavier notes are provided by Rachel Mars and Alicia Jane Turner. The former (with musical support from singer-songwriter Louise Mothersole of Sh!t Theatre) performs her proudly spiky, witty work ‘Our Carnal Hearts’, “a gleeful, thrilling and murky celebration of envy, competitive spirits and all the times we fuck each other over… performed with a live surround-sound choral score, it is born from the suspect parentage of an ideological rally, a drunken sing-song and a seductive dream.” The latter uses her skills as composer, performance artist and multi-instrumentalist to present ‘Breathe (Everything Is Going To Be Okay)’ – “a full-body immersion of soaring strings and spiralling sound in a daringly vulnerable solo performance exploring the relationship between our bodies and minds… blending visceral live music with intimate confessions, Breathe is an unflinchingly honest dissection of our daily anxieties and fears.”

https://vimeo.com/189904027

As you’ll guess from the above in particular, not everything in the festival is kid- or family-friendly, but there are some exceptions. Moths (performer/musician Joe White and theatre maker Tanya Stephenson, both of whom also work with perennial percussion-fest STOMP) present ‘Pale Phoebe’ – a performance mingling storytelling, clever lighting and projection effects and percussive, androgynous contemporary synth pop to tell the dreamlike story of an imagined journey to the moon. In ‘The Castle Builder’, punky, childlike, lo-fi electropopper Kid Carpet and actor-storyteller Vic Llewellyn join forces for a playful, uplifting show based around true tales of unlikely people who created extraordinary outsider art just for the pleasure of it. In the process, they ask questions about art, who it’s for and what mark it leaves on the world. In addition, each performance will feature a different maker, who at the end of the show will present the audience with something they build or create using the debris from the show and anything else they find scattered around the stage.

If you’re after more esoterically cerebral (or potentially baffling) performances, a couple of those are waiting in the wings. Perhaps coincidentally, both are two-handers featuring frenetically active male text’n’context shredders and reknowned female experimental violinists who blur the boundaries between being muses, partners and upsetters. In ‘Within The Context Of No Context’ Tim Parkinson and Angharad Davies explore the crossover between theatre-as-sound and sound-as-theatre via prepared-violin music drama interpretations of avant-garde compositions by Louis D’Heudieres, Stefan Thut, Alison Knowles, John Cage and others (with a title inspired by George S Trow’s influential essay about the decline of society in the new age). In ‘Seeping Through (CPT)’, regular collaborators Aisha Orazbayeva and Tim Etchells perform an intense, rolling two-hour improvisation in spontaneous fragments, with text and music treated as fluid forces in the same space, fading in and out of each other, breathing together, cutting and cancelling each other, creating a dynamic and always unstable landscape. Tim collages and constructs the show’s verbal content from diverse fragments of notebook scribbles, past performance text and works in progress, creating collisions, loops, and unexpected connections between different spoken materials; while Aisha plays vigorously deconstructed classical violin using extended technique, strange sounds, and “radically remixed and quoted” elements from the classical repertoire. (As an example, below is an earlier Etchells/Orazbayeva work: nearly six excruciating yet compelling minutes of the duo wringing as many disrupted nuances as possible from brief sentences and clauses recited over grinding string noise.)

https://vimeo.com/169558395

Also on the festival bill are a pair of straight (well, relatively straight) musicals. “Misguided and aspirational” performance art group mingbeast present their “uplifting musical” ‘Awful Things Can Happen At Any Time’ (in which two barely-prepared pop wannabes struggle to get their act and songs together on a shared and battered iPad, jostling the business of dreaming about being in a band and actually becoming one).There’s a work-in-progress showing of Duckie star Boogaloo Stu’s ‘The Regeneration Game’, a comedy musical taking well-deserved sideswipes at the property racket currently turning scores of community pubs into community-detached luxury flats. See landlord and landlady Kev and Babs, from closure-threatened pub The Dog & Dumplings, plan to take on the big boys in a tale of “a boozer in decline, dodgy developers and dogging…”

A couple of pieces embark on voyages into the family and the circumstantial shocks and resolutions to be found within it. Armed with voice and electronic drumkit, poet-musician Antosh Wojcik performs his innovative, touching ‘Building A Voice-Percussion Gun To Kill Glitches In Memory’, in which he explores “the effects of dementia on speech, memory and motor skills. Assigning rhythms to family members, Antosh attempts to build a ‘voice-percussion gun’ to destroy inherited Alzheimer’s. Poems become beats become glitches in time in this poignant and mesmeric display of live drumming and spoken word.” Ziad Nagy’s ‘Too Human’ is “an interdisciplinary exploration into the chasms of family constellations, the fragmentary structures that make us who we are, and the insatiable desire to make things better. Through the disjointedness of live collage making, experimental music production, and confessional storytelling, Ziad lays bare what at first seems idiosyncratic and slowly transforms into the poetically ubiquitous.” (As you can see, I didn’t much feel like paraphrasing all that.)

Other events include a panel session discussing why live music and theatre are converging (featuring contemporary music theatre driver Patrick Eakin Young, journalist/editor Andrzej Lukowski of ‘Time Out‘ and ‘Drowned In Sound‘, and punk singer/theatre maker Racheal Clerke); and ‘Controlled Madness’, in which DJ, party promoter and acid house philosopher-celebrity Andy Blake engages in a late-night quasi-symposium (lit and soundtracked to conjure up a backstreet backroom atmosphere) with cultural commentators Ben Bashford and Joe Muggs, dealing on party culture and its role (questioned or otherwise) in contemporary society.

The ‘Big Bang’ evening features four work-in-progress shorts and excerpts – a love monologue from poet Ross Sutherland (compiled from actual outbursts he’s shouted at drum and bass DJs mid-set); ‘High Rise Estate Of Mind?’ (a tower-block, housing-crisis, class-and-character study in beatbox, rap and spoken word by Paul Cree and Conrad Murray of Beats & Elements); a scratch performance of sleepwalking, sleeptalking husband-and-wife dream drama by Lillian Henley and Tom Adams; and Nima Séne’s ‘I Belong’, in which Nima and her alter ego Beige Bitch explore the concept of belonging (nostalgia, deluding, seductive and political) via a melange of theatrical tricks, electronic sound, pop culture and autobiography.

Probably a good place to start (assuming that you can clear your evening) is tomorrow’s special night-after-opening night show ‘Note Form’. This features music-heavy excerpts from ‘Awful Things Can Happen At Any Time’, ‘High Rise Estate Of Mind?’ and She Goat’s ‘DoppelDänger’ (a “theatrical live-music gig of original music and unlikely cover songs with synth-pop, electronic textures and baroque harpsichord”); plus a standalone piece – ‘The Beginning Of The End Of The Heroic Child’, a “secular ecstatic ritual” by Nwando Ebizie‘s Afro-Anglo-Caribbean goddess persona Lady Vendredi which “transform(s) pain into beauty via the medium of discarded remnants of empty trash signifiers. Moving from the sea beneath the waters of the past through the fourth dimension and passing to a glimpse of a forgotten future. A rite for all of those who wish to take part in an inter-dimensional breakdown. A wild ride down a rabbit hole of splintering realities. Dogmas challenged, desires and dreams unravelled.” I think that pretty much covers everything – and so does this.

Tags: Aisha Orazbayeva, Alicia Jane Turner, Alison Knowles, Andrzej Lukowski, Angharad Davies, Antosh Wojcik, Beats & Elements, Billie Bottle & The Multiple, Boogaloo Stu, Chris Brett Bailey, Conrad Murray, Daniel Marcus Clark, Duckie (event), Eugenie Pastor, Flowdan, Isobel Rogers, Joe White, John Cage, Kate & Nate, Kid Carpet, Lady Vendredi, Lauren Gauge, Lillian Henley, Louis D’Heudieres, Louise Mothersole, mingbeast, Moths, Nima Séne, Nwamdo Ebizie, Patrick Eakin Young, Paul Cree, Racheal Clerke, Rachel Mars, Ross Sutherland, Sh!t Theatre, Shamira Turner, She-Goat, Stefan Thut, Stomp, Tanya Stephenson, The Memory Band, Tim Etchells, Tim Parkinson, Tom Adams, Vic Llewellyn, Will Dickie, Ziad Nagy

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Categories 2016, acoustic music, agit-pop, alternative folk, alternative pop, ambient music, art pop, blues, cabaret, classical fusion, club music, comedy music, cover versions, cross-cultural music, crossover, dance music, dance performances, DIY music, DJ sets, drone music, drum and bass, electro-acoustic music, electro-pop, electronic, experimental music, experimental pop, festivals, field recordings, folk music, folk-pop, folktronica, garage soul, glitch music, grime, hip hop, house music, IDM, interactive performances, music drama, outsider music, performance art, poetry, political music, pop, previews, process music, protest songs, psychedelic ambient music, rock, sampledelia, singer-songwriter, song cycles, sound collage, soundscapes, spoken word, storytelling, synth pop, theatre music, trash-blues, vocal music

October 2016 – upcoming London gigs (Independent Country, She Makes War and Zoot Lynam at Daylight Music on the 1st; the debut London shows for Flock Of Dimes on the 4th) – plus Simon Reynolds’ glam tome launch events in Sheffield, London and Manchester (4th to 6th)

24 Sep

At the start of October, the Daylight Music autumn season continues with a splash of country, a clash of cymbal, and just a dash of kohl…

* * * * * * * *

Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 234: Independent Country + She Makes War + Zoot Lynam
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 1st October 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

Blurbs by Daylight Music, with interjections by me…

“Independent Country are a six-piece band who play country versions of classic indie hits from the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. Hear your favourite shoegazing tunes reimagined with pedal steel, lush three-part harmonies and fiddle.” Sounds as if someone’s taking the Mojave 3 idea and yanking it to the logical ludicrous extreme. Their debut album’s called ‘TrailerParkLife’… Well, at least it’s not another sodding rockgrass band; and Independent Country’s version of an old Jesus and Mary Chain tune (originally from the latter’s oft-slated, synth-pop-slanted ‘Automatic’), pulls off the neat trick of sounding as if it’s the original, rather than the cover. Either they’ve genuinely discovered Jim Reid’s inner roadhouse man, or they’re just really good at putting new blue-denim flesh on pallid British songbones.

“She Makes War is the gloom-pop solo project of multi-instrumentalist, visual artist and all-round polymath Laura Kidd…” whom ‘Misfit City’s covered before, back at the start of August when she did a runaround British tour with Carina Round. Back then I made a few appreciative noises about Laura’s one-woman cottage-industry explorations: dark, brooding song topics sheathed in driven, melodic alt-(but-not-too-alt).rock, and self-directed videos which make the most of her Goth-next-door/folkie looks and still presence. Here’s one of the latter – a semi-animated video for her song Paper Thin, shot in New York and Boston with a comradely guest appearance from Belly’s Tanya Donnelly.

“Zoot Lynam doesn’t just march to the beat of a different drum; he plays a different drum altogether: Zoot’s instrument of choice is the handpan (or “hang”), which is essentially a sci-fi spaceship of a percussion instrument. This is the first time a handpan’s been played at Daylight Music, so come and see it in action!” Web information on Zoot is a little thin on the ground – frankly, there’s not much more to that homepage than a bold stare and a waxed moustache – but it seems that he started to make his name back in the 1990s as an actor via work in various British theatres and voiceover performances in cartoons (I must have heard him thousands of times while my son watched ‘The Willows in Winter’).

I’m guessing that his move into music ties in with his theatre work, since I’ve tracked down odds and ends about live scoring and workshops, and because he comes to his gigs with a reputation as a raconteur. All of the evidence suggests that he’s one of those perpetually youthful, puckish characters existing on the dividing line between theatre and other arts: a stage polymath with a little bit of the mystic or magician to him. It’s a little early in the season, but here he is with something Christmassy on the handpans (to be honest, it’s all that I could find…)

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Only a few posts ago, I was writing about Jane Siberry and was musing on other, next-generation musicians who seem to be following the trail Jane beat for a female art pop perspective back in the 1980s (some of whom, apparently guided by a mutual sense of community and affinity, are playing support slots on her ongoing British tour). It seems that I missed another one out.

Tickets are still available for the debut London shows for Flock Of Dimes (the solo project from Wye Oak frontwoman and guitarist Jenn Wasner) in early October. She’ll be playing a lunchtime instore show at Rough Trade East, followed by a full evening show up the road at the Hackney in Victoria. Flock Of Dimes has been developing for the last four years alongside Jenn’s decade-long body of work with Wye Oak (and her occasional ventures into dance pop as half of Dungeonesse. It’s taken until now, however, for Jenn to release a full Dimes album (something which perhaps coincides with her departure last year from her longtime Baltimore home to resettle in Durham, North Carolina). That album, ‘If You See Me, Say Yes’, was released yesterday on Partisan Records, and has been trailed in recent months by a pair of singles, Semaphore and Everything Is Happening Today.

Jenn has described her vision for the former single as the “struggle to communicate with each other, over distances literal and figurative, great and small,” and worked with film directors Michael Patrick O’Leary and Ashley North Compton to create a striking animated video for the song. According to Ashley and Patrick, all involved “wanted to present the tension of reaching out and not being able to touch. Fleeting communication with an outside world, felt but not seen, and Jenn’s interaction with her own double, create a hallucinatory sense of limbo. It creates a solitary confinement, wherein no matter how partnered or joined we find ourselves, those selves, our own best and worst companions, are all we have.”

Fantasies of isolation aside, the current form of Flock Of Dimes sounds liberating and upbeat, with less of the noisy indie mumble of Wye Oak. The project brings her pop melancholy into focus. Wye Oak might have become a poppier proposition in the last few years – 2011’s Spiral single definitely had a touch of the funk – but even Spiral left Jenn echoing in the distance like a mermaid dream, while the same year’s Civilian had more of an indie mumble. In contrast (and maybe on account of Jenn’s earlier dry runs at R&B with Dungeonesse), Semaphore is percolating electronic commercial art-pop in a 1986 Jane Siberry/Peter Gabriel vein, with a dash of country and bursts of beefy funk-roll bassline: qualities shared by Everything Is Happening Today, even if the latter has a more contemporary-sounding, speaker-busting alt.rock distortion halo wrapped around the chorus.

As you’ll gather from the names I’m dropping here, Dimes also has 1980s art pop written all over it – the stadium-scale reverb in which the guitars float and jostle like belfry runaways; the slick electronic technology which sounds as if it’s on the verge of cracking and hatching into a giant ungainly chick; and most of all the sense of an empowered, expressive perspective using all of this sonic trickery to blow open the windows and release the songs. I hate to sound as if I’m trying to ring a band’s death-knell (and I suspect that Jenn’s personal loyalties inform, inspire and justify her musical work as much as anything else) but on record, at least, Flock Of Dimes suggests ways forward for Jenn which Wye Oak simply doesn’t.

Rough Trade East, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, Spitalfields, London, E1 6QL, England, Tuesday 4th October 2016, 12:45pm – information
The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, Hackney, London, E8 3AS, England, Tuesday 4th October 2016, 7.30pm – information

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Simon Reynolds: ‘Shock And Awe’

Finally, legendary music writer Simon Reynolds – the man who defined post-rock and re-canonised post-punk, and has striven to contextualise and illuminate every ingredient in contemporary pop (from the most challenging Afro-American sub-bass growl’n’gurgle to the flossiest bit of floating white vanity-froth) has most recently been focussing on glam rock.

He’ll be launching his new book ‘Shock And Awe: Glam Rock & Its Legacy‘ via a short English book tour in early October. Dates and summary below:

“In ‘Shock And Awe…’, Simon Reynolds explores this most decadent of genres on both sides of the Atlantic. Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper, The Sweet, Gary Glitter, New York Dolls, Sparks, Slade, Suzi Quatro, Cockney Rebel, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Mott The Hoople — all are represented here. Reynolds charts the retro-future sounds, outrageous styles and gender-fluid sexual politics that came to define the first half of the seventies and brings it right up to date with a final chapter on glam in hip hop, Lady Gaga, and the aftershocks of David Bowie’s death.”

Off the Shelf Festival @ The Auditorium @ Student Union, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 2TG, England, Tuesday 4th October 2016, 7.30pm – information
Faber Social @ The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England, Wednesday 5th October 2016, 7.00 pm – information here and here
Faber Social @ Home, 2 Tony Wilson Place, First Street, Manchester, M15 4FN, England, Thursday 6th October 2016, 7.00pm – information

All events will also feature a glam rock film screening: there’s no information on what’s playing at Sheffield, but for Manchester it’ll be Ringo Starr’s 1972 T-Rex rockumentary ‘Born To Boogie’ and for London it’ll be a “special curated series” of glam rock videos.

Again, there’s no mention of a sparring partner at Sheffield: but in Manchester Simon will be talking with a fellow ‘Melody Maker’ polymath (journalist, curator, pop historian, film director and St Etienne member Bob Stanley) and in London with ‘Guardian’ pop music critic Alexis Petridis from ‘The Guardian’. Simon Price (a Reynolds friend and contemporary who knows more than a little about the glamour chase and how to spin a polemic on it) will be joining in at London with a guest DJ set.

Tags: 'T. Rex: Born To Boogie' (film), Alexis Petridis, Arctic Circle (promoter), Bob Stanley, book launches, Daylight Music (event), Faber Social (event), Flock Of Dimes, hang (handpan) music, Independent Country, London (England), Manchester (England), Off The Shelf (festival), She Makes War, Sheffield (England), Simon Price, Simon Reynolds, Tanya Donnelly, Wye Oak, Zoot Lynam

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Categories 2016, acoustic music, alternative pop, alternative rock, Americana, art pop, club music, comedy music, country-and-western, cover versions, dance music, dance pop, experimental pop, glam pop, glam rock, hip hop, pop, previews, R&B, rock, singer-songwriter, synth pop

September 2016 – upcoming London gigs – Penny Rimbaud’s musical Wilfred Owen evening at the Horse Hospital and the ‘Songs of Separation’ female folkstravaganza at King’s Place (both 9th)

31 Aug

Here’s some more upcoming September shows in London – a musical setting of First World War poems down at the Horse Hospital courtesy of parts of the Crass family, and an all-star, all-female folk meet at Kings Place to celebrate the collective indigenous folk music of Scotland and England (nice to see some fellow feeling there).

Sadly, both of these concerts are on the same night, so choices will need to be made – unless you take a good look at the timings and figure that you can make the best of both, via a gruelling sprint or rapid Tube ride between Russell Square and the upper reaches of Kings Cross…

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Penny Rimbaud recites the Works of Wilfred Owen (with Kate Shortt & Liam Noble)
The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Friday 9th September 2016, 7.00pm – information

A couple of notes from the event blurb:

“As part of the exhibition ‘Under The Changing Light: The Landscapes of The Somme’ (consisting of photos by Toby Webster), Penny Rimbaud recites the works of Wilfred Owen with Kate Shortt (cello) and Liam Noble (piano).

Penny Lapsang Rimbaud was born in south-west London. He is a poet, writer, philosopher, painter, and musician. He was formally a part of the performance art groups Exit and Ceres Confusion. In 1977 he co-founded the anarchist punk band Crass with Steve Ignorant, which disbanded in 1984. From then up until 2000 he devoted himself to writing. He returned as a performance poet working with Australian saxophonist Louise Elliot, as well as a wide variety of other jazz musicians as the group L’Académie Des Vanités.”

Regarding Penny’s accompanists, both Kate Shortt and Liam Noble have previous Rimbaud form. Both have collaborated with him in L’Académie Des Vanités forebear Last Amendment – itself formerly the Crass Collective or Crass Agenda performance art group, set up as a post-split arrangement enabling former Crasseurs to work together without either over-commodifying their ex-band’s name or being restricted by its form.

Liam needs little introduction to those who’ve seen his spiky, droll playing across the British jazz scene over the last two decades (initially playing with Stan Sulzmann, John Stevens, Harry Beckett and Bobby Wellins, latterly leading his own projects or collaborating with Christine Tobin). So far, Kate is arguably less well-known; but her witty multi-instrumental singer-songwriter contributions to contemporary British cabaret have drawn comparisons to both Victoria Wood and Jim Tavares. Her Crass connections, continued membership of L’Académie Des Vanités and willingness to provide more sober aspects to events like this one demonstrate that she’s by no means cocooned in the cabaret box.

As for Penny himself – a lifelong anarcho-libertarian and punk hero who was initially inspired by an unlikely literary combination of Ernest Hemingway, Henrik Ibsen and Walt Whitman – there’s plenty to say on the varied subject of Crass and his work in and out of it. This is generally handled by better counter-culture historians than myself. If you’re new to Penny (or to Crassage in general), here’s a fairly good place to start, courtesy of ‘The Quietus’…

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Kings Place Festival 2016 presents:
‘Songs of Separation’: Eliza Carthy + Karine Polwart + Mary Macmaster + Kate Young + Hannah James/Hazel Askew/Rowan Rheingans (Lady Maisery) + Jenn Butterworth + Jenny Hill + Hannah Read
Hall One @ Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, England
Friday 9th September 2016 – 9:45pm – information

From the Festival promotional info:

“In June 2015, ten of Scotland and England’s leading female folk musicians joined forces to explore the rich musical, cultural and linguistic heritage of the two countries. What emerged is one of the landmark collaborative folk albums of recent years, Songs of Separation.

Various Artists: ‘Songs Of Separation’
“‘Songs of Separation’ is an outstanding collaboration between ten of Scotland and England’s leading female folk musicians. Devised and recorded in just six days, on the fairytale Hebridean Isle of Eigg, the musicians explored the rich musical heritage of the two countries, drawing on their respective and collective musical experiences and crafting something both new and very special.

“Celebrating the similarities and differences in our musical, linguistic and cultural heritage, and set in the context of a post-referendum world, the work aims to evoke emotional responses and prompt new thinking about the issue of separation as it occurs in all our lives. The collection of traditional and original songs aims to get to the heart of what we feel when we are faced with a separation; linking us both to previous generations who shared the same human experiences and responses to separation, and to generations that will follow. The horizons of the project are already evolving and speak as much about connection, as they do about separation.

“The album was launched in January 2016, with a sell-out tour and received exceptional reviews from the music press and musicians alike. Opportunities to experience ‘Songs of Separation’ performed live are rare… and unmissable.

“A richly evocative and quietly provocative collection of traditional and newly composed songs, the artists behind this album include two of the most celebrated contemporary voices on the UK folk scene, England’s Eliza Carthy (fiddle, percussion) and Scotland’s Karine Polwart (tenor guitar, Indian harmonium); two boundary-breaking Scots, Mary Macmaster of The Poozies (harp) and Kate Young (fiddle); Hannah James (accordion, percussion), Hazel Askew (flute, melodeon, harp) and Rowan Rheingans (banjo, fiddle, viola) from the award-winning English ensemble Lady Maisery; Jenn Butterworth (guitar) and Jenny Hill (double bass), brilliant backline players who have worked across both the English and Scottish trad scenes; and Hannah Read (fiddle, guitar), a New York-based musician and singer who spent much of her childhood on the Isle of Eigg.”

This is the last ‘Songs Of Separation’ concert of the year, with previous 2016 performances having occurred at assorted festivals (Celtic Connections, Dumfries and Galloway Festival of Arts, Cardiff’s Festival of Voice, the Cambridge Folk Festival) as well as shows in Edinburgh, Stroud, Didcot and Bury. The project is ongoing, with recent developments including onstage collaborations with schoolchildren and mythology-inspired plans for field recordings, among other ideas.

Tags: Crass, Eliza Carthy, Hannah James, Hannah Read, Hazel Askew, Jenn Butterworth, Jenny Hill, Karine Polwart, Kate Shortt, Kate Young, Kings Place (venue) - Kings Cross - London, Lady Maisery, Liam Noble, listening to women, Mary Macmaster, Penny Rimbaud, Rowan Rheingans, Songs Of Separation, The Horse Hospital (promoter/venue), Wilfred Owen, women of heart and mind

July 2016 – video premiere – North Sea Radio Orchestra’s cover of Robert Wyatt’s ‘The British Road ‘

27 Jul

It’s nice to have a ‘Misfit City’ premiere once in a while. This is the brand new video clip for The British Road, North Sea Radio Orchestra‘s cover version of a Robert Wyatt song. It’s from NSRO’s new album ‘Dronne’ which is coming out on the band’s own label The Household Mark on 9th September. The song itself will be out as a download single on August 5th: the video’s another genius pocket production by Chaos Engineers.

Singalong time:

Those foreigners are at it again
When will they learn to fight like our men?
There’s nothing new under the mirror
And it’s time for one more bedtime story
Get beauty sleep for morning glory
How can I rise if you don’t fall?

Robert Wyatt originally recorded The British Road for his 1985 album ‘Old Rottenhat’: it’s also on the ‘Mid Eighties’ compilation. It’s part of a set of songs composed in “a conscious attempt to make un-misusable music” which was done in the face of covertly (or nakedly) aggressive right-wing politics appropriating or co-opting songs for cheerleading or for broadcast padding. The song itself is a typically cryptic Wyatt threading of oblique satire and Dada-jazz playfulness over a friendly, ever-so-slightly plaintive melody, taking glancing swipes at petty nationalism and irritable torpor as it rolls along. (If you’re weary of all of the recent Brexit sabre-rattling and bottlecough, it’s a real restorative.)

North Sea Radio Orchestra: ‘Dronne’

The NSRO take on The British Road immediately bears their own stamp. Elements are blended in from early English airs to Germanic-electronic organ haze; there are dewdrop metallophones and passionate bird-flight string parts; there’s budding pastoralism charged with bursts of motoric minimalism; and there’s a kernelled heart in Craig and Sharron Fortnam’s softened everyperson vocals, ever-so-slightly shaded by a touch of Wyatt Cockney. It originally stems from a 2014 concert night performance of Wyatt’s music for the Nuits de Fourviere Festival in Lyon, which Craig was invited to direct and arrange. As well as producing both this and other NSRO arrangements of assorted Wyattisms, the event had a profound effect on Craig’s approach to the rest of ‘Dronne’:

“Being the composer and producer has led to me having total control over all aspects of making NSRO records. This way of working is, of course, a double-edged sword, as spontaneity and inspiration can be lost under all that control. Robert Wyatt seems to tread the line between the two with great skill, incorporating lots of elements of chance into his albums. Re-working his songs while trying to maintain freedom within the arrangements has been a great inspiration while making ‘Dronne’. This record features lots of improvising which I have edited and manipulated; certain accidents within have been left intact – these elements of chance are a real antidote to the necessary microscoping and control-freakery needed to create NSRO records.”

If you’re interested, French experimentalist Pascal Maupeu recorded another version of this song six years ago, under his Mop Meuchiine alias – part grinding industrial underpass music, part Krautrock ice-cream van, part rough-edged chamber ensemble (while still finding space for a banjo). Here it is.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on ‘Dronne’, you can pre-order it now from Rough Trade, Piccadilly Records, iTunes and Amazon.

For more ‘Misfit City’ coverage on North Sea Radio Orchestra and its related bands (including some very early NSRO work indeed), click here.

Tags: Craig Fortnam, Mop Meuchiine, North Sea Radio Orchestra, Pascal Maupeu, premieres, Robert Wyatt, The Chaos Engineers (audio-visual producers)

July 2016 – a pair of one-day English festivals on the 16th (EppyFest 5 in Stroud, The Whole World Window in Preston)

13 Jul

This Saturday sees a couple of interesting pocket festivals taking place in the west and north-west of England – there’s still a chance for last-minute tickets or walk-ups for each of them.

The fifth in the series of EppyFests is happening this Saturday in Stroud, Gloucestershire. As with the previous four, it’s the brainchild of Stroud-based psychologist and music enthusiast Ian Fairholm and is a spinoff of his well-respected Epileptic Gibbon music podcast, whose remit rambles enthusiastically across “prog rock, art rock, post rock, prog metal, jazz rock, folk rock, math rock, downtempo, chill-out, ambient electronica, IDM, chamber pop, folktronica, psychedelia , neo-classical , film and TV soundtracks and experimental/avant garde music”.

EppyFest is an attempt at translating the podcast’s flavour into live music and live socializing. A well-run, self-starting pocket occasion (complete with its own T-shirts and integral dinner options) its previous events have featured ferocious British post-prog (Thumpermonkey, The Fierce & The Dead, Trojan Horse), latter prog/jazz-rock/jam acts (Sanguine Hum, Schnauzer, Henry Fool, Unto Us, Flutatious and Andy Pickford) and (in the case of Stackridge and The Korgis), a 70s prog outfit and a band of Britpop precursors sharing a last hurrah in the same body. Also in the mix has been loop guitar (Matt Stevens), classical/world chamber-fusion (Firefly Burning) and folk performers with extra ingredients stretching from neo-Celticana to chalkhill psychedelia, European electronica or Balkan jazz (Sheelanagig, I Am Your Autopilot, Tinker’s Cuss, Arch Garrison). As you might expect from a thoughtful curator married to an accomplished female musician, Eppyfest has also featured a healthy proportion of women players including bandleaders and solo artists (such as Becky Rose, Candythief and She Makes War).

Assuming that you’re not already committed to attending the Felix M-B gig down the road on the same day, EppyFest 5 looks set to carry on the tradition in fine form. (I’m jealous. I wouldn’t mind running something like that myself. It’s time to start thinking about empire, or benevolent despotry…)

The Epileptic Gibbon Podcast presents:
‘EppyFest 5’: William D. Drake + Judy Dyble & Her Band of Perfect Strangers + Marvyn B. Naylor + Darkroom (with Elif Yalvac) + Tom Slatter + Sirkis/Bialas International Quartet
Lansdown Hall, Lansdown, Stroud, GL5 1BB, England
Saturday 16th July 2016 , 4.00pm to 11.00pm – information & tickets

Over the years, I’ve said plenty about this year’s EppyFest headliner William D. Drake over the years, and will probably say more. Woody-throated singer and former Cardiac; the organic keyboard wizard who turns television sets into organs; the man you might find if you went looking for the place where baroque pop meets Punch-and-Judy professor. Bill’s songs suggest a parallel English music: one in which antique pop songs on crackling wax cylinders mingle seamless with both Henry Purcell and Frank Zappa.

In his mid-fifties, and with the release of his fifth album ‘Revere Reach’, Bill’s reached a crucial point in his career, in which the jolly avuncular eccentricities of his earlier work have finally given way to the blossoming kernel of beauty within his compositions. He’s probably far too rounded a person and songwriter to entirely give into it, though. Expect the full range of glorious pastoralism and bouncy humour from a full chamber pop band including members of Stars In Battledress and North Sea Radio Orchestra.

I’ve also said plenty about Darkroom , the textural electro-morphic partnership of sometime No-Man/Samuel Smiles/Henry Fool guitarist Michael Bearpark and loop/synth/woodwind/patch-man Andrew Ostler. Over two decades Darkroom have delivered a massively underrated body of work straddling gigantic cosmic soundscapes like deliquescing Hubble images, intricate cerebral dance rhythms, broodingly beautiful guitar tones and (recently) cryptic bass clarinet and flute strands, touching upon influences as diverse as OMD, Autechre, Robert Fripp, Neil Young, Delia Derbyshire, Can and Bennie Maupin.

For this concert their polyglot electronica is augmented by a special guest, Turkish electronic guitarist Hazal Elif Yalvaç an Istanbul-based composer, musician and linguist. We’ll have to see whether Elif’s work (much of it glitching, grumbling guitartronic abstractions) brings out Darkroom’s more abstract instincts; or whether Os and Michael’s knack for direct expressiveness brings out that proggier aspect which Elif’s threatening to reveal in her forthcoming Light Curve project.

Show opener Tom Slatter also shows up in ‘Misfit City’ quite often. He’s a Victorian town-crier with a guitar and a slew of fantastical tales about monsters of air, land and sea, strange goings on in laboratories, haunted gentlemen and master criminals loose on the railways. On record he’s a multi-instrumental steampunk proggie, building himself instrumental Rube Goldberg machines (and occasionally collaborating with one). Live, he’s mostly unplugged and solo, letting his charm make up for the shortfall in instrumentation. One day he will build himself a bicycle-powered, bat-winged portable orchestrion out of old tuba piping and traction engine spares, to allow him to merge both situations. It will probably go off course and fly him somewhere horrible.

https://youtu.be/J6ikYCRedj8

One of the prime strengths of jazz players is that they can come from anywhere in the world, meet each other for the first time and immediately speak a common improvising language of immediate flexibility. The four musicians who make up the Sirkis/Bialas International Quartet – Asaf Sirkis (drums, Israeli, Londoner), Sylwia Bialas (voice, Polish, currently a Londoner but only recently a Würzburg resident), Kevin Glasgow (bass guitar, a Scottish Londoner via Ireland, but Invernessian rather than actual Glaswegian, replacing an Englishman who originally reached the band via Australia, Scotland and the United States) and Frank Harrison (keyboards, English, surprising lack of other complications) – make more of their scattered nature than most.

With all of that in mind, you’d expect a riotous mix of cultures, making hay out of clashes. What you actually get is aquamarine almost-acoustic jazz, cupped and propelled by Asaf’s winds-of-the-forest percussion subtleties, sung in Polish or vocalese, sheathed in softness and in smoothly-flowing instrumental gestures. The lightness of touch and the Northern hemisphere reserve hearken towards both Pacific Northwestern new age and ECM atmospherics; the light-as-a-feather scatting, twirling Rhodes piano and lissom six-string electric bass suggests a hushed Kurpie version of Flora Purim’s time with Return to Forever.

While the pure, piping soprano tones of co-headliner Judy Dyble might distract you from her full story, they do tie her firmly to the 1960s folk revival. It’s a true tie, as well – teenage friendships with Ashley Hutchings and Richard Thompson led her to spend a year as the singer for the original lineup of Fairport Convention. This auspicious start was followed by a brief, obscure stint in King Crimson prelude band Giles, Giles & Fripp, a more celebrated year as half of much-touted psychedelic folk duo Trader Horne; and finally a handful of gigs in the company of Canterbury characters Lol Coxhill, Steve Miller and Phil Miller.

A gentle, often reticent character, Judy’s musicality wasn’t enough to keep her comfortably engaged with the bruising demands of the music business; and in 1973, after six years of flitting nervously in and out of the spotlight, she retired from music into a quiet life of family and library work while still barely into her twenties. Perhaps it wasn’t as mysterious or dramatic a withdrawal as that of peers such as Anne Briggs or Vashti Bunyan, but it was enough to reduce her reputation to a shadow for all except those who dug up her handful of recordings in search of half-forgotten treasure and found something that didn’t deserve to be overshadowed.

Bar a couple of flitting, fitful Fairport reengagements at Cropredy in the early ‘80s, little was heard from Judy for three decades until – widowed and empty-nested – she was inveigled back into recording by Astralasia’s Mike Swordfish in 2002. Since then she’s pursued a quiet but exploratory revival of her musicality, working in fields fromfolk-rock to trancetronica and experimental art pop, and with collaborators including Dodson & Fogg, Tim Bowness, Sand Snowman, Joxfield Projex, Fuxa and Thee Faction. Her regular home, however, is with her Perfect Strangers ensemble (mostly drawn from co-writer Alistair Murphy’s Cromerzone project) with whom she’ll be performing at EppyFest. Throughout all of this, Judy’s signature tone has remained intact – the folk sweetness, the subliminal hint at hesitancy and tremble which betrays the nerviness and unsurety which has both interrupted her career and given her work its humanity and honesty. As she heads towards her seventies, both tone and temperament have become allied to a longer perspective of value, loss and change – something which, strengthened and deepened by time, she’s grown into and fleshed out with natural experience.

Completing the bill is another, even less well-known hidden treasure. Winchester singer-songwriter Marvyn B. Naylor has been delivering music for twelve underappreciated years now. His mixture of intricate, allusive psychedelic pop songs and pulsating 12-string guitar folk instrumentals tip nods to and shake hands with inspirations including the early David Bowie, Edward Elgar, the Beatles, Joyce Kilmer, Frank Sinatra, Francisco Tarrega and Guy de Maupassant: but he’s a whole meal in himself.

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There’s just one former Cardiac on the bill at EppyFest. Technically speaking – unless it’s true that Kavus Torabi is DJ-ing – there are no former Cardiacs at The Whole World Window, which takes place on the same day as EppyFest but five counties up (in Lancashire). In spite of this the bill, spread across two stages, is suffused with Cardiacs enthusiasm. Unsurprising, since it’s the latest in a series of benefits for the band’s stroke-felled leader Tim Smith.

Greg Braysford presents:
‘The Whole World Window – A Benefit for Tim Smith’: Britney + All Hail Hyena + 7Shades + The Scaramanga Six + Sweet Deals On Surgery + Sterbus + Trojan Horse + Adam Shaw + The Jackpot Golden Boys + Sean Keefe + Ahsa + others tbc (or fibbed about)
The New Continental, South Meadow Lane, Preston PR1 8JP, England
Saturday 16th July 2016, 2.00pm – information here – tickets here and here

Bellowing Scots Britney are as garish and hardcore as a fairground teddy-grabber covered in backstreet tattoos. They’re given to one-and-a-half-minute bursts of earsplitting rock numbers plastered with crumpled ice-cream-van melodies. The latter trait, something of a Cardiacs stock-in-trade, tinkles through several of the other bands on the bill – be they outright disciples 7Shades (who lovingly pillage the ornate Cardiacs style wholesale) or pyjama-clad Burley power-pop trio All Hail Hyena (who sound like Bo Diddley rocking an birthday-cake castle).

Something more grandiose is offered by Huddersfield rock bullies The Scaramanga Six. They’ve devoted twenty-one years and enormous musical flair to hammering out poperatic tunes and bursts of garage gonzo, providing tragicomic insight into the flawed and unsettled ethics of everyday men (all carried out with assured baroque brutality and gallows humour). Self-styled “noisy prog rock bastards” Trojan Horse might not be returning to EppyFest this year, but they are bringing their omnivorous Salfordian rock cocktail to Preston: a catalogue of work which plunges into swaggering ‘70’s funk, belting avant-garage moments, broad-spectrum Beatles-pop and audacious psychogeographic experiments. Power-poppers Sweet Deals On Surgery lean towards the punkier side, bucketing towards the end of a song as if it were a race, but distractedly bursting into different versions halfway. For God’s sake, keep them off the Haribos…

All the way from Italy, Sterbus (Smith/Fripp/Zappa obsessive and noblest-Roman-of-them-all) will be coming to either yomp through some of his triple-jointed proggy power pop or to play leafy psychedelic summer-lounge acoustica (which may or may not include some of his takes on Cardiacs, Spratleys Japs and other limbs of Smithiana). If he doesn’t hold up the acoustic end, rest assured that Ivan Campo frontman Adam Shaw will, as he brings along his light-touch, thoughtful folk pop for us to unravel.

The rest of the bill’s made up of bands which predominantly reflect the humour (if not necessarily the horse-laughs and art-punk prankery) of the Cardiacs world. Silly-goodtime pop culture obsessives The Jackpot Golden Boys throw assorted metal, pop and funk chops at things from TV theme tunes to geek topics and hope that a few of them stay embedded. Militant hat wearer, slide guitarist, Strumstick player, comedy yarner and genre-mash novelist Sean Keefe – brings along his own version of honky-tonk Americana.

The (known) lineup is completed by acapella singer Asha Hewitt (seen below performing with Gummo Cleyre and Alex Dickinson as Yorkshire Latin pop band Solana). Asha might be the last kind of musician you’d expect to see getting up at a Smith benefit gig; but her presence is proof positive that the happy skewed tastes of the Cardiacs audience let in all kinds of light. Once they’ve stopped cheerfully bawling for their mashed-up chord sequences, that is…

Tags: 7shades, Adam Shaw, Ahsa, Alex Dickinson, Alistair Murphy, All Hail Hyena, Andrew Ostler (Os), Asaf Sirkis, benefit gigs, Britney, Cromerzone, Darkroom, Elif Yalvac, Eppyfest (event), Frank Harrison, Gummo Cleyre, Judy Dyble, Letchworth (England), listening to women, London (England), Marvyn B. Naylor, Michael Bearpark, Patrick Bettison, Preston (England), Royston (England), Sean Keefe, Sirkis/Bialas International Quartet, Solana, Stroud (England), Sweet Deals On Surgery, Sylwia Bialas, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, The Jackpot Golden Boys, The Scaramanga Six, The Whole World Window (event), Tom Slatter, Trojan Horse, William D. Drake, Winchester (England)

July 2016 – upcoming London gigs – A.R. Kane + Plastic Flowers’ dream pop evening (13th), Jausmė with Nicole Collarbone and Sian Magill in Battersea (13th); Cecil Sharp Choir’s Appalachian evening (14th)

11 Jul

…And in the middle of the week it’s about dream pop, folk music and the margin in between…

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Our Friends Eclectic presents:
A.R. Kane + Plastic Flowers
The Good Ship, 289 Kilburn High Road, Kilburn, London, NW6 7JR, England
Wednesday 13th June 2016, 8.00pm – information

This Wednesday, resurrected dream pop pioneers A.R. Kane play one of only two small, indoors British gigs while they ride the wave of worldwide summer festivals. This little London show is the guaranteed best opportunity to see them for the foreseeable future, especially if you missed their Manchester gig at the Soup Kitchen back in May (an event which, I’ll admit, I myself was too disorganised to even flag up) and especially since ’Kane leader Rudy Tambala has been enthusiastic about his preference for “a small crowd loving it, getting it” (as opposed to a fieldful of musical floating voters).

The original A.R.Kane were many things before those things became more commonplace – Afropean art-culture swaggerers, dissolvers of rock and pop’s hierarchical structures, sound-melters in whom dancefloor politics met punk threshing, electronic upsetters who played equally with roots and the bewilderingly synthetic. Rudy formed the band in 1986 with his childhood friend Alex Ayuli – two east London black kids with family roots in west or south-east Africa; a pair of eclectic clubgoers and self-confessed cocky chancers with broad listening habits, enough gab to make their brainwaves sound seductive (notably, Alex’s day job was in advertising), and a post-post-punk whim for running with ideas rather than technique. The idea of A.R. Kane was conceived as a backfiring party boast that Rudy and Alex felt obliged to follow up. Citing Cocteau Twins, the Velvet Underground, Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell as a range of influences might have been a handful of arty clichés then – it would certainly become so later. For two men who approached music as something envisaged rather than something played, however, it was a recipe for building a project from the ground up.

A.R. Kane’s work is often cited as pop reinvention. In fact, it’s more of a sprawl of jouissance – anti-formalism, a dab of abstract expressionism, and a joy in capturing moments on the fly. All of this should have been in the air when (early on in the journey) they joined forces with experimental dance duo Colourbox for the M|A|R|R|S sessions, leading to a number one hit via the British house classic ‘Pump Up The Volume’. As it happened, an experience that should have felt like a triumph of creative opportunity ended up as a bruising, short-lived encounter with hit factory frenzy, mutual intransigence and a blizzard of copyright litigation. These days Rudy dismisses ‘Pump Up The Volume’ as straight cultural theft from black and gay American club culture, but keeps a soft spot for the flipside – ‘Anitina’ (a confection of careening, planing guitar feedback and joyous narcotic pop vocal over hammering Colourbox industrial drums).

It’s this track that exemplifies ‘Kanework, rather than the pulsing plunderphonics of ‘Pump Up The Volume’. When Rudy and Alex played pop, it sounded like toy music or a process of on-the-spot discoveries. Nurtured along the way by the production suss of Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie and Gentle Giant’s Ray Shulman (with the latter’s post-prog bass often adding a subtle touch of spine and structure to the core cavortings), A.R. Kane seemed to achieve their aims by recreating music from around its edges rather than heading up through the centre. Paradoxically, they deracinated while remembering exactly where the roots were grounded, as if rock music was a complicated hairstyle which they were ripping the pins out of, sending them rattling onto the floor.

Sometimes they’d sound like what would happen if someone had had the gall to strip all of the blues out of Hendrix’s ‘Third Stone From The Sun’, leaving just the cosmic frizz, fragmentary whippling stringwork and mind-opening vocal fragments; like a disembodied, chromatically-dappled sci-fi Afro. Ecstatic hollers might chase sleepy narratives over chamber strings. Gnarly Guthrie-esque guitar noise, hell-gate heartbooms and refracting-knife feedback would bob around dashes of funk and house (which Alex and Rudy were onto long before the Madchester boom). From Jamaica, they gleaned dub-echo bursts of clipped piano or high snare. From American psychedelia, they drew jelly-baby lyrics that bobbed around dancing synth basslines (as if ‘60s acid casualties were making healing pilgrimages to New York electro clubs). From the underground currents of their hometown, they took their conceptual irreverence, their underlying cheek and their mix-and-match mercantilism. (It’s also where they gained their hard-knocks guile and ingenuity, that second-or third generation immigrant pluck that Western city racism forces back onto even the smartest of its homeboys).

Despite all of this sonic ensorcelment, on the early albums you could (if you wanted to) cock your head, peek underneath the noise and find a couple of guys who could barely play or sing; who were keeping it all afloat via acts of will, wit and weather. Most of the time, you’d wink back at them, then return to the bliss and forget the slender mechanisms holding it together. However, by the time of their sun-kissed swansong album, ‘New Clear Child’, A.R. Kane had skilled up and drifted towards a more coherent pop music. Apparently inspired by Alex’s move to California, the later songs meandered up to both Love and Talk Talk via West Coast funk, with daisy petals matted into their nappy hair. As was only appropriate for a band driven by an elusive and amorphous ingenuity, the more A.R. Kane solidified, the more they dissolved. Alex went solo; Rudy teamed up with his sister Maggie (an occasional ‘Kane backing singer) in Sufi and for twenty-odd years, that was that.

As is often the case, the band were finally tempted back into action via the nostalgia engine which fuels pop festivals. Last year Rudy was coaxed into weaving A.R. Kane back into existence, although he had to do it without his erstwhile partner (apparently busy with his own perspective on dream pop, Alex Ayuli opted to sit this one out). 2015’s ambitious Alex-free septet has now been trimmed to the core trio of Rudy and Maggie Tambala plus new cohort Andy Taylor; a mess of three guitars, three voices, computers and synths. While they originally billed themselves as “#A.R.Kane”, with Rudy optimistically explaining that “should Alex come out-to-play, we can easily drop the ‘#’..”, they’ve subsequently dropped the hashtag anyway, along with the distinctions and (it seems) the hope that Ayuli’s “said no, gave no reasons” refusal wouldn’t be permanent.

The flipside of this disappointment is that the band’s new lease of life has inspired and toughened them into a more committed playing unit fired up by contact with both fans and heirs. Back in the ‘80s, few bands used A.R. Kane’s methodology and thinking. Nowadays you could pull together a huge, snaking, intercontinental conga line of the fuckers. One of them’s playing at the Good Ship alongside Rudy and co. – Plastic Flowers, the London-based dream pop project of Thessaloniki-born George Samaras, whose grand skeletal lushness (bare-bones drumbox echo, threaded vocal and towering ripcurls of melodic guitar noise) is an almost pure mainlining of the ‘Kane lineage.

Now a revitalized Rudy is talking, with giddy enthusiasm, about future recordings and about the new material he apparently brought to the Soup Kitchen gig the other month. (I’ve checked for reviews of that, but found nothing unless it’s been reduced to telegrammatic burbles on Facebook – being off-‘book at the moment, I wouldn’t know). We’ll have to see how his intentions pan out. With planned American coastal tours cancelled (due to date and commitment clashes rather than lack of interest), there are still a couple of showings at the Siren and Half Die festivals in Italy later in the month; and then back home for On Blackheath in September. After that, the future’s both blank and open – which, in a way, is where A.R. Kane came in in the first place.

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If vindicated dream pop discombobulation doesn’t float your boat for Wednesday, then perhaps you’d prefer a free event at Battersea’s delightful acoustic playground on the same night…

Jausmė (with Nicole Collarbone) + Sian Magill
The Magic Garden, 231 Battersea Park Road, Battersea, London, SW11 4LG, England
Wednesday 13th July 2016, 9:00 pm – free event – information

Transplanted Lithuanian singer-songwriter Jausmė – Vilnius-born, but Milton-Keynes-based – will be performing a set of her own material accompanying herself on the kanklės (a twenty-nine string Lithuanian zither with a sparkling sound) and aided by Liverpudlian cross-disciplinary cellist Nicole Collarbone (whose myriad projects and collaborations include the Neil Campbell Collective and folk ensemble Sonnenberg).

Jausmė describes her work as “urban etherealism”. Translated, this seems to mean a half-invented, half-archaeological folk music (like a less grandiose, less Gothic, closer-to-the-source Dead Can Dance), and one in which the focus is shifted thirteen hundred miles northwest to the Baltic states; it also means that Jausmė listens to, and can slip into, the work of sub-bass, garage and techno producers. On this occasion, though, it’s all wood and no electronics, and the roots are northern. For evidence of what Jausmė and Nicole can do together (and of Jausmė’s skills on her own), see below.

In support is another no-less-impressive Milton Keynesian, Sian Magill, who honed her subtly immersive, highly literary folk songs at venues both there and at Oxford, where she studied English Literature at degree level. If the latter suggests someone whose work’s likely to wear its intelligence as clever English hauteur, think again. Sian’s songs draw on more distant traditions, coming across as a more Irish-toned echo of the dense, individual American song-tales of someone like Dayna Kurtz, although she sounds less likely to venture to bars on the wrong side of the tracks, or to lean quite so much into the urban blues. Instead, Sian makes her own way into a story through a quiet and continuous flow of detailed observation and consideration, atop a busy, depth-inducing weave of fingerpicked guitar (see below).

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Appalachian 100: Cecil Sharp House Choir (with Alice Cade + Pete Cooper + Ed Hicks)
Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regent’s Park Road, London, NW1 7AY, England
Thursday 14th July 2016, 7.30pm – information

If you missed the Cecil Sharp Choir at the Union Chapel last Saturday (singing songs for a Daylight Music marine afternoon), they’re back on home turf at Cecil Sharp House for another show on Thursday. This time, they’re celebrating the centenary of musicologist Sharp’s first folk-song-collecting visit to the Appalachian Mountains of America, a region replete with influences from sixteenth-century England and from the tough feuding culture of the Scottish Borders, as well as (at least in the Ozark region) a great line in dirty stories.

I don’t know whether any cheerful smut is going to be reeled out at the concert (in song or in asides), but the choir are promising “a selection of glorious a capella harmony arrangements of traditional songs, including some collected in the Mountains”, in new arrangements by leader Sally Davies. Three special guests will be adding to the show- flatfoot dancer Alice Cade, fiddle master Pete Cooper and multi-instrumentalist Ed Hicks (banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, Anglo concertina and voice).

Tags: A.R. Kane, acoustic guitar music, Alex Ayuli, Alice Cade, Andy Taylor, banjo music, Cecil Sharp House Choir, cello music, Cocteau Twins, Colourbox, concertina music, Ed Hicks, fiddle music, free events, Gentle Giant, Jausmė, kanklės, Liverpool (England), London (England), Maggie Tambala, mandolin music, Milton Keynes (England), M|A|R|R|S, Neil Campbell Collective, Nicole Collarbone, Pete Cooper, Plastic Flowers, Ray Shulman, Robin Guthrie, Rudy Tambala, Sally Davies, Sian Magill, Sonnenberg, Vilnius (Lithuania), zither

July 2016 – upcoming gigs in London and Sunderland – end-of-the-season for Daylight Music with Cecil Sharp House Choir, Lisa Knapp, Hermes Experiment, David Julyan and John Potter (9th); the live-soundtracked premiere of Somme-and-Mackem documentary ‘Asunder’ with Field Music, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Warm Digits and The Cornshed Sisters (10th)

6 Jul

This weekend, in London, mostly-unplugged afternoon Daylight Music will bow out for the summer with a distinctly maritime-toned concert – and one which features another choir as the headlining act. I’ve been tempted to give Daylight’s organisers a bit of stick for their interest in choirs this season, but it makes no more sense than ribbing them for liking performers with acoustic guitars. While, for me, the scratch-choir-does-pop-hits musical meme gets too cosy too quickly, Daylight has done its level best to vary the choral diet, with this week’s headliners delving back into deeper folk roots (and the other acts on the bill ranging out across nautical atmospheres and underwater imaginings).

At the other end of the country, in Sunderland, film-makers have teamed up with art-rockers, bleepers, folk singers and community consciousness to create a picture of the First World War’s impact on a thriving north-eastern community. Keeping true to their inspirations, they’re premiering their work there. We Southerners will have to wait, and quite rightly too.

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Daylight Music 231 – Cecil Sharp House Choir + Lisa Knapp + The Hermes Experiment + David Julyan & John Potter
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

“Known for its unique, spirited and moving a cappella renditions of traditional songs from the British Isles (and occasionally beyond), Cecil Sharp House Choir is one to catch. Helmed by inspirational choir leader, Sally Davies (and open to any confident singer able to hold a tune, learn by ear and be keen to perform), the choir performs regularly at Cecil Sharp House and at a host of other venues and events including the Southbank Centre, the Roundhouse, the House of Commons and the Oslo Musikkfest.

“Singer and fiddle player Lisa Knapp burst onto the scene in 2007 with her much lauded debut album ‘Wild & Undaunted’, which contained refreshing interpretations of traditional folk songs peppered with highly distinctive original pieces. Numerous appearances across BBC Radio and BBC4’s Christmas TV folk song extravaganza followed, as well as a performance tribute to the late Lal Waterson for BBC Electric Proms. Further recordings (made in collaboration with her musician/producer husband Gerry Diver) have included the EP ‘Hunt The Hare – A Branch of May’ and 2013’s ‘Hidden Seam’ album. Lisa’s BBC work continued with Radio 4’s acclaimed ‘Shipping Songs‘ in 2015 (musing on the extraordinary sounds from far-off places on the Shipping Forecast), and it’s this which should inform her July Daylight appearance, which features a duo performance with Gerry Diver and a song sung with the Cecil Sharp House Choir.

“Park Lane Group Young Artists 2015/16 and winners of Nonclassical’s Battle of the Bands 2014, The Hermes Experiment is a contemporary classical music quartet comprising harpist Anne Denholm, clarinettist Oliver Pashley, soprano Héloïse Werner and double bass player Marianne Schofield. Their performance style has been hailed as “meticulously nuanced, witty and chic” by The Times, while The Evening Standard has acclaimed their “whole new expressive world.” Capitalising on their deliberately idiosyncratic combination of instruments, the ensemble regularly commissions new works, as well as creating their own innovative arrangements and venturing into live free improvisation. So far, the ensemble has commissioned thirty-one different composers at various stages of their careers. The ensemble also strives to create a platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration and they recently created a ‘musical exhibition’ with photographer Thurstan Redding. Future plans include a residency at Aldeburgh Music in September 2016 developing a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale with director Nina Brazier and composer Kim Ashton.

“The Hermes Experiment’s Daylight performance this weekend will be a marine-themed set first performed in 2014 (and recently revived at a Park Lane Music Group concert at St John’s Smith Square earlier in the year), at which they performed Giles Swayne‘s ‘Chansons dévotes and poissonneuses (Devout and Fishy Songs)’, a setting of three piscatorial poems by French Symbolist Georges Fourest. Whether they’ve got time for some of the other songs for the St Johns set – Kate Honey‘s ‘Predator Fish’, Freya Waley-Cohen‘s ‘Oyster’, Josephine Stephenson‘s ‘tanka’ – remains to be seen.

“As the fourth act, David Julyan (a film composer best known for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan on Memento’ and ‘The Prestige’, as well as for horror movie ‘The Descent‘) will be teaming up with John Potter (of ambient project The Music Of What Happens) in order to create a live sea soundscape.”

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Field Music/The Royal Northern Sinfonia/Warm Digits + The Cornshed Sisters
‘Asunder’ – film premiere with live score
Sunderland Empire Theatre, High Street West, Sunderland, SR1 3EX, England
Sunday 10th July 2016, 2.30pm and 7.30pm – information

“Northumbrian art poppers Field Music (with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and electronic duo Warm Digits) are set to perform a newly commissioned live score to accompany ‘Asunder’, a film telling the tale of the North East’s involvement in the Battle of the Somme (one of the most horrific battles in World War One) through largely unknown personal experiences. The collaboration marks the Battle’s centenary. Royal Northern Sinfonia will be conducted by Hugh Brunt, Artistic Director of the London Contemporary Orchestra (and Radiohead collaborator). Sunderland folk quartet The Cornshed Sisters will also perform an a cappella rendition of traditional Wearside folk tune The Rigs of Sunderland Fair.

“‘Asunder’ brings together the stories and images of the past with music from the present to tell a poignant and relevant story of what happened to a typical British town during the First World War, with virtually all of the its men abroad fighting and all of its women and children left behind. The North East was in the front line, thanks to its shipyards and munitions factories.
Through the stories of half a dozen people from Tyneside and Wearside, ‘Asunder’ uncovers just what life was like on the home front – with bombs falling on Britain for the first time, conscientious objectors sentenced to death, and women working as doctors, tram conductors and footballers, some of them (God forbid) wearing trousers.

“The story begins in the pre-war Edwardian golden era when cricket, football and rugby boomed, and aeroplanes and cars pointed to a bright new future – only for this progress to be horrifically reversed through the early years of the war. This culminated on 1st July 1916 in the Battle of the Somme, when British, French and German forces began one of the most traumatic battles in military history. Over the course of just four months, more than one million soldiers were captured, wounded or killed in the Battle, a confrontation of unimaginable horror.

“The story is told through a beautiful film carefully crafted by documentarist Esther Johnson using archive and newly filmed footage, and narrated by Kate Adie (with Alun Armstrong as the voice of the ‘Sunderland Daily Echo & Shipping Gazette’).

“‘Asunder’ will premiere at the Sunderland Empire on 10th July before touring at selected venues around the country (dates to be confirmed).

“Field Music’s David Brewis says of the commission:

“The chance to write something completely new and play it with an orchestra doesn’t come around very often. And as we heard about the plans for the film, the idea of telling a more complete story about our home town and how the war affected it was very appealing. There’s nothing quite like hearing a full orchestra right in front of you and if we get it right, then the balance between what you see and hear on screen and what you see and hear from the musicians should be spectacular. One of the other things which intrigued Peter (Brewis) especially about this project was our love of the orchestral music from that period. Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ premiered in 1913, Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ in 1912. Bela Bartok and Maurice Ravel were composing, as was Claude Debussy, so it was a time of huge change in harmony and composition and we’ve dipped into that period for inspiration a lot.”

“Writer and ‘Asunder’ creative director Bob Stanley comments:

“For me, ‘Asunder’ is an opportunity to work with a group I’ve admired from afar for years, Field Music, and one of my favourite documentary makers, Esther Johnson, as well as a group I only discovered last year but are one of the most thrilling electronic acts in the country, Warm Digits. The premiere will be a truly unique event – the combination of a live score to a new film featuring some incredible archive footage and fascinating local stories, along with the other events going on inside and outside the Empire should be a really memorable day, and I hope one that people will be talking about for years to come. I want everyone who sees it to take pride in the region’s unique history and to feel they can help to build its future.”

Tags: Anne Denholm, Arctic Circle (promoter), Asunder (film), Bob Stanley, Cecil Sharp House Choir, David Julyan, Daylight Music (event), Esther Johnson (filmmaker), Frey Waley-Cohen, Georges Fourest, Gerry Diver, Giles Swayne, Héloïse Werner, John Potter, Josephine Stephenson, Kate Honey, Lisa Knapp, London (England), Marianne Schofield, multimedia, Oliver Pashley, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Sally Davies, Sunderland, The Cornshed Sisters, The Hermes Experiment, The Music Of What Happens, Warm Digits

July 2016 – upcoming and ongoing gigs – some pickings from the Frome Festival, west of England (1st-10th)

2 Jul

While I missed the chance to plug the Sin Eater Festival a few weeks ago, I’m just about in time for the modest fireworks which herald the Frome Festival in Wiltshire.

I’m too late to plug the opening party (in which Frome’s own electro-poppers Sweet Machine shared a bill with psychedelic synth-cabarettier, rock biographer and all-round performance character Alan Clayson); I don’t have much to say about the festival’s big-draw act Reef (currently enjoying a new revival of their original ‘90s revival of 70s blues-rock); and I feel sorry that the free gig by “ukular fusion” band The Mother Ukers doesn’t involve furious Mahavishnukulele jazz shredding (instead of being a variation on banjo-happy rockgrass covers). But there’s plenty more on offer, so here are a few other things picked out from the billing.

It’s by no means everything on offer (the festival’s full of visual art, talks and theatre; there’s plenty more jazz and classical; and there’s a show by Billy Bragg which will probably take care of itself) but these represent the bits-between-the-bits which are closest to ‘Misfit City’s natural constituency (if such a thing exists).

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The Magical Folk Garden @ The Archangel, 1 King Street, Frome, BA11 1BH, England
Tuesday 5th-Friday 8th July 2016, 7.30pm each night – information: Tuesday 5th / Wednesday 6th / Thursday 7th / Friday 8th

At the upstairs room at the Archangel pub, The Magical Folk Garden continues to turn itself into an annual institution with a series of cushion-strewn/standing-room-only unplugged gigs, creating a “euphonious forest of folk and contemporary acoustic music from some of the UK’s finest talents.” It’s all pretty well-scrubbed and tasteful – there’s nothing to scare the horses here. That said, a few of the performers might own horses, and some might whisper them; while a few might go all ‘Poldark’ and ride off on one, bareback and bare-chested, a honey-coloured guitar bouncing up and down on the withers (it all probably depends on the state of the booze and the pollen count).

The Tuesday show features two Bath acts – lit-pop cello-and-guitar duo The Bookshop Band and romantic solo-balladeer Tom Corneill – plus the sunny pure-pop/psychedelic fizz of Trowbridge’s The Pigeons.

The Wednesday show has a band-backed performance from Frome’s Al O’Kane (a gravel-and-honey country-blues-folker who, with his mix of rolling American roots guitar and British mysticism, can come across as a one-man ‘Led Zeppelin III’). Also playing are Alex Taylor (bouncy, jazz-and-funk-tinged, broadening his sound and filling out his pockets with pedals and loops) and young songwriter Emma Shoosmith, whose output has ranged from thoughtful folkified Taylor Swift covers to the lilting ska-tinted song shown below.

The Thursday show has a chamber-folk air. Bookshop Band multi-instrumentalist Beth Porter returns with her own augmented-string quartet band The Availables and her own clutch of intricate literary songs. Also on board are the strings, percussion rustles and detailed guitar of Rivers Of England (fronted by Rob Spaulding) who, although they take on some pretty familiar modern folk tropes, land them in an interesting marginal territory in which the early-’70s John Martyn and the early-’80s Julian Cope sit down to exchange lines and tips. The bill’s completed by the lost-boy charm of Avebury singer-songwriter (and Nick Harper protégé) George Wilding with his warm, abstracted songs of distraction and heartbreak (simultaneously soothing and haunting).

The Friday folk-final involves wayward Bristol-and-Bath folk septet The Cedar. Beth Porter makes her third Magical Folk Garden appearance of the week as the band’s cellist, alongside five other musicians. Playing a variety of instruments and implements (from guitar, glockenspiel, viola, organ and ukulele to calculator, screwdriver, musical and tri-square) they weave Neil Gay’s slightly distracted songs into a musical fabric that’s sometimes Belle-&-Sebastian communal, sometimes music-school precise, and sometimes as frayed as a scrap-basket oddment.

The rest of the evening gently mixes Western with Western. Accompanying herself on guitar, baritone ukulele, harmonium or shruti box, Bradford-on-Avon’s Jess Vincent delivers a set of original country-folk songs with a sound and demeanour that’s seen her compared to both Iris DeMent and Kate Bush. Evening openers Ali George and Ruby Brown do their own take on Gram-and-Emmylou duets, filtered through Ali’s trunkful of original English folk/clawhammer guitar songs.

https://youtu.be/CgZQaSVMQcQ

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The town’s Rook Lane Chapel arts centre is hosting plenty of events. These two in particular caught my ear:

Snowapple
Rook Lane Chapel, Bath Street, Frome, BA11 1DN, England
Thursday 7th July 2016, 7:30pm – information

“Snowapple is an outstanding female harmony trio from Amsterdam who draw on folk, classical and chanson influences, in unique, charming and beautiful arrangements of original songs. Having sold out the Granary for the last two years, Snowapple have earned a reputation all over Europe and the US, and this year appear in the perfect setting of Rook Lane Arts.”

Praying For The Rain
Rook Lane Chapel, Bath Street, Frome, BA11 1DN, England
Friday 8th July 2016, 8.00pm – information

From the blurb: “Known for their dynamic and compelling live performances, Praying For The Rain blend contemporary folk, Celtic and world music with irresistible rhythms, memorable melodies, beautifully crafted vocals and inspired musicianship. Their music brings to mind a modern blend of Crosby, Stills and Nash, Robert Plant, to Fleet Foxes and the Dave Matthews Band, creating a truly uplifting experience. Following last year’s sell out concert, Praying for the Rain return to Rook Lane for Frome Festival 2016. Expect an exhilarating night of high energy, movement and wonderfully engaging songs.“

I’m sure I remember Praying For The Rain from when I was a regular at Martyn Swain’s wonderful Dreamhouse acoustic nights, a refuge of warm bohemian chic and unplugged music alongside the Splash Club in scuzzy mid-’90s Kings Cross. These were the same shows at which I was delighted by up-close performances from Marcy Detroit, Simons Warner and Whitaker and many more… there’s a little bit about Dreamhouse here, since someone’s been writing a crowdfunded book about the Splash years (and you can still pitch in to help it). Dreamhouse was the kind of night where you could expect table candles and belly dancing interludes most weeks; but during their own slot, Praying For The Rain completely overflowed the little Water Rats stage with finger-cymbals, accordions, cellos, cirrus-band harmonies and what seemed like about ten people on whispering percussion, temporarily transforming the place to a full-on New Age folk temple.

Although they seem rather more bluesy and straightforward-rootsy than I remember through the gauzes of memory, it’s good to see that they’ve lasted the twenty-year distance and garnered themselves a new up-to-date list of comparisons.

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Over at the Granary, there’s a semi-unplugged triple bill and a visit from a ‘Misfit City’ favourite.

Three Is The Magic Number presents:
Three Corners + Molly Ross + Gum Girl
The Granary @ The George Hotel, 4 Market Place, Frome, BA11 1AF, England
Friday 8th July 2016, 8.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like

Regular Frome-and-Wiltshire unplugged night Acoustic Plus takes on a new identity for this three-act bill of “original songs, haunting vocals, mesmeric music” celebrating a diversity of approach via three different acts. Molly Ross offers fledgling piano pop touches on folk and R&B; Three Corners (with their roots in 1980s new-wavers The Impossible Dreamers, and featuring ex-Dreamers Nick Waterhouse and Caroline Radcliffe) play sparse, questing songs around more of a loose blues-and-jazz-informed tip; but the one I find most interesting is the dreamy beat’n’texture pop of Gum Girl.

Arch Garrison
The Granary @ The George Hotel, 4 Market Place, Frome, BA11 1AF, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 8.00pm – information http://cheeseandgrain.ticketsolve.com/shows/873554307

As Arch Garrison, North Sea Radio Orchestra mastermind Craig Fortnam and Stars In Battledress‘ James Larcombe explore gentle, intricate psychedelic folk: partly gentle clean chapel tones, partly kosmische textures, partly chalk-ridge geomancy. A duo of Craig’s nylon-strung acoustic guitar and James’ assorted keyboards (organ, monosynth, harmonium and piano), their two albums’ worth of songs have enabled Craig to bring the smaller and more personal songs he writes to life, when they don’t fit the grander feel of NSRO. Their ‘Will Be A Pilgrim‘ album was one of my favourites of 2014 – an unexpected gem of small voice and thinking space. Support comes from local favourites Dexter’s Extra Breakfast, playing Dave Clark’s soft-petalled and “Weltschmerzian” songs of middle-aged reflection.

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John D Revelator
The Griffin, 25 Milk Street, Frome, BA11 3DB, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 8.00pm – free event

At the Griffin, John D Revelator will be bringing along their dark-tinged acoustic swamp-pop for a free show. Even if there’s not actually such a thing as the “Somerset Levels delta”, they’ll lie to their last tooth and their last busted guitar string trying to persuade you that it does exist.

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Towards the end of the festival, the second of Frome’s two substantial concert halls is offering two very different performances on the same day. One is a post-lunchtime concert of vividly Catalonian Spanish classical music from the twentieth century; the other is an evening show of polymusical fusion from an all-star collective trio.

Elena Riu & Clara Sanabras: ’A Taste Of Spain’
Cooper Hall @ Selwood Manor, Jacks Lane, Frome, BA11 3NL, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 1.00pm – information

Pianist Elena Riu and singing multi-instrumentalist Clara Sanabras (the latter on voice, harp, oud, charango and guitar) perform selections from the ‘Songs & Dances’ of Catalan impressionist/miniaturist composer Federico Mompou and the ‘Spanish Dances’ of his compatriot Enrique Granados, interspersed with Clara’s performances of the original Catalan folk songs on which Mompou drew.

Birdworld
Cooper Hall @ Selwood Manor, Jacks Lane, Frome, BA11 3NL, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 8.30pm – information http://cheeseandgrain.ticketsolve.com/shows/873554308

“Birdworld is made up of musicians Adam Teixeira (drums/percussion), Gregor Riddell (cello/electronics); and Alex Stuart (guitar). The project came about when Gregor and Adam met during self-directed Banff Creative Residencies where they discovered a shared interest in blending electronic and acoustic sounds. Since Adam moved to the UK in 2014 they have continued to develop BirdWorld, adding Alex along the way. Combining their artistic voices as both instrumentalists and composers, the trio will showcase each members original compositions arranged specifically for this unique musical exchange. Creating a unified sound that blends the inspirations of modern jazz, world music, contemporary classical, rock and electronic music in a rare concert setting.”

Here’s a video of the original two-piece in action, to give you two-thirds of an idea of what might be on offer.

Tags: Adam Teixeira, Alan Clayson, Alex Stuart, Alex Taylor, Ali George, Arch Garrison, Beth Porter & The Availables, Billy Bragg, Birdworld, Clara Sanabras, Craig Fortnam, Dreamhouse (event), Elena Riu, Emma Shoosmith, Enrique Granados, Federico Mompou, Frome (England), George Wilding, Gregor Riddell, Gum Girl, Hot Chip, James Larcombe, Jess Vincent, John D Revelator, London (England), Martyn Swain, Molly Ross, Mother Ukers, multi-instrumentalists, North Sea Radio Orchestra, Praying For The Rain, Reef, Rivers Of England, Ruby Brown, Snowapple, Sweet Machine, The Al O'Kane Band, The Bookshop Band, The Cedar, The Impossible Dreamers, The Pigeons, Three Corners, Tom Corneil

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Categories 2016, 20th century classical music, a capella, acoustic music, acoustic pop, alternative country, alternative folk, Americana, baroque pop, blues, cabaret rock, Catalonian folk music, chamber music, chamber pop, classical (Western art music), classical songs, comedy music, country-and-western, cover versions, cross-cultural music, crossover, crowdfunding campaigns, DIY music, electro-acoustic folk, electro-acoustic music, electro-pop, electronic, electronica, festivals, folk baroque, folk music, folk rock, folk-jazz, folktronica, funk, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, kosmische & Krautrock, New Wave rock, outsider music, performance art, pop, previews, psychedelic folk, psychedelic pop, psychedelic rock, rhythm'n'blues, rock, roots music, singer-songwriter, ska, soul, spoken word, swamp rock, synth pop, vocal music

June-July 2016: two upcoming music-and-multimedia performances – Open Music Archive with Leafcutter John (London, 30th June) and Gawain Hewitt/Steve Lawson’s ‘Beneath the Waves’ (Birmingham, 3rd July)

25 Jun

Open Music Archive with Leafcutter John
The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, St Pancras, London, WC1N 1AZ, England
Thursday 30th June 2016, 6.00pm – information

From the Museum’s press release, with tweaks:

“Join artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White, whose work is featured in our current exhibition ‘Found‘, for a mesmerising musical performance with electronic musician Leafcutter John.

“Eileen and Ben work at the intersection of art, music and information networks, seeking to challenge default mechanisms for the authorship, ownership and distribution of art. Their ongoing collaborative project Open Music Archive is an initiative to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings (ranging from jazz and blues to folk and instrumental) and use these as a vehicle for collaborative projects exploring the material’s potential for reuse. The archive aims to distribute these recordings freely, form a site of exchange of knowledge and material, and be a vehicle for future collaborations and distributed projects.

“The artists found this long-forgotten vinyl in the personal collection of architect Luis Barragán, whilst on an artists’ residency in Mexico City, 2012. Treating it as a found object to be excavated, Simpson and White extracted and separated copyright-expired sounds from within the original recording, creating a public sonic inventory of thousands of samples. This has been pressed onto vinyl for inclusion in ‘Found’ and can be heard by visitors as they explore the exhibition. It has also been released into the public domain for re-use, as part of the Open Music Archive’s aim to initiate creative collaboration through the music of the past. You can hear it by clicking on the link below:

“For this event, Eileen and Ben will provide an audiovisual introduction to the archive, followed by a live Leafcutter John remix of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s 1958 record ‘Music for Children’ – effectively, an exclusive live set assembled from samples of xylophones, glockenspiels, drum hits, crashing cymbals and fragments of children’s voices. The live performance will be recorded for future copyleft release.”

Some examples of a similar previous Leafcutter John/Sound Music Archive project follow:

“Regarding the ‘Found‘ exhibition in general, it’s the result of the Museum’s Foundling Fellow Cornelia Parker inviting sixty outstanding artists from a range of creative disciplines to respond to the theme of “found”, reflecting on the Museum’s heritage. Combining new and existing work with found objects kept for their significance, this major exhibition unfolds throughout the Museum, interacting with historic works in the Collection and with each other. Parker’s inspiration has in part been taken from the Museum’s eighteenth-century tokens – small objects left by mothers with their babies as a means of identification should they ever return to the Foundling Hospital to claim their child.

“Other artists participating in ‘Found’ include: Ron Arad RA, Phyllida Barlow RA, Jarvis Cocker, Richard Deacon RA, Tacita Dean RA, Jeremy Deller, Edmund de Waal, Brian Eno, Antony Gormley RA, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Heatherwick RA, Christian Marclay, Mike Nelson, Laure Prouvost, David Shrigley, Bob and Roberta Smith RA, Wolfgang Tillmans RA, Marina Warner, Gillian Wearing RA and Rachel Whiteread.”

‘Untitled’ by Rachel Whiteread, 2016 (for ‘Found’ exhibition at the Foundling Museum, London)

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Further up country:

Gawain Hewitt & Steve Lawson: ‘Beneath the Waves’
mac birmingham, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, B12 9QH, England
Sunday 3rd July 2016, 7.30pm – information

“Sound artist Gawain Hewitt presents a live improvisation combining water processed with live electronics and field recordings he has made of water in London, Norway and Bangladesh, three places where water – and ice – are at the very core of both their history and their future.

“Gawain will be performing for the first time with Birmingham resident, bassist/improvisor Steve Lawson, internationally renowned for his innovative use of processing and looping to create emotive, melodic soundscapes. This will be a unique performance showcasing two musicians exploring both the sonics of water and electronic/acoustic collaboration in real time.”

There’s not much more background information out there on ‘Beneath The Waves’ (it’s sounding as if it’s the kind of gig you really need to attend and discover). However, anyone who’s interested in music technology (and who liked the concept of the Mi.Mu. glove instruments used as part of the Whispers & Hurricanes gig earlier in the month) might be interested to hear that Gawain leads research and development for Drake Music, one of the Mi.Mu. project contributors.

As for Steve, longtime ‘Misfit City’ readers will recognise him as a frequently-appearing name: newer readers and those who don’t know about him can find plenty of posts here covering some of his polymathic, melodious and deeply textured musical work from the past decade-and-a-half.

Tags: bass guitar music, Ben White, Birmingham (England), copyleft, duo music, Eileen Simpson, Gawain Hewitt, Leafcutter John, London (England), multimedia, Open Music Archive, Steve Lawson

June 2016 – upcoming London gigs – four for Saturday 18th (Glass, Matthew Bourne, Darren Morris, and The Leaf Library at Daylight Music; Tanya Tagaq soundtracks ‘Nanook of the North’ at the Forge; Rock Candy Girlz & Malcolm Bruce at MAP Studio Café; the Pussywarmers at Wilton’s)

16 Jun

An interesting London Saturday is coming up, with music ranging from shattering electronic jazz to faintly worrying lounge music and psychedelic pop; pipe organ explorations to Inuit vocalese; transfigured electropop to sing-alongs and drone-strumentals… with the odd dancing gorilla and shocking pink hairpiece showing up too.

More below…

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Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 228 (‘Electric Dreams’): Glass + Matthew Bourne + Darren Morris + The Leaf Library
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 18th June 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation – £5.00) – information

“Daylight Music goes electronic this week with three superb acts.

“Rising pop duo Glass are set for big things in 2016. Their spectacularly roaring body of work and captivating live shows have seen them hotly tipped as ‘ones to watch’ by The Maccabees, Huw Stephens and Tom Robinson. Jessica Winter’s haunting, enunciated vocals and Scott Rimington’s other-worldly guitar break-outs meet to create a language all of its own, underpinned with pummeling grooves, meticulous synth lines and addictive ear-worm hooks. Today they’ll be playing an acoustic set.

“With a reputation as a fearlessly unpredictable pianist and composer, multi-award-winning musician Matthew Bourne is a passionate explorer of sound, possessed of a burning desire to make music on anything old, broken or infirm. Renowned for his intensely personal and sometimes confrontational solo work, his uncanny ability to balance delicacy and virtuosity – while establishing a close affinity with his audience – have become hallmarks of his concert performances. He has his fingerprints on a huge number of projects, having worked with artists as diverse as John Zorn, Annette Peacock, Nils Frahm, Nostalgia 77, Broadway Project, and Amon Tobin.

In the last year, Matthew set up a studio in his rural West Yorkshire home in order to capture the spontaneous moments of inspiration his concerts have become famed for. With a nod to the pioneering work of Annette Peacock and Paul Bley, he has turned his considerable talents to the world of analogue synthesisers; arming himself with an arsenal of vintage electronics, tape delays and a creaky harmonium alongside his trusty piano and cello, and preparing for a period of intense and varied activity in his own name after many years of collaboration. Growing from improvised live performances, new compositions have taken shape in the studio as Bourne explored and moulded the vast sonic possibilities of voltage-controlled oscillators.

“The seed for this project was planted when Matthew acquired an uncooperative 1982 Memorymoog, having it painstakingly modified and upgraded by Rudi Linhard in Germany. Created without the use of computers or sequencers, ‘moogmemory’ is the first album to be recorded using only the Lintronics Advanced Memorymoog. This process also served as a pathway to another of his current projects, ‘Radioland: Radio-Activity Revisited’, a visceral live audio/visual experience created to mark the 40th anniversary of Kraftwerk’s seminal Radio-Activity album. In collaboration with electronic composer Franck Vigroux and installation artist Antoine Schmitt, ‘Radioland…’ sees him pushing his work with synthesisers into uncompromising new territory, as earth-shattering bass frequencies are contrasted with moments of eerie near-silence.

“The intriguing Darren Morris worked as a producer and musician for twenty years (with the likes of David Holmes, Tim Goldsworthy, Ashley Beedle) and he’s currently touring with former Beta Band-er Steve Mason. He’s been performing live as a professional musician for over fifteen years, playing keyboards, synths, and bass with a variety of artists including Gabrielle, Sugardaddy (side project of Groove Armada’s Tom Findlay), and Robin Hitchcock. He has a background in improvisation, working alongside many well-respected and influential players on the London improv scene such as Veryan Weston, Hugh Metcalfe, Sibyl Madrigal, Lol Coxhill, Gail Brand, Jon Edwards and Mark Sanders. Today, Darren will be playing the Chapel’s glorious 125-year old Henry Willis organ.”

Just noting that Darren isn’t a stranger to this particular instrument… Here’s the outcome of one of his previous encounters, plus an explanation:

“(This) started out as a ninety-minute improvisation, performed on the amazing organ that lives in the Union Chapel Islington. I was just zoning into the instrument and the building it breathes in, traveling through various pockets of 20th century western concert music, modal ’50s jazz, glimpses of Sun Ra, Terry Riley, daydreaming of space and psychedelic films here and there. The recording wasn’t anything special but it was easy to get sucked back in on listening back. I haven’t been able to leave it alone. For a few weeks I’ve been chipping away at it, adding a sort of electronic orchestra of synthesizers and string machines. I hope this album can make you believe it was all there at that moment, being recorded and witnessed. Maybe I’ll get this space orchestra together one day and return to the Union Chapel for a rather extraordinary gig. Hope you can be there!”

Back to the press release:

“There’ll also be improvised electronics from The Leaf Library, whose drone-pop love songs are particular Daylight favourites. If that wasn’t enough watch out for a special appearance by The Action Men who will bring their EU-topian roboto dance vision to our stage.”

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Tigmus and The Nest Collective present:
Tanya Tagaq in concert with ‘Nanook of the North’
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Saturday 18th June 2016, 7.30pm – information here and here

“Award-winning Inuit vocalist Tanya Tagaq, known for her intense, evocative style based on traditional throat singing, performs a live accompaniment to Robert Flaherty’s controversial 1922 silent film Nanook of the North. Joined by percussionist Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot, Tagaq reclaims the film’s images of life in an early twentieth-century Inuit community in Northern Quebec. This is not an experimental performance to be missed.

“Commissioned by the Toronto Film Festival, Tagaq’s work with Nanook began with a sonic exploration of the film’s imagery. With her own sense of the sounds of places shown in the film, she transforms its images, adding feeling and depth to what is a complex mix of poignant representations and racially charged clichés. The film, one of the world’s first major works of non-fiction filmmaking, is rife with contradictions. Flaherty lived and worked with Inuit communities for many years, and yet he included staged scenes of buffoonery and feigned Inuit ignorance of modern technology and accoutrements.”

https://youtu.be/FcOYx4_72Zo

Tanya’s own comments on the project:

“Everyone will take what they want from it. I have no intention of spoon feeding people what they need to know. Yet, hopefully, via coaxing and innuendo and emotion, I can elevate people’s consciousness of Inuit culture, and of culture in general. I can take a small bite out of the underground racism against Inuit and Aboriginal people. I have faith that if people are educated about what’s actually happening, and if people believe, it can be fixed. But you have to acknowledge the bad to sprout the good.”

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Rock Candy Management present:
MAP Live Lounge: Rock Candy Girlz + Malcolm Bruce
MAP Studio Café, 46 Grafton Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3DU, England
Saturday 18th June 2016, 7.30pm

Saturday Live Lounge at MAP Café is a regular night of eclectic live music. It’s hosted by Rock Candy Girlz, a three-piece West London band featuring members of ‘90s charting band Amazulu who do “quirky interpretations of classic songs” in a lively glammed-up fashion. I’m usually left cold by this kind of Scissor Sisters thing – the crowd-pleasing cover versions, the high-camp glow, the pink wigs etc (although I’m a secret slut for dressing up) – but the Girlz’ wit and roguery win me over. Here they are doing a Kylie Minogue cover. Underneath that is a trailer for the first Live Lounge, sans glad rags, which shows that some people aren’t remotely slowed, subdued or suppressed by middle age. Good on them. If I could muster half of this kind of charisma, people would be falling over themselves to read the blog.

Their special guest this week is multi-instrumentalist and classic rock scion Malcolm Bruce, son of Cream’s Jack Bruce and grafter in a number of different musical zones (rock, jazz-rock, folk) since his mid-teens. It’s hard not to talk about Malcolm without reference to his dad, since Malcolm’s musicality reveals some of the genetic and cultural debt he owes to Jack. They share a similar singing voice (a forceful high-rise tenor which ranges from pugnacious to yearning), and Malcolm paid some of his dues as the guitarist in Jack’s band. Also, he can – and sometimes does – work some of the same musical seams that his father did.

However, Malcolm’s Soundcloud page reveals him as a softer, more intimate songwriter and interpreter than Jack was – touched by a more lucent strand of Celtic romanticism (as with Brian Kennedy, Van Morrison, Paul Buchanan), annealed by a touch of the sensibilities of another great ’60s white rhythm-and-blues star (Steve Winwood) and counterbalanced with judicious dashes of technical smarts and abilities (an accomplished acoustic folk guitarist, he’s also a lyrical, Satriani-esque electric hard rock player with arena sensibilities). Here are a couple of tracks from an EP he’s putting together for a Pledge Music crowdfunder goodie, as an enticement to help record his forthcoming album. One’s a straight folk lovesong, another’s a version of Purcell’s ‘Dido’s Lament’.

Regarding the latter, it’s tough to go up against some of the existing pop versions which this beautiful tune has spawned over the years (including grand, soaring counter-tenor renditions from Klaus Nomi and Jeff Buckley, and the heart-melting voice-and-piano folk version Barbara Dickson and Troy Donockley performed on ‘Full Circle’) but Malcolm approaches his own arrangement with pluck and honesty. It’s also a tricky task to switch between baroque lute elegance and full-blooded pomp rock – let alone fold a brand new anti-war song into the second half – without resulting in a hamfisted mess. Yet somehow Malcolm manages to pull it off and cover all of the necessary bases.

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Babel Festival of Literature & Translation presents:
The Pussywarmers
Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, Whitechapel, London, E1 8JB, England
Saturday 18th June 2016, 9.00pm – information

This in from Wilton’s:

“The Pussywarmers bring you a lively mixture of music from the dope’n’glory jazz era of the mid-1920s. With horns, upright bass banjo and many more acoustic instruments, they have a wild and dusty character… plus trumpets. Cosmically bound to their Hungarian ladyfriend Réka, spasmodically accompanied on their travels by unpredictable trumpeters, The Pussywarmers – originally from the Mediterranean district of Switzerland – have spread their credo all over the continent. Indeed, audiences of all ages have fallen under their spell – a charming and obscure concoction of melodies that stubbornly eludes all attempts at a definition but which is leaving ever more gig-goers indefinably warmhearted.”

This doesn’t actually cover the half of it. What it doesn’t mention is this band’s teasing, wayward unknowability; their honey-sliding psychedelic atmospheres (like a half-cut Mamas & The Papas if they’d been woozily rebounding from the Haight); their playful lack of embarrassment and their apparent attachment to the Dada of their hometown. All of this can be seen in the video for their song ‘Young Men Living’, which blends Freud, Godard and Melanie Klein into three minutes and forty-three second of messy-play picnic.

If you’d prefer something less psychosexual, the video for Sunrise sees the band dancing blankly across Swiss hilltops in colour-bleached film stock; which, to a Brit, is going to look like a teasing ’70s memory from childhood forays onto BBC2. (Then again, if you’re not wanting something psychosexual, perhaps you shouldn’t be checking out a group called The Pussywarmers…)

The band is appearing as part of the tenth Babel Festival of Literature & Translation, described as “(a) unique border-crossing event (with) its own special brand of linguistic hospitality… a celebration of voices, rhythms, linguistic diversity, creolisation and hybridisation.” Usually based in Switzerland, it’s celebrating its decennial in London and at Wilton’s instead, bringing a day of “readings from writers and translators spanning China, Mexico, Poland, Bosnia, Switzerland and the USA.” . Full info on the whole event is here if you fancy making a fuller day of it.

Tags: Amazulu, Arctic Circle (promoter), Cream, Darren Morris, Daylight Music (event), Glass, Jack Bruce, Jean Martin, Jesse Zubot, London (England), Malcolm Bruce, MAP Live Lounge (event), MAP Studio Cafe (promoters), Matthew Bourne, Nanook of the North, Rock Candy Girlz, Tanya Tagaq, The Leaf Library, The Nest Collective (event/promoter), The Pussywarmers, Tigmus (event/promoter)

June 2016 – upcoming gigs – North Sea Radio Orchestra play London and Salisbury (12th, 26th) with Daisy Chute and William D. Drake (and maybe some other people…)

30 May

After a four-year hiatus (punctuated only by a brief 2014 showing at a Robert Wyatt tribute evening in France) North Sea Radio Orchestra – the pocket alt.chamber ensemble formed by husband-and-wife art-rock refugees Craig and Sharron Fortnam – are returning to action with a couple of warm, low-key English shows in London and Salisbury during June.

North Sea Radio Orchestra, 2016

Based around Craig’s aerial compositions (propelled by a fine lattice of nylon-string guitar or gestural piano) and fronted by Sharron’s grand, pealing mezzo-soprano, NSRO emerged fifteen years ago via a series of church concerts in the City of London. A familial, twenty-strong English-gala-on-legs, sporting a rugged/ragged choral section, they blended the feel of a market-town classical festival with the more omnivorous preoccupations of world-city musicians flitting between concert halls, experimental rock clubs and eclectic podcasts.

Notoriously, Craig’s tune-sense drew on a romantic-futurist melding of Britten, Zappa, Vaughan Williams, Peter Warlock, traditional and psychedelic folk, Victorian poetry and the bassoon-laden locomotional soundtracks of Smallfilms’ Vernon Elliott: while the musician-and-singer pool drew not only on moonlighting classical and film-score people, but also on London art-rockers with broad skills and wide-open ears. In retrospect, there are some superficial similarities not just between the NSRO and one of their clearest equivalents – the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, who enjoyed a comparable tidy balance between cosmopolitan genres and methods – but also between the NSRO and that ongoing wave of enjoyable pop-up community choirs who roll around with Beach Boys, Bjork and Pulp songs stuffed in their pockets. Certainly both of the latter share a “get-up-and-do-it” communal warmth which endear them to audience, plus a pleasing lack of collegiate polish (the NSRO’s choral parts managed to be disciplined and soaring and loveably rough’n’baggy, while Sharon’s lead singing has muscled in on uncolonized areas between classical diva, ’60s coffee-house folk and Yorkshire punk).

Having said that, the NSRO have always been a more serious endeavour, treating their inspirations and ongoing creative paths with a discreet and earnest gravity; something typified by their third album’s pre-hiatus digression into a more compacted style, in which minimalist and Krautrock influences subsumed their initial romanticism (and in which self-penned lyrics of connection, loss and retreat replaced their earlier settings of Tennyson and Blake).

Today’s NSRO are a more streamlined affair than they once were: a compact mostly-instrumental nonet with Sharron’s voice still to the fore. Many members may have gently fallen away (if not too far away), but most of the original players remain in place alongside the Fortnams. Percussionist Hugh Wilkinson, organist/monosynther James Larcombe, string players Harry Escott and Brian Wright, and Luke Crooks and Nicola Baigent on reeds are still all on board, Despite being absent for these shows (he’ll be back in the autumn) the ensemble’s newest recruit, percussionist and viola player Stephen Gilchrist, fulfils the usual NSRO criteria of strolling or scrambling across genre lines: as “Stuffy” Gilchrist, he’s best known for thrashing the drums behind Graham Coxon or Art Brut, or for doling out his pop-eyed alt.rock as Stuffy/the fuses or Stephen Evens.)

These new shows should contain material from the NSRO’s upcoming fourth album ‘Dronne’, due out in early September. The first signs of the album came from a minute-and-a-half of dreamy domestic phase music uploaded to their Facebook page back in January (see above). Various other hints which have seeped out suggest a further change of course, perhaps influenced by the inspired psychedelic folk course which Craig and James Larcombe have been following with their parallel project Arch Garrison . In James’ words: “the new NSRO album’s amazing – in my opinion rather further down the psychedelic avenue, particularly the long instrumental title track. The song we’ve recently done a video for (‘Vishnu Schist’) is without a doubt my new favourite NSRO song… I’ve been listening to it loads. There’s a Robert Wyatt cover on it too, which is lovely.”

Regarding the gigs…

Tigmus presents
North Sea Radio Orchestra + Daisy Chute
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Sunday 12th June 2016, 1.30pm – more information here and here

In support at the Forge is Daisy Chute. Though she’s undoubtedly best known as one-quarter of glossy-teen pop/classical fusion queens All Angels, Daisy vigorously and actively pursues a broad sweep of additional music including theatre, education and modern folk. In addition to her frontline work as a singer, she’s an accomplished composer, arranger, orchestrator and multi-instrumentalist (guitar, piano, ukelele, banjo and pixiphone), and a member of varied other bands including Camberwell folk-pop quartet threeandme. On this occasion she’s going out under her own name, singing a set of self-penned folk-and-jazz inspired songs and fronting a quartet of Tristan Horne (cello), Will Collier (double bass) and Zara Tobias (harmonium and backing vocals).

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Salisbury Arts Centre presents:
Transplant Music Night: North Sea Radio Orchestra + William D. Drake + special guests
Salisbury Arts Centre, Bedwin Street, Salisbury, SP1 3UT, England
Sunday 26th Jun 2016, 8.00pm – more information

This one’s billed as “a special night of music to accompany Salisbury Arts Centre’s ‘Transplant’ exhibition” (more on that in a moment…) For this show, the support act is onetime Cardiacs member William D. Drake, who forged his own belated solo career alongside NSRO’s (simultaneously putting in time in the latter as both choir singer and occasional composer/pianist). Building on from his interest in Early Music, his stint as the classically-inspired keyboard wildcard amongst Cardiacs’ polystylistic punk tumult and his subsequent immersion in rootsier work, Bill has developed his own idiosyncratic approach to songwriting: baroque, playful and soulful. It’s culminated in his latest – and greatest – album, ‘Revere Reach’, which lovingly threads folk, rock, classical and mythic elements together in a compelling and timeless act of musical bridging.

There are also additional “special guests” mentioned on the bill. This could mean anything; but it’s worth speculating on location, on confirmed attendees and on similar associations including the ‘Transplant’ exhibition itself:

“Celebrating the interconnectedness between art forms emerging from the festival scene and the joy of being outdoors in nature, ‘Transplant’ brings together sculpture, image, music, poetry and living plants. Forming the heart of the exhibition, Matt Cutts’ wooden sculptures sit in ‘fields’ of wild flowers and trees. Accompanying them are huge batik paintings by Sarah Jones reflecting the beauty of trees. A soundtrack for the exhibition has been created from new music and field recordings by Sarah Jones and William D. Drake. The exhibition opens on Midsummers Eve (Tuesday 21st June) for a 6-8pm viewing, prior to the exhibition proper running from the 22nd to the 25th.”

Citing the fond connections between the world of Cardiacs and that of Salisbury is a pretty easy game. Not only have many former Cardiacs members and affiliates (the Fortnams included) ended up living around Salisbury, but the band recorded their reknowned ‘All That Glitters Is A Mare’s Nest’ concert film in the Arts Centre itself seventeen years ago. Bill Drake’s contributions to both Transplant concert and exhibition further binds the worlds together, but a closer look reveals yet more links. A long time ago (before the batiks), Sarah Jones was Sarah Smith, blowing a puckish saxophone and frail silvery backing vocals in Cardiacs. Before that, she was Sarah Cutts; born into an artistic Forest of Dean family and sister to Matthew Cutts, who himself put in a long stint as a Cardiacs roadie before returning to his sculpting work.

Sarah Jones

Whatever the main intentions, it’s clear that a nodding, benevolent Cardiacs spectre looms over the whole event, sealed by the nature-saturated green-fuse inspirations which collectively permeate the artworks of Transplant, North Sea Radio Orchestra’s pastoral heart, and the undergrowth of Cardiacs songs (with their fascination with life and damp and greenery). It could, in fact, be part of one of the ever-more regular waves of Cardiacs-related activity which ripple through English crannies and corners each year in the band’s absence, keeping alive their loving and cheerfully prickly approach to music, friendship and existence (see also the upcoming ‘Whole World Window’ benefit gig in Preston next month, which I’ll flag up again later in the summer). It may give some clues as to who else might turn up; or it might not.

However, I’ll leave any speculation there. Moving back to certainties, here are a few video clips of NSRO in the past – from their choral triumphs to their airborne or churchbound meditations – to pave the way for whatever they’ve got ready for us now.

Tags: All Angels, Arch Garrison, batik, Benjamin Britten, Brian Wright, Canterbury scene, Cardiacs, Craig Fortnam, Daisy Chute, Harry Escott, Hugh Wilkinson, James Larcombe, London (England), Luke Crookes, Matthew Cutts, multimedia, Nicola Baigent, North Sea Radio Orchestra, Robert Wyatt, Salisbury (England), Sarah Jones (Sarah Smith), sculpture, Stephen Evens, Stephen Gilchrist, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, The Forge (promoter/venue), threeandme, Tristan Horne, Will Collier, William D. Drake, Zappa-esque, Zara Tobias

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, chamber jazz, chamber music, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, classical songs, cover versions, folk baroque, folk music, folk-jazz, jazz, kosmische & Krautrock, minimalism, psychedelic folk

June 2016 – upcoming gigs – picking through BBC Music Day

29 May

The annual BBC Music Day comes up this year and this week on Friday 3rd June. It’s a generally beneficial nation-building exercise in typical BBC style, informed by magazine-style news, middle-range tastes and light entertainment. Much of what’s on is comfortably communal – plenty of light music choirs, familiar regional touches of brass and pipes.

In all fairness, there’s plenty here to like. There’s a scheme organising gentle live shows in hospitals throughout Scotland and England. There’s a focussing on church bell ringings around the country which is free of gimmick and simply lets the art speak for itself (emphasising both its national status and its localism). There’s the ‘Take It To The Bridge‘ programme, during which the nation’s bridges will be briefly overrun by symbolic musical meetings, community choirs, time-travelling orchestras and local songwriters.

There’s also a strong sense of that other nation – the one which the BBC still encourages in the face of rumbling political dissatisfaction, manipulation and discomfort. It might be a non-partisan wash of generic English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish decency which doesn’t offer much to scare the horses, doesn’t break a sweat breaking new ground, and doesn’t ultimately provide much event-by-event challenge; but it should still be applauded for at least trying to encourage common ground and (at a time when art is being squeezed out of schools) a culture of engagement with music. For the full programme – and for British readers who want to find out exactly what’s going on in their region – check the links above.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been sifting through the programme with my jaundiced, picky eye and selecting out what I feel are some of the more unusual or rewarding events dotted around the comfy musical quilt (more or less in order of occurrence), starting in the middle of another festival in Hay-on-Wye…

BBC Radio 3 Live/Hay Festival presents:
Hay Festival Guitar Jam with Morgan Szymanski
Friends Café @ Hay Festival Site, Dairy Meadows, Brecon Road, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5PJ, Wales
Friday 3rd June 2016, 9.30am

“Prior to his Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert (a collaboration with the Cremona String Quartet at 1.00pm, and already sold out) classical guitar ace Morgan Szymanski will be inviting amateur guitarists to join him for a morning guitar jam. Help create and perform a brand new piece for a hundred guitarists to be featured in the concert. Morgan will lead you through the process, whatever your level, from beginner to advanced. The event includes a special master class from Nitin Sawhney on playing the guitar.”

Unlike the walk-up nature of most of the other events listed here, a Hay Festival ticket is required for this one.

In Cambridge…

BBC Radio Cambridgeshire presents:
English Pocket Opera vs. Imperial & K.I.N.E.T.I.K
Silver Street Bridge, Silver Street, Cambridge, CB24 5LF, England
Friday 3rd June 2016, 11.30am

“English Pocket Opera will be performing on a punt through the waterways of Cambridge. As they approach Silver Street bridge the opera will be joined by a local ‘BBC Introducing’ hip-hop duo Imperial & K.I.N.E.T.I.K, on top of the bridge. Hip-hop and opera will merge to create a brand new sound.”

Christ, this one could be a car-crash in multiple senses. I mean, it’s hard enough to handle a Cambridge punt at the best of time – it’s an unhappy marriage of Newton and Zen – let alone try to synchronise it with anything else. Still, given the sunny, positive and playful nature of both sets of musicians involved (don’t expect a collision of ‘Wozzeck’ and Kanye), let’s give them the benefit of the doubt… and just to put it into perspective, I‘m an appalling puntsman and these guys know their music.

In Nottingham…

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop presents:
Afro Therapy: featuring Jourdan Pierre Blair + Ella Knight + Early Bird + Garton + D Dot + others tbc
Rough Trade Nottingham, 5 Broad Street, Nottingham, NG1 3AJ
Friday 3rd June 2016, 7.00pm

“Live music and DJs will be putting music of black origin in the spotlight. Unsigned and independent artists Ella Knight, beat maker Early Bird, and MCs Garton, D-Dot and Jourdan Pierre Blair (the last better known as Jah Digga) will represent a range of R’n’B and hip hop styles with a British stamp on global music. This free event is open to people over the age of 14.”

I’ve got to say that – for all of the community ethos being trumpeted elsewhere – this show is probably the most proactively street-level event on a day which needs to be about everyone in the country, not just people who like choirs and crumpets. (I’m not trying to bitch here; I just… noticed.) Here’s a run of video and soundclips for most of those involved.

Sheffield also deserves credit for working outside the comfy box…

Yellow Arch Studios present:
A Law Unto Ourselves: The Eccentronic Research Council (featuring Maxine Peake) + The Death Rays of Ardilla + Sieben + The Third Half
Yellow Arch Studios, 30-36 Burton Road, Neepsend, Sheffield, S3 8BX, England
Friday 3rd June 2016, 7.30pm – free event – more information

This is probably the most experimental event of the lot: an opportunistic but rewarding live spotlight on Sheffield’s unique independent music scene. There should have been more events like this dotted up and down the country – not necessarily with an experimental pop thrill, but emphasizing local current indigenous music which could only have happened in particular towns and at this particular time. All respect is due to Sheffield musicians, to the Yellow Arch venue and to curator Sophie Toes for taking the trouble to spot this challenge and rise to it.

Probably the biggest draw for A Law Unto Ourselves are the headliners – The Eccentronic Research Council, barbed and crafty exponents of their own scenic and sample-heavy “library/soundtrack, experimental, folkloric/non-populist pop”. They’ll be accompanied by their own established muse and mouthpiece – Maxine Peake (actress, declaimer, proud overturner of complacent applecarts) – and are the most questioning act across Music Day, bringing a touch of dissent, argument and the British radical tradition into its general cosiness. In support are spaced-out and (literally) brotherly garage-rock duo The Death Rays of Ardilla, Sieben (a.k.a. beater, plucker, tickler and layerer of voice and violin Matt Howden) and The Third Half (a duo who combine and alternate harp, celeste, guitar and voice in “twenty-first century neo-pastoral rare groove”).

ERC

There will also be DJ sets from representatives of some of Sheffield’s other interesting underground or experimental bands – spooky lysergic-child-song folksters Antique Doll, progtronicians I Monster, psychedelic country-and-western band The Cuckoo Clocks – plus one from Sophie Toes herself. There’s limited capacity for this show, so early arrival is recommended to avoid disappointment.

* * * * * * * *

In Bristol…

Charles Hazlewood and the British Paraorchestra
Colston Hall, Colston Street, Bristol, BS1 5AR, England
Friday 3rd June 2016, 8.00pm

“After the success of last year, the ground-breaking British Paraorchestra, the world’s first professional ensemble of disabled musicians, return to Colston Hall to perform for BBC Music Day. The group is headed up by Charles Hazlewood, a genuine pioneer and innovator in the world of classical music. In a unique show, the Paraorchestra will be joined on-stage by performers from Extraordinary Bodies, the professional integrated circus company and partnership between Cirque Bijou and Diverse City. The combined effect of The British Paraorchestra and Extraordinary Bodies playing ‘In C’ by composer Terry Riley, promises to be cathartic and uplifting. The aural equivalent to climbing inside a giant lava lamp.”

On spec, this may sound like a case of worthiness over content – but while it’s true that (despite the Riley) the Paraorchestra plays its fair share of light-ent pop transcriptions to sugar the pill, albeit in its own way – it’s also worth noting that the ensemble isn’t just about the state of bodies. The Paraorchestra also explodes a lot of ideas about how an orchestra might work, in terms of instrumentation and approach: likewise, Extraordinary Bodies has plenty of challenges and delight to offer. See below:

…and finally…

Aardman Animation/Colston Hall/Bristol Museums present:
Shaun the Sheep’s Vegetable Orchestra
Studio 2, The M Shed, Princes Wharf, Wapping Rd, Bristol BS1 4RN, England / Colston Hall, Colston Street, Bristol, BS1 5AR, England
Friday 3rd June 2016
Workshops and rehearsals at Studio 2: 10.15am, 11.15am & 12.15pm (tel: 0117 352 6600 for details)
Veg Orchestra Finale! featuring Shaun the Sheep and his Vegetable Orchestra at Colston Hall: 1.40pm

“In celebration of BBC Music Day and Aardman’s 40th anniversary, children are invited to join Shaun the Sheep and become part of his Vegetable Orchestra for a live performance at Colston Hall. (There will also be an Aardman birthday singalong and cake presentation.) There will also be pre-performance workshops at M Shed to decorate your veg instruments and learn how to play your part, all set to the ‘Shaun The Sheep’ theme tune. Workshops presented by Farmer characters & Shaun himself, it’s ‘flock ‘n’ roll’ for all ages and all set on Mossy Bottom Farm!”

Sorry. For a variety of reasons (parenthood, humour, a taste for experimentalism and a love of everything Aardman-esque) I just couldn’t bloody resist that last one… and it turns out that the foremost practitioners of the vegetable orchestral art are as cheerfully experimental and conceptual as anything else I tend to feature in here…

Tags: Aardman Animation, Antique Doll, BBC Music Day, Bristol (England), Cambridge (England), Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (event/promoter), chamber ensemble, Charles Hazlewood, Cirque Bijou, classical guitar music, Cremona String Quartet, D-Dot, Diverse City, Doctor Who, Early Bird, Ella Knight, English Pocket Opera, Extraordinary Bodies, Garton (England), Hay Festival (event), I Monster, Imperial & K.I.N.E.T.I.K, Jah Digga/Jourdan Pierre Blair, Matt Howden, Maxine Peake, Medway (England), Mexico, Morgan Szymanski, Nitin Sawhney, Nottingham (England), Shaun the Sheep, Sheffield (England), Sieben, Sophie Toes, Terry Riley, The British Paraorchestra, The Cuckoo Clocks, The Death Rays Of Ardilla, The Eccentronic Research Council, The Third Half, vegetables

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Misfit City

June 2017 – upcoming London classical/experimental gigs – Kammer Klang double event – ‘Soarings: A Salon on Else Marie Pade’ (5th June); Apartment House and Jacob Kirkegaard play Pade and Henning Christiansen, plus Vitalija Glovackyte (6th June)

May 2017 – upcoming London classical gigs – polygender opera with ‘Binary Optional’ at CPT (May 25th & 26th)

May 2017 – upcoming London gigs – I’m This I’m That play Moondog, plus Ed Dowie (19th May); Trembling Bells spinoff Alex Rex plus The Left Outsides and Plague Dogs (20th May)

May 2017 – upcoming London gigs – Beatrix Players + King Of The Opera (May 11th); Cosmo Sheldrake + A House In The Trees (May 12th)

April 2017 – upcoming gigs – performance of Tim Smith/Cardiacs pieces in Amsterdam by jazz ensemble, for free (6th)

December 2016 – upcoming gigs – ‘Staggerlee Wonders’ with Robert Mitchell, Debbie Sanders, Corey Mwamba, John Edwards, Elaine Michener, Mark Sanders and others (London, 8th); Trio Generations with Maggie Nichols/Lisa Ullén/Matilda Rolfsson (Cheltenham and London, 9th & 11th)

November 2016 – upcoming London gigs – a dash through the weekend (26th, 27th) – various adventures in international folk music, experimental music, hip hop and underground rock via Tuesdays Post, Daylight Music, Laura Cannell, Nest Collective Baba Yaga’s Hut and others…

November 2016 – upcoming gigs – Spratleys Japs recreated live in Brighton, co-starring Stephen Evens, Emily Jones and sundry Brighton psychedelic talent (19th November)

November 2016 – upcoming London jazz gigs – FuMar at Map Studio Café (17th); Laura Jurd’s Dinosaur + Daniel Herskedal Trio meet the BBC Concert Orchestra at the RFH (19th)

November/December 2016 – upcoming music theatre – sounds from Billy Bottle & The Multiple’s ‘The Other Place’ and a rundown of the other shows in the All The Right Notes multi-media music theatre festival (15th November to 3rd December)

September 2016 – upcoming London gigs – Penny Rimbaud’s musical Wilfred Owen evening at the Horse Hospital and the ‘Songs of Separation’ female folkstravaganza at King’s Place (both 9th)

July 2016 – video premiere – North Sea Radio Orchestra’s cover of Robert Wyatt’s ‘The British Road ‘

July 2016 – a pair of one-day English festivals on the 16th (EppyFest 5 in Stroud, The Whole World Window in Preston)

July 2016 – upcoming London gigs – A.R. Kane + Plastic Flowers’ dream pop evening (13th), Jausmė with Nicole Collarbone and Sian Magill in Battersea (13th); Cecil Sharp Choir’s Appalachian evening (14th)

July 2016 – upcoming and ongoing gigs – some pickings from the Frome Festival, west of England (1st-10th)

June-July 2016: two upcoming music-and-multimedia performances – Open Music Archive with Leafcutter John (London, 30th June) and Gawain Hewitt/Steve Lawson’s ‘Beneath the Waves’ (Birmingham, 3rd July)

June 2016 – upcoming London gigs – four for Saturday 18th (Glass, Matthew Bourne, Darren Morris, and The Leaf Library at Daylight Music; Tanya Tagaq soundtracks ‘Nanook of the North’ at the Forge; Rock Candy Girlz & Malcolm Bruce at MAP Studio Café; the Pussywarmers at Wilton’s)

June 2016 – upcoming gigs – North Sea Radio Orchestra play London and Salisbury (12th, 26th) with Daisy Chute and William D. Drake (and maybe some other people…)

June 2016 – upcoming gigs – picking through BBC Music Day

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