A little parable about bigotry from politically-inclined Cambridge pop brain Lizard Brain lays out the nonsense of segregation, and of Jim Crow racism. ‘If Our Eyes Were Blue’ draws heavily on the educational thought experiments of Jane Elliott, in which school classes were divided up purely on the basis of eye colour and then made to act out rules of discrimination, of social caste and of restricted association based on that distinction.
Via archive samples, Jane’s crisp voice punctuates the retro-synth-pop bounce, buzz and beat in which Lizard Brain have chosen to sheath the song; almost in duet with on/off Lizard Brain vocalist Tony Jenkins as she delivers her satirical edicts. “Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people… You blue-eyed people are not to play with the brown-eyed people at any time.” Meanwhile Tony, dreamy and gentle, provides the emotional content, the empathy which soothes the sense of outrage. “Young girl she cries, / tears crystallize… / Can’t understand / the heavy hand / “look at the things they do, / because my eyes are blue”…”
There’s never any question of where Lizard Brain’s own sympathies lie, regarding Jane and her lessons –“She can see the people we should be / and what we all should do.” This is essentially an adjunct to the original experiment, a pop reduction for a classroom singalong. It even ends with a quick sample of Jane proposing the idea of discrimination as fair to her classful of children, and with them resoundingly rejecting it. Unambiguous in its stance – a spelled-out whiteboard lesson rather than a philosophical trick-bag – this might not be exactly what you or I need as adults; but in its ethical straightforwardness it might be exactly what our kids need (assuming that they’ve not already learnt their civics, and they’re not already way ahead of us).
In contrast, ‘Pressure’ – the latest from Swedish production duo Vi. – deals with the problems in being straightforward. Housed in a softly melancholic deep house pop frame, and helmed by singer sam, it dramatizes the feelings of someone wanting to vent deep emotions but being terrified of judgement. Right from the start, it’s rooted in imminent panic (“blurry vision, voices in my mind – wish I could flow the world around me,”) and building angst ( “I got way too many hours on my own, / and I’m not that good at being all alone.”) While sam sings with the abstract tenderness of many a deep-houser, his words ripple with introversion (“searching for a sign / I never really made an effort, / falling back to square one all the time,”) and slip into a chorus like a soft-shoe landslide – “I don’t want to talk about it, it won’t work. / Can’t you see that I have tried it – it gets worse. / Gets better if I keep my feelings to myself. / I shouldn’t bother someone else. / Keep it all to myself, just talk about something else.”
The soundcrafting does what it can to capture this, too. While Vi. have shaped ‘Pressure’ to be a smooth, gently tear-jerking slice of contemporary dance pop (and while they’ve succeeded in this), small production details and club mix tricks give it an edge of subliminal hysteria. The instrumental hook is a glorious yet tissue-thin synth billow, tentatively overwhelming but pulled back. Other parts sometimes come lurching violently out of the mix only to be yanked back immediately. The effect is one of brittle poise being wrecked by rippling tells – one which breaks down into a silky middle eight of impending collapse. “Please don’t do this right now – I don’t wanna see ya. / I’ve been doing all right, / now I’m gonna leave ya – / tryna find a place where I don’t have to hide.”
All of which should lead neatly into Parnell March‘s ‘Therapy’, a rolling spread of analogue EDM in classic Germanic/post-Boards of Canada style; a serenely ecstatic micro-weir of tumbling electronic tones and melody-pulses. But while there’s a voice is there, it’s tweaked beyond recognition by vocoder into an unintelligible but comforting burble. If there’s a message, it’s muffled and medicated; sunny but slimmed; a minimal, murmuring beehive.
In the accompanying video, meanwhile, a sweet little ginger-haired lad grows gradually more disturbed by online imagery and body anxiety, seeking out the services of a series of slick but shallow counsellors before deciding to take matters into his own hands. A thin film of quizzical irony covers the bright, mundane vistas. Therapists nod along sympathetically while covertly buying stock in anti-depressants; there are cameo appearances from a Joe Rogan video and a Jordan Petersen paperback; and even after he tosses his pills down the toilet and hits the road there’s no clear conclusion as to where our boy ends up. For the moment, Parnell seems content to soundtrack the ambiguous anomie of these states of mind – the strange, shallow elations, the papery calm; the gentle manic high and the buried rumble; the vacant reverb behind the day-to-day noise.
Lizard Brain: ‘If Our Eyes Were Blue’ German Shepherd Records (no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 9th July 2021
Still rabbiting, joke-ranting and stretching his argumental monologues as if they were chewing gum stuck to his fingers, Ian Moss turns his attention to conspiracy theorising with ‘Qanon’.
Not backing them up, of course. His sense of the absurd is far too amiable, far too easily amused to inhabit those angry warrens. Instead, as 2 Lost Souls turn out a growling, churning, tooting synth-funk groove in the P-Funk tradition, Ian capers across the top like the kid’s-party clown version of Mark E. Smith, Manc-rapping sarcastically about shapeshifter lizards, melting ice-caps, Trump, moonshine and doomsday plots. “…’Ere’s armageddon, that’s a fact. / We deal in truth and won’t retract; / but the day, it gets pushed back, / falls off the edge of the earth, that is flat.”
He sounds like he’s having a laugh, at least; a cackling veteran who hasn’t let age get the better of his critical faculties, or his mither-detector. It’s sometimes a little disappointing – conspiracists seen merely as a deluded flock, worth little more than a dusting of observational comedy and an eye-roll synced with a tongue-wobble, rather than a phenomenon to be taken apart properly; but if light-hearted fun is all we’re going to get, then so be it.
It’s not as if some of the lines aren’t enjoyable in their custard-pie fashion. Maybe we should be content, for the moment, to see some of these idiots off with a bit of screw-you, laugh-at-you dancing while Ian conducts the singing with a bog-brush. “The living Agent Orange is the golden one… / Is all that I believe a con / but your wisdom I can count upon?… / Are you part of that joyless throng, / or are you going to a fancy-dress party?”
It’s arrived a little later than planned, but here’s E Rodes‘ early-July offering. Over the past year, he’s proved himself to be one of the most reliable generators of psychedelic-tinged guitar pop in Britain. ‘Isolation’ continues to build on that. Built around a ravishing fingerpicked guitar part and a decidedly country-ish rhythm as it sprints down the road, it’s sweetly disrupted by pounces of mad panning and exultant sonic smearing. It’s also got one of his most winning melodies so far; beyond the country, there’s also tinges of classic Glaswegian literary indie (Lloyd Cole, Edwyn Collins, Postcard Records) and of Prefab Sprout.
Musically, it’s delightful enough that you could just enjoy the play of sounds and ignore the lyrics, which would be a pity. Étienne’s worked out a little personal spiritual conundrum, but he wants to express it in Enlightenment terms: maths, geometry and the self. “Raise a finger, point it to the stars, / and the non-Euclidean plane of the night sky / show two lines meet always, not sometimes. / Show your working out, end it with a clear-eyed summation / so one knows it emerged in isolation. / I’ve found myself, I was right there all along, / just round the corner from a certain nowhere. / It has been years and miles / of near-misses and solitary trials in oscillations.” It’s an agile bit of wordery, smuggling its cerebral play across under the guise of tunefulness.
Call me a smartarse, call me effete, but I like it when that happens. I like it even more when that kind of cleverness merges seamlessly with emotion, with humanity; where there’s no awkward edge. That’s what Étienne manages here, skimming like a brinksman round the curb, choosing not to stay in the conundrum. “Just know it emerges in isolation. / We owe it all to chance and isolation, / orphan idioms and isolation. / And though I may have gone too far with isolation, / I’ve reasoned myself out from isolation. / So take me home.” While still keeping up that light-footed groove, the bridge falls deliberately out of time for a few measures, tossing up some turbulence, ripping some wild guitar fragments and pasting them into a swirl: a bit of welcome, manic joy to counter the reasoning.
If you feel as if you’re being cheated of a carefree summer (whether its by fires, quarantines, or just holes in your wallet), the latest Pearl & The Oysters single might feel like some kind of compensation, possibly also involving a touch of time travel. Luscious and carefree, ‘Soft Science’ is a loving contemporary cop of any number of 1970s quiet storm sprinklings (think Minnie Riperton, Stuff, even the softer Flora Purim end of Return to Forever) and space age pop.
In essence, it’s three minutes of loving tug-of-war and soft banter, dusted with Rhodes pianos, Omnichord and little psychedelic meteorites. Juliette Pearl’s restless summer-baby coaxes a boyfriend (played with gently agreeable charm by Kuo-Hung Tseng from Taiwanese synth-poppers Sunset Rollercoaster) away from his studies and out to the beach. There’s not much more to it than that. Affectionate worrying from her (in both senses of the word), and polite reluctance from him (“I really should work” / “You’ve studied all night long”… / “Love…” / “I told you I can’t.” / “The sun is hot.” / “I don’t want to know.” / “You shouldn’t stay inside.” / “I’m not nearly done”) until he packs it in. (“Well, I guess I could / close my books for now.”)
The rest is drops of sunshine, all of it welcome.
2 Lost Souls: ‘Qanon’ German Shepherd Records(no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 7th July 2021
Following up on last month’s twirling ‘Bard of a Wilderness’ single, Gabriella Smith and Gabriel Cabezas continue to bring voice, cello and found percussion items to bear on the theme of human responses to the wild spaces, and to the destruction wrought on Gabriella’s California home by last year’s wildfires. While building on the pattering jazz and classical extended-playing techniques which threaded through ‘Bard…’, ‘Lost Coast III’ also sidesteps the former’s barely-restrained murmur and its mingled mourning/accusatory wordings. Skipping across a triple-beat, it’s more of a fiery Latinized waltz heading out on an angry roadtrip – its rage barely constrained, its grief turned into a wild chattering momentum veering all over the tarmac.
This time, Gabriella ignores texts in favour of dance chanting and thermal-tossed multi-tracked vocalese. She plays against herself in what sounds like a wordless, impressionistic vocal ballet of fire-panicked neighbours chattering and arguing, sharing fears and concerns as they try to save themselves what they can. Mingling with this is a sense of boiling injustice, a fury at the fact that this is actually happening. Hands and bow beat on cello case and cans, while Gabriel’s rapid string melodies squeal, strum and chop against the rhythms (and the viola of Bedroom Community labelmate Nadia Sirota adds more midrange sinew).
Round about the halfway point, the piece erupts into a frantically hummed-and-sung chorale of overdubbed Gabriellas, the cello casting disaster drones across the voices. Towards the end, everything disintegrates into a tangled mass of cello frenzy, alarms and firebell rattles before soaring out into a finale which combines everything that’s gone before into a thrillingly twisted-up whole. The more times that you listen to this, the more it seems to reveal; as if it’s not just dealing with the impact of the 2020 fires but mining deeper into Californian history for a catalogue of misfortunes, oppressions, mismanagements and outright fuck-ups, giving voice to all of the indignations that came with them but which were brushed under the forest floor. Rousing stuff, in every sense.
The remaining two singles (this time around) are much more relaxed.
Mixing rare groove with early hip hop/boom bap, the debut Hot Mustard single ‘Jerkwater Strut’ is a bit of idealised, retro-fitted funky-sidewalk strolling. At the group’s core, Jack Powell and Nick Carusos create a Chic-ish dynamic of guitar and bass co-leadership, although the group’s rural South Carolina location (and Jack’s taste for softly melting wah-wah trickles and behind-the-beat pacing) locate it in a much lazier groove. Brooklyn’s Big Brass Beats horn duo (with their Antibalas and TV on the Radio connections) phatten it out, but with the outcome being more New Orleans and Memphis than it is Big Apple (though they do cite a little bit of Wu-Tang Clan as an addition to the mixture). I guess Charleston (a boat ride and a bump away from Hot Mustard’s Johns Island hangout) also gets a look in.
Wordless, thoughtful and quietly happy, ‘Jerkwater Strut’ is more urban than island. Yet, if so, it’s a window onto a different kind of city life in which the tourists are gone, the guests no longer need to be impressed, and an early evening can be spent on the stoop and the street at your own, relaxed pace.
We might be being softened up here, or we might be being let in on an open secret. I can’t really tell yet. That title (like a bit of ancient jazz-age mockery) and Jack’s Gilliam-esque animated video (full of fish, cryptids and marine mythology) are laden with clues which don’t ultimately lead anywhere. Eventually, it’s just sunshine, personal contentment, and the subliminal beat of the far-off city as a comfort, all subsumed into a relaxed neighbourhood vibe.
The third in a monthly progression of singles by Stockholm-based semi-ambient composer Ada Moreau, ‘My Shadow Halts’ leaves behind the gorgeous European fogginess of its predecessors. With that former chilly brume replaced by a more evanescent sonic misting, its descending temple-bell arpeggios, distant piano and even more distant mother-of-pearl synth-sheening lead it more into Asian temple haunts.
These days, there’s more of a risk involved in attempting this kind of thing. Even as ‘My Shadow Halts’ nods to the 1980s traveller’s-ambience of Harold Budd or Roedelius, it also risks summoning up the same kind of atmosphere as many a touristy New Age salute to Bhutan or Kyoto (narrowly skirting Chinoiserie and faux-Gamelan as it does so). Fortunately, despite sounds and intimations, Ada’s actual intentions are less to do with evoking place than in fixing a position of grace.
According to her, ‘My Shadow Halts’ is about “the subjective experience of time. When the light is just right, and everything seems to slow down to that moment, frozen in time. A sudden sense of a more elevated and peaceful reality. Your stress and aggression momentarily forgotten and left behind.”
With that in mind, listening reveals something better. By avoiding direct geographical or cultural tags, Ada allows the crass, picture-postcard aspects which can taint this kind of project – that collecting, spiritually acquisitive side of things – to gently drop away from the music. While still a little second-hand, the Asiatic touches become more like a thoughtful, mood-evoking temple print hung on the opposite wall, rather than a wholesale theft of scenery. As with Hot Mustard, I think Ada’s successfully blended her inspirations into something fresh enough to work. I’m also feeling that she’s narrowly dodged a genre bullet.
Gabriella Smith/Gabriel Cabezas: ‘Lost Coast III‘ Bedroom Community Records (no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 7th June 2021
“If you are lonely, I’ll be lonely too. / Find yourself a wall and I’ll hang next to you. / It won’t be easier hanging there that way / but we can be a diptych for the light of day…”
Craig Fortnam has spent two decades building a distinct style, both with North Sea Radio Orchestra (leafy, nostalgia-toned English chamber music drawing ever closer to lucid, Canterbury-esque psychedelia) and with Arch Garrison (slimmed-down duo/trio songwriting with more upfront personal concerns and a ranging freedom). It’s not surprising that his first solo material (at least, the first released under his name alone) falls close in tone to both of his previous projects. It’s also still very much a family affair, with the Garrison’s James Larcombe contributing piano and a delicately shrunken raft of other NSRO members adding strings, reeds and vibraphone.
‘Ark’ (the title track of Craig’s forthcoming album) is still redolent with dark walled-garden curlicues of NSRO bassoon and cello, gently astringent viola, bumble-bee monosynth and twinkling glockenspiel; all of it pumping away like steam-workings under the naive strum of guitar and Craig’s unaffected Wyatt-ish drone of vocal. Impacted by his loves and losses in the past few years – not least the death of his mentor Tim Smith – it’s downbeat, uneasy and self-effacing in a particular English fashion (a way that still throbs and flows on beneath current aggressive Brexit blustering). As a song, it’s in part a retreat and an admission of fear in ominous times. Craig’s never looked as vulnerable as he does in the video, fumbling around his rehearsal room, gazing anxiously through thick glasses, gently contorted around his guitar or haltingly reassembling broken-down instruments.
However, it’s also a frail but faithful statement of empathy and loyalty in times of threat – a recognition that trust can be rebuilt in the face of despondency. An unexpected coda with a new hint of furrowed darkness suggests that Craig has swapped some of those NSRO green leaves for a bag of tougher, tarter limes; but he’s shored up the delicate song-line, made strengthening bulwarks to share. “Two by two, I’ll paint the people in” sings Craig, “with all my deepest longing.” The clouds may be fat and dark, the cliffs may be crumbling, lights may be going out in the little houses everywhere; but community starts with two, and then another two.
When much of California went up in relentless wildfires last year, blotting out much of the Pacific seaboard in a broil of toxic brown smoke, it left scars – economic, geographical, psychic. Singer/composer Gabriella Smithmight live mostly in Marseille these days, but her roots are thoroughly Californian, emotionally entwined with the hiking trails through forests and over rocks in the wild places, now little more than ash and scorching. Composed on the hoof as she paced helplessly in the Bay Area, unable to stop the despoilment from the raging fires, ‘Bard of a Wasteland’ is the first part of a fierce lament over the wrecking of her countryside.
Rage pushes at the roots of Gabriella’s soft conversational soprano, beginning to unweave its politeness, swooping through its steel-guitar pitching and murmurs. Meanwhile, her collaborator (the genre-flexing New York cellist Gabriel Cabezas) makes his cello sound like – and do – everything else. Jazz swoops and purring, fretless Mediterranean bass lines of the Mick Karn kind; quivering tremolo ornaments to the vocal melodies; staccato thumps and strums; subtle screeches of desert birdcall; reedy drones and a rainfall pattering of fingertip percussion.
All of this is layered into flexing rhythmical and methodic song-loops, perhaps owing something to Arthur Russell’s cello-beat, to African cycles and Italian tarantellas, in which Gabriel explores the rub and the push of instrumental voices while Gabriella digs into root causes of neglect and responsibility, of strip-mining the future and impoverishing the present. “You left us with fire / and we let it burn / You lined your pockets with the breath of your children,” she sings. “All you leave is a wasteland / And we’re fighting to breathe on.” As music, it’s pretty thrilling, it’s rhythm teasing your ankles and hips into dancing. As a story, it’s unresolved and inconclusive: as it has to be, as Gabriella starts to piece together her own emotions, to find out what her new place is, and where she sits on the chain of responsibility (if not the roster of blame).
“Lost time. / Another lick of the tide, / another loop in a line…. / Far enough from the slaughter, / close enough to the dam, / I lost the dream of a daughter / to be the bard of a wasteland.” It’s a reminder that protection of a landscape comes with sustaining one’s own awareness of and connection to it. Gabriella is performing the start of a war dance on hers, to remind those who failed their duties that this kind of failure matters.
On ‘ABBA/Mary’, ambient-classical composer and onetime Dead Texan Christina Vantzou effects a two-on-one remix of eerie New York post-classical rebels LEYA, whose threnodic conflations of violin, harp, unusual intervals and porously melancholic male-alto vocalising have enthralled various freak-pits, noise-dens, art-porn movies and other liminal performance spaces ever since they formed. The originals sound like weeping shroud-cloths peeled off the sleeping bodies of castrati. They’re disturbingly beautiful, their lyrics indistinct and parched, and they’re also deliciously unmoored from time, from strictness of gender, from tone-temperament. ‘ABBA‘ is a meeting of undulant string fades and detuned harp; ‘Mary‘ is more slanted towards traditional balladry and baroque continuo.
The Vantzou blending produces quite a different hybrid. Swimming in on a tide of fluting, falling vocal samples, its shifting spine is built from gentle alteration to ‘Mary’s harp continuo. Of the vocals, Marilu Donovan’s wispy backings are moved more upfront and given their moment in the spotlight; while Adam Marciewicz’s alto is further detached from its blurred storytelling role, now echoing protracted yearning syllables in distant corridors. Throughout, gentle background interruptions prod and nudge LEYA’s original building blocks as Vantzou mixes in computer blips, finger cymbals and insect chirps and the kind of electronic glissandi you’d expected to hear in vintage psychedelic science fiction.
Building assertively on LEYA’s taste for detuning, Vantzou also brings regular and unsettling shifts in pitching, progressing the music from chord to subtly dissonant chord. You’re never entirely sure where you’re being led, other than down a staircase in which the steps are each of different, treacherous sizes. There is no particular ending or straightforward resolution: the component fragments fray and ghost out together, the last sigh of a spectral tape.
Craig Fortnam: ‘Ark’ Onomatopoeia Records (no catalogue number or barcode) Download-only single Released: 14th May 2021
Gabriella Smith/Gabriel Cabezas: ‘Bard of a Wasteland‘ Bedroom Community Records (no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 14th May 2021
The personal, and the political. Flip a coin next time you walk out of doors. If it falls the wrong way, imagine that at some point you’re going to be the target of some kind of abuse while you’re out there – aggressive attention, or being boxed in, or physically assaulted. Possibly murdered.
Loud Women: ‘Reclaim These Streets’
If you’re male (and if you’re taking this seriously), you’re probably feeling slightly paranoid at imagining this sort of a world. If you’re female, you don’t even need me to tell you that you’re already dealing with it – often the actuality, but always the ever-lurking fear and concern, and the rage that comes because of the way that this situation just grinds on and on forever… and of how it not only stalks the street, but seeps into the home, smothers the protest, blocks the initiative.
Spurred into action by two particular deaths, those of Blessing Olusegun and Sarah Everard (two outcroppings of this collective outrage, the first of which has highlighted the relative dismissal which the deaths of black women receive; the second how gynocidal murder can be dealt out even by those who are duty-bound to protect), a choral swarm of female musicians have come together under the umbrella of the Loud Women collective for ‘Reclaim These Streets’. In part it’s a well-deserved fund raiser for Women’s Aid. In part, it’s a righteous kick against this horrible cloud of threat and complacency.
On top of all that, as a protest song it works both in message and in form. Written by Loud Women founder Cassie Fox (of Thee Faction and I, Doris) it sits tight in the crossover pocket of punk and guitar-pop, with perhaps Deb Googe’s ferocious dragster-thrum bass as its prime component. Pounding along, fiercely and hungrily, it simultaneously finds room for a whole spectrum of female thinking, emoting, flavourings and positioning. The assured and assertive whomp of punk protest to the bruised-but-unbeaten notes of confessional; the hookiness of girl-group vigour and the whisper-to-gale push of the female chorale; the empowered party zest of women in solidarity; through to the roar of collective rallying.
As for the words, they’re forthright in their abraded, angry sketching of trepidations and injustice (“From the age of thirteen / I’ve known the fear of dark streets. / I’ve known my body’s danger / – can he hear my heart beat?.. / From the age of thirteen, / been told that it is my fault. / Blamed for male violence, / better watch where I walk… / Every woman’s got a story, / breaks silence with a whisper… / Text me you when get home; / keys between your fingers; / staying close to streetlights – / fear of shadows lingers…”). They’re equally forthright in their call for something better, something more just. “We have a right to safety / She was just walking home / Too many women share a story / You are not alone… / Daring to tell her truth / Calling to her sisters… / Till every woman’s safe from harm in her own home / Till every woman’s safe to live her truth / Till every woman’s safe to walk on every street.”
Perhaps its strongest impression, though is the coming-together – the commonality – of so many female musicians from across nearly five decades. A tranche of 1990s indie queens include Debbies Googe and Smith, Salad’s Marijne van der Vlugt and journalistic ground-breaker Ngaire Ruth; Brix Smith adds a gawky-but-gutsy rap in the middle;. latterday rock journeywomen Charley Stone and Jen Macro serve as guitar backbone. Elder voices (with lippy and lippiness) include Siobhan Fahey and that steadily-evolving, she-punk/polymath-auntie Helen McCookerybook.
As for the extended hand-to-hand patchwork of the Loud Women community choir, it contains among others MIRI, Lilith Ai, Laura Kidd (of Penfriend/She Makes War), Julie Riley, Lee Friese-Greene, Estella Adeyeri (Big Joanie) and Cassie’s I, Doris bandmate Abby Werth; plus dive-ins from assorted members of fierce female and female-slanted bands (such as Dream Nails, The Pukes, The Tuts, Desperate Journalist, Gender Chores, Slut Magic, Deux Furieuses, Berries, Muddy Summers & the Dirty Field Whores), all of them asserting and persuading together. It’s a reminder that few things are as naturally formidable – as naturally authoritative – as adjacent generations of women in full agreement, and who are forcefully letting it be known.
From material certainties to something metaphysical. In ‘Blood Moon’, Penelope Trappes imagines herself as Isis (protecting goddess of women and children, divine healer) but also as struggling against present-day burdens which have grown too heavy, too deadening. In the Agnes Haus short film which accompanies the song, a silver car pulls skittishly into a multi-story car park at night and Penelope-as-Isis (tumble-haired, teary-eyed, all too human in her distress) drags the unresponsive body of another woman across the concrete. The other woman’s face is unseen. Her leopard-print coat is snagging, her mass a dead weight.
There are flickers of power in Isis yet – she summons lightning and snow from her fingertips, and is dogged in her hauling efforts – but the film ends unresolved. Having dragged her burden all the way to the moon-shrouded docks, and with both the lifeless other body and her own wig of blonde curls now discarded on the roadway, the exhausted goddess stares angrily into the camera in a smear of kohl and sweat. Around her, the world continues, part-asleep, part-unregarding; a freight lorry cruising slowly past as if all too aware of damaged and brutalised women, and indifferent to them.
Visually, it’s all a bit didactic: besides Penelope’s goddess-role, there’s the fact that that anonymous dragged woman is eventually identified only as “societal expectations” (like something out of a mummer play for …feminism) It makes up for this with its mingled air of dread, fear, resolve and resentment as Isis shudders, pulls together strengths and repurposes fear, tries to function in the face of a massive injustice which billows between the mythic and the material. Likewise the song, which sounds as if it’s been stitched together from shreds and rags of weariness and resolve. The beats are like sparse, distant artillery; the piano sounds as if it’s been dropped from a great height before Penelope could pick a tune out of it.
Her own voice is a denatured wisp heard round a corner, delivering shadowy ambiguous lyrics. Groundings and splinterings mingle with prayers and protest and, somewhere, deep down, the shards of a mangled love song.“Centre body and guide, /show me what to do. / Serve grace with trebles eye, / turn must push on through. / I , I won’t lose. / I’ll tear up our love… Blood moon rising above… / Lover remember / repurpose fear within / along heated lines. / Can’t hear if you are fine. / I’m strong enough, / I’m strong enough…” The picture never becomes entirely clear. Perhaps it’s something which is felt over time… or in a pull-back. Too many congregating factors which rip a hole in the side of strength. Too many furious stitchings-up.
Bay Area baroque popper Spellling delivers a clearer message, somewhere between the fulsome protest of Loud Women and the abstracted one which Penelope favours, but hovering with purpose in a place of her own. You’d think you’d know what’s coming with a song called ‘Boys from School’ – either girl-group coo left as it is or flipped over to express rage at classroom and playground sexism. Spelling touches briefly on the latter (“I hate the boys at school / They never play the rules,”) but she has bigger fish to fry.
It’s not just the boy-runts who are failing her as a person. Admittedly, there’s a hint at dealing with disinterest and thwarted desire with “the body is the law and I’m only human after all / Wanted to bе the one that you need…”. But mostly it’s the whole institution that’s failing her as she drifts, purposefully, through its corridors while gradually disconnecting from its expectations and requirements. “Take me to the Lord before the boredom takes me over.” she hiss-whispers. “I am waiting on his move. I’m going under the floor. / What am I waiting for? / Floating down the hall / through all the voices, through all the walls. / Thought you could be the one to set me free.”
As a song, it’s in keeping with the genre-fluid approach that Spellling’s shown before: it’s a theatrical, near-orchestral shape-changer incorporating gusts of New Orleans funeral jazz, Kate Bush keenings, blended-in Chinese motifs, glam-prog riffs and chilly synthpop flourishes while always keeping to the pace and poise of trip hop soul. As a manifesto, it’s playful but forceful – an out-and-out rejection of being shaped, not just from the outside but also by pressures coming from the inside. “Tomorrow I turn sixteen years and I don’t want to grow older” sings Spellling, a black Pippi Longstocking; turning a retreat, rejection and revolt against adult expectation into a biting political resistance, ‘Tin Drum’-style. She’s called this a “step back into my younger self, my teenage self to voice my angst, desires and disillusionments,” and she’s taking this all the way, unfinished edges and all.
There’s ambiguity here, for certain, but she wields it with deliberate intent. “Shut out the sun until I’m small again,” she demands, embracing the need for aloneness and self-reliance. “I’m way too tired to climb out of bed. / Four walls is all I need of friends.” Yet there’s also no self-pity here, and she’s always completely clear and centred. “I’m meaner than you think, and I’m not afraid of how lonely it’s going to be./ If I change my mind I’ll go walking outside, / just to see how the law is in place still.” Blending ambitious art-pop with a dose of that original black-girl wokeness, it’s a prologue to further choice and action; a kind of witchy taking-stock. It’s very rewarding.
Loud Women: ‘Reclaim These Streets’ Loud Women(no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 14th May 2021
Backed by cloudy saxophone and slow-jam beat, Dope Sagittarius – a.k.a. Luqman Brown and various New York cohorts – are meditating on meaning and commitment. Their previous fistful of punky Afro/electro/funk numbers hasn’t been noted for its love songs; and while ‘Define Love’ might indeed be a love jam, and an unexpected one, it’s also a subtly introverted one, a song of return and re-evaluation, a big change of course. Luqman himself was temporarily felled by a stroke in between recording this and bringing it to the world, and had to spend a year learning how to walk, talk and live again. That might not have anything to do with how the song came about, but it has a heck of lot to do with how we frame it now.
Timing provides a chance to make changes, and plenty about ‘Define Love’ places it as a way of adjusting matters of the heart, of focus. “How to define love? that moment? that flame?” muses Luqman, while making it clear (via plenty of gospel confessional) that defining it in the past was an unmet challenge. “I made many mistakes and done so many wrongs. / I beg you’ll forgive me for my ignorant shortfalls / and now I’m living anew, conscious of what came before. / Girl, I’m coming to you again, trying to stand tall.”) Classic prodigal smoochery aside, this is mostly about righteousness, doing the right thing, being courageous. “It seems I stealed away to safer harbours and safer lands. / Love is treacherous, so dangerous, unfair – / so ride with caution and try to play fair.”
The video revels in sinous jazz chiaruscuro; the song itself simmers delicately but decisively in a deep vat of sophisticated New York black broth, drawing not just on jazz and soul but also on the musculature of the Black Rock Collective and on Afro-American classical (the last via saxophonist Mica Gaugh). It peaks with a pealing, meditative slowhand solo from fusion guitar giant Ronny Drayton, a gift from his last years before lymphoma took him from us in 2020. As with so much black pop, there’s more than just the surface meaning here, and this is coming at us during a time when we’ve all been sorely tested by pandemic and bereavement; by questions about how we conduct our lives, unthinking, unquestioning, maybe unproductive and full of worthless, passive choices. Live and contribute while you can.
Makandi’s ‘Dum Dum’ lives very much for the moment, and its sincerity is of a much more clipped, matter-of-fact kind. Musically, this is deep house with a riffling blue-seas tropicalia tinge; fluttering synth melodies like inquisitive hummingbirds; a relaxed cool-mood/wise-child female vocal.
A flicker of lyric lets us know what’s going on. This is about a no-strings hook-up as natural as an incoming tide; a gentle warning-off; a temporary joining. She comes like a glamorous thief in the night. A hand softly, sensuously scratches your back. You collude without questioning. You gain from it.
Some of the fans tuning in to King Crimson’s 1981 resurrection had their cages thoroughly rattled to hear that the new, leaner version of the former grand English prog giants appeared to have gone urban New York and funky. There always was more than a touch of go-go dancing to ‘Elephant Talk’; its effervescent minimalist cyclings and Adrian Belew’s post-Talking Heads yelp given some more meat and waggle by Tony Levin’s monstrous itchy-rubbery Stick basslines. Forty years later, this BassLord cover (all layered bass guitars bar the drum track and voice) allows a fresh group of people to rediscover ‘Elephant Talk’ without the baggage.
As much YouTube video joker as he is virtuoso, Basslord waggles and glares at us, and lectures us like a neurotic affronted shock jock. Cameos from Ganesh, newscaster and op-ed loudmouths set against swirling squadrons of busily working hands, third eyes, skimpy shorts and a pair of giant tropical hardwood earrings prove that we’re in a different, fruitier and more indulgent world from the clipped post-punk era into which Belew and co. first brought the song; although BassLord’s linking of Belew’s whimsical yap about rhetoric and word babble to the current world of online news fakery, video hucksters and rabid opinionators reminds us of the turbulence and aggression that’s barely even hiding beneath the window-dressing.
Otherwise, it’s pretty true to the original version… and why shouldn’t it be? Those exorbitant multi-stopped bass riffs (simultaneously galumphingly funky and faux-prissy) are ageless and compelling, a grand applecart-kicking romp both then and now. Enjoy.
Dope Sagittarius: ‘Define Love’ Buddhabug Records (no catalogue number) Download/streaming single Released: 19th March 2021
Staring boldly out of a welter of digital rotoscoping, Yeslah is a virtual aidoru with teeth – a fierce-girl pop star as a living cartoon, a self-declared “animated rap-bitch queen, hell-bent on summoning the return of the female power, and to every female her power”. Just how much of this is really sensual ghost-in-the-machine and how much of it is just a particularly dedicated image filter is up for questioning (well, not so much, really); but ‘Trancefixion’ is a terrifically assured blend of assertion and body-positive narcissism. Literally a wake-up-in-the-morning-and-masturbate-over-how-great-you-are disco pumper.
There’s more to it than that. Bounding through a massive confection of four-on-the-floor beats, porny come-ons, bustling synth-soul brass, winddowns and speed-ups, Yeslah grabs as much as she can in terms of image control and self-summoned goddess frenzy (“I get decked out and I hit the streets. / Nowhere to go but I like to be seen. / I’ve got glitter in my eyes and my fish-net tights, / period blood dripping down my thigh,”) while simultaneously embracing what seems to be a full-on identity meltdown (“I wake up and I don’t belong / I look in the mirror like there’s something wrong / There’s someone smiling from behind my face / I see stars when I masturbate.. / I’m a princess trapped in a video game / I might be a hologram but I’m no slave… / Boys and girls inside a machine, / I start to see the cameras, they can’t see me.”).
Nothing’s in conflict, though. Everything’s rapped with the same level of slinky, sexual assurance. Yeslah spits (no holds barred) about pussy power and being “older than love”; is equally cheerful and arrogant about her bi-appeal; goes cross-eyed, disassociative and Baudrillardian about her fluctuating image and her virtual presence. Other women have been here before – Nikki Minaj, Madonna, Peaches and Megan Thee Stallion to name a few – but I don’t think anyone’s flung themselves quite as gleefully into the maskwork as Yeslah has. “In dreams I am always appearer,’ she raps, during the breakdown. “Reflected, my body is clearer.” Clarity in confusion. The extended mix offers extra crystallinity – not New Age chimes and twinkles, but more like some club nutter playing serious maracca-shake with a giant pair of chandeliers. It’s all about the subtlety here.
Following this blast of hyper-pop, ‘Messages’ is more down-to-earth: New York singer Lachi teaming up with London DJ/producer/songwriter Treasure Gnomes following a bit of mutual bonding over aggrieved texts and voicemails sent to exes, or to gonna-be exes – “you got me on that hang-up, call-back, sayin’ things that nobody ought to hear.” While ‘Trancefixion’ takes everything (from musical changes to violently altered perspectives) in its lubricious stride, ‘Messages’ hops from mood to mood, accelerates, blows up; follows the dynamics of a building monologue when what were once sad love-diary notes and held-in thoughts become full-on outcries.
Lachi is magnificent throughout – starting off soft and buzzing, (“I saw you talking with your friends and I wonder do you ever mention me? / But what could you really know? / when you don’t take the time to pay attention, though?”) rising through broken R&B rhythms and gut-grunts (both skeptical or wounded), and through swelling protest to full-diva wail with nary a moment that she isn’t controlling and shaping what she has to say, even as the surges and counter-emotions play with her. Treasure Gnomes backs it up with beats switching from sparse and breezy to machine-gun dance bursts, and with malleable synth-strokes like cartoon whale-song, while Lachi tumbles and rebounds from feeling to feeling. “I see the way that you glance at me, but I don’t mean shit on the gram to you,” she accuses, before making confessions about sleepless nights and haunted lovesick meals alone.
With today’s power plays, entitlements and manipulations being so easily spotted, so easily buried under public scorn, it’s a tougher job to make obsession seem dignified. ‘Messages’ manages it, though; never sullying itself with whines or vindictiveness even as its fever mounts. “I’m aware that it’s crazy – I need you to hear me,” Lachi sings at one point, confessing and asserting. Later, during a musical lull, she’ll reveal “I’m no longer up at all hours, I’m finding my energy.” One chorus later, she’ll be back at the love-call; but although she’s currently stuck, there are signs that she won’t be stuck permanently. They’re there to be picked up. It’s in the tone. At some point soon, those message are going to stop, and they’ll be missed.
On ‘Forbidden Moments’, the spare, moody, ominous pop of Dutch duo GMTA plays us out by etching a picture of illicit mutual fascination: the pull of temptation and seduction where it isn’t allowed. A drum machine beat like a watching camera, slightly out-of-sync with what it’s supposed to be watching. Dark-toned electric piano and the drag of bass. And the voice, mournfully romantic but stony with constrained intent… “Forbidden moments with your hungry eyes. / Secretly moving my hands on your thighs – / Mind says stop, but lips contradicting… / Forbidden moments, share what’s not mine, / the feeling of guilt and tears in your eyes. / Heart wants love, but body’s conflicting.”
A different kind of horny, then. A different kind of romance. Caught under the gaze of guilt and God (if not a jealous spouse) and the clench of northern European propriety. The strain is there – just there – in the grain of the voice. Like many a tragic crooner before him, he’s enjoying the ache, but he’s masking it with a studied cool.
Or is he? It’s cracking. He bursts out with “but don’t you feel that we could be something else? / and don’t you think that we should be somewhere else? / and don’t you feel like we should be running / and we should be hiding away?” There’s not a change in the sustained forebodingness of the music behind him. It runs on. It fades out. No answer, just a heavy question, finally raised. “We are something of each other – / there are only lines to cross…” Out of shot, decisions will be made.
Yeslah: ‘Trancefixion’ self-released (no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 9th October 2020
You can tease The Mission all you like, but you can’t deny that they’ve got heart… not least because Wayne Hussey is usually waving it at you on the end of a long stick. Even during their full booze’n’powders youthful phase, they had an avuncular, endearing air about them, partly due to Wayne’s effusive need to be loved. Over thirty years later, they’re able to settle into the role more comfortably.
Even though ‘TOS2020’ isn’t quite The Mission in itself – it’s performed by Wayne with a small army of friends and allies under the ReMission International banner – it’s pretty much Mish at heart. Tower of Strength was always the key Mission tune, and it stays timeless when it’s building on its key elements: that elegant spidery twelve-string guitar riff (like a slithering slow jig midway-morphed into a belly dance); that knee-patter of a drum pattern; and, finally, Wayne’s voice (showing less of the cavernous keen of old and more of the intimate warmth underneath it). Drawing on mystic Mediterranean drone, its distant kissing-cousin relationship to Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir, and presumably Wayne’s childhood memories of old Mormon hymns, it’s a spirit-lifter; an admission of weakness, an expression of gratitude, an affirmation of faith.
This particular version is a covid/healthcare fundraiser for frontline workers, with its profits to be spread globally across a wealth of charities. The array of contributors include longtime Hussey boon companions Billy Duffy, Miles Hunt and Julianne Regan (the latter slipping smoothly back into her old Queen Eve role), plus assorted characters from Gene Loves Jezebel, including the long-estranged Aston brothers. Other Goth-tinged old-schoolers contributing are Kirk Brandon, Bauhaus’ Kevin Haskins, ex-Banshees/Creatures drummer Budgie, Lol Tolhurst, Martin Gore and Gary Numan. Also on board are Midge Ure, metal/fusioneer Steve Clarke, Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, Guns N’ Roses guitarists Robin Finck and Richard Fortus (the latter reworking the faux-Hindi string parts), Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and (representing the neo-dark side of things) both Evi Vine and James Alexander Graham of noise-folkers The Twilight Sad. Various packages include a tribal-Goth remix by Albie Mischenzingerze and a lullaby- synthwave one by Trentemøller.
Most all-star collaborations lumber along like a tired old tailback, and you’d expect this one to be the same. Instead, it manages to coast like a streamlined train; a persistent smooth swap-over of duties from voice to voice, guitar to guitar, kit to kit. In its middle age, Tower of Strength seems to have evolved from an individual prayer into a communal round, from lighter anthem to campfire hymnal. The Mission always wanted to be luminous in the darkness. Despite the Goth-y star cast, there’s less glitz in the glow this time around, and it’s all the better for it.
Derw: ‘Ble Cei Di Ddod I Lawr’
Having opened up with the expansive piano pop of ‘Dau Gam’ during early summer, Welsh-language chamber poppers Derw are rapidly going from strength to strength. There was a dash of Celtic soul and sophisti-pop to ‘Dau Gam’; they’ve kept all of that for ‘Ble Cei Di Ddod I Lawr’, but have incorporated it into an ornate slow-building confection which suggests a Cymrification of various sources including Clannad, Queen and Brian Wilson, with both a contemporary pop dusting and a hook into the past.
Derw’s particular dynamic remains the creative triangle comprising the songwriting partnership between Daffyd Dawson and his mother Anna Georgina, and Daffyd’s overlapping musical and performance partnership with singer Elin Fouladi: two different definitions of family which seem to have combined into a larger one. The Welsh title for the new single translates into English as ‘Where Did You Come Down’; the core concept is apparently Welsh hiraeth, or nostalgic homesickness.
Combining with Elin’s own part-Iranian roots, a sense of place pervades the song: more particularly, a sense of place adrift. Elin’s clear, fresh voice zigzags over rolling piano landscapes, a powerful melody skylarking its own way over plenty of places to land but always restless, as if looking for a new locale in which to renew old feelings and to build anew. Stuck in my limited Anglophone world, I’m probably overcompensating, trying to make up for missing out on the Welsh lyric which unfurls alongside the music; but you don’t have to know the Welsh to catch the mood. This is potent stuff; if it’s Celtic soul, it’s of a new, post-insular, hybrid-futured kind, and it’s very welcome.
The Forever Now: ‘Reciprocals’
Mutuality is on the mind of The Forever Now, right now. It’s a little unclear as to where and what they are. Known as Winchester up until last year, previously associated with Toronto but now based across the icy seas in Copenhagen, they’re a duo who seem to be a little reluctant to be a duo. If you take The Forever Now as a solo act, then it’s Monty de Luna; Lauren Austin, however, is the “frequent collaborator” who seems to be something of a fixture and stands to the fore on the cover art. Musically speaking, it’s all a bit friends-with-benefits.
This is probably a bit misleading; but these kind of thoughts are provoked when a song like ‘Reciprocals’ surfaces. With a ruminating electric piano ballad at its core, it’s also a duet with no solo spots (Monty and Lauren sing in strict unison and harmony throughout). Contemporary pop choruses come at us in a rush of synthy planetarium twinkle; but the verses drop, line by line, into bitten-off spaces graced by click and patter, tinkles and rattle-rushes. Monty admits, straight out, that it’s “an honest and naked statement about the end of a relationship” as well as “a metaphor for broader statements about the world”. With his group in flux geographically, nominally and practically, it’s difficult not to read the song as a musing on changing terrain of all kinds.
If you’re looking for direct answers in the lyrics, there’s enough here to suggest a rationale for an honest break – “If we’re honest, I’ve been here before. / If we’re honest, I can’t see a way forward. / If we’re honest it’s not worth the fuss, / and if we’re being honest, you know I never wanted this much.” But it’s also about wordplay; masking full disclosure with abstractions and constructions, and (as Monty points out elsewhere) blurring the language of love with those of analytical equations. “So if you’ve got the time, then its time we go, / and if you’ve got the lines, then it’s time we draw them. / Because in another life I’d never let you go, / but I’ve been spending mine on reciprocals, on reciprocals.”
You don’t need to know or think about any of this, of course, and you might be more comfortable not knowing.
ReMission International: ‘TOS2020’ SPV, SPV 243541 LP/SPV 243542 CD-EP/SPV 24354D (no barcode)
Vinyl/CD/download single
Released: 28th August 2020 Get it from: buy/download from ReMission International store or Beauty in Chaos store; stream via YouTube The Mission online:
Derw: ‘Ble Cei Di Ddod I Lawr’ CEG Records (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 28th August 2020 Get it from: download from Amazon Music; stream via Soundcloud or Spotify Derw online:
The Forever Now: ‘Reciprocals’
Symphonic Distribution (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 28th August 2020 Get it from: download from Bandcamp; stream via Soundcloud, Deezer, Google Play or Spotify. This is also the lead track from the ‘Reciprocals’ EP. The Forever Now online:
Driven by the realities of covid isolation and a shortage of live and external inspirations, a couple of new solo standalone pieces by Colin Edwin explore various aspects of fretless bass guitar, percussion programming and sound design. He’s calling them “limited elements” tracks: limited initially by time, place and opportunity and later by choices, although in themselves they’re rich-sounding enough to gainsay the name.
If the ear hints are correct, ‘First Point of Origin’ starts in a sort of shunting yard before heading off somewhere Can-nish, though Colin claims Neu! as a more accurate accidental reference point for a piece made via “heavy use of bass guitar fed through a delay pedal, drones courtesy of SuperEgo and Ebow, and driven by minimalistic “You must play monotonous!”-type rhythmic backing augmented by sliced and processed pieces of the underlying drone.” Either way, the drive forward ends up in a kind of enjoyably dour Krautrock disco space, some of Colin’s basslines wah-ed up into clavinet-style perks.
Colin Edwin: ‘Second Point of Origin’
If ‘Second Point of Origin’ has a key marker, it’s probably the relentless space rock throb of Hawkwind rather than Neu!. However, that’ll be a Hawkwind stripped down to delay-darkened dub bass and a menacing, grinding ambient purr. There’s also touch of the Blue Mondays to the building kick drum (not that trademark jammed-key stutter, more the build itself). As the track goes on, there’s more of a shift from bass sounds to drum sounds; not a replacement as such, but more an altering of priorities, a shift of emphasis.
Colin calls it “an exploration of inner space conceived whilst outer space was completely inaccessible.” There’s certainly something in that. Echoes bounce around a murky tank; the drone is like a searchlight illuminating nothing; the percussion passing though like a continually-altering blind signal. As the percussion and blocky pulses take over, the bass guitar itself is freed up to do lethargic, lazy marine arcs through the piece’s volume, a whale exercising slow-motion loops.
The abiding impression which Bloom’s Taxonomy‘s ‘Mount Bromo’ leaves is one of a serene, near ecstatic happiness. The forthcoming Bloom’s album is called ‘Foley Age’, suggesting a trip around field recordings and sound-creating objects. There’s certainly one in ‘Mount Bromo’ – an Indonesian gamelan, which provides the track with its playout sound (as an undoctored field recording, complete with conversation, children and engineer indiscretions); and also, via sampling, rings out the riff that cascades through the main section like a spiritual ice-cream truck.
The man behind Bloom’s Taxonomy, W.B Fraser, usually uses the project to explore urban desolation and science fiction pessimism. For this track, though, he seems to have embraced something more outrightly positive, bouncing it across a bed of unhurried breakbeats and a slow-tide swell of string synths.
‘United Nations Bicycle Parking’ is a little closer to standard Bloom’s practise. A little chillier and ambient in its electronica sway, its bass and beats virtually subliminal under its sky-buzz, its orchestrated sirens, its swerves of crowd-chatter. It has the pitch of a great city, one not defined by any imperial form but by the life that swirls through it, and by its optimism. At times this tune is up amongst the heights of the skyscrapers; at others, it’s dipping into the street markets. It sounds hopeful, it sounds accepting. It sounds as if Mr Fraser’s broadening his horizons in more ways than one.
Colin Edwin: ‘First Point of Origin’
self-released (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 6th August 2020 Get it from:Bandcamp Colin Edwin online:
Colin Edwin: ‘Second Point of Origin’
self-released (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 31st July 2020 Get it from:Bandcamp Colin Edwin online:
Bloom’s Taxonomy: ‘Mount Bromo/United Nations Bicycle Parking’
self-released (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 31st July 2020 Get it from: download via Bandcamp or Amazon Music; stream via Soundcloud or Spotify Bloom’s Taxonomy online:
From the land of drifting day-jobs and lo-fi song nights, Nottingham’s Jack Peachey, a.k.a. Gallery 47, moves into his second decade of music. As ever, he sounds like a slacker Jon Anderson; one who never left the shared flats and scruffy bedrooms, nor left the airy space of ’60s pop: there’s the high birdy voice, the elevated melodies, the melancholia that only faintly tinges the carefree tunes (cloud shadow on a fine afternoon). His drowsy electric folk-pop is fragile without being brittle or vulnerable: he’s a blade of grass in the breeze, capable of bending in the unwelcome currents.
Look a bit deeper, though, and there’s existential horror, treated with a feather-light touch, belying the Andersonian falsetto with a touch of Elliott Smith. Even more, perhaps, a shade of Love’s ‘Forever Changes’, in which everything under the sun also has an ominous shadow. Launching from a tabla zing but immediately settling for drums which flap and billow like a pair of antique flares, ‘I Wish I Was’ shows Jack gently adrift in a world of options, finding in each of them a nearing ghost of entrapment. “Did you know you can search for conditions online? / Read a graph of relative norms and real lives? / How close or far you are from the day you’re gonna die?” The gentle disappointments mass, almost imperceptibly, into a pall, neither family nor travel a solution, with escape into a spliff the only temporary remedy. “See, the jail we’re going to has no get-out card at all…” Throughout, though, the shrug is a gentle-spirited one. Jack doesn’t rail or sulk about things, just gently regrets them and lets them slip over him.
Wugo: ‘Océan’
‘I Wish I Was’ is about helplessness settling around you like the flapping wings of a friendly pterodactyl. ‘Océan’, the latest song from French bedroom-popster Wugo, is apparently about “a sea change in people, a hope of a collective conscience to set things right.” It’s in his native French, so I can’t quote him directly. Translated, though, it’s a sighed state-of-the-world lament for a literal and figurative sea that’s been polluted by human short-sightedness and greed.
Wugo’s not slow to lay the blame, but he’s not quick to stagnate in despair either, travelling backwards in memory to honour how things once were, hoping that things will be in a better state in future decades, gently dropping a simple ultimatum. To catch the feeling for how it is, bask in the music: powder-blue puffs of synth and wriggly electronic lines like a kite-tail in the sky. Chillout minus the complacency.
The Powdered Earth: ‘Blossom’
With their third single (after the curtain-raising instrumental of ‘The Atlantic‘ and the illustrative folk testimony of ‘Hold Your Breath‘), The Powdered Earth feel as if they’ve found their centre with ‘Blossom’. Neither of them men in the first flush of youth, they’re well aware that not all lives end in crashes or operatics: that some longer lives will fade delicately instead, like old watercolours.
While instrumental half George Moorey provides misty piano, gently lagging guitar and a touch of synth cello, vocalist Shane Young comes to the fore with a gently narrated observation of an ageing widower’s rituals as he gathers tree and hedge flowers for his empty house; male and meticulous, understated but kindly. If you’re looking for it, there are parallels with Wugo’s chillout in the overlaying of memory with the present (“he chuckles into space / at her disapproving face / as he takes the crystal glassware from its ornamental case. / Along the window sills, / beside dispenser packs of pills, / are the fragrance bottles salvaged from the sale. / She would joke his perfume was brown ale…” ), plus the overlapping of times and promises altered. What’s different is the matter-of-factness about the protracted aftermath of someone’s death, its quietus and continuance: “he ties each sandwich bag / with a disused Christmas tag / and documents the scent with studious care. / Then he shuffles round the house / that he once shared with his spouse / and he fills up every piece of crystalware.”).
The spoken poetry is deliberately workmanlike, relying on its sober intimations rather than on over-flowering, and it’s all the more effective for that. Last time around, I mentioned Arab Strap as an unlikely comparison; if Moffat and Middleton stood as witnesses and recounters to dirty realism and damn well made you care about it, Moorey and Young could be said to be doing the same thing for a more genteel and understated strand of realism. You could picture the lyric being spelled out on a bereavement card, or a silver-surfer web meme, but that doesn’t take anything away from its understated compassion. “So precious quick the petals start to brown – / once more into the fields in dressing gown…” Logging the quiet and unspectacular dignity of carrying on. Someone needs to do it.
Wugo: ‘Océan’ Echo Orange (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 24th February 2020 Get it from: download from Amazon Music; stream via Deezer, YouTube, Spotify Wugo online:
The Powdered Earth: ‘Blossom’
self-released (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 28th February 2020 Get it from: now part of the ‘Singles’ EP on Bandcamp The Powdered Earth online:
The last few tickets are selling out for the return of Byron Wallen’s audacious gamelan reinvention of Boards Of Canada’s ‘Music Has The Right To Children‘, playing in Bristol and London next weekend (following its London debut a couple of years ago). Quick repro of the blurb here:
“Having previously sold out two nights at London’s famous venue the Jazz Cafe, Byron Wallen comes to EartH, Hackney and Bristol’s Thekla for two incredible shows in January. His fantastic show pays homage to Boards of Canada’s seminal album ‘Music Has The Right To Children‘ working with his rarely used Gayan Gamelan Ensemble for a truly unique night.
‘Music Has The Right To Children‘ is the debut studio album by Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada. It was released on 20 April 1998 in the United Kingdom by Warp and Skam Records and in the United States by Matador Records. The album stands as the Scottish duo’s magnum opus, made all the impressive by the fact that it was their debut record. An adult meditation on childhood, concerned with play, naïveté and nostalgia, all tinted with rosy pastoralism, the sensitivity of the compositions marry beautifully with Byron’s orchestration of the gamelan sound.”
The band is Byron Wallen (trumpet and conches), keyboard player Chris Jerome, bass player Paul Michael and drummer David Dyson, with the Gayan Gamelan Ensemble made up of Freddie Abel Parish (saron, trumpet), Wilf Diamond (gongs, trombone), James Wade-Sired (saron demung, peking, trombone), Thomas Morley (bonang barung, keyboards) and Tara Jerome (bonang panerus, keyboards). Here’s Byron talking about the project, and a snippet of last year’s Gayan Kraftwerk project.
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On a more purist electronica tip, there’s an evening of post-classical beat-and-synthery a few days later in London, when a couple of acts on the Denovali label come out and do their thing.
Thomas Bücker, a.k.a Bersarin Quartett has been at work for a decade now on an evolving body of music from the gushing, overwhelming haunted-rehearsal-room ambience of his debut album, the graceful space-capsule visions of the follow-up and the melancholic minimal sheen of the third effort. While Bersarin music has all of the soundtrackery smoothness of its genre, there’s a yearning side to this which cuts through the drawbacks of slickness. The project’s newest album, ‘Methoden Und Maschinen’, sometimes refines this and sometimes slips deeper into aspects of post-rock guitar gutturality and Tangerine Dream sequencer dreams.
In support, former Old Apparatus member LTO showcases his own new “Déjà Rêvé“ album focussing on an “abstracted sense of time and place” via busy floating piano patterns, room booms, vaporous keyboard pads and passing comment from cirrus guitars and mournfully reverberant brass hangings. It sounds as if the world of post-ery has gone so far round it’s colliding with early Mike Oldfield albums again. No bad thing.
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Dates:
Soundcrash presents:
Boards of Canada’s ‘Music Has The Right To Children‘ played by Byron Wallen’s Gayan Gamelan Ensemble
Thekla, Floating Harbour, The Grove, Bristol, BS1 4RB, England – Friday 17th January 2020, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Bersarin Quartett + LTO The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Tuesday 21st January 2020, 5.00pm – information here, here and here
If you missed Holly Penfield’s London launch gig for her ‘Tree Woman’ album back at Halloween last year – or if you attended and wanted to see it again – then she’s looping back on herself and staging another one at the 100 Club on 8th March. For those unfamiliar with her, here’s what I wrote (indeed, here’s what I recycled) last time.
“Raised in San Francisco (and a veteran of the 1980s LA pop scene with the scars to prove it) Holly spent much of the ‘90s writing and performing the psychodramatic one-woman pop show ‘Fragile Human Monster’ in London and elsewhere. A show with such troubled and intense undercurrents that it eventually blew itself apart, it’s now spawned a return… but under very different circumstances. The whirling mirror-glass synths and saxophones of the old days have been replaced by a gritty post-Americana rock band (which growls, gnaws and struts through her songs like a Cash or Waits ensemble) while Holly herself has mostly forsaken standing behind a keyboard (except for when a grand piano ballad calls for that set of skills).
“It’s funny, sad, uplifting and stirring all at once. Once the very embodiment of storm-tossed waif and precarious survivor, Holly’s now a wiser and much happier woman. She still absolutely owns the stage, though, helping herself to a big dollop of the jazz and blues flavourings which shaped her initial development, playing a dash of ukulele and engaging in some zestful shimmying (and some delightfully ludicrous party outfits, worn with wit and flair – it seems as if her recent steps away from cabaret involved at least one sly step back).
“What hasn’t changed is the quality of her singing, and of her songs. While old FHM standards like Misfit, The Last Enemy, puddle-of-grief ballad Stay With Me, and slinking fingersnapper You Can’t Have The Beauty Without The Beast have shed skins and made the transition to the new show, Holly’s also been dipping into a trunk of neglected and mostly previously unheard work, including the tremendous state-of-the-world song Confessions (based around a lyrical hook she once dangled in front of an intrigued Joni Mitchell) and the vivacious Tree Woman (a more recent effort in which she vigorously embraces both her own ageing and the resilience that comes with it).”
If you can’t wait until March, Holly and her multi-instrumentalist husband Ian Ritchie (the latter an ex-Deaf School member recently fresh off playing sax on the Roger Waters tour) will be playing another London gig this coming Friday, up at the Fiddler’s Elbow. This one will be an “experimental thirty-minute duo gig of originals with vintage ‘80s drum machine… interesting, quirky,and challenging!”
Although Holly and Ian are going out under their Cricklewood Cats moniker (under which they’ve previously released a few synth-jazz swing songs), theirs has been a long and varied partnership also encompassing cabaret, out-and-out jazz balladry, noisy rock diva songs and the bewitching sequencer-torch-pop of the ‘Parts Of My Privacy’ album. So you could expect takes on all of the above and more, including some of Holly’s newer songs. At the moment she’s on a serious creative upswing, and there’s rarely been a better time to see her than now.
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On the following Monday, the reunited and reinvigorated Kenny Process Team launch their own new album, ‘Travlin’ Light With… Kenny Process Team’. Actually, it’s an old one, recorded as a live session over twenty years ago with the band’s 1998 lineup but lost in the abstracted shuffle of the band’s history, which has seen members swap out, disappear, impale themselves on fences and even join Oasis.
Part avant-surf, part Afro-prog and compared in their time to both The Ventures and Captain Beefheart (while proggies will also find parallels with Television and The League of Gentlemen), there’s more on the Kenny Process back story here. In the present, with the addition of Rhodri Marsden as new guitarist (replacing the late Simon King) and thanks to his existing connections with Lost Crowns and Prescott, they’re further cementing their links with London’s current crop of art/prog/psych/cellularists.
Also playing is KPT labelmate Keith John Adams. Once Rhodri’s bandmate in zestful 1990s avant-skifflers Zuno Men, for twenty years now Keith has been a solo act coming at acoustic pop from a gently skewed angle, buffeting around friendly lyrical ideas like a sozzled housefly bumping against a lampshade and turning out understated little song-gems as he does so. His accidental forebears might include Robyn Hitchcock, Kevin Ayers; you might also pretend that he’d been dreamed up from some lazy Walthamstow afternoon when Leon Redbone shared a sofa with the young Bill Oddie.
Opening the evening is The Happy Couple, the languid instrumental duo formed by Kenny Process drummer Dave Ross and his life partner Judith Goodman, born out of two decades of inseparable love mingling with the inspiration of the Epping Forest woodscapes where they live. Judith plays a variety of open-tuned guitars, predominantly a Weissenborn acoustic slide guitar but also a 4-string tenor and a 3-string cigar box model (plus a mysterious “early English” example which suggests a rewriting of instrumental history). Leaving his drumkit behind, Dave plays a variety of mouth-held lamellophones: a classic American jaw harp, Indian morchangs in both brass and iron, a Norwegian Munnharpe and a mouth bow harp created in Devon. As for the music, it’s a relaxed evocation of companionship, glissando and boing and intersecting rhythms: or, as Judith comments, “it’s about the sounds that happen when we put our sounds together. We just create a world we want to be in.”
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The following Saturday, British/Serbian electronic folk project Arhai slip into the little cellar at the Harrison to deliver their own electro-acoustic atmospheres. A two-decade-long project led by singer/composer Jovana Backovic, they were a traditional Serbian acoustic octet for their first ten years, gradually shifting into electric terrain before dissolving and allowing Jovana to form the current duo with British multi-instrumental specialist Adrian Lever (mediaeval dulcimer, hammered dulcimer, guitar, tambura, Bulgarian lute etc). Now they’re Balkan-cum-Gaelic, intertwining ancient and technological: or, as they put it “rethinking the archetypal modes of music performance in the context of modernity”. Which sometimes means they’re ultra-accessible and synth-quilty in the familiar Clannad model, and sometimes means that they’re off and racing like a cross between izvorna and a hyperspatial hip hop track.
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All of the above events will be in London: for the next one, you’ll need to head up to Manchester, where singer, songwriter and electronic pop creator Ben McGarvey, a.k.a. Minute Taker, is unveiling his multi-media performance ‘Wolf Hours’. Ben is no stranger to mixing theatre and music, having already presented a love-and-ghosts story on tour with ‘To Love Somebody Melancholy’ featuring animations from Ana Stefaniak. ‘Wolf Hours’ is an even more ambitious undertaking – “a unique performance combining mesmerising film with a dynamic live soundtrack. From forbidden love in the First World War, to the pain and rage of AIDS, to contemporary hedonism and heartbreak, ‘Wolf Hours’ explores the stories of gay men at different points in time through their dreams. This series of stunning new short films (directed by John Lochland, Joe Stringer, Kirk Sylvester, Raphaël Neal and Ben McGarvey) are accompanied throughout by Minute Taker performing an intimate musical and vocal score that both builds the atmosphere and pulls on the heartstrings. Visually explosive and emotionally thrilling, ‘Wolf Hours’ transports the audience through pleasure, grief, lust, joy and our collective historical imagination.”
In this interview with ‘Superbia’, Ben expounds on the approach he took when putting together ‘Wolf Hours’, which he describes as “jumbled-up memories, fears and fantasies.. It’s presented a bit like late night TV from back in the ’80s and ’90s (when anything queer was relegated to an after-midnight slot!) with different programmes and images emerging out of the static as you drift in and out of sleep… I also decided to include lots of archive footage in the show, which explores the way homosexuality has been portrayed in the media over the years… all of the stuff that finds its way into the subconscious minds of the characters as they lie awake at night, having an effect on how they view themselves and the gay community.” He’s hoping to take the show out on a broader tour much later this year, but for now this is all that you’re getting…
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Dates:
Holly Penfield & Ian Ritchie: The Cricklewood Cats The Fiddler’s Elbow, 1 Malden Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3HS, England
Friday 10th January, 2020, 8.20pm – no information links, just turn up…
Kenny Process Team + Keith John Adams + The Happy Couple Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Monday 13th January 2020, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Folk and Roots presents:
Arhai The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England
Saturday 18th January 2020, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Minute Taker presents ‘Wolf Hours’ Hope Mill Theatre, 113 Pollard Street, Beswick, Manchester, M4 7JA, England
Friday 24th January 2020, 8:00pm – information here and here
Holly Penfield The 100 Club, 100 Oxford Street, Soho, London, W1D 1LL, England
Sunday 8th March 2020, time t.b.c. – no information links yet
Following (and overlapping) the recent/current set of female poptronic gigs in London (with Caroline Polachek, Imogen Heap, Yeule and others), here are some more.
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Alice Hubble (best known as half of tweetronic duo Arthur & Martha) has been striking out on her own this year and is playing at Servant Jazz Quarters on the 5th. Her debut album ‘Polarlichter’, driven by iPad workings on long journeys and transformed at home via Mellotrons and analogue synths, apparently stems from wistful envisionings of faraway places (including Ruby Falls in Chatanooga, USA, Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies and Dubai’s Atlantis Palm hotel) plus “a desire to work on a project without constraints, to move away from the traditional song writing process and to experiment with the form. Inspired by the ’70s recordings by Tangerine Dream, Ashra and even Mike Oldfield, Alice wanted to take a more delicate approach; a distinctly feminine take on (an) often pompous ’70s progressive synth sound. Other inspirations include Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Lee Hazlewood’s Swedish recordings and 80’s American synth pop band The Book of Love.”
A good set of reference points, although if you are going to snark about the pomposity of your male predecessors it’s best if you’ve built something startlingly different. Much of Alice’s work still cleaves rather closely to those familiar silvery Germanic/kosmische synth tropes, the cautiousness of several generations of post-Tangerine Dream acolytes, albeit with twists of post-punk melancholy and Stereolab-ilk avant-pop.
As for the femininity, it’s present mostly in the preoccupations of Alice’s lyrics, such as the stern reflections on male gaze and pedestal-placing on ‘Goddess’ (“a man idolising a woman to the point that he doesn’t see her as a person. His ‘love’ is all consuming and the focus of his affection is seen merely as an object. As a result he consumes her and takes from her until she has little left, but thankfully she finds the inner strength to walk away.”). All well and good to state; but, given that the song’s mostly concerned with climbing inside its misguided protagonist in order to critique him from within, leaving the woman in question almost as enigmatic, idealised and unexamined as he did, I’m not altogether convinced. But perhaps I’m snarking now – either way, I can’t help but feel that there’s better to come. Alice has a quiet, determined voice: maybe, at the gig, we’ll find out what else it has to say.
Support comes in two parts, one being from jazztronic array Blick Trio, made up of veteran polymathic brass-and-wind-player Robin Blick (from the sprawling Blick/Blake musical dynasty that also includes Mediaeval Baebes’ Katherine Blake), drummer Andrew Moran (who’s put in time in groups including The Violets and Not Cool) and bass player/synth programmer James Weaver (who already plays with Robin in Gyratory System). Prior to Gyratory System, Robin was also in Blowpipe; with both these and the Trio, he’s been building jazz/clubtronic/kosmiche meldings for a good couple of decades. The Trio, however, lean more towards “post-punk rhythms and straight jazz melodies” than the club beats and electrofuzz racket of the previous acts; with Robin’s musicality and wide genre-savviness in particular calling up aural and harmonic/melodic imagery from riffling snake-charmer music to pithead brass band melancholia.
The other support act is Merlin Nova, who vigorously straddles the space between musician and sound artist. Too tuneful to work consistently in the latter mode, and too flat-out sonically ambitious and diverse to be restrained by the former, she instead works both of them to the bone. She creates, records and broadcasts whatever comes to her mind, whether it’s surreal foley-bolstered persona narratives, soundscaped poetry or unorthodox fragmented songs across a vocal range from femme-baritone to skyscraping whistle register.
Merlin’s most recent pair of Soundcloud offerings illustrate her restlessness. Just Calling is one of her most straightforward works (a vocal and reverbscape’d love-song of faith, degrees of separation, faith and independence), while To The Sun is a drone-strings-and-vocalise solar prayer half an hour long, equal parts Alquimia and Sofia Gubaidulina. There’s plenty more to find there, evidence of an ambitious sound creator who’s tapping at the heels of multiple precursors… Ursula Dudziak, Cathy Berberian, outer-limits Björk, Maja Ratkje…
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On the 12th, left-field synthpop writer Carla Dal Forno comes to Electrowerks trailing her newest album ‘Look Sharp’, in which “the small-town dreams and inertia that preoccupied (her) first album have dissolved into the chaotic city, its shifting identities, far-flung surroundings and blank faces”, thanks to her wanderings from her Melbourne origins to London via Berlin, telling “the story of this life in flux, longing for intimacy, falling short and embracing the unfamiliar.”
Sonically it’s frowning post-punk basslines and pearly sheens around subtle hollows; occasional touches of plainsong; arrangements stroked into shape by psychedelic-via-radiophonic synthesizer bends, swoops and flutters – a big step up from the queasy lo-fi wobble of her debut. As with Alice Hubble, Carla rarely changes tone vocally, etching momentary stories of subtle revenges, covert assignations and bleak reflectiveness with the same abbreviated unruffled whispercroon; delivering songs with the crisp, faux-reticent undertones and hardnosed observation of a finishing-school ace who’s opted to spend the rest of her life speaking softly but carrying a sharp hatpin. Simultaneously minimalist and expansive, sensual and austere, revealing and forbidding, the songs of ‘Look Sharp’ are measured diary entries enclosed in dove-grey leather, giving away little but hinting at much more. It’s as if one of the early versions of the Cure had agreed to back Jean Rhys during a venture into confessional songcraft, with Delia Derbyshire adding sonic filigrees.
The whole record sounds attractively antiquated. Not in terms of its harking back to early ‘80s proto-Goth, but in the way it feels as if it’s been written for (and in) a monochrome London of the 1930s: sparser crowds, the hiss of steam trains and the rattle of heels in empty housing courts. In fact, ‘Look Sharp’ functions best when Carla relinquishes the more obvious darkwave thrumbles, loses the bass and trusts to her electrophonic textures and spaces. This lends the instrumentals a touch of 5am light, an air of sneaking out into an unfamiliar town while it’s still slumbering unguarded, with a dream-frown shadowing its features. For songs such as Don’t Follow Me (with its deepening undertone of sexual threat), it allows a more sophisticated atmosphere to build, sound becoming character in the way that scenery and lighting do in film.
In support, there’s electronicist, live-looper and spatial explorer Maria Rossi – a.k.a Cucina Povera. As anyone who’s covered Maria before will tell you, “cucina povera” translates as “poor kitchen” – like “poor theatre”, a way of making the most of minimal ingredients and lean times: indeed, of making a virtue of the enforced simplicity, to the point of deliberately choosing it. Maria’s most recent project – ‘Zoom’, released back in January – had her strip back her already-minimal gear choices to just voice and loop pedal plus the digital recorder which gave the record its name: bar the very occasional bit of huffed or clinked bottlework, or synth bloop, that was it.
Last year’s ‘Hilja’ album applied the Cucina Povera methodology to a gaseous, beatless, haunting form of ambient art pop. It was full of folk-ghosts in the machine, bringing along hints of the ecclesiastic, of children’s songs and of traditional song fragments, much of it pillowed on vaporous keyboard textures and meticulous arrangements. In contrast, the Zoom pieces were recorded in “intimate spaces full of acoustic or ideological intrigue” and were a set of impromptu, improvised rituals-for-their-own-sake. Sometimes gabbled, frequently hymnal and monastic, blurring between established language and glossolalia, they build on the mysteriousness of ‘Hilja’ while venturing into more musically naked areas, taking from the previous album’s most cut-down moments without falling back on its cloudy synth-padded comforts or its pleasing banks of harmony.
Whether these pieces can be transported, translated and performed afresh in other locations is not so clear. Perhaps, for Electrowerks, Maria will improvise a new set in honour of the Slimelight’s fallen ghosts.
Also stirred into the evening’s menu will be a DJ set from darker techno/DIY/industrial specialist Kenny White of the Low Company record store.
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At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a splash of raucous female colour. Riding the momentum from the release of her debut album last month (if you’re a budding remixer or mash-upper, Bandcamp has it complete with sample and stem packs), Rachel K. Collier plays the Grand in Highbury in mid-November, with live percussion and interactive visuals augmenting her storm of sequencers, keyboards and Abletoning. Her house-inspired, undulating electronic club pop has been evolving over six years or so now, including bold intrusions into the world of adverts, collaborations with garage/house stars Wookie, Mat Zo and Ray Foxx, and more recently her current fearless-sounding solo work.
It’s a powerfully assured and complete pop sound, fusing full dancefloor momentum with righteous girl-power; although one that’s been achieved in the face of considerable bullying, scorn and condescension along the way from male musicians. (If the fuck-you beat and withering dismissal in her Dinosaur single is anything to go by. You can’t say that she didn’t get her own back. Success is the best revenge.)
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Dates:
Parallel Lines presents:
Alice Hubble + Blick Trio & Merlin Nova Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Tuesday 5th November 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Upset The Rhythm presents:
Carla dal Forno + Cucina Povera Electrowerkz @ The Islington Metal Works, 1st Floor, 7 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Tuesday 12th November 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Rachel K Collier The Grace, 20-22 Highbury Corner, Highbury, London, N5 1RD, England
Tuesday 19th November 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Enigmatically romantic Copenhagen label Janushoved are throwing a fifth anniversary party in London at the start of November. Defining a Janushoved release isn’t a precise art – you can throw around the usual reductive tags like “dream pop”, “dance music” and “ambient”, but establishing a Janushoved sound and feel is more of a textural thing. Music released on the label stretches beyond the usual complacencies, suggesting at least one extra dimension. A Januhoved piece is more like enchantment heard around a grey door; intimate and intimatory, already huge yet incrementally growing, suggesting huge technicolour cloudscapes and bioluminescent pagodas.
Janushoved label curator Mikkel Valentin Dunkerley will be playing a strong role in the show. Unsurprising, since many Janushoved artists are him in some form or another, with or without assorted collaborators. Certainly he’s bringing the expansive, heroic ’80s electronic crownings of Rosen & Spyddet (also featuring mysterious sidekick P.E.) and will be returning for a second go onstage with the incandescent, sighing minimalism of his solo project Internazionale. His Shell Fantasy bandmate Susanne Mouritsen will also step up with the plaintive trance/found sound gush of her own work as Yuri. Various DJs should be playing but are yet to be announced: if nothing else, the three Janushovedians will probably be stepping up to the decks themselves and presenting various influences and inspirations.
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On the same evening, you’ve also got the opportunity to go to something much more abrasive, as the Horse Hospital plays host to an evening of assorted noise and audio mysteries. It’s centred around the ‘Tape 313‘ project by Orlando Harrison (who plays keyboards for Alabama 3 under the alias of “The Spirit”, has touched on work with Coil, Red Crayola, the Amal Gamal Ensemble, Dr Miasma and the Carousel of Headless Horses, Guapo, and The Daughters of God and who puts out strange semi-occult radiophonic collages of music, found speech and rants on Resonance 104.4 FM as ‘The Wrong Show’). Best to let the press release inform… or disinform:
“Reworkings of long thought lost audio tapes obtained on the premises of Senate House, ‘Tape 313’ interrogates two dissident voices, uncovering hidden meaning and deciphering coded messages.
“Stammheim Prison, 1975 — Gudrun Ensslin outlines the political position of the Red Army Faction, eighteen months before her alleged suicide, her voice a ghost in the machinery of the German state. The perpetual revolution of helicopter rotors over the prison house echo the grinding of the wheels of justice below, and the relentless rotation of the swastika at its heart.
“Trafalgar Square, 1956 — Nye Bevan delivers a speech attacking Sir Antony Eden’s Conservative government following the seizure of the Suez Canal. Twenty thousand people heard Bevan speak, after which a crowd marched on Downing Street. Harrison’s deconstructions transform Bevan’s words into air-borne weapons, soaring over the equestrian bronzes of Nelson’s Column, drowning out the death rattle of the British Empire.”
Contributing to the evening alongside Orlando are various people from around the Wannamarchi Club disorganisation (in their own words, “a multinational cabal centred around the labels Broken Britain Cassettes and NKT encompassing events, radio shows and visual art activities.”) Making assorted sounds and projecting visual are assorted industrialists and other noisemakers – S.P.K. visualiser and synth player Dominic Guerin in his Tone Generator persona; Imperial Leather (industrial tapesmiths setting growling toolwork against cutup echoes of rabble-rousing speeches – he/she/they seem to have a particular fascination with Brexit dyspepsia); and David Rage. It’s tricky to track down much of anything about what anybody’s doing, some of them may be working together and some of them might be employing a single-use-then-throw-away name for the evening; but here’s a bit of Orlando and a scrap of Leather.
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Orlando’s Dr Miasma colleague Daniel O’Sullivan has been pretty active recently, gigging his ‘Folly’ album and his Dream Lyon Ensemble around London and Europe. The night after Orlando’s gig, you’ll find him reviving his occasional, unorthodox performance piece ‘The Honourable Daines Barrington’ – trumpeted as “an ecstatic sound and movement ritual heralding the inner succession of the hypostasis and a channeling of musics from the vegetable kingdom… based on the cryptographic responses to the letters of eighteenth century parson-naturalist Gilbert White” (but which he’s also revealed, in an M Magazine interview a couple of years ago), as being about “an atavistic vegetable man” and involving “a very, very awkward costume that’s very difficult to see and perform in.” Here’s just under a minute of him doing it in Moscow back in 2016…
This Daines Barrington revival is part of a similarly unorthodox evening, centred on the release of ‘The Walled Garden’, the brand new album by Suffolk audio-visual experimental duo and “radioactive ambient pop” creators Paper Dollhouse. Daniel will be using the same garden-themed stage set which PD have assembled for this show, upon which they’re promising a “special, spectral, 3D performance” of “the follow up to 2018’s neon-lit ambient pop album ‘The Sky Looks Different Here’, and its sister release ‘All The Colours Align’, to form the final part of a triptych set across the plains of rural Suffolk and London. Inspired by surrounding nature, domestic routine, Maggi Payne and Henning Christiansen’s ‘The Executioner’, the release was recorded on a portable twenty-four track recorder and holds up a mirror to autumn the dawn and early hours, an exploration of synthesiser experiments, field recordings and snapshots of conversations that quietly define areas of personal growth, patience, curiosity, understanding and freedom… Where the group’s previous album explored an audio journey from the rain-soaked streets of East London out to the now fast eroding landscapes of Suffolk, The Walled Garden captures the after-hours ambience that falls across Astrud’s childhood surroundings within the ancient London borough of Southwark, an area with a rich but hidden music landscape home to the outer edges explorations of Coil and Derek Jarman. While field recordings from Nina’s studio in the rural yet equally meditative oceanside pepper the long-form synth transitions and blurred recollections of conversations and early morning reflections.”
Irish looper/layerer Juno Cheetal – a.k.a. Flowers At Night – will also be performing her own audio-visual set, droning away on vintage analogue and digital synthesizer, pulling in rural and urban field recordings, and adding live drums, vocal harmonisations and autoharp. The visual aspects are drawn from her Sherkin Island homeland, near Cork – possessor of a wide variety of spectacular shapings from woodlands to sea views.
The evening’s further expanded by Yorkshire sound collageist Lisa Lavery, who’ll be presenting her soundwork ‘The Valley’ (inspired by the changing social landscape and preoccupations of the Yorkshire Dales, it’s “made up of ‘sounds of the salon’ put through a harsh bleaching process… obsessed with the sheer number of salons in the valley and how that reflects the work opportunities available to women there and their existence as a safe space for women,” and realised with various salon accoutrements – hairdryers, clippers, hair foils and polystyrene wig heads. (Originally commissioned by the Calderdale branch of Yorkshire Sound Women Network – well worth checking out if you’re a sounds-and-noise girl of any age, and you want some active support – she’ll also be playing it as part of YSWN’s Hebden Bridge concert on 5th November.)
Finally, Soho radio show producer and haunted-beatsman King Knut (Knut Jonas Sellevold) will be offering up DJ sets containing “an instinctive, psychedelic mix of private press rarities, industrial electronic work, rock, unearthed 70s library music, Eastern-European folk, Algerian pop, jazz and hip hop” aiming for “a MoonDome garden ambience”
(UPDATE – it seems that Daniel O’Sullivan has in fact now cancelled, but everyone else is still playing…)
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Dates:
Janushoved presents:
Janushoved 5 Year Anniversary (featuring Rosen & Spyddet + Internazionale + Yuri + DJs t.b.c.) The Glove That Fits, 179 Morning Lane, Hackney, London, E9 6LH, England
Friday 1st November 2019, 7.30pm – information here
Paper Dollhouse + Daniel O’Sullivan + Flowers At Night + DJ King Knut New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Saturday 2nd November 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
Some interesting technological pop shows (at various scales and predominantly female-driven) are arriving in London shortly.
First of all, Caroline Polachek is playing a small show at Hoxton Hall on 30th October. Though she spent her first musical decade as the leader of clever, multi-media-aware New York pop band Chairlift (best known for their Bruises single) she’s overlapped this with forays into ad hoc/lo-fi/female-fun supergrouping (the Girl Crisis cover band) and pastoral/theatrical electronica (from 2013 to 2015, as Ramona Lisa) as well as being the prime writer and arranger for (if we’re being honest, being the creator of) Beyoncé’s ‘No Angel’. Along the way, she’s established herself as a signally complete and disciplined performer, profoundly hands-on-involved with her own image and how it relates to her music, from designing her own choreography and makeup through to choosing all aspects of wardrobe and video presence.
It seems that in her mid-thirties – and after six years of releasing music on her own in various shapes and forms – Caroline’s starting to settle into the idea of a solo career. Her latest album – this year’s ‘Pang’ – is the first to emerge under her own name: a well-packed set of contemporary R&B/alt.pop with the same kind of expansive ear and mind for exploratory forms as peak works by Kate Bush, Jane Siberry or Björk (or, more recently, f.k.a. Twigs and Jenny Hval). Calling it some kind of solo revelation is over-simplifying; Caroline’s use of various pseudonyms for her one-woman projects always seems to have had more to do with creating useful self-eliding masks in which she can unselfconsciously explore different musical ideas. Like Björk, she’s also a frequent, restless and productive collaborator with others (most recently, with PC Music’s Danny Harle), and like Bjork similarly firm in that she’s ultimately the person in control and making the choices.
The ‘Pang’ singles so far, both musically and visually, show a talent and imagination at a comfortably full (and wide-ranging) stretch. Here are three of them in video form, showing off Caroline’s particular vision.
Playing support at Hoxton is Yeule – a persona project by visual artist and sometime synth builder Nat Ćmiel. A Singaporean-born nomad “obsessed with tinkering and discovery” and currently settled in London, she’s taken her talents for construction, reconstruction and textural explorations of the subconscious deep into her own music. The latter, merging a kind of transplanted Chinese pop with a slippery international EDM lucid drowse and sugary whispery vocals, sometimes makes her resemble an East Asian Julee Cruise settling, like a dreaming moth, into clubland’s sensuality and wilfully fluctuating identity space.
Certainly there’s plenty of surreal Lynchian lushness and reverie to her sound, complementing the smoke-and-mirror verbiage which she generates and which one has to stumble through while trying to get to the bottom of what makes her tick and flutter. Yuele characterises the main component of her work in terms both sensual and psychological (“(a) stifling psychological haze turned into perfume”) and adds, Sybilline, that “it’s difficult for my mind to stay in one place. I can go back to revisit the person I was in my dreams. I see them as multiple people. Sometimes they talk to me, but I’ve cut most of them off because they start screaming in my ear.” All of this inspires her ongoing fluid and successional approach to performance personae, which she continually tries to break down and move through in a series of metaphorical deaths and album tracks exploring the hinterland between death and rebirth, awareness and oblivion. The aforementioned Twigs might be a closer comparison than Cruise: there are similarities in the wispy softness of tone, the lightly assured stepping between different art forms, the moving body as creator’s canvas, the simultaneous exposure and walling off; the final definitions which slip through the fingers of any external searcher.
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Yeule is also playing two further London shows in November. The first is her own – a headliner down in the basement at Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston on 1st November, at which she’ll have a full chance to stretch out and take control of proceedings.
Ijn support is French-born Geiste, who creates her own dramatic, multi-instrumental pop: compelling undulator songs containing slow-burner stories. Also around is Yeule’s fellow Singaporean Kin Leonn, extending the warm, blipping, ambient/electronic instrumental side of the pillowy dream-pop he’s known for back home as a third of Midst. His debut solo album, ‘Commune’, deals with “longing, nostalgia, revelation, and other curious introspections… a dive into the subconscious and a documentation of the sensibilities encountered along the way.”
The second Yuele appearance during November is another support slot nearly three weeks later, over in Hackney Wick, supporting Moscow EDM-er Kedr Livanskiy at a Bloc night. A onetime Russian punk turned electronica explorer (and a member of Moscow’s Johns’ Kingdom collective), Kedr embodies a particular Russian spirit at the moment: the outward reach in collision or contradiction with its own bullish sense of identity. Her wavering vocals are distracted white dance-diva slipping into semi-operatic chant phrases: since it’s all sung in Russian, it all sounds strangely ritualistic and ancient to the ignorant or linguistically challenged (so that’ll be me and most of the rest of us, then). The music itself sometimes summons up some classic old London dance tropes of jungle and drum’n’bass; sometimes lonely analogue darkwave contortions and streetlight synth pads; sometimes international techno blurb and dubby keyboard clanks rebounding off blippy little traffic bleeps and horns.
Also supporting Kedr is Finnish techno diva Detalji (a.k.a. Krista Myllyviita), the night’s smoothest and most direct proposition. Making her UK live debut, she creates a mixture of cellar throb and of clear and arresting pop songs around a sleek IDM chassis, preoccupied with intimacy and detachment, with their overlap with sexuality, with the ups-and-downs of clublife friendships and power games and with the struggling state between urges and self-awareness. You can get suckered in by the cruising beats and the urgent electronic slither: afterwards, you may be nagged and haunted by the words that have slid across your eardrums, carried by the pulse and the needing.
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While looking into the Caroline Polachek date, I couldn’t help but notice how her recent single So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings has certain similarities with Imogen Heap’s similarly sweet’n’horny Goodbye and Go, from fifteen years ago. Most people probably know – and knew – the latter from last year’s slice’n’dice acquisition and remodelling by Ariana Grande. It’s all amicable, all supportive, all respectful – Immi and Ariana are mutual fans, share assorted tips and in all respects are the model of a supportive cross-generational female friendship. On top of that there’s still plenty of Heap sales, shows and activity (more of which in a moment).
Yet it still sometimes feels as if Immi herself has slipped through a crack of public awareness. A fully self-contained female writer, singer, producer and instrumentalist almost a generation before it became commonplace. Known, loved and worked with by other musicians from Ariana to Joshua Radin to Jeff Beck. A polymathic grafter with plenty of industry success over two decades plus a field of work covering theatre, film and classical concert hall as well as pop songs (that’s her score you’ll have heard in the Harry Potter play)… For all that, still in too many respects a cult artist, at least in her home country. I was trying to work out why this was, and whether it was in part the twists of image. While Immi was being overshadowed by fellow BRIT School graduates like Amy Winehouse, it can’t have been because her own songs lacked spirit or immediacy: anyone who thought that couldn’t have heard the suspended tech-apella heartache of her other best-known song, Hide And Seek (or can’t have caught up, later, with the deceptively dense lines of her mother’s-lullaby Tiny Human).
It’s probably more that, in a country that likes its imported and its homegrown pop divas to fit specific strands of celebrity (the light entertainment celeb sprung from national reality TV, the party provider, the own-brand corporation juggernaut selling scent and other beauty-myth trapping, the icon playing out huge-scale soapy stories in public, or a combination of all four), Immi has never really fitted the measures. There’s that lack of mystique, for which she’s happily substituted an affable beanpole strut combined with a chatty, cheery, Essex duchess-next-door poise. There’s that wild sense of dress-up that’s ultimately more about the laugh and the moment than it is about eight hours in wardrobe.
Then there’s the way in which, rather than stamping her name on perfumes and couture, she’s enthusiastically and publicly involved herself in ambitious, constructive and practical tech geekery which is all about shifting control into the hands of artists: investigating blockchain, developing and marketing ungimmicky wearable MIDI instruments and, more recently, putting together the cloud-based Mycelia Creative Passport (which streamlines a user’s digital credentials and payment channels, bringing the workings and remunerations of their career directly into their own hands). Finally, there’s the fully-integrated talent: as well as the dancing and fronting, the skills which guarantee that (Prince-like) she’s responsible for every single note, noise and shaping on her own records – and that its happening at a level which could challenge any other pop producer or instrumentalist, rather than simply being a make-do necessity.
In some respects, then, Imogen Heap symbolises a kind of drive, inquisitiveness and achievement which we don’t associate with (or encourage in) women enough – in or out of pop. A bright, squirrelling intelligence. I’ll admit that such things won’t necessarily smear much righteous mascara; it’s unlikely to fuel and enable some cathartic life-changing bawl’n’bitch right at the moment when you really need one. On the other hand, she won’t sell you crap and you don’t have to trail in her glory: you never have to be the friend who’s ultimately just another fucking minor courtier.
In short, beyond the songs and sounds there’s something about Imogen Heap that makes her seem more like an inclusive brilliant friend than an out-and-out pop goddess. Perhaps in some respects, that’s all for the better. I don’t know whether her model of self-sufficiency and practical enquiry has influenced the other, younger women mentioned here. I’d like to think that in some ways it has.
At any rate – Immi’s ongoing year-long Mycelia world tour touches down at the Roundhouse in London for one of its three British dates during November (the others are in Gateshead and Manchester). Thematically and practically, it links in with the ongoing Creative Passport project, using workshops and talks alongside the concerts to build a canny community of new tech-savvy users.
In addition, this particular tour sees Immi re-united with her old friend and fellow instrumental/production boffin Guy Sigworth, for the first time since their short-lived/one-off album and tour in the early 2000s as Frou Frou (in the meantime, Guy’s busied himself working with a bevy of other singers including Alanis Morrisette, Bebel Gilberto, assorted Sugababes and Chinese electropop chanteuse SingerSen). A new version of Frou Frou takes over part of each of Immi’s shows to resurrect old Guy-and-Immi collaborations. Here’s a live rendition of their old album-launcher Let Go from earlier in the tour, plus a rare of-its-time Frou Frou video from the old days.
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More on other upcoming November femmetronica soon…
Meanwhile, dates for now:
Parallel Lines presents:
Caroline Polachek + Yeule Hoxton Hall, 130 Hoxton Street, Hoxton, London, N1 6SH, England
Wednesday 30th October 2019, …pm – information here, here and here
Parallel Lines presents:
Yeule + Kin Leonn + Geiste Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Friday 1st November 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
DHP Family presents:
Imogen Heap & Frou Frou The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, Camden Town, London, NW1 8EH, England
Friday, 15th November 2019, 7.00pm –
information here, here and here
Bloc presents:
Kedr Livanskiy + Detalji + Yeule Bloc @ Autumn Street Studios, Unit 3, 39 Autumn Street, Hackney Wick, London, E3 2TT, England
Thursday 21st November 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Alt-rock trio Hurtling (fronted by My Bloody Valentine tour noisemaker Jen Macro) have a debut record to offer you – ‘Future From Here’, on Onomatopeia Records – and are launching it at north London’s The Islington in the middle of October. Their sound’s relatively easy to peg – post-Pixies, post-grunge, post-dreampop – but difficult to dismiss. There’s a full cupboardful of familiar indie rock ingredients to hand, but all reshuffled and re-examined via Jen’s particular perspective and inspired by the disorientations of touring, the displacement of emotions, the waywardness of health: the bumps and setbacks of a bright, questioning human organism pushed into too much motion. Sometimes, despite the noisy ethic, it’s surprisingly gentle; sometimes sludgy guitar parts pile up like rainbow cement ooze; sometimes it’s all about the vocal harmonies.
Once upon a time, most of Hurtling were part of cunningly witty indie/artpop sloggers stuffy/the fuses, and their glowering former employer (and current Onomatopeia labelmate) Stephen Evens is also on hand for the evening: ostensibly in a support slot, but probably to keep a dyspeptic jaded eye on them and to crush their remaining youthful dreams beneath his tapping boot. He’s playing solo – probably with guitar, microsynth and anything else portable which he fancies and which comes to hand – and is still working his own 2017 debut album, ‘Bonjour Poulet’. Which is fine, since it was excellent: a mordant larderful of creaky treats which revealed themselves to be gappy armour-plate wrapped around a surprisingly tender heart. He’ll probably give you all that sardonic, seen-it-all expression: actually, he’ll be pleased to see you.
London-based Swedish “post-death music” quartet Junodef fill the other support slot. Their debut single, a soft-strummed slice of spectral folk with additional Gothic guitar boom and the bleakness of a death metal song, was called Make You Die. Subsequent work hasn’t travelled too far from those initial emotional roots, although they’ve toyed with spooky progressive rock keyboards, acid rock shadings and lingering dark-country embellishments (the latter suiting both the paired vocals of Tyra Örnberg and Karin Grönkvist and their admiration for Emma Ruth Rundle and Chelsea Wolfe).
More recently Junodef have been feeding in noirish elements from trip-hop and droning electronica, citing inspiration by Portishead and Young Fathers. At the same time, they’ve upped their Bad Seeds clang and their clarity and put greater emphasis on their visual work, resulting in their most vividly fleshed-out songs and atmospheres yet. Don’t expect floppy Goth ragdolls: this band has a tough core, and a storytelling streak that’s just beginning to come into its own.
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In the same week, on the following day, relentless psychedelic noise-fosterers Baba Yaga’s Hut are putting on a Bethnal Green gig for block-party-inspired thunder-twosome Gum Takes Tooth. Singer/electronic bombardier Jussi Brightmore and wired-up drummer Thomas Fuglesang have been at this for a decade now, producing a music that’s
grinding and urgent, slow yet filled with unnerving impetus.
As with plenty of British acts on the weird/occult cusp, Gum Takes Tooth are fascinated by ritual (attempting to initiate it in both their recorded output and, more significantly, in their live performances) and with the jarring subconscious impact on the human animal from the mechanisms of technology, hierarchy and blunt cultural forces which surround us. Their last record, ‘Arrow‘, focussed on London gentrification from the perspective of those squashed under or flicked aside by its well-heeled, well-polished bespoke shoes; and on the savage simultaneous pressures from above to indulge the inner beast in competition, in nationalism, in a fracturing of common responsibility and empathy. While writing ‘Arrow’, Jussi saw all of this as a kind of cultural intoxication with the emphasis on toxic: it gave the duo a musical and moral focus which they’ve pursued ever since.
A couple of years ago, open-minded Sheffield Afrobeat/noise/dance-pop combiners Blood Sportcalled it a day. Two-thirds of them – drummer Sam Parkin and guitarist/Octatracker Alex Keegan – have since resurfaced as Hyperstition Duo, a blistering stew of kit-rattles and synth noise smudging and battering the line between live gig and avant-garde DJ electronica. They’ll be supporting Gum Takes Tooth on this occasion: but where the headliners favour slower pace and a ritual weight, the Hyperstitioneers prefer a break-neck-speed informational barrage.
At the end of this past summer, Hyperstition Duo released their debut EP ‘Virotechnics‘. There’s the usual jargonated hype to go with it – “summoning egregors of the Anthropocene, (they) plunge deep to deliver a maximalist collective immersion into their own lysergic phonosphere. Lurching, polyrhythmic pathways crumble and re-assemble; elastic dynamics snap; propulsion sparks from the nerve-centre of machine and corporeal entanglement… templexing, möbius loops and cybernetic subjectivities abound in an attempt to conjure escape vectors in a world of ubiquitous sound.” For once, the texture of the press release – a plunge into lathering, urgent verbalisation – actually fits the texture of the music.
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Overlapping the Gum Takes Tooth/Hyperstition Duo concert, Ben Vince’s south-east London clubnight Ellipsis (blending strands and clumps of experimental dance and experimental pop) ventures up north to Dalston on the same night for an evening of seamless switching between stage and DJ deck. I’ve not encountered Ellipsis before, but I’m impressed with what I’m finding out now.
To headline this time, Ben’s enticed the perplexing Dutch-born Mancunian Bunny Hoova down for her full-band London debut. Her work is simultaneously delightful and frustrating. At its simplest, it’s a kind of fall-apart dream pop – intermittent rhythms, addled guitar chording and bass thumbing, a cloudwork of woven-in samples, and a constant tripping over unvoiced questions, obscured conclusions and the track-loops of the thought-train. But while most dream-pop sinks into a narcotized structural conservatism (strumming away in the same key while admiring the whorls of sound coming through the pedalboard), Bunny’s material seems constantly uncomfortable, actively intelligent, and hovering at the midpoint between insight and misdirection. She’s been yoked in with experimental pop deconstructors/faux-idiot savants like Tirzah and Micachu, and I can see why. There’s that classical conservatoire training: coyly hinted at in the PR, for extra credit, but in practise forced off into the distance like a spurned aunt (even as it’s being used as the counterweight to punkish anti-technique). There’s the idea that the usual rules of pop song and riff culture are being scorned in a meticulous matter-of-fact way via an admixture of free play and cerebral manifesto.
Plenty of the songs on Bunny’s debut album, ‘Longing’, have the sensual drag-and-tug rhythm of slow jams; but rather than focussing a mood or a regular pace, they wander off at instinctive mental tangents or hiccup into a different arrangement; the instruments and samples entwining in a scratchy, bewildered, irregular intimacy. At times she seems to be taking up an erratic desert map scrawled by Captain Beefheart and attempting to apply it to close urban living. At other times, she seems to be spontaneously transposing into song experimental short stories about offbeat relationships, jolting encounters or small moments which change the course of a life; rich in detail and significance, short on conclusion. Plot and flavour are stretched out and split into gobbets, like odd-shaped beads necklaced on a guitar string. Her most-talked-about song, Lazy_Easy, is a scrubbing, slurred, pointed dissection-tract covering both the implicit and explicit links between consumerist culture and animal cruelty: more of a wall-collage with blended-in musical notes than an actual song. The world she flits through feels as rickety as a condemned flat; one that she’s too good for and shouldn’t have to live with, but which she has to accommodate and fit her voice to.
Also playing are a mixed bag of London and Manchester electronic experimentalists with bedroom studios. Gribs is a creative DJ and electronic musician, a label co-boss (Tobago Tracks) who in her own music weaving connections between straight-up dance music (trap, jungle, bass culture) and lo-fi DIY sound-and-voice experiments. There’s a distinct edge of discomfort to her work: not so much or so often that it repels, but her found vocals and implied song characters seem uneasy, morbidly eccentric or disassociated from the music’s rhythmic propulsion or sensual salve.
More DJ-ing and deckmixing comes from J.B. Glazer, another London-based creator of peculiar counter-intuitive dance music: for him, a kind of relentlessly alienated mirror-image R&B, all of its comfort and slickness rusted away into disassociative ennui. In the work of both Glazer and Gribs, there’s an echo of chopped-and-screwed culture: the slowing, the altered-state disconnections and new connections, the sense that they’re using alienation as a kind of gatekeeper (if you like dance but are prepared to discard much of its qualities of release or of socializing, then perhaps you can squeeze through this door).
Rounding things out (or upsetting any remaining unspilled applecarts) there’s the mysterious and performative Halfs – from what I can work out, a try-anything beat-making romper on Manchester’s queer arts scene. I’ve found a very fruity synthdance EP of his/theirs from 2017, so there are a few slurps of its whooping dayglo industrial tones below. There have also been percussion-favouring mixtapes and albums which have been whipped capriciously on and off Soundcloud, but are gone now: other than that, there seems to be involvement with scratch theatre, video and so on. In order to properly keep up with Halfs, you need to subscribe (both literally, and in terms of consistent loyalty) so just consider this vague, semi-accurate plug of mine to be a jumping-on point and take it from there.
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Dates:
Onomatopoeia Records presents:
Hurtling + Stephen Evens + Junodef The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Islington, London, N1 0XT, England
Thursday 17th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Gum Takes Tooth + Hyperstition Duo The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Ellipsis presents:
Bunny Hoova + Gribs + J.B. Glaser + Halfs SET (Dalston Lane), 27a Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 9.00pm – information here and here
At the start of the month, a Women In Jazz summit in London brings Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dreams, the Rosie Turton Quintet and Alina Bzhezhinska to the Jazz Café.
Trumpeter/flugelhorn player Yazz Ahmed has been covered in here before (thanks to Polar Union’s Jazz Herstory series) – a young British-Bahraini already being dubbed “the high priestess of psychedelic Arabic jazz” thanks to her exploration (across two previous albums) of her mixed cultural heritage, and via the use of a custom quarter-tone flugelhorn which enables her to explore the microtonal pitching within Arabic music. Electric Dreams is her electrophonic/acoustic multi-textural tie-up with drummer Rod Youngs, guitarist Samuel Hällkvist and “vocal sculptor”Jason Singh. Emerging from Yazz’ interest in spontaneous composition, “these free-flowing and conversational improvisations make use of electronic effects, sound design, live looping and sampling, in an exploration of contemporary jazz from a different angle.”
Trombonist Rosie Turton is usually to be found as part of all-female Tomorrow’s Warriors-linked octet Nérija alongside other expanding-profile bandmates including Nubya Garcia, Cassie Kinoshi, Zoe Rahman and Shirley Tetteh (the latter of whom, not content with being a jazz guitar name to watch, also operates as one-woman pop project Nardeydey). As I’ve noted before, Rosie’s own leanings are towards Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, with digressions via hip hop and Himalayan ragas; and her quintet (sometimes known as 5ive) “works around a sensually airy intertwining of Indian violin (played by Johanna Burnheart), trombone and electric piano (from Maria Chiara Argirò), in which adventurous tunes effloresce and sway around light-on-their-feet rhythm grooves: a clever, flowing, flowery architecture.” The quintet’s completed by drummer Jake Long and bassist Twm Dylan.
The orchestral harp is always a potentially explosive instrument. Particularly so when it’s under the fingers of Alina Bzhezhinska – a soulful beast of a player who steps easily between classical demands and jazz immediacy. She’ll be playing a solo jazz set to open the evening.
Yazz and Electric Dreams will also be playing – on their own, this time – up in Newcastle the day after the London gig.
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At the end of the month, New York new-school jazz rock quartet Forq also play the Jazz Café. Fluid, grooving and highly accessible improvisers, they’re strongly Snarky Puppy-affiliated. Two of the current Forq-ers, plus the band’s departed co-leader Michael League, also play in the celebrated Brooklyn jam family, while keyboard-playing Forq leader Henry Hey is even something of a Big Apple mentor to League, having first convinced the Snarky Puppy leader to move and set up shop there.
As originally conceived by Hey and League, Forq’s music doesn’t stray too far from the Snarky blueprint (dextrous young super-sidemen put together a fizzy stew of everything they’ve learned from playing jazz, blues, rock, funk, etc), but according to League“we had the idea to start a band that was bi-i-i-i-i-ig on groove and sonic exploration, without getting caught in the snags of the modern jazz world. We want to play shit with personality, character, and not nerdy, brainy stuff. Also, we want people to shake their asses. I think the band has a very hard, NYC-style sound that is industrial but also innovative, but also has some serious Texas flavour…” League moved on a couple of years ago, replaced on bass by Kevin Scott, but the band, currently completed by Snarky guitarist Chris McQueen and drummer JT Thomas, continue the initial work.
In support is London trio SEN3: in some respects, a transatlantic Forq mirror image. They’re another grouping of top-notch overtrained pop and rock sidemen who fancied doing something fun, immersive and different. Citing “Pink Floyd’s ethereal epic-ness, Thundercat’s psychedelic soul-funk, a touch of J-Dilla/Madlib beat conducting with a twist of Led Zeppelin riffs” as inspiration and aims. Max O’Donnell (on guitars, synths and assorted tuned percussives), Dan Gulino (on bass guitar and synths) and Saleem Raman (on drums) put together something jazzy, dubby, reverb-y and floaty: very much a product of the London melting pot they’re proud of.
SEN3 are also playing two dates of their own earlier in the month – at Kansas Smitty’s in London on 1st October, and at The Mesmerist in Brighton on 8th October.
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French horn virtuoso and bandleader Jim Rattigan continues to step up activity with his Pavillon twelvetet, currently featuring Martin Speake, Andy Panayi and Mick Foster on saxophones, Percy Pursglove, Steve Fishwick and Robbie Robson on trumpets, Mark Nightingale and Sarah Williams on trombones, and a rhythm section of Hans Koller (piano), Dave Whitford (double bass) and Martin France (drums).
Pavillon’s new album ‘The Freedom Of Movement’ comes out in mid-October, featuring more of Jim’s original tunes (which have been compared to Charles Mingus, Gil Evans and Duke Ellington). To help it on its way, he’s taking Pavillon out extensively (around southern England and the Midlands) on assorted dates over the next four months, between early October and mid-January.
Previous Pavillon commentary from me – “confident, breezy, swing-happy music seamlessly blending inspirations from different times and places; beery, wise and cosmopolitan but also very English. It’s the sort of sound you’d expect to hear currently curving its way around London’s seawall, if such a thing existed.”
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Dates:
Women In Jazz presents:
Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dream + Rosie Turton Quintet + Alina Bzhezhinska The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Thursday 3rd October 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Jazz North East presents:
Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dreams Gosforth Civic Theatre, 125 Regent Farm Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE3 3HD, England
Friday 4th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
SEN3:
Kansas Smitty’s, 63-65 Broadway Market, Dalston, London, E8 4PH, England – Monday 1st October 2019, 7.00pm – information here
The Mesmerist, 1-3 Prince Albert Street, Brighton, West Sussex, BN1 1HE, England – Monday 8th October 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Forq + SEN3 The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Wednesday 30th October 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Norwich Jazz Club @ Bedfords Bar, 1 Old Post Office Yard, Bedford Street, Norwich, NR2 1SL, England – Tuesday 15th October 2019, 8.30pm – information here and here
Jazz Cafe Posk, 238-246 King Street, Hammersmith, London, W6 0RF, England – Saturday 19th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Now with a debut album behind them (‘Maladyne Cave‘, which popped out last month), propulsive, eclectic, electro-acoustic Bristolians My Octopus Mind are revving up for another handful of dates in England and France for early and mid-autumn.
As I’ve mentioned before, the band “occupy a pleasing position, settled in their own web of connections between a number of different influences but reliant upon none of them.” ‘Maladyne Cave’ reveals how they’ve worked through those inspirations to the full and springboarded to something more urgent and stirring in its own right– strings, twitches and harmonic jumps from Balkan folk and Indian raga; influxes of shifting-terrain jazz rhythms from the interplay of double bass and drumkit, a post-minimalist precision, and surges of distorted amplifier-frying art rock allied to prog atmospherics and dynamics (from acoustic shoegazery to Zeppelin electric-folk drone). Overall, though, it’s about the way all of this is enabled by the mushrooming complexity of Liam O’Connell’s songwriting, a set of shifting organic moods and associations which package up personal restlessness, jokes, retributive snarls (about exploitation and bad politics), Patton-esque character vocals and more.
Other close cousins to what My Octopus Mind currently do would be the psychedelic garlandings of Knifeworld or the more out-there voyagings of The Verve, the protracted lilting commentaries of Damien Rice, and whatever Fyfe Dangerfield’s up to these days; while MOM themselves cite Radiohead, Josh Homme, the Buckleys, Jose Gonzalez and raga/Tagore song specialist Rajeswar Bhattacharya (there’s a version of the latter’s Anundena on ‘Maladyne Cave’). Ultimately, though, the band are already establishing their own identity: a strong debut firming out what should be a lively career. Hopefully they’ll bring out their string section on tour this time. If not, the sinewy acoustic power trio at the heart of the band (with Isaac Ellis taking a bow to his resonantly booming, textured double bass when needs must) has already proved itself well capable of holding an audience rapt.
While there doesn’t seem to be anyone else playing at Bristol, the London gig features a set from past-pop masher-upper-in-chief/swing & bass pioneer DJ Fizzy Gillespie. Playing both host and support at Lille are local latterday heavy/alt.rock trio Paranoid, fronted by émigré Matthew Bush, billed as grunge and citing an undying loyalty to Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana (as well as to Radiohead and newer Biffy Clyro, to whom their driving, punchy, quick-raid songs arguably have the most similarities).
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Although his Westminster Kingsway College gig in in June was cancelled at the last minute, Daniel O’Sullivan is back playing live in London mid-September. Since it seems a shame for what I wrote last time round to get buried, here it is again:
“It’s easy enough to own a varied music collection; to shuffle quickly and smoothly between folk music, noise, synthtronica, experimental psychedelia, arthouse sound design, prog, proto-punk, pseudo-Zeuhl and the rest. It’s quite another to work, as a creative musician, across all of these: inevitably some purist will call you out as a fraud or a daytripper. Daniel, however, has made a name for himself as one of the few people who can apparently flit and slide between the scenes without being stalled by suspicion or rejection. Formidable multi-instrumental skills help, as does his apparent willingness to be a utility man as often as a leader. Over two decades, he’s piled up a pyramid of projects – his own Mothlife and Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses; duo work with Miracle or Grumbling Fur; a stint effectively directing Guapo; contributions to live and studio work with Ulver, Sunn O))) and This Is Not This Heat; plus sound installations and soundtracks in the fine art and cinema worlds. During the course of this, no-one’s fingered him as an interloper; no-one seems to have frozen him out. It’s a rare talent to be so ubiquitous, so flexible – or so insidious.
“Daniel’s most recent album, ‘Folly’, is the second one he’s released under his own name, pursuing something more intimate and personal. Written around the death of a friend and the birth of a son, it sees him continuing to tack away from the experimental rock he made his reputation with in favour of hushed, rich-textured chamber folk, burnished like a picture window by the warm depth of Thighpaulsandra’s production. Still ,a psychedelic perspective follows in its wake, like a contrail of blossom; easily found in the swirl of instrumentation and in the way that Daniel dips in and (more often) out of straightforwardness like a flying fish, offering transient reveals and kaleidoscopic digressions. Live, he’ll be performing solo and won’t be able to dodge behind the arrangements, but will be inviting up a couple of special guests to play along.”
In contrast to the solo gig that was planned for Westminster Kingsway, the Lexington gig will feature Daniel’s full electro-acoustic Dream Lyon Ensemble octet, featuring frequent collaborators Peter Broderick, Thighpaulsandra and Knut Sellevold (of Elektrofant, King Knut), Astrud Steehouder of Paper Dollhouse, dronester Christos Fanaras, Frank Byng on drums and Chlöe Herington on reeds.
Supporting Daniel (and probably with Peter Broderick helping out) is Irish singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power, whose multi-instrumental, multi-layered contemporary folk songs have been causing a stir since the release of her debut album in 2016. Her second album, ‘The Two Worlds’ brings more of them into the world: dark-toned, literate, dreamy, deceptively calm but gradually revealing undercurrents of hope, strength and survival set against sinister depths of intimation.
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Dates:
My Octopus Mind on tour:
The Canteen, 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3QY, England – Thursday 5th September 2019, 9.00pm – information here
The Magic Garden, 231 Battersea Park Road, Battersea, London, SW11 4LG, England – Friday 6th September 2019, 9.00pm(with DJ Fizzy Gillespie)– information here
La Rumeur, 57 rue de Valenciennes, 59000 Lille, France – Wednesday 27th November 2019, 8.00pm(with Paranoid + guest) – information here
Upset the Rhythm presents:
Daniel O’Sullivan (octet) + Brigid Mae Power The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Friday 13 September 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
An imminent show at the Church of Sound in Clapton showcases British and French artists – the Greg Foat Band and the Neue Grafik Ensemble. Both play a contemporary take on ’70s soul jazz as it moved on a mystically airy arc away from earthiness and into the more fantastical zones of funk and psychedelia: in Greg’s case laced with tidal Radiophonic electronica via antique suitcase synth, and in NGE’s case celestial Rhodes keying.
More from the Church:
“Greg Foat’s latest album ‘The Mage’ threads lineage between the past and future of British jazz, enlisting the talents of jazz/library/soundtrack legends Duncan Lamont, Art Themen, Ray Russell and Clark Tracey to collaborate with their modern contemporaries, Greg Foat, Moses Boyd and Heliocentric’s drummer Malcolm Catto. Something undeniably British but outward-looking and global has been created. Greg’s compositions and arrangements showcase the old and new, downtempo folkscapes, free jazz with notes of hip-hop and soul from the young team flavouring the mix. The album is a testament to the versatility and pure musicality of all those involved and Greg Foat’s ability to bring artists together to record beautiful, timeless music.
“Personnel on the night: Greg Foat (piano, EMS Synthi AKS), Clark Tracey (drums), Eric Young (congas), Phil Achille (bass), Trevor Walker (trumpet), Rob Mach (saxophones), Hugh Harris (guitar) with special guest Duncan Lamont (tenor saxophone).
“Parisian-born producer Fred “Neue Grafik” N’Thepe formed his Ensemble last year, consisting of trumpet player Emma-Jean Thackray, Vels Trio’s drummer Dougal Taylor, bassist Matt Gedrych and of course Fred himself on keyboards. Grafik’s sound is a hybrid of jazz, house and hip hop, all with his unique geographical tones of African ethnicity, Parisian roots and a love for London sounds (like broken beat and grime) thrown into the mix. For this session, they will be joined by rapper and poet Brother Portrait who is omnipresent on NGE’s forthcoming EP.”
Representing the Church of Sound DJ resources, half of the CoS diumvirate (and Total Refreshment Centre founder) Lex Blondin will be manning the decks, and there’ll be an aftershow party over at Tottenham’s Five Mile club.
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Further north-east, the Polish Jazz London Series is opening up in Waltham Forest. It’s a handshake between a borough celebrating its current status as London Borough of Culture (and pushing hard not to be overshadowed by the existing momentum of Hackney and Tottenham), the Polish Cultural Institute, B Side Events and the Music Halls Project which is opening up church spaces in Walthamstow and Leytonstone as high-quality music performance venues.
Poland isn’t the first place that springs to mind when jazz is mentioned. Cognoscenti, however, are aware of it as an incubator of high-end music with typical Polish determination. Five monthly concerts starting in the summer and leading into the autumn – each featuring some outstanding talent – demonstrate how productive this can be.
The first, on 4th July, features Warsaw avant-fusioneers Niechęć – saxophonist Maciej Zwierzchowski, drummer Michał Kaczorek, guitarist Rafal Błaszczak, keyboard player Michał Załęski and double bassist Maciej Szczepański stir ominous misty shifts of chord-tones and atmospherics into spinning jagged cyclones. Theirs is a frictional engagement with the air, although one which embraces a tight mothership of form rather than a straight free-jazz explosion.
Szczepański’s fondness for arco bowing, Zwierzchowski’s for caustic, cryptic Shorterish sax commentary and the band’s readiness to pursue whistling psychedelic rockscapes close to that of ‘Saucerful’-era Pink Floyd (as well as touching on the tweaked, ring-modulated open-ended fierceness of early electric Miles and the initially freeforming argumentation of Weather Report) pin them as spirit brothers to the permeable explorers of the ’70s cusp. Translated from the Polish, their name means “dislike”; and sometimes their music’s a growling frown, a diet of harsh and undying embers. Despite that, it’s never withdrawn or surly, never dull – it constantly takes you along with its dark and challenging moods.
The August concert features a new trio led by pre-eminent young Polish polymath Marcin Masecki. Not new in that his keyboard playing is augmented by his regular project cohorts (Jerzy Rogiewicz on drums and Piotr Domagalski on double bass) but new in that he’s apparently not looked into the possibilities of a classic trio since his schooldays. Since then, he’s been busy mastering and promoting a dizzying variety of projects and musical applications (the program lists it all as “big bands, brass orchestras, classical symphony orchestras, choirs, alternative pop bands, electric quintets, acoustic duets, sextets and nonets, composing for film and theatre, giving masterclasses, classical chamber musicking, and a vast body of solo work”).
It took an extended moment alone to trigger this new project – a jogging session during which Marcin became fascinated by both the bodily mechanics of respiration, extension, heart-rate (and so forth) and the mental changes and separation of mind which occur during the strictures of exercise. He opted to translate this across into music. In this clip, you can see how the post-bop pulse motors away while Marcin plays a succession of complex, diversifying ideas on top of it, maintaining both independence and integration while also sustaining perfect stability and authority.
The September gig features the bony, peppery rhythmic work of the Kuba Więcek Trio, whose paradoxical music (authoratively skittish; cerebrally frenzied; making overpowering gestures within a small and disciplined space) has been noted by uber-critic and fellow countryman Piotr Metz for combining the Polish post-bop of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s with knowingly neurotic Manhattanisms. More specifically, “the melody, which seems straight from Komeda songs, also has the noise of the New York traffic.” Each member doubles, musically – bass player Michał Barański spits and mutters konnakol (Carnatic drum-talk vocals), drummer Łukasz Żyta rattles out additional melodies on glockenspiel, and Kuba himself swaps between saxophone and dropped-in synth or electronics.
Packed into the music are funk and marches, transposed tabla burrs, Birdland boptalk and strains of eastern European folk dance. The trio’s also capable of periods of delicate sweetness, but always with a febrile watchfulness and staccato undercurrent; as if they’re tiptoeing precisely over a tough streetscape of broken glass and stray syringes even as they chat or serenade.
The October gig features High Definition Quartet, who come with sky-high praise from Randy Brecker: but if, from that, you’re expecting them to fit into his American fusion tradition, you’d be surprised. While this collectively-run quartet are second-to-no-one in hoarding and firing out classic chops, they’re also continual polyreferential box-busters, moving through multiple styles . It’s not just a case of tricksy polystylism, though: not something carried out as a joke. Instead, Piotr Orzechowski (who also rejoices in the nickname of “Pianohooligan”) and his allies (double bassist Alan Wykpisz, saxophonist Mateusz Śliwa and drummer Grzegorz Pałka) come across more as people whose brains process at double-speed: simultaneously and voraciously riffing and developing from anything which flits across their attention or their synapses.
For their current project, Piotr and the quartet have created jazz rearrangements of ‘Bukoliki’, a set of short piano pieces (originally string duets) by Witold Lutosławski – which he, in turn, derived by old Polish folk songs from the distinct Kurpie forest culture of north-east Poland (whose music also inspired Górecki). A second-generation mutation, then; and one which the HDQ deliver with breathtaking speed, precision and invention, respecting the source material by stepping deeply into it and refusing to do anything less than give it and gift it every scrap of their own intuition.
The last show (as far as I know) is in November, in the grand Art Nouveau surroundings of Leyton’s Great Hall, sponsored by LVE Foundation. Signing us out is Wrocław septet Electro-Acoustic Beat Sessions, or EABS – a Polish answer to the current club-culture reinvigorations of jazz forms as demonstrated by Shabaka Hutchings, Kamasi Washington and others. Via their technological wildcard Spisek Jednego, EABS merge sampling and looping into their instrumentation in a “reconstruction from deconstruction” approach. The rest of the band consists of Marek Pędziwiatr (on piano, synths and voice), guitarist Vojto Monteur, drummer Marcin Rak, bass player Paweł Stachowiak and a doubled brass line of Jakub Kurek (trumpet) and Olaf Węgier (tenor sax); merging a profoundly lyrical sensibility and a taste for European conceptual landscapery, while pulling in and transforming strong strands of hip hop, jungle, funk, gospel and electronic music.
As with many jazz acts, EABS build into a developing future while looking deeply into a specific cultural past. Among their preoccupations are the ideas of “Slavic melancholy” and the culture’s tendency to have favoured oral transmission over literacy: something reflected in the examination of Polish demonology and general Slavic mythology in their most recent recording, ‘Slavic Spirits’, drawing on accounts from “musicians, historians, journalists, writers and even psychotherapists.”
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Dates:
Church of Sound presents:
Greg Foat Group + Neue Grafik Ensemble + Church of Sound DJ set
St James the Great, 188 Lower Clapton Road, Clapton, London, E5 8EG, England
Friday 21st Jun 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Polish Jazz London Series:
Niechęć – St Mary’s Music Hall, 8 Church End, Walthamstow, London, E17 9RL, England – Thursday 4th July 2019, 6.30pm – information here and here
Marcin Masecki’s Jazz Trio – St John’s Music Hall, High Road, Leytonstone, London, E11 1HH, England – Friday 16th August 2019, 6.30pm – information here
Kuba Więcek Trio – St Mary’s Music Hall, 8 Church End, Walthamstow, London, E17 9RL, England – Thursday 19th September 2019, 6.30pm – information here and here
High Definition Quartet – St John’s Music Hall, High Road, Leytonstone, London, E11 1HH, England – Friday 18th October 2018, 6.30pm – information here
EABS – Leyton Great Hall, 1 Adelaide Road, Leyton, London, E10 5NN – Thursday 21st November 2019, 6.30pm – information here
Long past the point when its cultural context receded into antiquity, mediaeval plainsong remains a ready grab for musicians seeking to bridge classical ideas with (in the broadest sense) pop ones. It’s easy to recall the Gregorian chants stapled to dance loops and succubus exotica pioneered by Enigma at the start of the ‘90s, in the wake of which waddled a million chillout chant albums: though to pick some more inspiring examples from past ‘Misfit City’ coverage, there’s also the post-plague requiem of Jocelyn Pook’s ‘Deluge’ and the acapella-versus-disintegrating-granular-noise of Soaring On Their Pinions.
Perhaps plainsong’s draw is in its sparseness, its directness – the way in which its emphasis on a soloist (or at least a monophonic group line) initially seems like a direct personal meditation or plea, a kind of ecclesiastic monastic blues. It could also be the way in which that sense of vulnerability mixes with a sense of ancient history (the early steps of Christianity, with the classical Hebrew and Greek temple music sources still evident, unobscured by the later agglutinating harmonies of the Renaissance). Or, to be a little more cynical, maybe it’s just that that same sparseness and built-in antique provenance has made it an easier cold sell to an audience in the age of recordings.
Ariadne could probably provide a better and more interesting explanation than I can. They’ve certainly got the background to enable them to understand it – electronicist/visual specialist Benjamin Forest and fellow electronicist and mezzo-soprano Christine Papania first formed an allegiance at the music school of the University of Indiana: and Christine also explores various strands of classical in her solo voiceloop project Lanx as well as singing for the Manhattan Chorale. Since around 2015, Ariadne have been investigating and altering plainsong and its relations in a succession of albums, EPs, concerts and installations.
Their 2015 album ‘Tsalal’ was based around Hebrew texts and was about plummeting into darkness, physical and psychological; the same year’s ‘Ex Tempore’ was a psalmic “dialogue between the physical and the ethereal in a languished and dense atmosphere.” Their newest work, ‘Stabat Mater’ is a “twenty-movement cycle of audio/visual ecstatic visions, heavily inspired by the visions of female Christian mystics Hildegard von Bingen and Teresa of Ávila.” The latters’ writings are rearranged and transmuted for the sung texts, with a third source coming via text from the surrealist poet Aase Berg.
Hildegard’s work, of course, has regularly blended in nicely with contemporary concerns of spirituality, pain and the female perspective: only last year her work was programmed in underground New York/London arthouse concerts by Daisy Press and Filthy Lucre, juxtaposed against Bowie, Byrne, Charlie Looker’s anguished hard-rock analyses of toxic masculinity and fascism, and the morbid queer romanticism of Claude Vivier… all of which I’m sure is just the tip of an associative iceberg. Hildegard’s ecstasies were paralleled by the rather more masochistic ones of Teresa (who also suffered a particularly grotesque fate-of-a-saint post-death postscript as her corpse was gradually disassembled and traded about by quarrelling groups of nuns, dukes, Popes and priests for open mercantile advantage).
As for Aase, still very much alive, she’s an often-bewildering overturner of expectations with a marked disdain for the “patriarchal… male sexuality” restrictions which she sees applying to standard chronology (“time passes and things have to happen and there has to be a narrative”). Her own work upends this in favour of polymathic siftings of “science, math, probability, string theory, etc.” in weird-fiction settings of post-environmental catastrophes and reconstructed worlds in which standard human perspectives are slipping away, being superseded or disintegrated by impassive, inevitable processes of change. Notably, Aase has also worked as a translator for the horror-struck, pessimistic fantasy texts of H.P. Lovecraft which, though they have an empurpled baroque verbosity which her texts avoid, often operate in similarly blasted philosophical territories.
While I’m sure that Ariadne too are paying plenty of attention to all of this, text is secondary to what they’re putting it through sonically. While experimenting with eerie pitchshifting, reverberation and sound chopping, their earlier work backgrounded it in favour of the traditional purity of Christine’s voice. Now they’re bolder, more assured and disruptive: while delivering perverse auto-destructive lyrics like “put my fist through my mouth and pull the roots out of the ground”, Christine’s voice retains its classical beauty but also negotiates its way through a far more confrontational path of distortions, subversions, doppelganger mockings and simple sequences of compline giving ways to gorgeous vomitations like a hopelessly poisoned Kate Bush. The electronically-generated sound, too, keeps its previous haunted/spinning chapterhouse atmosphere while rearing up like a briar thicket destroying a pathway, with distressing organic splatters, acidic treble rills, liquid-sword shatterwhooshes and nightmare distortion-belfry sounds breaking things up; plus vocal capture/turns like the obscene Pachucho squelch that chokes through Burning Sphere.
Like the last-act works of Scott Walker, though, ‘Stabat Mater’ manages to be disturbing and ear-opening without relying on shock-schlock. It hints at and flickeringly reveals dysfunction, confusion and horror without quashing or sneering at the beauty, structure or aspiration of the source materials. Benjamin’s video work, too, makes mesmerically beautiful optical scapes out of disruption, data corruption, trippy fetish hints and perspective explosions.
An upcoming Ariadne tour takes ‘Staber Mater’ around selected spots in America and Europe – as well as assorted arts centres, venues include an avant-garde-sympathetic bar at home in New York; an accommodating church crypt in Bristol with a patience for the heretical; a preserved grand Tudor chamber in London; and the marine guts of a permanently harbour-bound Hamburg merchant ship.
That New York hometown concert is taking place at metal/experimental hangout bar Saint Vitus, accompanied by Ideal and Dasychira (with records spun by DJ Clone). Dasychira is a platform for some brilliantly inventive experimental dance music from transplanted, intriguingly alienated South African sound artist Adrian Martens. Adrian explores and celebrates his own psychological vulnerability and resilience via industrial detonations and scatters of mbira chops, alarming darkwave pop interjections and bursts of monastic chorale. Scurrying underneath are thematic undertows of insect regeneration, building new lives from nothing. He debuted with 2017’s ‘Immolated’ EP, while last year saw the ‘Razor Leaf’ single and the ‘Haptics’ EP consolidate his work. The gig’s worth attending for his sake alone. As to whom Ideal are, I’m less sure. I’m assuming that they’re not these German New Wavers from 1982, but within the ever-refreshing and surprising Brooklyn ferment, I probably shouldn’t assume anything.
In Bristol, there’ll be slots featuring a pair of duos from the town’s Avon Terror Corps underground label, whose artists draw their loose inspirations and guidelines from“”medieval visions of the future, breakcore, ‘Westworld’ (the original film), industrial, the psychogeography of Castlemead, the legacy of shoegaze, the legend of Goram and Vincent, the total destruction of “deconstructed club”…” Both are best judged by their contributions to the ‘Avon Is Dead’ compilation, which amasses sundry ATC cloud uploads from 2018.
Salaċ – bewildering, serious-playful aural occultists – create long-spooling jump-cut soundscape ceremonials, the outcome of their “sculpting séances of sound with tape machines.” These are aggressive dirtbass rumbles, spasms of object-rolling across metal sheets, complaining recitations of disassociation, punctuated by watertank booms, data-screech waterfalls and a certain amount of dry psycho-geographist’s humour (as in fucked-up cheesy drum machine beats they occasionally summon up and put through the soiling chamber). So far, it’s best to judge Bokeh Edwards and Jade Hybou, a.k.a. “esoterrorists”Java Java Wetware by their track Even Cowgirls Get The Blues – a fragmentary aural story via a dreamy harmonica-assisted trudge through ruined domes and shattered glass, set further off-kilter by lapping folk soprano vocals and ending with secretive whispers and a handful of reverb-muffled gunshots.
In Manchester, support acts include obscure local psych/alt.folker and “veteran astral wanderer”Lazy Bones. Whether solo meanderer or journeying band, he/they have been at it for at least a decade and a half, coming up with “gentle melodies hid(ing) strange shadows, hidden yearnings and the promise of the transcendental” with a “whimsical ’70s edge” following the lysergic thicketry of Cope, Barrett and Jansch: some of it may be found on this cobwebbed MySpace site, if you can find your way in. Working in a similar vein (but easier to track down) is the bouzouki-driven power pop and stoner beat of The Peace Pipers, enthusiastic ’60s hippy-punk throwbacks with a taste for dressing up and dancing down the garden paths of The Move, early Pink Floyd and Dave Mason. The evening’s real wildcard is sometime ILL member Sadie Noble, a.k.a. Nummo Twin: generator of woody, baffling dream pop and abstracted yet covertly clever chucking-mud-at-the-wall collages of glitchy electronics, woodworking noises, and half-heard vocal mumbles.
The Todmorden show features raffishly arty tenor sax duo Wolf Scarers (Simon Prince and Keith Jafrate) and thrumming audio-visualizer Anna Peaker. With printmaking, DJing and gig promotion as part of her activity alongside the sound and graphics designer (and with an eye on branching out into dressmaking and ceramics.) Anna is an impressive DIY/do-anything character. Across her artwork she takes inspiration from Yorkshire weaving mills, witchcraft, old record sleeves and film posters; from ancient pathways and the millennia-spanning architectural layers of her base in Leeds. By itself, her music is skirling Yorkshire-Germanic variations on assorted psychedelic-chapel organ drones, billowing in and out of focus and sometimes including autoharp and field recordings – for the full effect, though, it’s tied into the cascade of her live visuals.
With Wolf Scarers, Simon and Keith blow a free-brewed stewing of various ingredients and inspirations from the multiple genres each has played individually (and sidestepping the temptations to baffle the acoustic tones any further with computer processing). The results range from “gentle meditations that almost become chamber music across to full-blown shout-ups in the true tenor sax tradition, via, possibly, messed-up marching band funk and deconstructed jazz strut.” Larger Wolfscaring lineups are rolled out when the music necessitates, but on this occasion it’ll be the core duo at work.
In Berlin, Ariadne are slotting in at the bottom of a mixed bill in the Kiezsalon series run by Michael Rosen. At the top is American sampling-and-computer-music pioneer Carl Stone, whose 1970s loops and repurposing of library records drew a kind of academic-based parallel to hip hop’s turntablism, and who’s subsequently kept pace with technological collaging possibilities while maintaining an accessible sense of found/captured/manipulated melody, plus a continually expanding taste for incorporating suggestions and content from other cultures’ music (in particular Asian cultures) and a disarmingly bonkers vocal quality. In the middle is French wind instrumentalist/synthesist Ariel Kalma, who’s been dwelling on the borderlines of process music, Paris experimentalism, New Age and electrophonic minimalism since the mid-‘70s.
Over at Prague’s Punctum venue, the first of two listed support acts is the acousmatic Sound Situation trio: domestic New Music exponents with electronicist Michal Rataj (electronics), Jan Trojan (more electronics, plate-bashing) and Ivan Boreš (prepared guitar) Veterans of academic music and live improv, as definition they spit out a host of word associations as definition: “sound design, freshly baked bottle in the fridge, movie soundtracks, radio art, pieces of sheet metal, flamenco, sirens, spectral transformations, Kvok!, teaching at the university… Ostrava new music days, abandoned sea beach, Contempuls, Noise Assault Agency Budweiss, BERG Orchestra, Gride”.
Unpick and reassemble that little lot if you wish; but note that Punctum have spent far less time expounding on who second Prague support Julia Dyck might be. To be frank, they’ve spent no time at all on it so far… but evidence points towards it being this woman. If so, you can expect to see or hear anything pulled from a bewildering, inspiring rack of potential directions and from a mind seething with forma drawn from feminist/queer/gender theory, from technological awareness and from Julia’s formidable polymathic curiosity about the world. It might be radiophonics, or synth minimalism, or voice-and-fx constructions, or ambient noise; it might be ideas drawing from her time as radio producer, writer and broadcast media artiste; or general conceptual experiments like the miked-up fruit-and-body performance she recorded for a batch of film festivals earlier in the year.
There are a few tasters below – the krautrock-in-the-frying-pan of Passenger, the ambient goo of Changes Made – but there’s too much to Julia to summarise in a paragraph or two or a handful of audio clips. Even briefly looking into what she does is like cracking an eggshell and finding an expansive, challenging pocket universe within, which then maps inexorably back onto your own and changes it behind your back.
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Full tour dates and details are still being assembled, but here are the ones I know about so far:
Saint Vitus Bar, 1120 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York City, NY 11222, USA – Friday 7th June 2019 (with Ideal and Dasychira) – information here,here, here and here
Blah Blah, via Po 21, 10124 Torino, Italy – Wednesday 12th June 2019, 8.00pm – information here
Le Brin de Zinc, 3 ZA Route de la Peysse, Chambery, 73000 Barberaz, France – Thursday 13th June 2019, 8.30pm – information here
St Paul’s Church Southville, 2 Southville Road (junction with Coronation Road), Bristol, BS3 1DG, England – Saturday 15th June 2019, 7.00pm (with Salaċ + Java Java Wetware) – information here and here
The Golden Lion, Fielden Square, Todmorden, OL14 6LZ, England – Sunday 16th June 2019, 7.30pm(with Wolf Scarers + Anna Peaker) – information here
The Peer Hat, 14-16 Faraday Street, Manchester, M1 1BE, England – 17th June 2019, 7.30pm(with Lazy Bones + The Peace Pipers + Nummo Twin) – information here
Sutton House, 2-4 Homerton High Street, Homerton, London, E9 6JQ, England – Tuesday 18th June 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
MS Stubnitz, HafenCity, Kirchenpauerkai 26, Umfahrung Versmannstraße, Baakenhafen/Baakenhöft, 20457 Hamburg, Germany – Friday 21st June 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Komplex, Zietenstr. 32, 09130 Chemnitz, Germany – 22nd June 2019, 8.00pm – information here
Punctum, Krásova 27, Žižkov, 13000 Prague, Czech Republic – Sunday 23rd June 2019, 7.00pm (with Michal Rataj/Ivan Boreš/Jan Trojan + Julia Dyck) – information here and here
Wolskie Centrum Cultury, Wolskie Centrum Kultury, ul. Obozowa 85, 01-425 Warszawa, Poland – Monday 24th June 2019, 8.00pm – information here
Kiezsalon, Greifswalder Strasse 23a, 10407 Berlin, Germany – Wednesday 26th June 2019, 8.00pm(with Carl Stone + Ariel Kalma) – information here and here
Macao, Viale Molise 68, 20137 Milan, Italy – 28th June 2019, time t.b.c.
Outdoor summer gigs from Woodburner are resuming at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden – as usual, I’m passing on the message…
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The 4th June launch event features Dylema Amadi’s Dylema Collective, Alxndr London, Boadi and Lex Amor.
“The Dylema Collective is a poetry-music project with sounds combining neo-soul, contemporary jazz and floaty R&B carefully blended with a cross-over of funk, latin and poly-rhythmic grooves and spoken-word poetry. Thematically, Dylema’s feminist poetry addresses head on matters of race, gender and individuality, values reiterated by the hidden message within their lead vocalist’s name’s acronym: “Do You. Let Every Man Adapt”. In short, they love sharing music and poetry that shakes the mind, soul and body.
“Effortlessly blending lyrical soul, R&B and electronic music whilst subverting it into something completely his own, the enigmatic and intriguing “Afro-Ronin” Alxndr London has returned with his new EP ‘2023’. Inspired by the sounds of UK Funky, London’s Garage sound, Yoruba spirituals and electronic soul, it’s an experimental project rooted in a genre-less space that balances spiritual conflict and Afrocentric themes, with unconstrained fantasy and spectacular science-fiction.
“Boadi is a twenty-three-year old soul/R&B singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist originating from South London, with a jazz-influenced sound combined with a dash of hip-hop for authenticity. Growing up his musical influences were legendary artists such as Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and Marvin Gaye. His mother migrated from Ghana and he spent a year living there when he was a child: when he was younger, he listened to a lot of traditional Ghanaian music which taught him about different rhythms and harmonies. Coming from a family of instrumentalists and singers, Boadi was instantly surrounded by music and developed his musical talents further when attending church, and perhaps this is where his heavy use of gospel-inspired backing vocals and harmonies stemmed from.
“London-based lyricist Lex Amor’s monthly dip into musical spices for Reprezent Radio’s addictive Mellowdic Show champions vibes upon vibes, from artists near and far. Consistently a treat for the soul; and the same can be said for the blissed-out hip hop of Lex’s own musical output. Such is the ease and natural cadence of her delivery, you find yourself hanging off her every word. Lex has the effortless ability to translate her full self in her music, with beats and rhymes you won’t be able to keep off repeat.”
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The 11th June gig features resurgent rapper Dizraeli, Latin psychedelic group Intaya and jazz-soul singer Charlotte Algar.
“Poet, producer, MC and multi-instrumentalist Dizraeli is a genre all of his own, building himself a cult following around Europe and playing to audiences of thousands around the world. Now, after three years studying percussion in Senegal, immersing himself in the world of London grime and bass music, working with refugees in Calais and finally, living through a mental breakdown, he’s back with ‘The Unmaster’, his first self-produced album and an electrifying new sound. ‘The Unmaster’ speaks of madness and collapse, struggle and redemption with searing honesty, surreal humour and a soundtrack unlike anything you’ve heard. A dark, fierce hybrid of hip hop, grime and West African percussion, it is music to make sense of an insane world.
“Intaya‘s sound is a combination of electronic music, jazz, hip-hop, future soul, Afro-Latin influences and psychedelic elements – electronic ethereal groove music. Formed by singer/producer Pao Pestana and multi-instrumentalist/producer Dom Martin, the band is half Venezuelan (singer and drummer) and half Londoner (guitarist and keyboardist) and the music reflects this combination. Expect Latin roots, electronic groove and space-age sonic lushness.
“Charlotte Algar is a twenty-three-year-old singer-songwriter from north-east London (and the assistant editor of ‘Songlines’). Charlotte draws on her classical training to create undulating, delicate guitar accompaniments. Paired with soulful vocals and pensive, poetic lyrics, this makes for a unique and compelling style.”
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The 18th June event mines the fervent south London jazz scene with sets from PYJÆN, Brothers Testament and Jelly Cleaver, and DJ work from Stephen Vitkovitch.
“Described by ‘Jazz Wise Review’ as having “a groove propelled with dynamism and formidable technique”, the PYJÆN quintet seamlessly melds funk, afro-beat and contemporary sounds with nods to hip-hop and disco, whilst acknowledging the traditional era of 1920s jazz and dance music. Having met at Trinity Laban, they aspire to create a culture that others can relate to and feel represented, and to help other young musicians carve out their own space. Self- motivated and driven by a DIY ethos and interdisciplinary approach, PYJÆN believe in building connections, supporting and collaborating with other artists to build communities and create culture in which everyone feels represented. Coming from diverse backgrounds, but united over a shared aim to connect with each other and their audiences, PYJÆN are burgeoning onto the London jazz scene.
“Brother’s Testament are a groove-based jazz fusion band from London. Consisting of Munashe-Caleb Manyumbu, Mark Mollison, Hugo Piper and Jack Robson, their sound amalgamates powerful grooves and stirring melodies whilst also rooted in the jazz tradition. Brother’s Testament perform from the heart and emphasise and embrace improvisation so that the set manifests organically on stage, differently each time. Last year saw the release of ‘Ascent’, their debut EP, which slowly gained traction and garnered acclaim from the wider jazz community in London.
“Jelly Cleaver is a guitarist, singer-songwriter and producer based in South London. With an eclectic taste in music, Jelly is heavily involved in both the jazz and DIY scenes in London. She’s also an activist, and a strain of political dissent runs through her music.
“Byrd Out label head Stephen Vitkovitch (who’s supervised releases from Andrew Weatherall, Evan Parker, Philou Louzolo and more, and is the brains behind the Walthamstow Jazz Festival) will play some tracks between the acts. Check one of his Netil shows here:”
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The final June show, on the 25th, takes a folkier turn with The Breath, Alice Zawadzki and Lunatraktors.
“The Breath is guitarist Stuart McCallum and singer Ríoghnach Connolly. Based in Manchester, their unique take on alt-folk journeys from lush, beguiling storytelling to uplifting punch-the-air anthems. For The Breath, it’s all about the song. Connolly writes the only way she knows how; a stream of poetic consciousness giving rise to honest, personal, heartfelt songs as likely to touch on childhood summers and first love as cultural dislocation, post-colonial injustices and grief. But it’s her deeply soulful, utterly engaging, stop-you-in-your-tracks voice – whether delicate and hushed or powerful and gutsy – coupled with Stuart’s understated brilliance and their exquisitely crafted, personal songs, that give The Breath such emotional depth. The duo share a remarkable connection on stage which make The Breath’s live performances utterly compelling.
“Vocalist, violinist, and composer Alice Zawadzki is a distinctive presence on the European creative scene. Her rich musical background and “whimsical hyper-creativity” (‘MOJO’) draw upon her early exposure to New Orleans jazz and gospel after years on the road as a teenager with the legendary Lillian Boutte, an extensive classical training as a violinist, and a continuous exploration of improvisation, poetry, and folk music from diverse traditions, “all propelled in a voice of velvet suppleness and gutsy emotional power” (‘The Arts Desk’). As an interpreter of new and unusual works, she has premiered several large-scale works both in the UK and abroad. Alice brings a stripped back and intimate performance to Woodburner, weaving ancient, modern, and invented folklore into a set of delicious pieces to share.
“What’s left when everything is taken away from us – our tools, technology and libraries, even our homes, communities and citizenship? What’s left is what we have learned by heart and we can do with our bodies: our voices, hands and feet. Using techniques from body percussion, tap dance, overtone singing and physical theatre, performance duo Lunatraktors explore a set of British, Irish and Australian ballads to rediscover folk music as a queer space of personal and political transformation. Weaving the tragedy and comedy of these traditional tales with hypnotic acoustic percussion and harmonies, Lunatraktors create a genre-defying, “spellbinding” performance on the borders of music, theatre and live art.
“Combining the percussive and choreographic talents of ex-Stomp member Carli Jefferson with the four-octave range and haunting overtones of trans folk singer Clair Le Couteur, Lunatraktors use the basic ingredients of body and voice to conjure up expansive, unexpected spaces. The duo are equally at home improvising with hands, feet and voices on a station platform, or electrifying a festival stage with custom drum kit, live loops and analogue synth. Lunatraktors strip folk down and rebuild it with influences from clowning, cabaret, art punk, flamenco and trip-hop. The tales they unearth of bravery in the face of forced migration, political unrest, and abuse of authority find particular resonances today.”
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All events are at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, 13 Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England on Tuesday evenings. Dates below:
The Dylema Collective + Alxndr London + Boadi + Lex Amor – Tuesday 4th June 2019, 7.00pm – information here
Dizraeli + Intaya + Charlotte Algar – Tuesday 11th June 2019, 7.00pm – information here
PYJÆN + Brothers Testament + Jelly Cleaver + Stephen Vitkovitch – Tuesday 18th June 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
The Breath + Alice Zawadzki + Lunatraktors – Tuesday 25th June 2019, 7.00pm -information here and here
Working off the back of his recent ‘Flowers At The Scene’ album, Tim Bowness will shortly set out on a live lope around Europe for the summer months.
During the decade-long lull in his No-Man activity, Tim’s bloom of solo albums have all been half-hidden treasures. They belong to a current, mysterious class of brilliantly-crafted labour-of-love pop records – the ones which make decent chart performances (in a chart which no longer obeys the simple rules of earlier generations) but which remain strangely invisible, apparently known only to cult audiences. They’re part of a kind of parallel-universe pop culture, only distinguished from our own by luck and chance.
When he was singing sweetly over dance beats for mid-’90s No-Man (a mixture of blush and bleak, stark and swoon), I was creating stubborn little write-ups dragging their art pop over into the prog rock court, armed with some of my suspicions and certainties regarding their eclectic musical appetites, their taste for a bit of well-spoken Anglo grandeur, their cinematic sensibilities. Gradually, over a couple of decades, I was proved right. Tim (like his No-Man partner Steven Wilson) now commands considerably proggy audiences; in Tim’s case, he also generously stewards art-rock megaboutique Burning Shed (something which gives him the additional blending of goodwill and cachet that helps attract silvering art-rock aristocrats like Peter Hammill, Kevin Godley or Ian Anderson into guesting on his records). All of this culminated in the epic kitchen-sink-Ziggy multitrack saga of ‘Lost In The Ghost Light’, in which Tim revisited the imprints of his ‘70s heroes and spikily reinvented them as an embittered, failing dreamshadow self.
Still, call me wayward or a backtracker, but for a while I’ve been wishing that there was less outright prog in the picture. Coincidentally, Tim seems to agree, as ‘Flowers At The Scene’ tempers and bounces away from the progginess of recent years, possessing a delicacy of musical touch to match his lyrical subtlety. At times it’s a missing link between several of his old touchstones (The Smiths, Kate Bush) while at others it flirts with the fan-dance flutters and delay guitars of ’80s art pop, indulges the odd florid arena-rock burst, or touches on glacial latterday synthpop. It’s also a possible curtain-raiser to more No-Man activity. Steven Wilson, always a friendly presence or passing mix wizard on previous Tim albums, quietly shared the full production chair and an open No-Man credit on this one. The songs, too – while recognisably Bownessian in their portraits of make-do-and-mend, subtly cultivated angst and discreet English agonies – have a lapping No-Man urgency to them, the exquisite solipsistic portraits and summaries refitted with a pulsing pop drive.
In keeping with the spotty, sporadic live patterns of cult artisty and cottage-industry songsmith, Tim’s tour is less of a tour than a series of temporary outbreaks – a couple of one-off shows at odd-matched English venues, two more in Poland, a festival appearance in the Netherlands, a raid on Berlin. His band continues to exemplify that stylistic spread I mentioned earlier. They’re a collection of friends with sympathies dotted across various British movements – current bassman John Jowitt represents a strand of classy neoprog veterans; regular drummer Andrew Booker flies the flag for the clean-cut clever bastards; a pair of multidisciplinarians (guitarist Michael Bearpark and violinist Steve Bingham) pull the ensemble towards the flexible art rock yearnings which are Tim’s genuine home, and to refresh things, Brian Hulse (Tim and Michael’s companion in recently revived ‘80s Manchester art-pop trio Plenty, and a major co-writer on ‘Flowers…’) is now covering keyboards, laptop and second guitar.
OK, I’m a malcontent. It still feels as if it would be be good, at this stage, to see Tim elsewhere, in a different less cosy, less ‘Prog’ magazine context – wrangling over stage space with spikier arty acts like Rufus Wainwright or St Vincent; Eyeless In Gaza or John Greaves; even Momus. He’d fit in – different moves and intimations might flex within the live show; the tart angst and great-battles-in-small-spaces tone underlying his songs could be seen better for what they are. But we have what we have. He’s appreciated. He has, at least, this home; and he’s making generous use of it in both senses, with several of the upcoming shows (bar the Bowness-only Poland gigs) providing support acts interesting to proggies and non-proggies alike.
For the London gig at Dingwalls, there are slots for Ms Amy Birks and Nick Beggs. A ‘Prog Magazine’ chart-topper last year in the female vocalist stakes (and having already made an upcoming name for herself as frontwoman for chamber-prog/classical projects Beatrix Players and Birks&Kroon), Amy is now fitting in space for a solo career, some of which will get an early preview at this show. Refreshingly free of diva blather and of irksome vocal histrionics (both on and offstage), she’s shaping up as a prime exponent for that thoughtful breed of songs pulled up immaculately from source; cool, clear material polished to a classical drawing-room sheen which only increases its impact.
Nick, meanwhile, was initially infamous as the hair-beaded beanpole bassist for Kajagoogoo during the early 1980s. He’s long since been unmasked as a serious and dedicated muso with a vibrant musicality and the requisite interesting arty quirks to put the right kind of distance between himself and the workaday session cat. Having spent his post-Kaja time travelling through Iona and Ellis Beggs & Howard (scoring a hit with the latter via slo-funk effervescer Big Bubbles No Troubles‘) he’s more recently been playing backup in the live bands for John Paul Jones and Steven Wilson, and fronting mildly dystopian prog-poppers Mute Gods. For this concert, he’ll be playing a solo set on Chapman Stick – an instrument on which he’s one of the prime British performers.
With John Jowitt in the Bowness band lineup, the Worcester show marks a fleeting IQ rhythm section reunion: IQ’s onetime drummer Andy Edwards is joining in for a couple of songs and is, in addition, the mentor behind the two support acts. The assured young Brummie power trio Hey Jester offer contorting, slightly grunge-y but always theatrical prog-pop something in the vein of Muse – or, to pick another budding band, Tonochrome. Imogen Bebb (better known as one of the British synthpop community’s superfan commentators via her Sound Of The Crowd blog plus her writing for ‘The Electricity Club‘ and various Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark sites) finally unleashes a musical project of her own. I can’t scrape up many details on this, but you might expect something rooted in her love for OMD. Alternatively, it might well be a live outing for her singer-songwriter project Music For Your Tape Recorder, which slipped a few tracks out onto Bandcamp last year: promising, shapeshifting piano or guitar ballads, like a nascent Tori Amos or Rickie Lee Jones coming up through British indie-folk.
The Netherlands gig is a double-headliner, shared with Anneke van Giersbergen. Another assured no-fuss singer (with a clean, bell-clear voice that can soar across grand pop, arena rock and experimental metal with equal facility), Anneke came up via Dutch doom metal act turned alt-rockers The Gathering (whom she fronted for twelve years between 1995 and 2007). She’s since forged a solo path, as well as being a frequent performer in ongoing rock opera project Ayreon and an equally frequent collaborator with Devin Townsend as guest vocalist, as well as fronting her own prog-metal project VUUR. It’s a little like getting Peter Hammill or David Sylvian to split a show with Nancy Wilson; but Tim’s already got form for gracious stage-sharing with female singers whom you might have thought didn’t fit his precise, rail-thin aesthetic, having already done so with iamthemorning’s Marjana Semkina a few years ago.
If you were hoping for something a little less prog’n’hearty – and a lot less rock – as a support act, you’d be better off getting yourself over to Germany for the Berlin gig, where the opening performer is Bernhard Wöstheinrich. Formerly a collaborator with Tim in ongoing avant-electric trio centrozoon, Bernhard’s primarily a visual artist. However, he’s been transposing that way of thinking onto keyboard and programming styles which (over more than twenty years) have been fearlessly and frankly swaying and transmuting between instrumental synthpop, a kind of foregrounded ambient method, faux-tribal rattlings, fierce dance barrages and what’s best described as a kind of pushy shape-building (like a restlessly, rapidly built pop-up city sprouting out of electronic pilings). Here’s a selection…
In late July, Tim and co. are back in Germany for the Night of the Prog festival in Loreley. In this case they don’t get to call the shots on who they play with, or how, being fourth on the bill for a day of Europrog (headlined by Nick Mason’s revival of psych-era Pink Floyd via Saucerful of Secrets, and also featuring Overhead, the interesting world/electro-tinged Lazuli, Czech instrumental sphere rock band Fors, Afro/classical-touched Canadians Karcius and the live debut of Thomas Thielen’s “T” project). That said, it does give them option of wheedling away some new fans from the more restless strands of a more traditionally proggy audience…
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Tim Bowness dates:
Worcester Arts Workshop, 21 Sansome Street, Worcester, WR1 1UH, England – Sunday 26th May 2019, 7.00pm(with Hey Jester + Imogen Bebb + Andy Edwards) – information here and here
CreativeColors Stage @ Cultuurpodium Boerdiij, Amerikaweg 145, 2717 AV Zoetermeer, The Netherlands – Friday 31st May 2019, 7.30pm(co-headline show with Anneke van Giersbergen) – information here, here and here
Klub Firlej, ulica Grabiszyńska 56, 53-504 Wrocław, Woj. Dolnośląskie, Poland – Sunday 2nd June 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Club Progresja, Fort Wola 22, 01-258 Warsawa, Poland – Monday 3rd June 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Prachtwerk, Ganghoferstrasse 2, Neukoln, 12043 Berlin, Germany – Tuesday 4th June 2019, 7.30pm(with Bernhard Wöstheinrich) – information here, here and here
Dingwalls, 11 Middle Yard, Camden Lock, London, NW1 8AB, England – Friday 7th June 2019, 7.00pm(with Ms Amy Birks + Nick Beggs) – information here and here
Night Of The Prog Festival @ Freilichtbühne Loreley, St. Goarshausen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany – Saturday 20th July 2019, show begins 12.00pm(with Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets + Lazuli + Karcius + T + Overhead + Fors) – information here and here
The last Kammer Klang concert of the current season is slipping its usual moorings, forsaking its usual London home at Café Oto in favour of the ICA, and staging a reconstruction (and UK premiere) of ‘GLIA’, Maryanne Amacher’s work for seven instruments and electronics.
As a fully-formed artist slipping into the realms of avant-garde composition, Amacher was best known for installation work and psychoacoustic ideas… although that’s a little dry and reductive. She was interested in exploring the ways in which humans perceive sound (including ways in which a listener can be subtly deceived by its manipulation and displacement), and in particular the perceptions induced by sounds generated within the ear. She’d use particular high-frequency sounds, volumes and sonic displacements to excite unusual tonal responses within the physical structure of the inner ears of her listeners; in effect, she benevolently transformed them into part of the sonic ensemble (or, perhaps more accurately, into instruments who could perceive themselves being played).
This from the archives at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe:
“The work bearing the title ‘GLIA’ (named after the glial cells in the brain that control the transmission of stimuli between the synapses) was performed once in the Berlin multimedia centre TESLA. This first exhibition was (still) instructed and supervised by Amacher herself in collaboration with the former director of Ensemble Zwischentöne, Peter Ablinger, as well as with current director Bill Dietz.
“In ‘GLIA’, Amacher imagines the audience as a kind of glial cell representing the interface between the electronic and acoustic-instrumental elements of the work. In a narrower sense, she imagined the “otoacoustic emissions” (the sounds within the ear radiating once again from the electronic devices and instruments as if “by magic”) emerging in the audience’s ears as precisely this “neural interface”. This corresponds to the same approach Amacher had previously intended with her piece for the Kronos Quartet in the 1990s which was never performed (and probably never completed). In fact, the material for this string quartet had been partly newly arranged for ‘GLIA’. After the Berlin premier, Amacher returned to Kingston, New York, and took home with her all the material for the performance of this work. In 2009, the Zwischentöne ensemble invited Amacher to return to Berlin to further develop ‘GLIA’. Unexpectedly, Amacher tragically died shortly before this planned reencounter.”
‘GLIA’ has been performed at least twice since then (with Zwischentöne performing it twice in 2012, at ZKM and at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart), but this will be the British premiere; with members of Zwischentöne joining another Swiss New Music ensemble, Ensemble Contrechamps and with Bill Dietz returning to direct. The performance will be preceded by ‘Ghost Written Scenarios & Unnamed Sensibilities’, a discussion between Bill and Amy Cimini, the contemporary music performer and academic historian Amy Cimini whose book ‘Listening in the Future Tense’ “examines the use of biological and ecological sound sources in late 20th century experimental music circles.”
It’s no coincidence that this subject overlaps with Amacher’s work: Amy was a friend and collaborator, as well as being part of the ongoing Supreme Connections collective which reengages with Amacher’s legacy and her back catalogue of music and ideas. Amy’s also a defender against over-casual summings-up of her friend’s intentions and achievements: “(Listeners are) like: ‘O.K., I totally get what this music is about — it’s about this crazy inner-ear sensation, she understood that intuitively, end of story. And that’s not the story, actually.” OK… I stand corrected…)
The concert and discussion will be preceded the previous day with a screening of Charles Atlas’ ‘Torse’ documentary from 1977 – a multiple-camera study of the choreography of Merce Cunningham’s ‘Torse’ dance piece, performed to Amacher’s composition Remainder (1976). As with the performance of ‘GLIA’, there’ll be a pre-screening conversation between Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini.
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Kammer Klang/Ensemble Contrechamps/Institute of Contemporary Arts presents:
‘Maryanne Amacher at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 30th-31st May 2019’
Screening of ‘Torse’ (plus pre-screening conversation between Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini) – Thursday 30th May 2019, 6.30pm
‘Ghost Written Scenarios & Unnamed Sensibilities’ (Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini in conversation) – Friday 31st May 2019, 7.00pm
Maryanne Amacher Focus (featuring Ensemble Contrechamps, members of Ensemble Zwischentöne and Bill Dietz) – Friday 31st May 2019, 8.00pm
Quick notes/blurb repostings on a pair of upcoming London jazz events:
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“Named after a wish-fulfilling and divine tree in Hindu mythology, Kalpadruma is an exciting 12-piece mixed ensemble that also functions as a jazz quintet. It was recently formed to explore connections between contemporary, jazz, Indian, Arabic, Turkish and flamenco musics. It’s a culturally and stylistically diverse band (jazz quintet, flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, saxophone feature alongside a string quartet with occasional bansuri flute).
“Kalpadruma comprises some of the finest emerging players from Guildhall, the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. The core quintet features 2018 BBC Young Jazz Musician finalist Reuben Goldmark on piano, Joe Parks on cajon and percussion, Charlie Heywood on guitar, Harry Pearce on bass guitar and Asha Parkinson on alto, tenor and soprano saxophones, and has played at venues ranging from the 100 club to the Union Chapel. The unorthodox line-up goes with the group’s unusual sonic identity, offering what’s been described as “a fiery feast of additive rhythms and Messaienesque harmonies and “feel-good” melodies”. The ‘Kalpadruma Suite’ is a six-movement work bringing together all these influences.
“‘Triggers’ is the title of a new three-movement saxophone concerto for soprano and alto saxophone and chamber orchestra, conducted by Noah Max and written and performed by Asha, whose work regularly crosses the boundaries between traditions. Described as a “fiery tenor saxophonist”, she was twice semi-finalist in the BBC Young Jazz Musician competition and was shortlisted in 2016 BBC Inspire Composers Competition. Additionally she was one of twenty young people internationally to win the Diana Legacy Award for her initiative Voices Beyond Divisions. Currently in her third year at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Asha has studied with the likes of Mark Lockheart, Iain Ballamy, Trish Clowes, Matthew King, Gareth Lockrane and Christian Forshaw.
“The narrative of the piece reflects the all-too-human struggle to quell negative emotions and establish a very practical and and effective “inner” peace in order to improve our relationship with the world around us. The starting point for which is becoming aware of and then “breaking” the “triggers” of negative emotions. The saxophone undergoes a transformation that parallels this change in dialogue with the orchestra, incorporating both improvisation and prepared composition.”
OK, this is a little unclear even after being carefully sifted and welded together from two different sources. I’m not quite sure whether this is a two-work bonanza for the price of one – but as regards price, it’s free; and as regards content, it’s intriguing.
I’d also urge a closer look at the Voices Beyond Divisions project. Initiated by Asha while she was still in her mid-teens, it’s a cross-faith singing project bringing Christian, Jewish and Muslim children together to perform music stressing the shared values of peacefulness and responsibility which feature in parallel in all of said faiths, drawing on passages from the Q’uran, the Talmud and the Bible. The finished performances involve schoolchildren, rising teenaged singers and instrumentalists and professional oud and ney players (representing instrumental traditions from the Middle East) and are based on quotations on a theme of peace from the Q’uran, the Talmud and the Bible. A little obvious, perhaps; but at a time when militant differences and brutal wedges driven between communities are being stressed and fostered so much, we need our do-gooding and our worldwide conscience drives even more than ever.
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Also available – the last tickets for the imminent Village Underground show by Maisha, drummer Jake Long’s sextet collective featuring anointed sax star Nubya Garcia on saxophone, her Tomorrow’s Warrior colleague Shirley Tetteh on guitar, double bassist Twm Dylan, Amané Suganami on piano/Wurlitzer, and doubled percussion provision care of Yahael Camara-Onono and Tim Doyle. As a band, they’re in the growing diasporan-sensitive vein that’s been characterising London jazz for a while now, “channeling the lineage of spiritual jazz, taking inspiration from Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane and Idris Mohammad, (and) fus(ing) their jazz influences with West African and Afro-beat rhythms.”
In support (and pointing up the same scene’s cofraternity with dance music) is Tim Doyle’s electronic dance alter ego Chiminyo, for which his live drumming triggers synthetic cascades of percussive and harmonic exotica. Also around is Arabian/West African slanted double bassist Ben Hayes, this time plying his skills as a DJ.
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Dates:
Kalpadruma presents:
‘Triggers: The Music Of Change’ Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Silk Street, Barbican, London, EC2Y 8DT, England
Thursday 23rd May 2019, 7.00pm – free event – information here and here
Maisha + Chiminyo + DJ Ben Hayes Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England
Monday 27th May 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Quick news on a couple of London dance events next week…
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“We have been sent synchronistic signs from another metaphysical plane. We are the glitch-seekers exposing the Holes In The Holoverse.”
Multimedia dance moves (swirling around various esoteric, psychedelic and club culture tropes) come from Lost Souls Of Saturn, playing at Village Underground. “Lost Souls Of Saturn is a multidisciplinary live project, primarily piloted by Seth Troxler and Phil Moffa, with opaque additional participants congregating to combine music, imagery, and storytelling into an inextricably linked whole, all wrapped up in a philosophy of their own making. Attempting something creatively that’s above-and-beyond, LSOS explore new ways to open doors of perception and challenge the reality vs. simulation paradigm whilst capturing the spirit of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Philip K. Dick, Sun Ra and The KLF within their music, live experiences, and forthcoming films… which is basically catnip to us.
“Having released their debut EP ‘Holes In The Holoverse’ on 1st March (with a debut album to follow in June), on Thursday 18th April the full LSOS live experience will be unveiled with DJ support from Seth Troxler, Phil Moffa and others – make sure you’re here for it.”
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Walthamstow avant clubnight More News From Nowhere, generally known for avant-tronica, texture music and various other delightful musical miscegenations, have recently returned “after a year-long hiatus… back with a new venture and spreading further afield – showcasing the best in London’s underground and experimental music with a series of occasional one-off events around the capital. The show takes place at the newly re-opened Brew Club in Hackney Central – a fantastic new warehouse venue a stone’s throw from their original location in Clapton, which played host to the raucous ‘Fresh Hell’ series of New Years parties which hosted, among others, Sly and the Family Drone, and UKAEA.”
I missed the first one, but the coming week’s event is part of MNFN’s sister event Total Cult, which “showcases some of the most interesting homegrown dance music London has to offer, with a headline set from 2018 Daphne Oram award winner Loraine James.
“James combines influences from the world of electronic music such as Aoki Takamasa, Telefon Tel Aviv and Toe, with an eclecticism borne of growing up in London in the 1990s and 2000s. Garage, rave, math-rock and chart pop references are combined into a pulsating, and intricate collage which is as joyful as it is thought-provoking. After releasing her debut album ‘Detail’ with DIY collective Fu Inle records in 2018, she returned with the four-track EP ‘Button Mashing’ on New York Haunted in 2019 – a more personal record which speaks to her experience as a queer black woman, while also developing her sound (which combines glitch, footwork, ambient and bouncing techno) even further.
“In support will be dub-techno veteran Matt Spendlove (a.k.a. Spatial), with his first London performance of a new audiovisual piece for 4.1 surround, originally performed at Grey Area in San Francisco. Spatial’s work pushes the dynamics of sound system culture incorporating low frequency vibration, hacked code, and optisonic experiments. An unconventional artist in the turbulent realm of bass music, he combines a preoccupation with emergent behaviour, rule based repetition and chaotic systems with an ability to shape dubbed out, cracked and reductive sonics into audible geometric form. Through textured intricate production, Spatial’s releases and live sets bring corporeal presence carved out with a minimalist’s scalpel.
“Also playing is Mike Neaves, whose intricate, hypnotic techno (showcased on 2019 release ‘Black Sauce’) combines delicate, hypnotic instrumentation with visceral, body-first bangers. ‘The Ransom Note‘ tagged him as an artist “mix(ing) drum machines, pianos, Wurlitzers and field recordings to create something forward-thinking. Imagine CJ Bolland reworking Pierre Schaffer’s musique concrete compositions, but with an ear on the dancefloor, and you’re on the right tracks”…”
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Dates:
Lost Souls Of Saturn Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England
Thursday 18th April 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Total Cult presents:
Loraine James + Spatial + Mike Neaves Brew Club, Hackney Walk, Arches 7-8 Bohemia Place, Hackney, London, E8 1DU, England
Friday 19th April 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Backed by cloudy saxophone and slow-jam beat, 
Makandi’s ‘Dum Dum’ lives very much for the moment, and its sincerity is of a much more clipped, matter-of-fact kind. Musically, this is deep house with a riffling blue-seas tropicalia tinge; fluttering synth melodies like inquisitive hummingbirds; a relaxed cool-mood/wise-child female vocal. 
