Boosting the signal for some experimental/eclectic gigs in London this coming week…
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Machinefabriek ( photo by Pieter Jan Minnebo)
IKLECTIK presents:
Machinefabriek + Graham Dunning & Colin Webster IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 16th June 2016, 8.00pm – information
“Machinefabriek is the alias of Rutger Zuydervelt, whose music combines elements of ambient, noise, minimalism, drone, field recordings and electro-acoustic experiments. His pieces can be heard as sonic environments for the listener to dwell in. Finding tension in texture, tone and timing, the result can be very minimalistic at first glance, but reveals itself upon closer listening. The devil is in the details. Rutger has collaborated (on record and/or live) with numerous artists including Colin Webster, Jaap Blonk, Aaron Martin, Peter Broderick, Frans de Waard, Steve Roden, Michel Banabila, Dead Neanderthals and Gareth Davis, amongst many others.
“The duo of Graham Dunning & Colin Webster perform improvised music avoiding conventional playing of their respective instruments. Graham Dunning uses a single turntable with dubplates of field recordings, dentistry tools and other objects to create crackling textures, tones and disjointed noise. On saxophone, Colin Webster uses a range of techniques to bring a palette of percussive and textural sounds, drawn tones, and raw, searing blasts. The duo have recorded 3 albums, with their 4th out in May on Tombed Visions, and have also recorded a collaboration with tuba player Sam Underwood.”
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An evening of assorted collective noises:
D503 present:
‘Mechanical Dreams Along the River’: Echoes… Leytonstone + Norvoir + Precocious Mouse + Shabash + D503 + Noteherder & McCloud New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Friday 17th June 2016, 7:30 pm – information here and here
“Echoes… Leytonstone is a solo project from James Shearman, interested in hypnagogia and inspired by musicians like Nadja, The Angelic Process and Birchville Cat Motel – ambient and ethereal dronegazing, minimal bellowing cave music.
“Norvoir is an ambient/drone project by Sam Saljooghi, using his guitar to slowly build and create vast atmospheric soundscapes from which you can immerse yourself in through his use of delay, reverb and looping.
“Precocious Mouse will be performing a new live iteration of the ‘seance’ project. Using a combination of generative, microsonics and found sound, the experimental/electronic/glitch piece explores themes of communication and alienation.
“A secret rendezvous of witches and sorcerers, characterized by orgiastic rites, dances and feasting and using violin, piano and noise, Shabash brings spirits of the deep forests and multidimensional realms, allowing different worlds to meet and journey together.
“D503 are Nicola Serra (beats, synthesizer, percussion) and Francesco Garau (guitars and manipulations), a North London-based duo aiming to explore drone, techno and industrial by using primitive and minimal sounds.
“Noteherder & McCloud undertake investigations. A thick grey soup of electronic noise and field recordings enlivened by some remarkable soprano sax playing from Chris Parfitt. We watch from dark corners where synthesisers struggle against illegal parameters.”
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Finding out everything that’s happening at a event at central London eclecti-night Scaledown always tends to be a last-minute matter, but here’s what was scheduled a working week before the latest show…
The Orchestra Pit presents:
Scaledown #119: V A L V E + Haymanot Tesfa + Frank E. & JK-ee (Lonesome Cowboys From Hell) + Mark Braby + Ed Dowie The King & Queen, 1 Foley Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1W 6DL, England
Friday 17th June 2016, 7:30 pm – information here and here
“Coming up this month we have:
“V A L V E is a progressive/avant-garde sound project from Knifeworld’s Chloe Herington, featuring an ever-morphing line up of conspirators and collaborators and rather a lot of bassoons, saxophones and found sounds.
“The beloved singer and artist Haymanot Tesfa brings her lyre to enchant us with songs of Ethiopia, ancient and contemporary, fresh and traditional.
“Yee-haw…. last year we put out the call for some cowpunk, and this coming Friday we get the grits courtesy of Frank E. & Blind ‘Gentleman’ JK-ee, two of the low-down psycho-reprobates that are Lonesome Cowboys From Hell. They will be regaling Scaledown with tales of family strife and cross-country travellin’ life.
“Co-Scaledown host Mr Mark Braby will perform one short story, one or two wee rhymes, two songs and an improvisation which will last until Duane the intern informs him that he has to stop.
“Ed Dowie has been making music since the late 1990s, firstly as one third of Parlophone’s Brothers in Sound, then later a solo act under the name Redarthur. After a five-year hiatus which he spent living in University libraries & music technology labs making strange bleeps, he returned to the music industry to join The Paper Cinema, a puppetry/animation/theatre/music hybrid (that tours both internationally & in Hackney). Now performing and recording under his own name, he makes music which fuses experimental techniques with melodic aspirations.”
It’s been two years now since the death of Roger Lloyd Pack. Though the eulogies flooded in at the time, hailing his work as actor, pop-culture hero (he played Trigger in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ and Owen in ‘The Vicar of Dibley’) and longstanding man of the people, one of the finest tributes to Roger only surfaced earlier this year when his widow (Jehane Markham) and son (Hartley Lloyd Pack) finally completed ‘Sixteen Sunsets’, an album project which they’d conceived together to help them work through their grief at the loss of Roger, and to raise money to fight the pancreatic cancer that felled him.
‘Sixteen Sunsets’ is one of the most touching records I’ve heard this year, or any year. It might have been a portrait of everyday heroism, or an obituary column with a mawkish soundtrack. It’s neither of these things. At root, it’s a fertile absence: an aching space into which layer of memories and flashes of emotion drift, to be woven into a portrait of love for a partner and father, of the hard-won acceptance of loss, and an exploration of how the recalling of things lost and a new reality of life without those things settle together. It’s a mixture of vigil notes and valediction played out under a wan London sky, simultaneously unfixed in time and subject to its relentless onward push.
Sixteen Sunsets: ‘Sixteen Sunsets’
The words and music (a mixture of Hartley’s organic hip hop delivery and Jehane’s stark poetry, plus voices and traces from r&b, folk, drone music and blues) gradually sketching out the shape of bereavement: sometimes dry and blank, sometimes aching or angry; and sometimes a source of pride and substance, a building block for the future. On hand to help put a shape to things are Kill Light’s Tom Vella and Richard Day, singers Sam Lee and Janai, singing cellist Natalie Rosario and crossover harmony group Trills: also in attendance are jazzmen Patrick Naylor and Michael Storey plus classical composer Keith Burstein (the last making an unaccustomed foray into tack piano and barbed, Weillian cabaret swing).
This is not the first time that Sixteen Sunsets’ songs have surfaced live – some were played at a cancer fundraiser at Wilton’s Music Hall at the end of January this year, while Map Studio Café hosted the project’s formal album launch in mid-February. This show, however, might have been particularly close to Roger’s heart: this particular library on the fringe of Camden (a bracing walk’s distance from the Lloyd Pack family home in Kentish Town, and a mere stone’s throw from his resting place in Highgate Cemetery) was one of his several cause celebres and a place which he vigorously defended in the face of government cuts and economic neglect. It’s not absolutely clear if everyone involved in the project is performing, although it seems that most of them will be (Hartley, Jehane, Natalie Rosario and Trills have all tweeted announcement about their own participation, and I may have missed news from the others.) It’s nominally a free event, but you’re encouraged to make a cash donation to Pancreatic Cancer UK on the door, in Roger’s memory.
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Later in the week, there are some more touches of folk, rhythm and community music at the usual Daylight shindig:
Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 227: Nat & The Noise Brigade + Ellie Ford + The Pop-Up Choir Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 11th June 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event (suggested donation: £5.00) – more information
“Grabbing anything they can get their hands on – brass, flutes, violins and even saucepans and biscuit tins – Nat & The Noise Brigade will be storming the stage. They’re a ten-piece band from East London, with songs ranging from politically charged grooves to anthems about poor punctuality via some unique cover versions (fancy some “ska Mozart” or “doo-wop Radiohead”?).
Ellie Ford‘s music is both thought provoking and utterly absorbing. Her songs are enchanting with harp and guitar parts underpinning sultry vocals. As a solo performer Ellie Ford is captivating, but she also fronts a five-piece band of multi-instrumentalists who play a mix of modern and classical instrumentation (harp, violin, clarinet, guitar and drums). Taking influence from a range of genres, Ellie Ford has an edge and variation that cements her uniqueness in the alt-folk world.
“There’s also a chance to enjoy south London’s fabulous Pop-Up Choir; a cappella ensemble of twenty-five singers who delight and surprise with their playful arrangements.”
Here are a pair of imminent shows showcasing various directions in experimentation (from spiritual politics and improvisation to pop soundscaping and music technology) at two of London’s most undersung but exciting current venues.
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IKLECTIK Arts Lab presents:
Firefly IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Wednesday 8 June 2016, 8.00pm – more information
Firefly is an improvising project led by Barcelona-born singer Cristina Carrasco, whose past work includes jazz, rock, soul and bossa nova. For the past five years Cristina has been working in free improvisation and experimental sound (she’s a recent alumnus of Cleveland Watkiss’ Stardust People’s Choir project, and also studied with voice improvisers Víctor Turull and Inés Lolago) and aims to combine this work with her other career in community arts and education, working towards promoting “equality and social integration, prioritising the idea of music and its benefits as a main element to heal any kind of society.
Cristina describes ‘Firefly’ as “a tribute to the surrender of human capacity. When we connect with our inner sound we are part of the universal vibration, we are in the present moment opening new channels of communication and creating expression. So, welcome to a free improvisation and experimental sound trip, where our soul leads the musical journey.” For this Firefly evening, Cristina will be joined by composer and broadcaster Daniel James Ross (Roddart, Mega Trio, ‘Beethoven Was Wrong‘) on electronics, former Goldie collaborator Justina “J Eye” Curtis on piano, and the remarkable arts-and-culture polymath Ansuman Biswas on percussion.
No soundclips for this one – you’ll just have to guess and attend…
“We take our night of weirdly wonderful new downtempo sounds to one of London’s best new artist community venues, New River Studios. This month sees artists blending electronic production, post-rock and brand new technology.
“Alternative post-rock/pop duo ALMA – a project from Codes In The Clouds members Pete Lambrou and Ciaran Morahan (the former also of Monsters Build Mean Robots) – deploy a loop station, multiple delay pedals, a piano and strings to create a slow-moving, high-flying soundscape of luscious gravitas. Their sound has grasped the heartstrings of many, and led to them recently completing an extremely successful UK tour with Nordic Giants as well as a slot at Mutations Festival alongside Lightning Bolt, Metz, John Talabot and Chelsea Wolfe. At this gig, they’ll be launching their new double A-side single The Lighthouse/While Nothing, featuring remixes by maybeshewill and Message To Bears.
“worriedaboutsatan are a Manchester-based electronica band made up of Thomas Ragsdale and Gavin Miller (also known for their other project Ghosting Season). They incorporate swirling ambient melancholia, skyscraping post-rock guitar atmospherics, dark house and pounding slo-mo techno. Since starting life as a bedroom project back in 2006, the band has always retained a strong DIY ethos, and pride themselves on being very much a live band, rather than just another electronic project with a laptop. They’ve so far shared stages on tours and supports with a diverse array of musicians, such as Ólafur Arnalds, Clark, Dälek, Apparat, Errors, Pantha du Prince, HEALTH, Vessels, and many more.
“Chagall (Chagall van den Berg) is a multimedia vocalist, songwriter and producer from Amsterdam. Singing live, she creates and triggers her rich electronic production, vocal effects and visuals by moving, bending and swaying her mi.mu gloves – wearable “gestural” technology developed with a team including Imogen Heap). Having spent some time on Universal/EMI’s roster, Chagall decided to quit the major label life and now prefers to make her way through Europe’s independent and underground music scene. Her live performance is unlike anything you’ll have witnessed.”
The annual BBC Music Day comes up this year and this week on Friday 3rd June. It’s a generally beneficial nation-building exercise in typical BBC style, informed by magazine-style news, middle-range tastes and light entertainment. Much of what’s on is comfortably communal – plenty of light music choirs, familiar regional touches of brass and pipes.
In all fairness, there’s plenty here to like. There’s a scheme organising gentle live shows in hospitals throughout Scotland and England. There’s a focussing on church bell ringings around the country which is free of gimmick and simply lets the art speak for itself (emphasising both its national status and its localism). There’s the ‘Take It To The Bridge‘ programme, during which the nation’s bridges will be briefly overrun by symbolic musical meetings, community choirs, time-travelling orchestras and local songwriters.
There’s also a strong sense of that other nation – the one which the BBC still encourages in the face of rumbling political dissatisfaction, manipulation and discomfort. It might be a non-partisan wash of generic English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish decency which doesn’t offer much to scare the horses, doesn’t break a sweat breaking new ground, and doesn’t ultimately provide much event-by-event challenge; but it should still be applauded for at least trying to encourage common ground and (at a time when art is being squeezed out of schools) a culture of engagement with music. For the full programme – and for British readers who want to find out exactly what’s going on in their region – check the links above.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been sifting through the programme with my jaundiced, picky eye and selecting out what I feel are some of the more unusual or rewarding events dotted around the comfy musical quilt (more or less in order of occurrence), starting in the middle of another festival in Hay-on-Wye…
BBC Radio 3 Live/Hay Festival presents:
Hay Festival Guitar Jam with Morgan Szymanski
Friends Café @ Hay Festival Site, Dairy Meadows, Brecon Road, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5PJ, Wales
Friday 3rd June 2016, 9.30am
“Prior to his Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert (a collaboration with the Cremona String Quartet at 1.00pm, and already sold out) classical guitar ace Morgan Szymanski will be inviting amateur guitarists to join him for a morning guitar jam. Help create and perform a brand new piece for a hundred guitarists to be featured in the concert. Morgan will lead you through the process, whatever your level, from beginner to advanced. The event includes a special master class from Nitin Sawhney on playing the guitar.”
Unlike the walk-up nature of most of the other events listed here, a Hay Festival ticket is required for this one.
In Cambridge…
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire presents:
English Pocket Opera vs. Imperial & K.I.N.E.T.I.K
Silver Street Bridge, Silver Street, Cambridge, CB24 5LF, England
Friday 3rd June 2016, 11.30am
“English Pocket Opera will be performing on a punt through the waterways of Cambridge. As they approach Silver Street bridge the opera will be joined by a local ‘BBC Introducing’ hip-hop duo Imperial & K.I.N.E.T.I.K, on top of the bridge. Hip-hop and opera will merge to create a brand new sound.”
Christ, this one could be a car-crash in multiple senses. I mean, it’s hard enough to handle a Cambridge punt at the best of time – it’s an unhappy marriage of Newton and Zen – let alone try to synchronise it with anything else. Still, given the sunny, positive and playful nature of both sets of musicians involved (don’t expect a collision of ‘Wozzeck’ and Kanye), let’s give them the benefit of the doubt… and just to put it into perspective, I‘m an appalling puntsman and these guys know their music.
In Nottingham…
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop presents:
Afro Therapy: featuring Jourdan Pierre Blair + Ella Knight + Early Bird + Garton + D Dot + others tbc Rough Trade Nottingham, 5 Broad Street, Nottingham, NG1 3AJ
Friday 3rd June 2016, 7.00pm
“Live music and DJs will be putting music of black origin in the spotlight. Unsigned and independent artists Ella Knight, beat maker Early Bird, and MCs Garton, D-Dot and Jourdan Pierre Blair (the last better known as Jah Digga) will represent a range of R’n’B and hip hop styles with a British stamp on global music. This free event is open to people over the age of 14.”
I’ve got to say that – for all of the community ethos being trumpeted elsewhere – this show is probably the most proactively street-level event on a day which needs to be about everyone in the country, not just people who like choirs and crumpets. (I’m not trying to bitch here; I just… noticed.) Here’s a run of video and soundclips for most of those involved.
Sheffield also deserves credit for working outside the comfy box…
Yellow Arch Studios present:
A Law Unto Ourselves: The Eccentronic Research Council (featuring Maxine Peake) + The Death Rays of Ardilla + Sieben + The Third Half Yellow Arch Studios, 30-36 Burton Road, Neepsend, Sheffield, S3 8BX, England
Friday 3rd June 2016, 7.30pm – free event – more information
This is probably the most experimental event of the lot: an opportunistic but rewarding live spotlight on Sheffield’s unique independent music scene. There should have been more events like this dotted up and down the country – not necessarily with an experimental pop thrill, but emphasizing local current indigenous music which could only have happened in particular towns and at this particular time. All respect is due to Sheffield musicians, to the Yellow Arch venue and to curator Sophie Toes for taking the trouble to spot this challenge and rise to it.
Probably the biggest draw for A Law Unto Ourselves are the headliners – The Eccentronic Research Council, barbed and crafty exponents of their own scenic and sample-heavy “library/soundtrack, experimental, folkloric/non-populist pop”. They’ll be accompanied by their own established muse and mouthpiece – Maxine Peake (actress, declaimer, proud overturner of complacent applecarts) – and are the most questioning act across Music Day, bringing a touch of dissent, argument and the British radical tradition into its general cosiness. In support are spaced-out and (literally) brotherly garage-rock duo The Death Rays of Ardilla, Sieben (a.k.a. beater, plucker, tickler and layerer of voice and violin Matt Howden) and The Third Half (a duo who combine and alternate harp, celeste, guitar and voice in “twenty-first century neo-pastoral rare groove”).
ERC
There will also be DJ sets from representatives of some of Sheffield’s other interesting underground or experimental bands – spooky lysergic-child-song folksters Antique Doll, progtronicians I Monster, psychedelic country-and-western band The Cuckoo Clocks – plus one from Sophie Toes herself. There’s limited capacity for this show, so early arrival is recommended to avoid disappointment.
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In Bristol…
Charles Hazlewood and the British Paraorchestra Colston Hall, Colston Street, Bristol, BS1 5AR, England
Friday 3rd June 2016, 8.00pm
“After the success of last year, the ground-breaking British Paraorchestra, the world’s first professional ensemble of disabled musicians, return to Colston Hall to perform for BBC Music Day. The group is headed up by Charles Hazlewood, a genuine pioneer and innovator in the world of classical music. In a unique show, the Paraorchestra will be joined on-stage by performers from Extraordinary Bodies, the professional integrated circus company and partnership between Cirque Bijou and Diverse City. The combined effect of The British Paraorchestra and Extraordinary Bodies playing ‘In C’ by composer Terry Riley, promises to be cathartic and uplifting. The aural equivalent to climbing inside a giant lava lamp.”
On spec, this may sound like a case of worthiness over content – but while it’s true that (despite the Riley) the Paraorchestra plays its fair share of light-ent pop transcriptions to sugar the pill, albeit in its own way – it’s also worth noting that the ensemble isn’t just about the state of bodies. The Paraorchestra also explodes a lot of ideas about how an orchestra might work, in terms of instrumentation and approach: likewise, Extraordinary Bodies has plenty of challenges and delight to offer. See below:
…and finally…
Aardman Animation/Colston Hall/Bristol Museums present:
Shaun the Sheep’s Vegetable Orchestra
Studio 2, The M Shed, Princes Wharf, Wapping Rd, Bristol BS1 4RN, England / Colston Hall, Colston Street, Bristol, BS1 5AR, England
Friday 3rd June 2016 Workshops and rehearsals at Studio 2: 10.15am, 11.15am & 12.15pm (tel: 0117 352 6600 for details)
Veg Orchestra Finale! featuring Shaun the Sheep and his Vegetable Orchestra at Colston Hall: 1.40pm
“In celebration of BBC Music Day and Aardman’s 40th anniversary, children are invited to join Shaun the Sheep and become part of his Vegetable Orchestra for a live performance at Colston Hall. (There will also be an Aardman birthday singalong and cake presentation.) There will also be pre-performance workshops at M Shed to decorate your veg instruments and learn how to play your part, all set to the ‘Shaun The Sheep’ theme tune. Workshops presented by Farmer characters & Shaun himself, it’s ‘flock ‘n’ roll’ for all ages and all set on Mossy Bottom Farm!”
Sorry. For a variety of reasons (parenthood, humour, a taste for experimentalism and a love of everything Aardman-esque) I just couldn’t bloody resist that last one… and it turns out that the foremost practitioners of the vegetable orchestral art are as cheerfully experimental and conceptual as anything else I tend to feature in here…
Tomorrow – two cities, two gigs. In Paris, people will be filing into the mediaeval cellars, all serious and attentive, fascinated by texture and the warp and weft of sound. In London, it looks as if they’ll be torn between wanting to be handsome psychotic brutes in sharp suits or shabby, demented hermits in bird masks.
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3ieme Festival Ambient de Paris Crypt du Martyrium de Saint-Denis, 11 rue Yvonne Le Tac, 75018 Paris, France
Saturday 16th April 2016, 4.00pm – more information here and here
From the organisers…
”Crypt du Martyrium is the most mystic and secret of Paris crypts (the head of the first bishop Denis was found here in 300 AD, and it was also the birthplace of the Jesuit Society). For one night only, artists from Paris and its suburbs will enchant this unique historical place with the kind of music you will hardly hear anywhere else in France.
The festival welcomes :
Ujjaya – an French ethno-ambient veteran, deeply influenced by Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Jon Hassell and Jorge Reyes. With his new found interest in suspended gamelan (which he’ll be enchanting the crypt with tonight), Loren Nerell has become another point of reference for his ongoing work. (For more information, try one or both of his two free-to-download albums: ‘De Retour’ and ‘The Master of Crossroads’.)
Onde Poussière – an experimental duo specializing in hypnotic minimalism and controlled chaos, and featuring Doedelzak (synth) and Kecap Tuyul (table-top prepared guitar). Think an ambient version of Jim O’Rourke , Taku Sugimoto or even Autechre.
Patrick Wiklacz – also known as Prats – is influenced by Terry Riley, Klaus Schulze and Bernard Parmeggiani. He will unleash his own electronic universe on synth and MIDI controller – a mix of repetitive minimalism, ambient and electro-acoustic music.
Archetype – an heir to Oöphoi, Alio Die and Mathias Grassow (and performing on guitar, synth, voice and table harp)Archetype makes deep listening music and also plays some ethno-ambient music not unlike Dead Can Dance.
Asmorod – the founder of the Snowblood label, synth/keyboard player Asmorod is both very discreet and very influential in the dark ambient scene (he’s an acknowleged influence on Kammarheit’s ‘Hysope’ album).
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Godzilla Black + Bobbie Peru + Punching Swans + Mashiro The Hope & Anchor, 207 Upper Street, Islington, London, N1 1RL, England
Saturday 16th April 2016, 7.00pm – more information
“Godzilla Black have been unsettling ears since 2006 with their own personal brand of depraved heaviness. This is the official launch party for their new album, ‘Press The Flesh’, which was released on 1st April through Quisling Records. ‘Press The Flesh’ is the most ‘normal’ Godzilla Black record to date, drawing on influences such as Cardiacs, Liars and The Jesus Lizard, underscored by feeling of sensuality in all the wrong places. ACCEPT NO IMITATIONS.”
I may have to revise that “James-Barry-in-a-sleetstorm” description with which I always saddle Godzilla Black. Listening through to ‘Press The Flesh’ reveals the band in all of their romping glory, sometimes sounding like gonzo-industrial hero Foetus hijacking a soul revue, sometimes like late Cardiacs channelling early Roxy. Glam-descends meet blaring beefhorns, with lyrics full of dark jokes and carnivorous, cannibalistic disassociation. They’re flowering into something sharky and vivid. Clips below for album opener ‘The Other Other White Meat’ and the first ‘Press The Flesh’ single, ‘First Class Flesh’ (note that there’s a theme developing here…)
In support are Bobbie Peru, whose music is heavily influenced by punk, post-punk, rockabilly and 60’s garage; and who offer “an abrasively grooving electric live show with a vibe somewhere between Sonic Youth, Nomeansno and Groop Dogdrill.” Currently recording their third full-length album in Manchester (and constantly playing live around the north-west of England), the band are something of a fixture in the world of indie and post-punk tours, having racked up road support slots with Black Francis, Buzzcocks, Spear Of Destiny, Killing Joke and The Fall since their own emergence in the mid-2000s.
Medway convulsers Punching Swans are self-described as “thrilling dischordance for fans of Future Of The Left and Fugazi”, although I can hear hints of The Residents lurking in their threshing pop-savvy upending of rituals, and when they’re not hammering alarmingly at a darker idea they’re out on the whoop chasing the spirit of ‘Song 2’. It’s the cryptic strangeness that makes them special, though – they’ve recently brought out a concept album about “a man cast out from society and taking on the habits and compulsions of a depraved bird, gone to seed,”, and are making the woodsbound videos to match. There’s a peek into this particular world below.
Oxford abstract mathcore metallists Masiro bring “heaviness, other-wordly atmosphere and headfuck grooves. Touching on Pelican, Isis and Battles. Don’t expect a singalong.” All right, then. Evidence of their jabbing attention-deficit methods is here:
In some respects Gnod – who are curating, and playing at, an extended gig in London this weekend – are a dubby Salfordian reflection of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They share certain working methods – a collective, leaderless initiative springing from communal warehouse living; a passionate ethos of anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian feeling expressed in vast, cavernous and primarily instrumental musicscapes; an atmosphere sourced from circulating cultural-economic ghosts of deprivation and stagnation.
As regards the music itself, the parallels shift a little. Though both bands use drones and scattered, marginal snippets of speech, Gnod’s approach is a good deal broader and looser than Godspeed’s blend of classical/minimal string austerity and wind-tunnel punk rage, seeding itself from a variety of persistently underground forms. In the stew are industrial dance music, noise rock and anarchic dub; mystical hippy staples of overtone chanting and psychedelic ritual music (stripped of their frivolous navel-gazing associations and brought back to their mind-opening sources); free jazz; and a swathe of aural art-punk collagery (the latter of which, in Gnod form, recalls apocalyptic Godspeedian end-of-days graffiti, an approving response to Linder Sterling’s sharp visual comments on consumerism, and diary notes from besieged squats and hermit bedsits).
Other information is there if you choose to dig it up. We know that Gnod are from the other Islington – that liminal corner of Salford in the elbow of the River Irwell between the rails, the university and the skeletons of light industry, where the Islington Mill Arts Centre (in which the band live and work) has flourished since the mid-‘90s. We know that multi-instrumentalists and producer-theorists Chris Haslam and Paddy Shine have been in the band from the start: we know that the other two current members happen to be Marlene Ribeiro and Alex Macarte. We know that what seems to be dozens of others (but might be the same six people in a constant shuffle of personae) phase in and out of the band according to need, whim and inspiration; and that these include Manchester improv saxophonist David McLean, journeyman keyboard player John Paul Moran and drummer Chris Morley (once of Welsh experimental rockers Klaus Kinski, now propelling no-wave’d punk-funkers target=”_blank”>Queer’d Science).
We also know that the hybrid steam of subcultural influences and spirit of resistance that boils off from all of these ingredients is winning Gnod awestruck acclaim. ‘The Quietus’ (increasingly the British tastemaker as regards bands negotiating that slippery margin between absolute chthonic obscurity and cultural penetration) has not only sung their praises but been seduced into actually recording with them; while digging into Gnod’s web of ongoing connections and activities shakes up all kinds of other possibilities. The Gnod network of fellowship stretches across Europe and encompasses ever-roving Can singer Damo Suzuki, billowing gonzoid sample-psych from the late ‘80s (revived arsequake veterans Terminal Cheesecake sport former Gnoddist Neil Francis as their current frontman), classic British post-punk (via The Monochrome Set and The Blue Orchids), Louise Woodcock’s multi-media feminist art and a Catalonian psychedelic scene which gives a new meaning to Spanish castle magic (a few years ago, Gnod teamed up with Barcelona’s Black Bombaim as “Black Gnod”).
Having been casting out recordings since 2009, Gnod came up to speed with the beefy-but-spectral ecclesiastic dubgrind of 2011’s ‘INGNODWETRUST’ (following up with 2012’s ‘Science & Industry’, a sort of post-industrial ‘Sketches of Spain’ for trumpet, drones, ironscrape guitar haze and indistinct female declamations). They’re currently best known for 2014’s mammoth 110-minute ‘Infinity Machines’, in which their instincts for mood and social challenge came into focus. For that album, Gnod returned to (scorched) earth and conjured up a classic post-war Mancunian landscape of bones, threat and concrete; marrying a bleak Joy Division grind and deadzone chimes with knell-beating Rhodes piano, distorted boomings like rusting gasholders being beaten into dub drums, and aghast chemtrails of free sax which sounded like black-sailed galleons creeping up the Ship Canal and advancing into the Irwell. Amidst the grindings and slithering drones and the pollutant-smeared sleet, vocal samples of resistance and disquiet gave shape to a dawning and outspoken atmosphere of scepticism; in Breaking The Hex, they finally unleashed an eleventh-hour blast of dub/punk/sax/noise rebellion, while the title track was a harmonium keen over dark sonic bubbles.
While it didn’t wear its manifesto in the shape of a set of placardable lyrics, ‘Infinity Machines’ was a work of Salford shamanism, spitting the city’s ongoing gentrification back into its own face. Since then, Gnod have refused to simply rework it – instead they’ve allowed the feelings that inspired it to lead them naturally into new forms. Last year’s ‘Mirror’ album was written on tour in a slew of traveller’s energy and impacted by destructive mental turbulence within the Gnod circle: inspired in part by rage at government austerity programs which apparently declared war on the poor) propelled the band away from grand studioscapes and into a raw, live feel. It’s more personalised, its anger and alienation borne on pendulous and discombobulated noise-punk anti-grooves. Hands slam onto instruments and slip beats; the music flares into outright rage rather than stern painterly stews. Amidst the overtone vocals and chants, there’s persistent raw yelling; while the soundscapes have shifted towards slowed sirens, and a dragging, coshing pace: a clear early Swans influence.
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Gnod Weekender, part 1: Gnod + Blood Sport The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Saturday 9th April 2016, 8.00pm – more information – tickets Gnod Weekender part 2: Locean + Water + Futuro de Hierro + H.U.M + Dwellings + Negra Branca + Arkh Wagner + Ayn Sof The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Sunday 10th April 2016, 3.00pm to 11.00pm – more information – tickets
Much of all of the above is going to come together over the course of this weekend, in which Gnod and a host of like-minded friends bring their collective approach to the current homestead of quirky London rock.
Saturday sees a full Gnod performance, supported by Sheffield trio Blood Sport, whose spindly and aggressive style is a ghostly, glassy-toned, black-sun approximation of Afrobeat and soukous. As for what Gnod themselves might be doing, the grind and gnarl of ‘Mirror’ might be their current output but they have a history of changing state and presenting an expectant audience with something unexpected: so be prepared for anything which reflects their history and their potentials (up to and including party blowers, possibly).
Sunday’s afternoon-to-late-night show features Gnod side projects and assorted friends in an eight-hour orgy. Some feature current Gnod members. Paddy Shine’s immersive “tantric vocal loop” project Ayn Sof will be opening the show; Dwellings is founder and bass player Chris Haslam doing hard-beat industrial electronica – dull-thud compulsive flesh beats, like the woody rattle of an early S&M loom, played in tandem with dank gothic synth drones. Negra Branca is a Marlene Ribeiro project, expanding on the “melodic and tonal dreamscapes” which she plays as part of the main band, full of squashy analogue synth shapes and temple-goddess vocals.
In Arkh Wagner, Alex Macarte (one of the more directly mystical Gnod members, if his online talk is anything to go by) teams up with Mark Wagner, a London-based multi-disciplinary artist and cybernetic mysticist, whose working practices are steeped in “cymagick” (a visualization of sound which takes in invisible and occult connections and “the vibratory nature of all things”). Their track Turn Off Your Mind (a narrative backed by a deepening pulse-chime in a confusion of noise surf) is a meditation on staring into the void, and on going too far out.
Mark Wagner’s also taking the stage as one-third of H.U.M. (or “Hypnotic Ultrasonic Magick”), a merging with two similarly shamanic noisemakers from Bristol’s ZamZam Records (these being the enigmatic surnameless H, or “Heloise”, who slipped into Bristol six years ago from a French fine arts background and has since been bewitching audiences with gigs that fall somewhere between installation and ritual and take place in caves, swimming pools and sundry found space, and fellow émigré and ambient droner Uiutna, originally from Switzerland but making her own way in the Bristolian avant-garde). H and Uiutna relocated to France recently but return to England for this event. H.U.M. present themselves as a kind of psychic cross-cultural art coven, citing “alchemical practice, incantation, chanting, drones, ritual drumming, French variété” as both inspiration and activity… although “French variété” is also on the list, so either a showbiz tinge or a sliver of hidden humour has been worked deep into the atmospheres. Here’s a clip of them in action:
Over in Barcelona, multi-instrumentalist, producer and happeneer Víctor Hurtado is the core of a “magic-inspired” scene of ritual psychedelic music. First coming to notice as the man behind acid-assemblage unit Qa’a (a richly detailed stew of lysergic rock and Nurse With Wound noise-and-texture garnishing), he’d soon diversify into a greater spontaneity with Huan (a project which he describes as “animalistic pulsations… almost like a living organism, that is at times sick, dying or excited”). Having collaborated with Jochen Arbeit, Steven Stapleton and more recently with Chris Haslam in the “monolithic, rhythmic, repetitive”Ordre Etern, Victor is bringing his Futuro de Hierro project to London for the Gnod Weekender. His latest musical pathway, it’s an outgrowth of his interest in more extreme and violent forms of electronic dance (such as speedcore and gabba) fused with techno, music concrete and a heightened psychedelic sensibility, featuring “disjointed rhythms” and “destroyed sounds, sonic detritus and live sound manipulation.”
All-female “art-carnage” troupe Water are another part of the Venn diagram which Gnod inhabit. Specifically, they represent the circles which intersect Manchester’s visual arts and multimedia, and the Devi Collective which coalesced around the Mill to commemorate and interpret last year’s William Burroughs centenary. Citing Throbbing Gristle, Wu-Tang Clan’s Rza and “well-witch horror scores” as creative spurs, they’re currently a five piece of multi-media “queen bee” Louise Woodcock, spoken-word poet/noise-guitarist Laura Bolger, visual artists Amy Horgan and Rachel Goodyear, and Emma Thompson (usually encountered as a DIY/punk/experimental gig promoter).
Soundcloud clips reveal something sounding like post-industrial Maenads: eerie threadlike female choruses and Laura’s dub-echo declamations seeping through a freeform background of womb-bass, malfunctioning engine drones, clanks and whistles, piston hisses, machine scrapes and tekiah blasts. The involvement of at least three women from a visual arts background – plus some striking photos – suggests that there’s a spectacle involved. Evidence of lengthy Water performances inspired by Aleister Crowley, by séances and by water rituals suggest that they’re fascinated with rite, summoning and form in a way which spans primordiality, Greek legend and map-fixes on esoterica ranging from Renaissance art to the present day. All of it slips through the fingers if seized on second-hand: it seems as if Water are an experience best soaked up live.
Laura Bolger reappears to add smeared, dreamlike vocals and narrations to the final act on the bill, Locean – another full-on Irwellian music collective in the Gnod and Devi orbit (sharing both Louse Woodcock and sometime Gnod tapesman/ranter Neil Francis). Offering another queasy grinding ride of driving punk-psych, noise improvisations and punk wail, their mantric sound binds The Velvet Underground, Mother Gong, Bauhaus and an abrasive Fall-esque groove in with bass-echo and wheel-rim guitar. As with Gnod and Water, they’re technically minimal but build up to a grand scale with their scratching, multiplying sonic detail: Laura’s words and musings, floating on the sound-wash like scraps of diaries and manifestos, ranges from odd and oblique polemics to numinous childhood memories.
As I post this, tickets are still available. If you’re spending most of your time trapped in London’s gravity well, this might be your best chance for a while to get something of that Islington Mill atmosphere and inspiration, and to beat along with Gnod’s dark-toned, troubled yet committed heart.
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
The Lucid Dream + Vena Cava + Fragments of Space Hex
Electrowerkz @ Islington Metal Works, 5 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Saturday 26th March 2016, 8.00pm – more information
The first of two Baba Yaga gigs for the weekend stretches its fingers out across psychedelia, noise and spacetronica.
The Lucid Dream meld a variety of factors into their sound. A Seeds-style, garage-rock sense of the groove; mechanistic drums which flail like a dogged threshing machine with an ‘Unknown Pleasures’ fixation, pinning the sound to the ground; spacious, folded-over guitar contrails which travel from chilly vapour to scalding smoke in a couple of heartbeats. They sound as if they spring from a West Coast town that’s swapped its soul with the most blasted Motown-less end of Detroit or the frowning shadow-Philadelphia of ‘Eraserhead’. They’re actually from the relatively unravaged streets of Carlisle.
Bristol-based Vena Cava are “a noise rock band that enjoys frequent flirtations with shoegaze, space rock and no wave” Well, that covers most of the hang-out-and-rattle scenes. They also call themselves “sludgegaze”, which more or less nails it – guttering mantra-riffs which start out like Lush or Cranes taking on ‘Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun’ and end up pulping themselves against a grille in a welter of grinding distortion.
Fragments of Space Hex flitted across these pages late last year when they played More News From Nowhere up in Walthamstow. An electronic confabulation of dub-techno musician Ciaran Mackle (Ashplant) and drone-kosmischian Andrew Nixon (Deathcount In Silicone Valley), they’re part BBC radiophonic, part Germanic oscillators and part Bakelite space-age, layering in bits of antique broadcast and hands-on synth lines in their rippling, lapping, pulsescapes.
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Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Hypochristmutreefuzz + Warren Schoenbright + Anji Cheung Birthdays, 33-35 Stoke Newington Road, Dalston, London, N16 8BJ, England
Sunday 27th March 2016, 7.00pm – free event – more information
To round off the week, Baba Yaga offers a free show featuring “three fantastic bands.”
Ghent art-punk fivesome Hypochristmutreefuzz headline, folding together sturdily uncomfortable but compelling riffs and musical figures (in the King Crimson/Les Savy Fav vein), punk drawls and a space-rocking burble of echoing synth. The music’s smart, bright, cheeky and oblique: like some mocking street-genius eating an ice-cream cone at you. I can also hear some of the clanging swagger of long-lost ‘90s art-hooligans Campag Velocet (although rather than dropping names, puns and flakes of Nadsat, this band tend to yank ideas from the floating debris at the top of the mind). I’m intrigued.
London-based noise/improv duo Warren Schoenbright are Daniel McClennan on drumkit, Matthew Pastkewicz on electronics and a shuffled deck of noises. When I listen to them, they remind me of the hackle-raising anticipatory stillness of Bark Psychosis on ‘Scum’, or of the eerie King Crimson sextet improvs from the mid-‘90s (murky, pulmonary, oft-detonating free-instrumental ghost-rides – once described by ‘Q’ as “ambient music for giants”, which is a phrase that’s far too good not to steal when you need it). Hissing, spitting drum improvisations and head-slithers from a jazz corner combine with boiling brewing ambient vapours from the electronic side to form spectacular instrumental illuminations.
Dynamically speaking, it can go from all-out drum hammering and scourscreech to tense gaps and lacunae in which the sound withdraws and poises. Often it sounds like slow-motion night trains caught in a series of stretched-out near misses, watched from the goods-yard shadows by a pair of twitchy, punchy hobos. Here’s fourteen minutes of live set from 2014, to show you what I mean.
Multi-instrumentalist and sound-sculptress Anji Cheung might make unsettling ritual drones out of frantically overdriven noise and subterranean bass frequencies, but she also murmurs sensual, semi-comprehensible fragmentary monologues on top; or brings in other women to add their own voices. It’s a compelling mix, and one which adds body – often a literal and living impression of thinking, human body – to the often deliberate alienating and dehumanising world of noise music. Some of Anji’s pieces sound like Raudive experiments (capturing a dead voice on bared electrical wires), or like an encounter with an occult ritual caught in the kink of a broadband cable. Some explore cruelty and subjugation, others the vulnerability of natural environments; some end in hypnotic folk songs. This noise may have been shaped by industry and electronics; but its exploring roots continue to grow deeper and downwards.
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Next up – more news on Piano Day around the world…
Daylight Music presents:
Daylight Music 220: Benni Hemm Hemm + The Second Hand Marching Band + Jilk Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 19th March 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event (recommended donation – £5.00) – more information
“This is the first of many epic celebrations for Arctic Circle’s 10th Anniversary; Benni Hemm Hemm are even coming all the way from Iceland to join the party!
Benni Hemm Hemm is the band of Benedikt H. Hermannsson, who writes the band´s songs and produces their recordings. The band is an organism that is hard to explain. Its members are in total around three hundred: at shows, the size of the band is usually somewhere from three to forty, deploying guitar, choral vocals, glockenspiel and a broad potential range of chamber instrumentation depending on who’s available. Their songs are variously described by ‘Pitchfork’ as “wispy, ruminative strums with brass, strings, and fiercely emotive rhythms… lullabies that age well – and go out with a predictable, usually affecting bang.”
“Sprawling anywhere between fifteen and twenty-two people, and led by accordionist/tenor horn player Pete Liddle, Glaswegian untraditional folk band The Second Hand Marching Band aim to create something that can’t be created by just four or five people – a mixture of cacophony and beauty, dancing and stillness. They play their music on a variety of brass, woodwind, accordion, guitar and drums; draw on dance, indie pop, post-rock, chanson, Balkan and Scottish music, and love home recording and ensemble madness. They don’t often play south of the border, so this is a good chance for Londoners to catch them in action.
“Expect an afternoon of collaboration and joy, as Benni Hemm Hemm and The Second Hand Marching Band join forces to perform pieces from their recent joint album ‘Faults’. The seeds of the record came from when Benni and Pete first met in 2007, at one of the first SHMB performances. Pete, Ross, Rich and Fraser from SHMB subsequently started playing in Benni Hemm Hemm, and at the same time Pete and Benni recorded some songs together as a collaboration between the two projects. Eventually, nine songs were produced in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fife, Cumbernauld and Reykjavik – a long project stretching over seven years, eight hundred miles, sixteen instruments and eight singers. The album is a totally self-funded, DIY, self-recorded, self-produced, self-assembled production. This is no mean feat for a normal band, but try it with seventeen people in two countries!
“In support, Bristolian folktronicists Jilk fuse a bewildering collage of home-found sounds with the ambient soundscapes of washy synths, insect-like clicks & cuts, and huge gorgeous waves of all encompassing experimental noise. Deploying violins, guitars, trombone, strings, flutes, multiple drums and vibraphone in addition to the samplers and electronics, they also describe themselves as “glitch-and-paste electronic ambience with balls” and “the sound of jelly babies in tin wellington boots at an Arctic rave”.”
“Composer and cellist Jo Quail writes and performs instrumental music. Her sound is courageous and demands the intense emotional investment of the listener, while remaining wholly accessible to fans of all backgrounds. The inspiration for Jo’s music is drawn from a wide spectrum of influences. Music itself is an obvious touchstone, the compositional aspects of Bach, Debussy, Arvo Pärt, Zoltán Kodály, John Tavener and Bartók sit beside her love of Whitesnake, Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails to name but a few. At this concert, she’ll be launching her new album ‘Five Incantations’, which she’ll perform in full along with a selection of her previous work.
Composer and performer Poppy Ackroyd , originally from London, is currently based in Brighton. Classically trained on violin and piano, she works by manipulating and multi-tracking sounds from just these two instruments so creating deeply affecting instrumental music. Her widely acclaimed debut album ‘Escapement’ was released in December 2012; a DVD called ‘Escapement Visualised’, featuring stunning bespoke visuals by Lumen for each track on the album, was released in September 2014. ‘Feathers’, her second album, was released in November 2014, and builds on the concept behind her debut – this time, the tracks also feature other keyboard and string instruments. Through the nature of the older instruments Poppy uses there is an intimacy to her work, while field recordings add to the cinematic and atmospheric quality of the music. Yet in a live context the sonic qualities of the performance space itself become another instrument to be manipulated and woven into the performance.”
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I’d got a couple of upcoming and nationalistically-inclined gigs to consider. The first of these, a Cornish music celebration, was an easygoing patriot’s-cream-tea of an afternoon, opting to put fun ahead of political confrontation. The second of the events – the Norwegian three-day London music festival By Norse – raises tougher questions almost from the start. Buying into the idea of “harder music’s position as Norway`s most important cultural export” isn’t a problem, as long as your idea of culture embraces extreme varieties of heavy metal. (For plenty of us, it does.) Outside of the Scandinavian peninsula, however, it’s a little more challenging to be asked to buy into the concept of old Nordic traditions of pure native paganism, standing firm against the corruption of an imported and state-imposed Christianity.
The two main artists behind By Norse – both of whom do buy into all of the above – are Ivar Bjørnson (of extreme metallers Enslaved) and Einar Selvik (of dark-folk project Wardruna, who blend their post-heavy-metal ethos with the use of ancient Scandinavian historical instruments – including deer-hide frame drums, tail-hair lyres, and goat and lur horns – as well as sourcing sound from trees, rocks, water and pitch torches). Most of Ivar and Einar’s shared beliefs and preoccupations have come together in ‘Skuggsjá’, the conceptual song-suite which they’ve written together and which they’re performing as part of By Norse this week with a united Wardruna/Enslaved ensemble. As they themselves describe it, the work is “commissioned to commemorate – and castigate – the 200th anniversary of Norway’s constitution, which took place last year, the suite is a furious journey into the dark reaches of Norwegian history. A counterweight to the enshrining of Christianity as the national religion and a harsh light on the atrocities committed in its name, its white-knuckle journey through innumerable musical moods is also a reminder of the rich pagan culture that was lost as a result…. ‘Skuggsjá’ translates into ‘mirror’ or ‘reflection’ in the Norse language, and the piece not only contextualizes harder music’s role in Norwegian democracy, but also joins threads from the country’s ancient musical history…”
There’ll be more on ‘Skuggsjá’ a little further down, but the following Einar-and-Ivar event at Camden’s Forge is the By Norse aspect which first drew my own attention and interest (and which, as I post this, is down to the last few tickets):
London By Norse/Metal Hammer present:
Einar Selvik workshop (‘The Thoughts and Tools Behind Wardruna’) + Ivar Bjørnson’s BardSpec The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Friday 18th March 2016, 6.00pm – more information
“At this Forge event, Einar Selvik will speak about his approach to Norse historical music and the extensive creative concept behind Wardruna’s ongoing ‘Runaljod’ trilogy as well as his approach and study of the runes and other Norse esoteric arts. He will demonstrate a selection of the oldest Nordic instruments, play fully acoustic Warduna music and there will be opportunities for questions from the audience.
“Ivar Bjørnson will also be performing as his immersive electro-ambient project The BardSpec, which features the set-up of Ivar, his computer, a few strings, plus a pedal or two (and sometimes a trapeze artist). The direction is dark, surprisingly rhythmic and hypnotic. Thematically, in both sound and concept, The BardSpec is about minimising – cutting away, subtracting and meditating upon the simplest essence of ‘things’; the single points, bones and salt particles, the basic elements and building blocks that make up the whole.”
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There’s some historical truth – not to mention dignity – in the neo-pagan position and in some of these neo-Viking rumblings. In times when more and more people are querying the long-standing cultural reflexes they live under – and becoming sceptical about the alleged benevolence of world-spanning systems – this is a local, specifically Norwegian example of pursuing a less industrialised identity. In Britain, music followers who’ve kept a long-term faith with the transformative cultural odyssey of Julian Cope (from beat pop to shamanism) are used to him rattling off tracts of anti-Christian Odinist rhetoric, exploring pagan ideas in song, and using them to raise questions about what British culture might be. In Norway, however, these matters are closer to their original home and bite a little deeper.
If you want to treat these ideas with proper respect, you need to unhook them from some of the more shadowy, ominous attitudes associated with Norwegian black metal during the 1990s, when (in spates of ferocious misanthropy and rejection of contemporary society) some of its adherents travelled from politically-motivated Christian church burnings to anti-outlander racism, death-cult derangements, hate-prejudice and even murders. Under certain conditions, this culture – with its core of masculine romanticism – can succumb to the erosive lapping of a vicious and half-disguised nihilism. This isn’t something unique to Norway or even to black metal culture. It’s something held in common with plenty of dissatisfied movements with cores of action-seeking males who overturn common laws in favour of a different, structured and self-empowering ethos regardless of a negative impact on others. Something which it also holds in common with belligerent nationalism.
As you’ve guessed by now, I’m sceptical… but I’m also inclined to give Einar and Ivar the benefit of the doubt. Despite their suggestions that unfavourable reviews or practical frustrations of their projects are the machinations of “Christian monks” (which might just be deadpan heavy-metal humour), their work seems to be rooted in an earnest, honourable and artistically committed place. Their dedication to their music (and their interest in how it evolves and how it draws on an interesting past, rather than continuously warming over a sterile present) is clear and evident, and they don’t appear to be motivated by smouldering surliness. Certainly there’s warrior rhetoric, and some battle lines declared; but all of it has been subsumed into music, engagement and open debate rather than hooded, ugly social violence. They might be interested in unravelling some aspects of the world as we know it, but constructively: not as a wanton teardown.
You could also, of course, argue that Einar and Ivar’s philosophical stances and their co-opting of history are mostly about building a brand: that the paganism and protest primarily constitute an art project and a commercial push. Approximately two-thirds of the music in the By Norse gigs features Ivar, and most of that is with Enslaved; suggesting in turn that perhaps (fanbase notwithstanding) this scene, its impetus and its artistic adherents are smaller in number than might be desired, especially when presenting a festival. Perhaps that’s true as well: but all art movements start relatively small, at which point enthusiasm and dedication matters, and integrity is measured by the consistency of the work.
With that in mind, I’m going to stop musing and just post details on the other By Norse concert dates – the ‘Skuggsjá’ performance and the three-night celebration of Enslaved’s career, from black metal beginnings to their current psych-eclectic form.
Enslaved 25 Night 1 – ‘…Of Frost And Fire’: Enslaved + Vulture Industries, The Dome, 2A Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park, London, N19 5QQ, England, Thursday 17th March 2016, 8.30pm – more information
Enslaved 25 Night 2 – ‘From The Runic Depths’: Enslaved + Helheim, The Underworld, 174 Camden High Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 0NE, England, Friday 18th March 2016, 8.30pm – more information
Enslaved 25 Night 3 – ‘Spinning Wheel Ritual’ show – Skuggsjá + Enslaved + Wardruna + Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal (art exhibition), The Coronet, 28 New Kent Road, Elephant & Castle, London, SE1 6TJ, England, Saturday 19th March 2016, 6.00pm – more information
Regarding each night of Enslaved music, Ivar Bjørnson says “’…Of Frost And Fire’ represents the quintessence of Enslaved roots. From the legendary ‘Hordanes Land’ with its soundtrack-esque musical long players, via the vast geomythological canvases painted on ‘Vikingligr Veldi’; the revolutionary ‘Frost’ that lifted us out of the strict underground; and finally the odd pair – ‘Eld’, which pointed forward to a progressive future, and ‘Blodhemn’, where we had a last blowout of black metal tempos and inspiration. For anyone curious about where such an eclectic band like Enslaved came from, this will be a first-hand guided tour through the primeval landscapes that shaped us.
“‘From The Runic Depths’ will explain the unlikely yet logical transition from then until now. From the nightmarish flirt with death and black on ‘Mardraum – Beyond The Within’; the spaced-out balancing act that is ‘Monumension’; the milestone and futuristic beacon ‘Below The Lights’; ‘Isa’, the second break for the band; and finally the refined prog-vs-extreme monument ‘Ruun’.
“‘Spinning Wheel Ritual’ is where the band wields together the dark roots with the psychedelic fabrics of the newer days – bringing to the surface the true potential of our songwriting and musical abilities. The focus is the same as it has always been – to bring to life our personal vision of whatever ‘good and meaningful music’ means to us, to create a vessel for atmosphere, deep association and simple enjoyment of music.”
Support on Night 1 comes from introspective Bergen progressive black metal band Vulture Industries, who describe their work as “dark, heavy rock vistas bent and twisted into living entities embodying the width and breadth of human emotion.” Support on the second date is by Helheim whose Viking black metal draws heavily on Norse mythology. On the third night, Wardruna will be performing a set of their own, making their second-ever appearance in the UK following an acclaimed Southbank Centre gig back in autumn 2013.
The last part of the third-night show will be a performance of ‘Skuggsjá’ featuring all members of both Enslaved and Wardruna, plus visuals by reknowned extreme metal artist Costin Chioreanu (who’s previously collaborated with At The Gates, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Arcturus among others). This will be only the third performance of the piece to date, following its September 2014 premiere at the Eidsivablot festival at Eidsvoll (where the constitution was originally written) and its subsequent performance at the Roadburn Festival earlier this year.
It will also be a release celebration for the release of the ‘Skuggsjá’ album on Season Of Mist Records, which came out the previous week (on 11th March).
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One more thing. As you’ve read, another aspect of that final show will be an exhibition of artwork by Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal, the former Gorgoroth/current God Seed frontman who’s also a Wardruna studio member. Historically, Gaahl has been one of the more controversial figures in Scandinavian extreme metal: when at home, he’s even transcended the public anonymity of the metal scene to become an occasional tabloid bogeyman. It’s certainly true that he’s come on an interesting, turbulent and confrontational journey.
For part of the picture, you’re advised to check out some of his more unpleasant mid-‘90s pronouncements on race (here and here) – you don’t have to be a Christian, or even particularly staid and self-righteous, to find this stuff alarming. Set against this is the much more easygoing way in which Gaahl revealed his own homosexuality a decade later. While it would be a little crass to suggest that Gaahl was Scandi-metal’s Malcolm X, there’s certainly a suggestion that, like Malcolm, he’s learning as he goes: making a journey from rage into something more sophisticated: staying true to his history and mistakes while not letting them constrict him, or peg him to blunt anger and inhumanity.
It seems to be that the truth of all of this – the conflux of paganism and nationalism, the engagement of anger and art – is likely to be a tricky knot to unwind, and one which I’ll leave there for now. Perhaps these gigs are worth attending for the thrilling roar alone, with the complexities to be worked out later, Go and discover, if you’re interested, but I’m sure that Einar and Ivar – and Gaahl too – would want you to go in with your eyes and ears fully open.
As some of you may have guessed already, I’m treating this blog – including the long stretches during which I’m only posting up about live dates – as an ongoing education. Plenty of the musicians I’m covering I’ve only learned about shortly before covering them; in other cases, in pursuing their tour dates around Britain or elsewhere in the world, I’m learning about places, projects and initiatives which I might otherwise have been ignorant about.
I’ve posted plenty about Laura Cannell since the start of the year. Her slightly psychedelic yet deeply-rooted improvisations on early, mediaeval and imagined tunes and ideas (played on standard or overbowed fiddle or on double recorder) span and spark across several of my musical interests. As she makes her way across Britain this year in a meandering voyage from high-profile festival to half-hidden venue to multi-genre bill, I’m following along behind (at least with the gig news). Here’s where she is this week:
Playing in support is the Colchester experimental musician and sound artist Phil Mill, whose work “focuses on the use of field recordings and digital DIY softwares made for processing sound. He has recently been recording in a variety of locations in Europe, often associated with or identifiable as a territory or boundary between places and their sonic signatures. Phil’s music is often improvised, and he is currently developing software that reflects on this process – enabling the process of composition to reflect on the nature of the sound environment and the unpredictability of the soundscape.”
Below are videos of Laura in concert and one of ‘The Drifters’, a film soundtrack by Phil using only sounds from sea/environmental field recordings, which was commissioned for Colchester’s Lightbulb Festival in 2015.
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In London, there’s another gig by one of the finest, most rubbery (and recently augmented) instrumental bands out there at the moment, playing hand-in-hand with some special guests in one of the city’s snuggest venues…
Prescott + Charles Hayward “begin anywhere” + Kavus Torabi (DJ) Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Tuesday 2nd March 2016, 8.00pm – more information
“It’s the North London debut of a new-look, four-piece Prescott, featuring Keith Moliné (Pere Ubu, Two Pale Boys) alongside Kev Hopper (Stump), Rhodri Marsden (Scritti Politti) and Frank Byng (Snorkel, Crackle, many others). A mesmerising collection of new tunes featuring soaring melodies, nagging riffs and explosive sounds. Also, the legendary Charles Hayward (of This Heat and many other endeavours, including the recently resurgent This Is Not This Heat) will be at the piano with his (begin anywhere) project: “A solo song cycle sequence of betrayal, paranoia, subterfuge, as well as sound events, spoken word and percussion pieces, stark, minimal arrangements; an unexpected departure.” And binding the whole thing together from the safety of the DJ booth will be Kavus Torabi (Knifeworld, Gong, Cardiacs).”
I’ll just add this quote of my own here, from the last time Prescott played London:
“ a percolating musical alliance… According to The Harrison’s blurb, the band deliver “a curious mix of the melodic and discordant with syncopated funky, skewed beats and lopsided, sometimes jabbing riffs that emerge from a complex web of musical interactions and expand or contract like sections of a stuck record.”< The band themselves talk about "jabbing heteroclite riffs, circular rhythmic patterns, vibrating harmonic clashes, irregular note intervals, all contrasted with pockets of beautiful melody" and their trick of "microriffing" – repeating the same tiny melodic segment for “as long as they can hold their nerve” (out of a sense of persistence, a zest for irritancy or a desire to pay homage to loop culture) . I’ll add that while these descriptions make Prescott sound like a set of ticks on a battered art-music bingo card, they’re actually one of the most entertaining and even danceable bands I’ve seen in recent years; pumping out a surprisingly melodious batch of hiccups, peculiar grooves and inventive colours, and sometimes seeming to plug into a monstrous late-Miles Davis synth-fusion groove (entirely by mistake).”
There, that should do it – but here’s some video of the new-look Prescott quartet…
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Lastly for now, something mixing classical drama, classical music and folk work…
Shakespeare400 presents:
Barbican Shakespeare Weekender – Play On…
‘A Hum About Mine Ears’: Clara Sanabras/Chorus Of Dissent/Vox Holloway/Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Harvey Brough
Barbican Hall @ Barbican Arts Centre, Silk Street, City of London, London, EC2Y 8DS, England
Sunday 6th March 2016, 6.00pm – more information here and here
“Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ is set in new surroundings in this performance of vocalist and composer Clara Sanabras’s new album ‘A Hum About Mine Ears’. More than a simple soundtrack to the play, ‘A Hum About Mine Ears’ takes some of the ideas and themes in ‘The Tempest’ – loss and retrieval, exile and reunion – and relates them to Sanabras’s own experiences as an emigrant.
While some songs lift direct passages from the play, surrounding these in Britten Sinfonia’s soaring strings and the swirling vocals of choirs Chorus of Dissent and Vox Holloway, conducted by Harvey Brough, others place the characters in more modern settings – Sanabras’s powerful soprano solos casting Ariel as a festival-crazed free-loving spirit, or Miranda as a free and independent woman, emancipated from Prospero. Drawing on elements of everything from blues and jazz to European folk, see one of Shakespeare’s most famous works unravelled in a performance as deep, mysterious and expansive as ‘The Tempest’ itself.
This concert takes place as a part of Shakespeare400 – a year of celebrations in 2016 to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.”
The third and last of a stream of Baba Yaga gigs this week dips us into dub, dub poetry and eerie electronica stews…
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Roger Robinson & disrupt + School House Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Saturday 27th February 2016, 8.00pm – more information
In recent years, Hackney-born/Trinidad-raised poet and vocalist Roger Robinson has probably been best known for his work as one-third of King Midas Sound (in which he works with eclectic dub/jazzcore/dancehall/grime producer Kevin Martin and Japanese artist/singer Kiki Hitomi). However, he’s led a peripatetic solo career since the early ‘90s: starting out as a spoken-word performer, he’s written and performed a number of acclaimed one-man shows, toured the world on behalf of the British Council and released books of poetry. Since 2004 there have been solo musical releases and mixtapes including the spoken-folk album ‘Illclectica’ and collaborations with or reworkings of music by Oneohtrix Point Never, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski and Alva Noto.
Roger’s most recent work (set in 2011 at the time of the London riots, and partially achieved by lone walks around his sometime base of Brixton, improvising dub poetry into a dictaphone) is last year’s ‘Dis Side ah Town’ album – a detailed work of study and reportage on the impact, distortions and erasures of change and gentrification, with Brixton observed both in its own right and as a signifier for similar distortions in London and the rest of the world (read Neil Kulkarni’s recent ‘Quietus’ interview with Roger for more background on this).
Production work on the album was handled by disrupt – a.k.a. Jan Gleichmar, an East German computer-music whizz who grew up on the Soviet side of the Berlin Wall and progressed through assorted home-made dance stylings (variously Detroit techno, digital hardcore, gabba and electronica) before settling on digital dub as his expression of choice. Co-boss of the Leipzig-based dub/reggae netlabel Jahtari for over a decade, Jan started off on a cheap laptop but currently achieves his sound with homemade electronic gear, being interested in the textural and process effects of antique microchips and manual voltage control.
Tonight, Jan and Roger will be performing together in London for the first time, delivering live material from or informed by ‘Dis Side ah Town’ and bringing Roger’s observations and warnings back home.
The support act is School House, a solo project by Manchester composer Peter James Taylor (once the baritone guitar player for Bletchley noise-rock project Action Beat, now known for his distortion-rich, Branca-esque massed-guitar works exploring custom tunings, extended techniques and graphic notation).
School House provides Peter with opportunities to explore other areas. Although the project’s first release, ‘Soft Focus’, explored a spooky, textured minimalism using customised Yuri Landman guitars, last year’s ‘Herd’ album moved into electronic instrumentation, concentrating on glitch-rhythms and software drones while keeping some of the layers of guitar texture for what Peter describes as “roiling, gaseous and slow-moving nocturnal dread.” It’s this latter side of School House which will be on display tonight, accompanied by suitable visuals.
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Here’s news from east London on “an eclectic night of math rock, experimental rock and progressive rock”…
Most of the text below is by the promoter or other people, so links are provided where they’re due:
Theo is Sam Knight, a one-man-band from London who puts on an astonishing performance. His Soundcloud bio says “taut, chugging guitar loops layer up with frenetic tapping patterns that interweave in spiralling complexity before near sub-atomically precise, powerhouse drumming clatters and builds each song into juggernaut of riffs and rhythms. To achieve something like this recorded is one thing, but to see Theo perform live is quite another as each song blurs into the next and the dazzling guitar and drum acrobatics leave jaws sagging on the faces of all who bear witness to the talent on offer.”
Battleship Grey are an experimental rock four-piece from London who combine highly melodic, powerful vocal melodies with innovative, forward-thinking rhythms and sounds. Drama-rock threesome Ex Libras(who’ve shared a bill with them) have commented “they toy with experimental ideas in a way that is the opposite of pretentious because they always seem to be about the groove or the way the music pulsates. It is music after all right? It isn’t an equation, it isn’t a painting, yet they are math and art-rock and dance-y all at the same time. Head. Explode.”
Olympians describe themselves as “a band that lives half in Norwich and half in London. We have two guitars, a bass, some drums, a glockenspiel, two keyboards and a trumpet. The next instrument we plan to buy is a vibraphone. We hope you like our songs.” A few years ago, multimedia obscure-music platform ‘Rightchordmusic‘ said “their sound is hard to pin down, with math rock roots, fused with barber-shop ‘Spring Offensive’ esque harmonies and plenty of instrumentation and experimentation. It’s a soaring piece of harmonious yet downbeat melancholic pop that gets better with ever listen. We’re smitten.”
Sounds and visions provided above. Draw your own conclusions.
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More shortly – Eddie Parker, Project Instrumental, and an even-more-typically-loose-than-usual Daylight Music show…
From where I’m standing, it’s looking like a mostly noisy and left-field week. Here’s the first bit of it…
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More News from Nowhere presents:
More News from Nowhere #4 – Simon Bookish + Sharon Gal + Deathcount in Silicon Valley The Victoria, 186 Hoe Street, Walthamstow, London, E17 4QH, England
Wednesday 24th February 2016, 8.00pm – more information
From the organizers:
“More News From Nowhere – Walthamstow’s regular night of new and interesting music – returns with a double headline performance.
“Experimental vocalist Sharon Gal is a widely respected figure on London’s improvised and avant-garde music scene – she’s worked with Steve Noble, David Toop. Steve Beresford and Thurston Moore amongst others, and is a founder of Resonance FM.
“Simon Bookish, the alter-ego of performer/composer Leo Chadburn, fuses his classical training and experimental leanings with electronic instrumentation and a pronounced pop sensibility. He’ll be performing his latest release – ‘Red And Blue’, released this January (“a collision between digitally-processed brass and distorted synthesizer drones; atonal electronic pop and drifting field recordings; spoken word and unearthly vocalisations” inspired by the ‘special relationship’ between the US and UK governments during the Cold War) as well as a new version of his ‘Trainwreck’ project from 2007.
“Support comes from Walthamstow’s own Deathcount in Silicon Valleyaka MNFN friend and co-conspirator Andi Nixon, who makes “ominous frazzled sci-fi scores” and will be performing his tribute to the film ‘Scanners’.”
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For the following three nights, there are three Baba Yaga’s Hut events in a row. Here’s notes on the first two, with the first one being something for lovers of scuzzed-up song…
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Joe Gideon + John J. Presley
Corsica Studios, 5 Elephant Lane, London, SE17 1LB, England,
Thursday 25 February 2016, 8.00pm – more information
This week sees the return to live action of Joe Gideon, who first came to attention in 2002 as leader of Americana-tinged post-rockers Bikini Atoll (which also featured his sister Viva on keyboards). Joe and Viva went on to form the critically acclaimed brother/sister avant-blues duo Joe Gideon & The Shark, in which Joe clanked trash guitar and drawled absurd, witty tales in Beatnik slang while Viva drummed, mixed in keyboards and beats, and layered a spooky background of looped vocals.
Two acclaimed albums later – 2009’s ‘Harum Scarum’ and 2013’s ‘Freakish’ – Joe and Viva have parted ways. While Viva busies herself with different musical work (including an appearance with Loose Meat for ‘Inside The Sun‘) and acting in video games (having won an award for her work in reconstructive crime tale ‘Her Story‘ last year), Joe’s continued his own work with a solo album – ‘Vice Versa’, recorded and released in 2015 with an all-star squad of Jim Sclavunos (Bad Seeds) on drums, Ed Harcourt on keyboards and Duke Garwood on horns. Jim’s stayed in the live band: following a London debut back in November and a guest spot at a Lee Hazelwood tribute, they’re back for a second full live show at Corsica Studios.
Support comes from John J. Presley, the Walsall-born songwriter and guitar who feeds his own take on freeform storytelling blues through a mess of noisy downtuned guitar, alternate tunings and drones (backed up with drums, Rhodes piano and harmonium.)
The second show features more outright noisiness; it’s a more typically Baba Yaga-esque soup of psychedelic noise, sludge and hints of prog…
With a new record poised for launch at the start of March, long-established Liverpudlian psykraut space-rockers Mugstar are headlining the show. Their dour-dark mantra instrumentals wed lugubrious organ drones and Morricone/Labradford-ian guitar parts with guttering smears of noise, while occasional distant snatches of speech or song flicker into hearing like tiny, frayed, long-ago rags impaled on endless wire fences.
Originally, Steve Gullick’s flinty moodists Tenebrous Liar were scheduled as the first support band. Their decision to split up last November has cleared the way for some gig-sullying from Henge. These London psych-sludgers belch out hanging, polluted, noise clouds through which singer Loz Chalk delivers his scratched, timorous, and fearful yells, his ankles enmired in dragging pace and guitar fry.
For my money, the most interesting band of the night is the one that’s opening the show. Elusive Liverpudlians Cavalier Song are Henge friends and tourmates (having played with them in Nottingham and London earlier in this month), have occasionally rolled out tracks on Soundcloud over the past five years, and released their debut album ‘Blezards’ only last month, delivering “soundtracks to earth, man and machine, the outdoors, the indoors and constant shift.” Sitting on a cusp between Swans and King Crimson (both of whom they claim are influences), they sound like a prog band in which the brain hemispheres are falling away from each other. Some pieces clench and raise the tension in their dissonances, their rapid rhythmic and dynamic transformations, while others engage in tearing, shifting Frippish drones. Panic, chaos and a liberated excitement loom as possibilities among the brutal rips of guitar, the resonating overtones and the low-hanging atmospherics; yet the band lean on – and sustain – that moment when form and skills of structure and rapid response still remain.
Other noise bands simply plod and accumulate: Cavalier Song sway and shift; light-footed knife-fighters, their eyes and attention flicking this way and that while keeping a deadly focus. Sod it. Make sure you turn up early. This is how it’s meant to be done.
More on the third Baba Yaga night, and a little more, shortly…
If you’re in or around Brighton this weekend with kids on your hands, and if you quite like the idea of them growing up to be lateral-thinking and freaky (I’d quite like that myself), here’s an all-ages event for you at a local community centre. No booze on offer, but you can bring your own.
Blurt date back to 1979, when restless self-styled “colonial brat” Ted Milton (by then in his mid-thirties) became disillusioned with his longstanding work as a professional puppeteer, which his restless and non-conformist spirit had been increasingly warping into audience-alienating Jarry-esque provocateur moves. Forming a Situationist rock trio presented a better opportunity for him to realize his aims for spontaneous expression, incorporating his neophyte Ornette Coleman-inspired sax playing, his improvised dancing and his spoken-word poetry (inspired by the Beats, the 1960s Liverpool scene and the Soviet school).
A strange mixture of sharp existentialist grit and whimsical Dada self-indulgence, Blurt have been out on a limb of their own ever since. Post-punk veterans who possess deeper roots in 1960s consciousness expansion and anti-authoritarianism, they joined the post-punk scene through chance, time and circumstance rather than affinity. Their music is a mixture of simple, jabbing musical figures and nail-tight drumming, with space for Ted to declaim or improvise freely on top. Now in his seventies, he’s still declaiming, dancing and blowing at the front of a lineup which currently features guitarist Steve Eagles and drummer Dave Aylward.
In support are a collection of kindred-spirit Brightonians offering a variety of music from the straight to the out. At the straighter end, The Sticks provide cheery, spindly country-garage, but beyond that things become a little more eccentric.
Coming across like the Sylvanian Families as abducted by Captain Beefheart, The Glugg perform in animal masks and sound like a threshing querulous lo-fi blues disaster that can’t be bothered to get out of bed. Variously described as “a local industrial complex” and “a noise-punk charter team” their racketing guitar, china-pig organ and wino vocals stumble over saxophone, harmonica, biscuit-tin drums and broken-telegraph slide in a welter of fake spaghetti themes and disintegrating rhythms.
Completing the bill, husband-and-wife tape-and-voice duo Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance make an appearance in their intermittent Dada-sound-experimentalist Blood Stereo guise. They’re like a Krautrock take on Ligeti: eerie sonic backdrops merge with pastoral electronic squiggles (a touch of the Cluster-ine), panting/yammering vocal sounds and carefully-recorded disruptions of function (violins with cello strings, incomplete mechanisms).
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Back in London, there’s still a few tickets left for this one…
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Terminal Cheesecake + Taman Shud + Khünnt The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Saturday 20th February, 8.00pm – more information
Terminal Cheesecake were amongst the protagonists in the “arsequake” movement of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in which chaotic bass-heavy British and European bands, inspired by the acid-juddered noisework and unhinged stage shows of American hardcore acts like Butthole Surfers or Jesus Lizard, grabbed that noisy baton and vigorously rammed it upwards through sampling, dub, hip hop and homegrown psychedelia. Standing out even amongst the hedonism and loud-living of their contemporaries for an exceptionally druggy, “fools at the gates of excess and wisdom” image (and sometimes falling foul of venue chains who didn’t appreciate their orgiastic performances and following), the band originally ground to a halt in 1995 – a mixture of too many chemical indulgences, not enough appreciation.
Since 2013, they’ve been back in action, with original-run members Russell Smith, Gordon Watson and John Jobbagy joined by Head Of David’s bass player Dave Cochrane (and with original fried howler Gary Boniface replaced by a contemporary psychedelic voyager, Gnod’s Neil Francis). Having played their own part in influencing a host of younger bands and musicians on the current psychedelic noise movement, the band are reaping the fruit of their original work- new concert opportunities, collaboration options, the pride of an actual living legacy.
Terminal Cheesecake have taken a lot of stick for their silly name, both then and now, but to me it encapsulated many of the qualities of arsequake: often ludicrous and tongue-in-cheek, yet stubbornly committed to art even to the point of ruination. The fact that they nicked that name from a list of fictional bands, cooked up in a spoofing mood by neo-psychedelic outlier Nick Saloman, somehow fits in with their plunderphonic psych ethos.
Monickers aside, it’s the music that speaks. With one foot enmired in rockabilly and ’60s psych and the other in the east London 80s scene that also birthed Bark Psychosis, M.A.A.R.S and A.R. Kane (and with the whole band effectively face-down, staring into a chaos pool) Terminal Cheesecake were exemplars of arsequake’s instincts and wildness, and the sloppy, overwhelming guitar noise of their early years was ameliorated on later recordings (most notably 1990s ‘Angels In Pigtails’ with its multi-levelled production approach of layers, samples, psychedelic loops and unusual instrumentation). The current band favours a return to the guitar stewings, but whether they’ve been thundering down a primitive or a sophisticated route there’s little doubt as to TC’s integrity regarding making a constructive racket, blowing open envelopes, or creating an atmosphere of free and uninhibited options at the rougher end of psychedelia.
Support comes from necro-psych band Taman Shud, who trail their influences and comparisons like heavy cerements (Killing Joke, “Hawkwind meets the Birthday Party”). With that doomy screech of hoarse vocal delivering lyrics of ziggurats and arcane diabolism and their taste for distorted grandeur and crashing rock guitars, they sound like an appointment with murder down at the end of a winding street, under crumbling Turkish battlements and harsh Mediterranean stars.
Dragging open the gates for the evening are Newcastle supergroup (or infragroup) Khünnt, whose members also play in various interrelated Toon heavy bands, predominantly power trio Blown Out and concrete-psych quintet Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. If Taman Shud lean towards the grand, Khünnt deliberately aim low. Theirs is an agonised, droning, thickened-trickle of a noise, a browned-out early Swans slithering into an oppressive doom-metal crush, Steven Palmer’s chord-shredding ghoul howls entangled with guitar riffs like dying hands clutching at a sewage outfall. The umlaut is important, too. Don’t ignore the umlaut.
Here’s another adjustment to the gig schedule, since Daylight Music have just announced their first 2016 season with a day’s notice and I’ve just heard about something else down in Brighton. Quickly, then…
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Daylight Music 211 – Strange Boy, Partikel + The Duke St Workshop with Laurence R. Harvey + Ed Dowie Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 16th January 2016, 12.00pm – free entry – more information
“Strangeness abounds at Daylight Music this week, with a splendidly unsettling start to the season. The Duke St Workshop are an electronic duo from Wigan making imaginary soundtracks, primarily to cold cases from the late 1960’s to the present time. Their new album, ‘Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft’ is a spoken-word collaboration with established horror actor and performance artist Laurence R. Harvey (of ‘Human Centipede’ fame).
Partikel are regarded as one of the most forward looking groups on the European jazz scene. Three London-based musicians, led by saxophonist Duncan Eagles, combine their various favourite musical elements to create a very particular sound of their own.
Rounding off the wondrous weirdness is Strange Boy, melding the beautiful songwriting of Kieran Brunt with the intricate soundscapes of Matt Huxley. Expect delicate melodic lines and crisp electronic textures wrapped up in soaring string arrangements.
Ed Dowie will also join us to pay tribute to David Jones on the 200 year old Henry Willis Organ.”
Daylight Music are justifiably proud of their cosy-meets-challenging gig rosters, and this upcoming season looks as if it will be no exception. From Daylight pilot Ben Eshmade – “the new season… includes music which ranges from electro-salsa to J-pop (and) brings you shows bound with even more ideas, surprises and themes, like our time travel special and a celebration of all things Cornish. The Hangover Lounge are returning, after their hugely successful shows in the past, and they’ll be taking over Daylight Music at the end of January for a special gig, including an album launch from The Wave Pictures. Another first this season will be a live set generated on an ipad app, thanks to the artist Ok Bertie!”
As usual, I’ll pass on previews of these gigs as they pop up, but if you want to read the schedule as it stands now, it’s here.
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Brighton’s Crayola Lectern are playing the Lewes Psychedelic Festival in March, and from following up on that for the previous post I also found out about this:
The Bleeding Hearts Club Winter Escape (presented by Bleeding Hearts Recordings)
Coachwerks, 19 Hollingdean Terrace, Brighton, BN1 7HB, England
Saturday 23rd January 2016, 3.00pm – more information
From Bleeding Hearts Recordings – “as we’re often sick of the winter by mid-January we decided to organise an indoors escape from the wintry grimness. This will be our third Saturday show at the Coachwerks but our first all-dayer. The show will be packed with music, poetry and performance art. Hopefully we’ll have time to organise food. Of course there is already a dangerously good bar run by Bartlebys Brewery in the venue. Entry incentive: £3.50 before 5.00pm (the acts on early will be amazing), £5 after 5.00pm (still a bonkers bargain). Get in touch if you’d like to help us out on the day.”
Although the Coachwerks Facebook page suggests that the venue’s permanently closed, I’ve been reliably informed that it’s open (Brighton anarchy). Confirmed to play at the Winter Escape are the aforemention Crayola Lectern and The Creaking Chair (both of whom specialise in a kind of kosmische-Anglica, complete with wit, smiles, drift and the occasional tearstreak); “sadcore/badcore/fadcore/dadcore” solo act Porridge Radio & The Cosmic Sadness; Xelis de Toro of electronic words/music/movement improvisers laboratoro); and The Trail Of Thomas Love (Shropshire-born songwriter and photographer Nathan Tromans, formerly of Mustard and John The Revelator, playing “slowgospelfolkrockcountrycore… reflective and intimate songs… small fragments of stories and ordinary myths of loneliness, misadventure, hope and redemption, of the journey and the coming home”). There are also various other acts whom I can’t find web pages for right now – singer-songwriter Daniel Searle, Hope In The Valley, TAiL, Dave Suit, Sophie Brown, Lisa Jayne, Ben Graham and Palmer’s Made of Sound.
Regarding those that I could track down, the usual tasters are below:
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More gig news next time, including those delayed previews for Of Arrowe Hill and Earl Zinger with the Emanative & Collocutor Duo; plus the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at Daylight Music…
There are a series of concerts coming up featuring East Anglian musician Laura Cannell. Playing a variety of instruments (predominantly straight or overbowed fiddle and double recorders, but also percussion and “other rarified wind instruments”, Laura fuses early and mediaeval music with a mixed ancient-and-modern approach to improvisation and to transcendent musical ceremony, taking fragments or inspirations from earlier sounds and melodies as the basis for exploration, illustration and linkages.
Laura will be playing up and down the country over the next few months at a variety of different events and locations, Each one has different musicians on the bill – Brooklyn-based Dutch lutenist and composer Josef van Wissem, who’s bringing the baroque lute out towards the worlds of experimental rock, folk and film; Liverpudlian tape-loop composer In Atoms whose “blissful and evocative” soundscapes and tones mix heath music and throbbing clubby sub-bass with the industrial and reveal him straddling Anglo-pastoralism and the European electronic grandeur of the Schultzes and Jarres; and two Yorkshire singers, Stephanie Hladowski (whose work stretches from reggae to traditional folk) and Magpahi (a.k.a. Todmorden based multi-instrumentalist Alison Cooper, who assembles a collage of folk song, fairy tale, Elizabethan poetry and dreamworld sonics from a variety of instruments and is inspired by “sepia stories, stray animals and recurring dreams of migration”).
Here’s the gig list, and something from each of Laura’s gigmates (including something quite rare from Magpani via the Was Is Das clubnight and promotions):
Laura has further gigs coming up later in the year, which I’ll also be posting about in due course.
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Born in Nagoya, (but now based in Bristol with his wife and collaborator, alt.folk singer Rachael Dadd) Ichi is paying London another visit with his truckload of invented instruments and mind-snagging riffs, digging a dayglo-lined tunnel between the avant-garde and a children’s playroom.
Ichi (The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, London, WC1H 8JF, UK, Saturday 23rd January 2016, 8.00pm) – £11.00 – information – tickets
From the Harrison’s blurb:
Ichi takes the notion of a one-man band to new limits, combining his quirky handmade instrument inventions (stilt-bass, kalilaphone, balloon-pipes, hatbox-pedal-drum, tapumpet, percussion-shoes & hat-trick-hat) with steel-drum, ping-pong balls, toys & everyday objects all in the space of one short set. Somehow there’s an ancient, ritualistic feel to his performances – he’s like the misplaced leader of a tribe. To see Ichi live is to witness something so playful and unusual you know that you’re experiencing something entirely new. It`s fun, it`s danceable, it`s exciting…. Also a practicing and exhibiting artist and film-maker, Ichi is usually seen with a cine camera in his hand, or his hands rooting through Bristol skips for materials for his musical and sculptural inventions, or his hands in the earth making human sized interactive earth xylophones as he did at Bristol`s Forage Festival.
And where words fail, there’s always the video to Ichi’s recent single Go Gagambo, “a song about mistaken identity (gagambo is an insect unfortunate enough to be mistaken as a big mosquito, resulting in probable death by angry clapping hands)”.
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I’d been hoping to bring you news of London acoustic steampunk-prog hero Tom Slatter playing Britain’s first actual steampunk bar (the recently opened Yellow Book, which is squirreled away in the Lanes of Brighton and claims to have been founded by time-travelling Victorians). Sadly not. Message just in – “This gig has been postponed. Don’t go there expecting to see me on the 23rd! Do go there if you want to see the venue, which is lovely. I will be playing at the Yellow Book in the near future. Watch this space.”
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More gig news next time, including shows by Of Arrowe Hill and Earl Zinger with the Emanative & Collocutor Duo; plus an appearance by Sealionwoman.
Born in Oldham, currently Saddleworth-based, but occupying a wayward and exciting multi-instrumental/multi-genre orbit (which takes in, among many others, Todd Rundgren, spangled electronica, Dirty Projectors, Van Morrison and Nancy Chodorow) teenage wunderkind turned twenty-year-old psych-pop pioneer Kiran Leonard embarks on a quick British tour this coming week. For a sampling of what’s on offer, have a listen to Kiran’s most recent single, which examines the panicked, unwilling misogyny of pubescent boys and uses it as a launchpad for sixteen minutes of charging, spontaneous-sounding twist-and-turn musical quest. Spattered with snippets of radio, cut’n’paste ADHD changes and lo-fi turnarounds, it sounds like Lou Reed and Jim O’Rourke grappling over the steering wheel of a gawky teenage Yes.
For the tour, Kiran’s four-piece band features three other flexible Manchester music luminaries. Guitarist Dan Bridgewood Hill also plays as dbh and with NASDAQ, Irma Vep Band and Seatoller), bass player Dave Rowe is from Plank and Andrew Cheetham drums with acts including Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, Easter, Butcher The Bar, the Birchall/Cheetham Duo and experimental rock duo Yerba Mansa. Support across the dates comes, variously, from Yerba Mansa, introverted Manchester singer-songwriter Tom Settle, Marc Rooney (taking a solo break from his usual band, Glaswegian “past post-modern bug-eyed beatniks”Pronto Mama), Edinburgh rock juveniles Redolent and inventive Sussex girl duo Let’s Eat Grandma.
The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, Hackney, London, E8 3AS, England, Monday 11th January 2016, 7.30pm – £8.50 – information – tickets
The Prince Albert, 48 Trafalgar Street, Brighton, BN1 4ED, England, Tuesday 12th January 2016, 7.30pm (with Let’s Eat Grandma)- £8.80 – information – tickets
The Eagle Inn, 18 Collier Street, Salford, M3 7DW, England, Wednesday 13th January 2016, (with Tom Settle & Friends + Yerba Mansa) – information – tickets
Something of what to expect from the support bands is below:
This gig info was added to the top of this post at the last minute, and these gigs are selling out fast, so move quickly.
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The past week’s death of Pierre Boulez cast an overwhelming shadow over the classical and avant-garde worlds. Under that pall, it’s easy to forget that breed of composers that the post-war work of Boulez and his acolytes sometimes eclipsed – working at a humbler altitude, often inclined to traditional tonalism and craftsmanship and generally writing for the vast and undersung body of working musicians and small regional music groups, their work’s left out of the big conversations. It may break fewer boundaries, or no boundaries at all, but (to my mind, at least) it doesn’t necessarily have a lesser value. Not only does it often demonstrate an empathy for the musician over the concept, it demonstrates music’s quality of constant giving, showing that the older schemes which a younger and more intemperate Boulez once dismissed as being played out are anything but: revealing an ever-renewing, ever-fertile grain to be worked with and against even in well-mined territories.
To my ears, the work of Julian Dawes fits into this category. Five decades of his composing has produced chamber and keyboard music, theatre compositions, youth pieces, assorted works on Jewish themes (including Kaddish songs, Exodus cantatas and Holocaust pieces) plus an acclaimed mandolin concerto. All of it displays a lambent, empathetic feel for subject, performer and musician; and this coming Wednesday sees some of it compiled for a dedicated concert in London.
A Concert of Commemorative Music by Julian Dawes (The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England, Wednesday 13th January 2016, 7.30pm) – £9.00 to £12.00 – information & tickets
This is an evening of music which Julian has written to celebrate people and events. The night is also in memory of Emma Daly, and the proceeds of the concert will go to the Rosewood Chemo Ward at the Darenth Valley Hospital.
Programme:
Love Life and Lyric (for soprano and piano)
Reflection on Psalm 43 (for piano) – first concert performance
Homage (for string quartet)
Wedding Song (Louisa) (for soprano, violin & piano) – world premiere
Piano Sonata – world premiere
Bagatelle for a Wedding (for string quartet)
Songs from ‘The Song of Solomon’ (for mezzo soprano, tenor & piano)
String Quartet (slow movement)
Sonata for Violin and Piano
Soundclips of Julian Dawes’ music on the web are few and far between, but I’ve managed to dredge up these two videos – one of Cantor Jason Green performing one of Julian’s vocal pieces, and a low-key one of Julian talking about his work (on behalf of the publishing service Tutti). You can also listen to soundclips of some of his work at the page for Omnibus Classics’ release of his ‘Chamber Music’ CD.
Julian’s most recently completed project is ‘Pesach Cantata’ with a libretto by Roderick Young telling the story of Passover. This will be premiered at the New London Synagogue in April 2016: I’ll post about that closer to the time.
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Lastly, there are a couple of New York gigs (this week and towards the end of the month) by a ‘Misfit City’ favourite of recent years, Brooklyn-based groove-pop band Legs, who mix irresistible New Wave dance grooves with twitchy emotional neurosis and a verbose, occasional waspish Steely Dan-esque approach to songcraft under the double-keyboard licks.
Legs + SKP (Hypnocraft @ The Manhattan Inn, 632 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, New York 11222, USA, Monday 11th January 2016, 8.30pm) – free event (suggested $5.00-$10.00- information
This pay-what-you-like gig is a Legs headliner, at which they’re supported by SKP – a.k.a. Sarah Kyle, frontwoman of Brooklyn psychedelic pop band Lip Talk. Sarah is also a member of recent Interpol tourmates Cosmicide, which features most of Lip Talk plus ex-Secret Machines leader Brandon Curtis.
Blank Paper + Tropic Of Pisces + Legs (Rough Trade NYC, 64 N 9th Street, Brooklyn, New York, NY 11249, USA, Friday 22nd January 2016, 8.00pm) – information here and here – tickets
This latter one’s a bottom-of-the-bill show for Legs. Swings and roundabouts, but they can play on both. At least they get to perform at Rough Trade (should be a natural audience booster) and they also get to act as warm-up and gig primer for two other stylish and eminently compatible Brooklyn acts. Keytar-wielding Blank Paper mix up classic hip hop rhythms, distant glimmering-city synthpop tones and vocals with just the right degree of hauteur for detached explorations of love and obsession sheathed in immaculate tunes. Tropic of Pisces is the new project from Mon Khmer/Oberhofer sideman Mathew Scheiner – his geeky white-boy solo funk seems to be inspired equally by glam, hip hop and South African township jive, though he himself describes it as “a warm, magical place that you must be special enough to have found.” Judge for yourselves below via the videos, with their ninja noir and tinfoil chic.
Back to the centre of London for some no-nonsense math rock, post-hardcore and brainwork with knuckles… and what could be more festive and seasonal than a band called Shitwife?
TINJR Xmas Party with Axes, Shitwife, Vasa & Wot Gorilla (This is Not Revolution Rock/Jebs Presents @ The Borderline, Orange Yard, off Manette Street, London, W1D 4JB, England, Saturday 19th December 2015, 7.00pm) – £8.50-£9.60 – information – tickets
“Absolutely buzzing for this show. Not only will this be the Xmas party for This Is Not Revolution Rock / Jebs Presents, it marks Del’s 30th birthday and 200th show as a promoter. So we’re really pushing the boat out and there might be some free mince pies. Please spread the word and let’s pack the venue out from start to finish for this, the last show we’re putting on in 2015!”
(They’re so carried away by the occasion that they didn’t really introduce the bands… or assumed that everyone reading would know them. I’m in a hurry, so here’s the one-line version.
Axes – brash and playful mathrockers with a Foo Fighter pop vigour. Shitwife – astonishingly brutal drums/laptop/electronics juggernaut fusing rave, death metal, noise and post-hardcore. Side project of musicians in bands with equally tasteful names. Vasa – noisy synesthesic post-rock package. Wot Gorilla? – how to noodle away at prog-inspired math rock and not alienate people.
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Here’s Knifeworld’s frontman (and eccentric broadcaster, in every sense) heading over to Deptford to dig up something old for the end of the year…
Dear Boss: Kavus Torabi and others (The Bird’s Nest, 32 Church Street, Deptford, London, SE8 4RZ, England, Sunday 20th December 2015, 4.00pm) – free entry – information
It’s Chri-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-istma-a-a-a-as! Join us as we are joined by avant-psych-rock multi-instrumentalist and all round Interesting Alternative guy Kavus Torabi (Knifeworld/Guapo)…(Mr. Steve Davis sadly can’t join us, as he’s gone skiing). And… come early to witness one of England’s strangest and most resilient midwinter traditions – ‘The Christmas Champions’ (a.k.a ‘The Mummers Play’). Our team of Jolly Boys and Guisers will offer up some seasonal shambols – preparing to entertain you with a short performance featuring William the Great, St George, Bull Slasher, The Doctor and old Beelzebub himself – with original music from James Larcombe (Stars in Battledress/North Sea Radio Orchestra). We’ll be doing it around 7-ish, I expect.
Boss. Wassail!
Beyond all of the throaty bombast I think that most of what’s beyond the mummery is DJ sets, although anyone who’s tuned in to Kavus on the Interesting Alternative Show will know that he can slap together some of the most extraordinarily eclectic sets you could ever hope to hear, featuring plenty of names you’d never heard, while telling cheerful lies about other cult artists who don’t actually exist. Fun to catch, in other words.
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On the subject of DJ sets, here’s one last one…
Café Oto NYE Party with Hieroglyphic Being 6-hour DJ set) (Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, UK, 31st December 2015, 10.00pm) – £20.00-£30.00 – information – tickets
We’re ecstatic to be welcoming in the New Year with Jamal Moss (a.k.a. Hieroglyphic Being), who will be flying in especially to Café Oto for a bumper 6 hour DJ set.
Jamal is one of the most unhinged and adventurous artists working in electronic music today; born in Chicago and raised in the heyday of the city’s house music scene, he has gone on to blur the lines between various forms of dance music, free jazz and industrial music, releasing countless singles and LPs, and even recently collaborating with the likes of Marshall Allen and Daniel Carter. His infamously unpredictable DJ sets have gardened considerable praise over the years, so we’re delighted to have him here for this very special occasion.
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And that’s it – although there’ll be a ramble through 2015 sometime between now and the end of January, and I may sneakily shuffle a few previously-incompleted posts back into the dates when I intended to publish them.
Back in London, Momentum Arts are setting themselves going with a Christmas gig tomorrow. They’ve got roots in, and are closely associated with, the Jeremy Corbyn movement, so the politically averse/committed should expect speeches and some familiar political faces to be included in the package along with the music. You can find out exactly who’s speaking, and in some cases what about) by following the information link). Personally, I share quite a few of their sympathies; but here’s what they have to say:
Momentum Arts Xmas Fundraiser with The Marzec Group + Mariela of Venus on the Radio + Maz O’Connor + Keith Burstein + others (Momentum Arts @ POW/The Prince of Wales, 467-469 Brixton Road, Brixton, London, SW9 8HH, England, Friday 18th December 2015, 7.00pm) – £6.00-£7.00 – information – tickets
Momentum Arts is an open network where creative people from all walks of life and lovers of the arts can unite through a shared passion for contemporary progressive, socially democratic politics. We are very proud of this and always aim (as far as possible) to create organising spaces which are safe for all. For this reason we’ll be operating on a zero tolerance policy for homophobia, racism, classism, transphobia and misogyny. We’re excited to present the first Momentum Arts event upstairs at the Prince Of Wales in Brixton! Get down to hear our excellent speakers, some inspiring music or just have a bit of a dance.
Performing:
The Marzec Group‘s appreciation for the club culture and electronic music genres brings back a reality to jazz; a grit long forgotten. Channelling these influences through a fresh and sophisticated combination of jazz, soul, blues and electronic music, their intense and improvisatory grooves are tailor made for the dancefloor.
Mariela is a girl of many hats; a musician and published author influenced by the likes of Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone, Jack White, Sergio Moroder and many others. With longtime collaborator Anthony she formed Venus on the Radio, a band which after recording in Abbey Road studios, was featured in BBC Introducing.
Maz O’Connor is a gifted singer of traditional and self-penned songs. Influenced by the folk songwriters of the 1960s; Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Neil Young along with her literary leanings make for a varied and intriguing body of work.
Keith Burstein is a composer whose work includes controversial operas which have provoked much comment and indignation from the right-wing press for daring to question the political establishment. Most notable among these is ‘Manifest Destiny’ (co-written with Dic Edwards) which portrays would-be suicide bombers who renounce violence and trigger a peace movement across the world. Keith will be performing two songs on piano, with a guest singer.
DJs Dr Punkenstein and Calvin De Kline will also be playing sets.
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In Deptford, something a little more straightforwardly musical:
Firstivus (The Bird’s Nest, 32 Church Street, Deptford, London, SE8 4RZ, England, Friday 18th December to Sunday 20th December 2015, 5.00pm onwards) – free – information & tickets
Two Deptford gig-scene lynchpins, Sinema City and Tom Moody –join forces for this year’s Firstivus – “a fun-filled weekend that will likely proved to be just a little too rhythmically-challenging for the whole family.”
Friday 18th opens, appropriately, with First (about whom no-one seems to know anything), followed by a pair of noisy drum-and-guitar duos (Charles Hayward‘s Bass Drum project with his son Riley Hayward, then the more secretive No One You Know). The music continues with garage-grungers Black Plastic Cardiacs/Bungle/Zappa-inspired progressive punk tanglers The Display Team, Gong-esque jazz-rock collisionists Psychoyogi, and finally by Ted Milton’s veteran schizo-disco art-punks Blurt (who are informed by poetry and puppeteering as much as by rock and roll).
Saturday 19th sports another diverse roster – stoner rockers The Cortège, the ”post-punk/alt-pop/awkward friendliness” of Dead Arm, The All New Greatest Hits Band (in which event organiser Tom Moody fronts the rhythm section of The Display Team), an acoustic Japanese interlude with shamisen player Hibiki Ichikawa and Champagne Dub, a new teaming of established friends: polydiscipline drummer Max Hallett (of A Scandal In Bohemia/Super Best Friends’ Club) and bassist Ruth Goller (Acoustic Ladyland, Oriole, Bug Prentice, many others), who’ve previously worked together in the encym trio. The evening rounds off with Afrobeat-ing Leeds post-punk trio Azores and headliners Boss Terror (who bring “drone, punk, spaced-and-motorway funk” as well as “Cockney tropical surf”).
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To be honest, I’ve got little idea of what’s going to happen with this next one, especially since it’s at The Others – but all of the clues point to a fusion of music, theatre and audience, and what time of year is better for that?
The Christmas Cabareilidh (Troupe @ The Others, 6-8 Manor Road, Stoke Newington, London, N16 5SA, UK, Saturday 19th December 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00 – information & tickets
A brand new night out that fuses the fabulous fun of cabaret with the gaiety of a good old fashioned ceilidh. Fresh from the success of our last sell-out event, Troupe presents another Christmas Cabareilidh that promises to be even more delightful than the evening’s portmanteau. You’re invited to sit under the glowing haze of fairy lights, as our hilarious cabaret performers fill you with festive cheer. Dance with giddy abandon to the live folk music of our Cabareildih band and fill your stomachs and hearts with mulled wine, minced pies and cheery Christmas carols. Join us at The Others for an evening of irreverent yuletide song and dance- because nothing says Christmas quite like a Cabareilidh!
Well, actually this is the first of the next-to-last gigs post of the year (I’ve still got to do the second round of Christmas parties). Apologies for terseness and excessive recycling of press-release blurb, but there’s a lot to pack in both here and elsewhere this month.
About half of these gigs are seriously avant-garde concerts for the London Contemporary Music Festival, with even more of a blizzard of links and odd video clips than usual. I’m also starting with a couple of full-on jazz or electronic improvising gigs.
Walthamstow’s newest (and only?) regular night of experimental/noisy/generally interesting music, returns with sets of bracing electronic experimentation from Phantom Chips and MXLX(the amazingly prolific Matt Loveridge, aka Fairhorns, Team Brick, and one third of BEAK>, among others), as well as the MNFN DJs playing ’til late.
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The Hat Speaks (LUME @ Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, Hoxton, London, E2 8JD, England, Thursday 17th December 2015, 7.30pm) – pay-what-you-want (£5.00 minimum) – information – tickets on the door
For our last gig of 2015 we return to Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, for the second edition of our dice-and-hat improvised music night. We held the first one in July to celebrate our second birthday, and it was so much fun we decided to do it again. As before, a nebulous ensemble of UK improvisers will gather to make spontaneous music together. This time the list looks like this:
Taking inspiration from long-running Manchester night The Noise Upstairs (founded by Anton Hunter and Tullis Rennie, no less), we will put all the players’ names into a hat, throw the dice to determine how many musicians will play, and then draw out the names. The result is lots of mini- sets from often completely new combinations of people! (Some groups from last time have decided to carry on playing together too: Tom Ward and Adam Fairhall are now collaborating on a new quartet for 2016 after their hat encounter in the summer).
Do join us for this last gig of the year – it’s been a blast, so let’s see it off in style! Entry, as usual, is one Bank of England note of your choice.
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And to close, here’s that run-down through the remaining London Contemporary Music Festival concerts.
We present the world premiere of a monumental new work by sound artist and recordist Chris Watson. Drawing on extensive underwater recordings gathered by the artist from oceans around the world, ‘Okeanos’ – a multi-channel sound installation that will play in complete darkness – celebrates the songs, rhythms and music of the oceanic depths.
In an attempt to shift our perception of what opera can do and be, we present a second instalment of ‘To A New Definition of Opera’, in which performance, video art and neglected modernist opera rub shoulders. Alongside a new commission from British performance artist Sue Tompkins, the night will include composer Tim Parkinson’s apocalyptic anti-opera ‘Time With People’ (performed by the University of Huddersfield’s edges ensemble) and Los Angeles-based artist Ryan Trecartin‘s dystopian film ‘CENTER JENNY’.
The centrepiece of the evening will be the UK premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s celebrated ‘Pieta’ from ‘Dienstag aus Licht’, with the voice of Lore Lixenberg and flugelhorn of Marco Blaauw. Interlaced throughout the evening will be an extremely rare performance of excerpts from Ezra Pound’s troubadour opera about medieval ne’er-do-wells, ‘Le Testament de Villon‘, which critic Richard Taruskin called “a modernist triumph.”
Programme:
Ezra Pound – excerpts from ‘Le Testament de Villon’ 1926 version (UK premiere) – performed by Lore Lixenberg (voice), Aisha Orazbayeva (violin), Lucy Railton (cello), Ian Sankey (trombone), Serge Vuille (percussion) Christopher Stark (conductor)
Karlheinz Stockhausen – Pieta from ‘Dienstag aus Licht'(UK premiere) – performed by Marco Blaauw (flugelhorn) and Lore Lixenberg (voice)
Ryan Trecartin – CENTER JENNY
Tim Parkinson – Opus 1, 2, 3 and 4 from ‘Time With People’ – performed by edges ensemble: John Aulich, Mira Benjamin, Jorge Boehringer, Eleanor Cully, Beavan Flanagan, Stephen Harvey, Dorothy Lee, Asher Leverton, David Pocknee and James Woods
Sue Tompkins – Like Sake (world premiere, LCMF commission) – performed by Sue Tompkins
‘A Martian Sends A Postcard Home’ takes its name from a poem by Craig Raine that sought to re-see the world through bold acts of defamiliarisation. This night celebrates the Martianist turn in music, with an exploration of composers who have made the familiar fresh.
The night will include the European premiere of Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund‘s lawless chamber work ‘Untitled School/Mud Jam/Campfire Tunes’, performed by the Plus Minus Ensemble, and Andrew Hamilton‘s electrifying ‘music for people who like art’. In ‘Mezcal No. 8’ Swedish composer/performer Hanna Hartman transforms a copse of steel rods and washers into a sounding presence.
We honour two standard bearers of “making strange” in composition: Helmut Lachenmann and Dieter Schnebel. Aisha Orazbayevaperforms Lachenmann’s ‘Toccatina’ alongside a recital of Russian poems by Mayakovsky and Yesenin that live and breathe the idea of estrangement or ostranenie. Meanwhile, composer and musician Christian Kesten presents Schnebel’s celebrated ‘Maulwerke’ where vocal technique is pulled apart into its constituent parts, alongside his own ‘Zunge Lösen’ that seeks to stage the tongues of three performers.
Artist Tino Sehgal takes on the body, intellectual property and materiality itself. ‘Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things’ is his earliest “livework”. It sees performer Louise Höjer transformed into, in the words of ‘Frieze Magazine’, a “hydraulic android”.
The night ends with a visit from Cairo’s E.E.K. Under the fingers of Islam Chipsy (accompanied by drummers Khaled Mando and Islam Tata), a digital keyboard is wrenched into explosive new sonic territory, articulating the sound of post-Tahrir electro-chaabi.
Programme:
Tino Sehgal – Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things – performed by Louise Höjer
Selected poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin – performed by Aisha Orazbayeva (voice)
Helmut Lachenmann – Toccatina – performed by Aisha Orazbayeva (violin)
Christian Kesten – Zunge Lösen (Releasing the Tongue) – performed by Christian Kesten (voice)
Andrew Hamilton – music for people who like art – performed by Becca Carson (piccolo), Ausiàs Garrigos Mórant (bass clarinet), Ian Sankey (trombone), Sam Wilson (percussion), Jack Ross (electric guitar), Siwan Rhys (piano), Joanne Evans (voice), Eloisa Fleur-Thom (violin), Valerie Albrecht (viola), Oliver Coates (cello), Martin Ludenbach (bass guitar), James Weeks (conductor)
Dieter Schnebel – Maulwerke (2015 solo version) – performed by Christian Kesten
Hanna Hartman – Mezcal No. 8 (UK premiere) – performed by Hanna Hartman
Øyvind Torvund – Untitled School/Mud Jam/Campfire Tunes (European premiere) – performed by Plus Minus Ensemble: Mark Knoop (piano), Roderick Chadwick (piano), Serge Vuille (percussion), Elsa Bradley (percussion
Islam Chipsy & EEK – live set
Some call it post-internet art: others “the New Aesthetic”. Whatever the name, there’s no doubt that the internet has scrambled the way we think, see and listen. Yet if art has placed this new paradigm at its heart, we are only now beginning to distil what it means for musical composition.
One pioneer of musical attempts to understand how things are changing in the digital shadow is Jennifer Walshe. The final night of LCMF 2015 will see the UK premiere of her latest, major one-woman work ‘Total Mountain’. Two further UK premieres arrive from Germany. Berlin-based Neele Hülcker investigates (as does Claire Tolan) the online phenomenon of autonomous sensory meridian response – or ASMR – in her work ‘Copy!’, while Brigitta Muntendorf explores the YouTubed bedroom in ‘Public Privacy No 2’.
The flight from reality captured by this post-internet music is not new. Serialist trailblazers like Milton Babbitt got there first with works such as ‘Reflections for piano & synthesized tape’. The hyperactive, networked aesthetic of Walshe and others, meanwhile, was foreshadowed by Jacob TV in ‘Grab It! Both are performed tonight.
As an occasional collaborator with London-based collective PC Music, Felicita‘s music is one in which the tropes of pop’s most commercial statements are accelerated, amplified and brought riotously together into a language that, if satirical, is also wildly inventive in its own right.
We conclude and project into the future with the long-awaited UK return of James Ferraro, whose 2011 album ‘Far Side Virtual’ is an essential post-internet text. For his forthcoming release ‘Skid Row’, Ferraro turns his attention to contemporary Los Angeles, a kind of “hyper-America” where violent realities are obsessively mediated and reproduced.
Programme:
Milton Babbitt – Reflections – performed by Mark Knoop (piano) with original tape recording
Jacob TV – Grab It! – performed by Nick Goodwin (electric guitar)
Brigitta Muntendorf – Public Privacy #2 (UK premiere) – performed by Brigitta Muntendorf with Mark Knoop (piano)
Neele Hülcker – Copy! (UK premiere) – performed by Neele Hülcker
Jennifer Walshe – Total Mountain (UK premiere) – performed by Jennifer Walshe
Felicita – live set
James Ferraro – new work
Friday this week sees the start of the London Contemporary Music Festival, which (as if it were part of a conspiracy theory) is lurking in a giant underground bunker near Baker Street…
London takes centre stage in our opening night, as we celebrate the exploratory fringes of the city’s music scene and the collective imperative that has been a spur to some of the capital’s greatest experiments. The proliferation of collectives among young musician-composers is reflected in new commissions from some of the most adventurous of these musical laboratories. The night will include premieres from Charlie Hope and Jamie Hamilton (a.k.a. Topophobia), Neil Luck (performing with his Squib Box ensemble) and John Wall & Tom Mudd (Utterpsalm and Contingent Events). We hear recent work by composers Edward Henderson (Bastard Assignments), Shelley Parker and the artist duo Claudia Hunte. We welcome an iconic figure and chronicler of London’s musical edgelands, David Toop, and offer a live improvisation from Poulomi Desai (Usurp), who started the Hounslow Arts Co-op at the age of 14.
We also offer a world premiere from artists Richard Wilson and Anne Bean. In the 1980s, Anne, Richard and Paul Burwell formed the legendary Bow Gamelan Ensemble, enthralled by the aural poetry and parallel visions of the Thames. Now, Wilson and Bean enter the territory as W0B. Theirs is a world that cracks and splinters and grinds into being as it races backwards and forwards through friendships of forty years. ‘NALEMAG’ becomes the totemic incarnation of their endless scrabbling around boat-yards, scrap-yards, gas depots, pyrotechnic munitions, voyages on many rivers in countless vessels and a frenzy of carrying, welding, investigating and making across the planet. The trajectory culminates with a landmark new AV performance from south London’s Visionist, whose singular language emerges from the fragmentation of dubstep and grime.
Programme:
David Toop – Many Private Concerts
Anne Bean/Richard Wilson – NALEMAG (world premiere)
Poulomi Desai – Vermillion Sands (world premiere)
Neil Luck – Via Gut (world premiere – LCMF commission)
Jamie Hamilton/Charlie Hope – New work (world premiere)
Edward Henderson – Tape Piece
Claudia Hunte – The Elephant In The Room Is Afraid Of Dying
Shelley Parker – Live set
John Wall – Live set
Tom Mudd – Live set
Visionist – Live set (AV)
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The second LCMF night, on Saturday, sees the series take a broad stylistic and historical sweep across twentieth and twenty-first century California (with one digression to Alaska, so it’s not all sun.)
The second night of LCMF 2015 is dedicated to the music of the American West Coast, an exploration of 100 years of musical non-conformism, from the piano insurrections of Henry Cowell to the deep listening of Pauline Oliveros (performing her own music on v-accordion). Oliveros is joined by another founding legend of the pioneering San Francisco Tape Music Center, Morton Subotnick, who presents a solo Buchla set and the UK premiere of a 1960s Tape Center composition with a film by Tony Martin. Another composer associated with the Tape Center was Terry Riley, whose ‘Keyboard Study No. 2’ gets a rare outing.
Alongside this we zig-zag through the experimental landscape, calling on John Cage‘s concussive ‘First Construction (In Metal)’, which premiered in Seattle in 1939, John Luther Adams‘s monumental ‘Among Red Mountains’ and Catherine Lamb‘s subterranean ‘Frames’. We excavate two gems from California’s 1980s computer music scene, Maggi Payne‘s ‘Flights Of Fancy’ and Carl Stone‘s ‘Wall Me Do’. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Watts Uprising we present an extremely rare performance from Otis O’Solomon, whose collective The Watts Prophets emerged from the rubble of that uprising and helped lay the foundations for hip-hop.
Programme:
Henry Cowell – The Banshee (for piano) – performed by Gwenaëlle Rouger
John Cage – First Construction (in Metal) (for percussion ensemble) – performed by PERC’M and Serge Vuille
Morton Subotnick/Tony Martin – PLAY! No. 3 (1965) (UK premiere)
Terry Riley – Keyboard Study No. 2
Maggi Payne – Flights of Fancy
Carl Stone – Wall Me Do
John Luther Adams – Among Red Mountains (for piano) – performed by Gwenaëlle Rouger
Catherine Lamb – Frames for cello & bass recorder (UK premiere) – performed by Anton Lukoszevieze/Lucia Mense
Otis O’Solomon – Selected poems
Pauline Oliveros – Pauline’s Solo (1992)
Morton Subotnick – solo Buchla set
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On Sunday, the third LCMF event has a polycultural and temporal feel:
LCMF 2015: ‘Five Ways To Kill Time’(London Contemporary Music Festival 2015 @ Ambika P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS, England,Sunday 13th December 2015, 6.30pm) – £11.75 – information – tickets
Time is stretched, bent and finally dissolved in ‘Five Ways To Kill Time’. Sound artist Ellen Fullman opens the night with a UK premiere of The Watch Reprise, which will be performed on her 50-foot Long String instrument that one writer compared to “standing inside a giant grand piano.” Ethiopian composer, pianist and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou makes her first visit to the UK to perform a selection of her intimate piano miniatures that seem to drift through space. Plus Minus Ensemble, meanwhile, offers up the intricate and disorientating world of Bryn Harrison‘s ‘Repetitions In Extended Time’ (conducted by Mark Knoop and featuring strings, organs, piano, guitar and clarinet). Mixing spoken text and music, theatre maker Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment) and violinist Aisha Orazbayeva offer a set of fragmentary improvisations in ‘Seeping Through’, a work fresh from a critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe. We end with a time-obliterating live set from doom pioneer Stephen O’Malley, whose work within and beyond his seminal group Sunn O))) exists in a kind of transcendent stasis.
Programme:
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – selected piano works
Bryn Harrison – Repetitions in Extended Time
Tim Etchells/Aisha Orazbayeva – Seeping Through
Ellen Fullman – The Watch Reprise (world premiere)
Stephen O’Malley – live set
A few months ago, I briefly covered folk/classical/pop fusion night Whispers & Hurricanes (the latest arm of the Chaos Theory Promotions mini-empire) and they’re back this week.
Raf & O + ArHai + Lucy Claire + guests (Whispers & Hurricanes @ The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green London, E2 9AG, UK, Friday November 20th 2015, 7:30pm) – £6.00 – information – tickets
After a wonderful launch in September, our newest night is back with inspired musicians who fuse traditional sounds with groundbreaking techniques in an evening of mesmeric triphop, folktronica, avant pop and contemporary classical electronics. Fans of Portishead, Bowie, Lamb, Bjork and Eric Satie will enjoy.
Raf & O are a duo from south-east London who are garnering widespread acclaim in the UK and Europe, creating a buzz via exciting performances of their uniquely detailed avant-pop and its vortex of live electronics, acoustic instruments and fragile, magnetic, strange lullabies. After supporting artists such as Faust and Little Annie Bandez, they were special guests in Richard Strange’s production for William S. Burroughs’ centenary at Queen Elizabeth Hall, and recently composed for the theatre play ‘That Woman’s Voice’ (a tribute to Jean Cocteau). Raf and O’s second album ‘Time Machine’ was named as one of ‘FACT Magazine’s Top 10 albums of 2014, with their “avant-bizarre” interpretation of David Bowie’s Lady Grinning Soul pricking the ear of Bowie’s pianist, Mike Garson (who praised their minimalist approach) and leading to appearances at two Memory Of A Free Festival concerts (re-stagings of the legendary Beckenham Free Festival organised by David Bowie and The Beckenham Arts Lab back in 1969). Tonight we’ll hear them perform music from their first two albums, as well as unheard music from their upcoming third album.
ArHai is an electronic Balkan folk duo, consisting of Serbian-born composer and singer Jovana Backovic and British multi-instrumentalist Adrian Lever. Their music is a fusion of electronic music and folk with medieval influences from both the Gaelic and Balkan traditions. Underlined with breathtaking visuals, Arhai breathes new life into the sounds of the Bulgarian 8-string tambura lute and hammered dulcimer (played by Adrian), blending them with Jovana’s ethereal vocals and electronic production. Their previous album ‘Eastern Roads’ is a must have. Tonight’s show celebrates the launch of their new website and the upcoming release of their single.
We also welcome back the brilliant composer Lucy Claire, who launched her beautiful ‘Collaborations’ EP with us last year. A soundscape artist and a contemporary classical composer with influences from the likes of Satie, Peter Broderick and Björk, Lucy composes music with a very organic heart to it and in a style so unique and diverse that it has resulted in her performing to classical, electronic, acoustic and post-rock audiences, as well as live performances on BBC London’s breakfast show and BBC6 Music. Her sound initially seems soft and ambient, but reveals a defiant spirit and gentle force breaking its way through. This evening we will see her perform new collaborative works with some special guests, some of whom you may know already.
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It’s always nice to hail a new music night, especially one that’s only a short stroll from your own front door. In the Archway cutting, just up the road from the current Misfit City HQ, Songs from the Cellar have begun to fill a café basement with sound: next week it’s an investigation of antique popular songs, but this week it’s guitar instrumentals…
Guitar Journey Duet (Songs from fhe Cellar @ Zelas Cafe, 216 Archway Road, London, N6 5AX, UK, Friday 20th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00 – information – tickets on the door
Guitar Journey Duet is a team-up between two leading London cross-disciplinary guitarists – British player Jonny Phillips (a member of Oriole and F-ire Collective) and Sardinian-born Giorgio Serci (whose twenty years of recordings, collaborations and performance has included work with Antonio Forcione, Eduardo Niebla, Denys Baptiste and Shirley Bassey).
Between them Jonny and Giorgio cover jazz, classical, flamenco, samba, art rock, British folk and African jazz. They might be off to play Verdi at the Albert Hall barely a week after this concert, but what they get up to in this small Highgate basement might well be something completely different. The only clue as to what they’re playing is that they’re favouring Spanish guitars tonight, as they are in the video below.
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The last gig I’m listing for the week is another Daylight Music effort, bridging the acoustic and the electronic, the pastoral and the urban.
Daylight Music 207 – 20 Years Of Lo Recordings: Grasscut + Astronauts + Lilith Ai (Union Chapel, Saturday 21st November 2015, 12.00pm–2.00pm) – free (£3.50 donation suggested) – information
Renowned for quality esoteric music, Shoreditch’s Lo Recordings has released music by Thurston Moore, Four Tet, Aphex Twin and others. Now the label is celebrating its 20th birthday with a special showcase at Daylight Music featuring label artists Grasscut, Astronauts and Lilith Ai.
Many accolades have been heaped on Grasscut, the teaming of Andrew Phillips (voice, keyboards, guitar) and Marcus O’Dair (keyboards, double bass) in a wide-thinking Brighton-based duo which encompasses electronica, classical minimalism and multi-media, and which draws inspiration from landscapes and history. Andrew, who writes and produces all Grasscut music, is also known for his soundtrack work for HBO, BBC Films and Channel 4: he has been nominated for an Emmy and shortlisted for an Ivor Novello. Marcus (who manages the band in addition to his instrumental contributions) also occupies himself with journalism for the Guardian and Financial, lecturing in Popular Music at Middlesex University and work as a broadcaster in particular on Stuart Maconie’s ‘Freakzone’: he is also the author of ‘Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography Of Robert Wyatt’. At this concert Grasscut will be playing music from their new album (and first for Lo Recordings), ‘Everyone Was A Bird’.
Astronauts is the solo project from Dan Carney (formerly of Dark Captain). Described by Sputnik Music as “often bleak and highly contemplative indie-folk”, according to Facebook, the project is mainly in the business of creating “ham-fisted bleep-folk neoliberal takedowns”. As with Grasscut, Dan’s interests and influences extend beyond making music: he is a qualified developmental psychologist with an interest in short-term memory development and in Williams and Down’s syndromes.
Lilith Ai is a new signing to Lo Recordings. A member of the Fight Like a Girl collective, she performs poignant tales of modern city living. Drawing from blues, folk and acoustic R’n’B, and dusted by subtle electronic shades and beats, Lilith’s songs show urban life through a clear lens which does not hesitate to reveal her own dark life experience.
On the 12th November, Baba Yaga’s Hut are presenting a double event in London: simultaneous gigs in the east and the south, each blending rock and electronica in different ways and at different intensities.
Tropic of Cancer + Shift Work + Telefon Tel Aviv (DJ) (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, London, SE17 1LB, UK, Thursday 12th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £10.00 – information – tickets
Gauzy, morbid-romantic LA dream pop project Tropic of Cancer (comprising murmurer and instrumentalist Camella Lobo plus collaborators) return to London for another set of blurred lyrics and slow-burner Gothic psychedelic-tinged tunes. Expect lapping echoes, grey-draped music and a numbed atmosphere with concealed drama: self-confessed romantic and “hyperbolic dramatist” Camella admits that the driving concept behind most of her songs is “a love so supernatural it lasts beyond death, but also a love that is sometimes not strong enough to conquer human weakness in the living.”
The live Tropic of Cancer band now includes Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv (and also Sons of Magdalene, Puscifer and the Nine Inch Nails tour band) who’ll apparently be playing a DJ set under his TTA moniker. Further support comes from London dance-electronica minimalists Shift Work.
Teeth of the Sea + Anonymous Bash (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ The Brewhouse, London Fields Brewery, 369-370 Helmsley Place, South Hackney, London, E8 3SB, UK, Thursday 12th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £9.00 – information – tickets
At this gig, the increasingly acclaimed Teeth of the Sea launch their fourth album – the subtly-titled ‘Highly Deadly Black Tarantula’.
The London band’s assured and stormy concoction of spacey psychedelic guitar rock dramatics, heavily-processed Fourth World trumpet, counter-culture festival techno, electronica and drone music – plus their assured-to-arrogant stage presence and mastery of performance – has been winning them a wide range of fans from across the board. The clips below should give you an idea of what to expect both on record and onstage.
Support comes from Anonymous Bash, featuring veteran experimental drummer Charles Hayward (of This Heat, Camberwell Now, Massacre and the myriad collaborations of Accidents + Emergencies). Based on the music springing from last year’s four-week Hayward residency at Salford’s Islington Mill (during which Charles collaborated with over twenty musicians from the Manchester regions), the project features a taut, dubby experimental sound centred around the sonic marriage of his own percussion, melodica and vocals with shifting, abrasive rock aspects brought in by his collaborators. The Salford-based Gnod ensemble (a mixture of kosmiche and cult-spoofery) played a substantial role in the Anonymous Bash album, and join Charles in the ongoing live line-up.
Increasingly a ‘Misfit City’ regular, the Belarusian classical pianist Olga Stezhko (whose superb technique is equalled by her audacious, densely intellectual approach to programming her repertoire) chalks up two landmark concerts at two British classical music institutions this week as she makes her debut at both the Wigmore Hall and the Bridgewater Hall. To each venue, Olga is bringing her ‘Lucid Dreams’ programme – a selection of pieces exploring ideas of childhood and children’s music.
Olga comments “this programme is deeply personal to me. It is a conscious attempt to rediscover those things that were central to the development of my musical identity. Inevitably this can appear to be a sort of light musical psychoanalysis, but as I recall my childhood I remember vividly being surrounded by magic, with all its signs and symbols, which greatly affected how I felt towards the world around me at the time. To some extent, I have never lost touch with my younger self thanks to my extensive teaching work with children. Their distinctive personalities are an endless source for artistic inspiration; I wish therefore to dedicate my concert to those boys and girls.
“The narrative of the programme reflects the development of our perception of reality during different stages of life. It moves from the magical realism of a child’s worldview in the first half (Toys & Dances) to the broader metaphysical questions we all face at some point in life in the second part (Images & Visions).”
Sergei Prokofiev – Old Grandmother’s Tales Op. 31
Sofia Gubaidulina – Musical Toys
Dmitri Shostakovich – Three Fantastic Dances Op. 5
Claude Debussy – Suite Bergamasque: Menuet
Lev Abeliovich – Tarantella
Aleksandr Skriabin – Deux Danses Op. 73
Part Two: Images & Visions
Claude Debussy – Images, Series 1
Aleksandr Skriabin – Cinq préludes Op. 74
Claude Debussy – Images, Series 2
Aleksandr Skriabin – Vers la flamme, poème Op. 72
Sergei Prokofiev – Old Grandmother’s Tales Op. 31
Sofia Gubaidulina – Musical Toys
Claude Debussy – Images, Series 1
Aleksandr Skriabin – Vers la flamme, poème Op. 72
(Note that the Manchester concert features a much shorter version of the ‘Lucid Dreams’ programme.)
Throughout the programme, Olga explores the further deeper brought up in her music choices, investigating Debussy’s complex psyche and relationship with his daughter, the cognitive differences between children and adults (including the former’s belief, often shared with adult musicians, that they shape the world by thought and action), her own childhood impulses as a pre-teen musician, and the roles of parent figures in successive generations of composers. She also challenges the subordinate role that children’s music seems forced to play, arguing “what is the definition of children’s music anyway? I believe when these works emerge as an innermost urge from a mature master, it epitomizes their most sincere and unpretentious artistic output.
“Such music as Gubaidulina’s Musical Toys (part of my future recording project ‘Toys & Tales’) or, for example, Debussy’s Children’s Corner (to be included into my next all-Debussy album) is as rich with imagery, colour, trepidation, emotion and symbolism as any symphonic masterpiece. Moreover, it is perhaps the most accurate musical description of any composer and their inner worlds. Both performers and listeners can relate to this kind of music precisely because there is something universal about it as we all were children once, authentic and genuine in our relationship with the world.”
Olga’s full thoughts behind ‘Lucid Dreams’ (from which the above notes and quotes are taken) can be found here, and are well worth reading.
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On the Saturday there’s another Daylight Music – a typically involved crossover gig of post-rock, soundtrack classical and communal musical spirit. Details and promo blurb below…
The wonderful Haiku Salut are best described as an instrumental dream-pop-post-folk-neo-everything trio from the Derbyshire Dales, and their talent for combining joyous folk, intricate electronica and spellbinding neo-classical has seen them compared to everyone from Beirut and múm to Sigur Ros and Aphex Twin. Their second album ‘Etch And Etch Deep’ has received acclaim from ‘Uncut’ (who called it “both warmly familiar and completely, fearlessly new”) and ‘Popmatters’ (“vividly coloured sonic canvas”), while ‘The Line Of Best Fit’ described the opening track and recent single, Bleak And Beautiful (All Things), as “uniquely stunning… isn’t afraid to tear up the rulebook and begin fresh.”
Formed in 2013, Camden Voices is a choir of thirty passionate singers, instrumentalists and teachers, as well as those working outside of the music world. Rehearsing weekly in the heart of Camden Town, they aim for high musical standards whilst keeping a friendly and fun sense of community at our heart. With groove and harmony as their foundation, they develop new approaches to ensemble singing; using new arranging talent, they dust off neglected gems from the worlds of jazz, soul, gospel, and a cappella with a vibrant contemporary twist.
You can also hear the elegant, beautiful music of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, an award-winning French pianist/composer currently living in London. Spanning film score, bespoke composition and art installations, her work is connected by both its high quality and evocative, meticulous craft – a common sensibility of elegant, instinctual composition. In 2015, she created a sound-walk for London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and her debut album ‘Like Water Through The Sand’ is set for a November release on FatCat’s post-classical imprint 130701.
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If ‘ve got a moment over the next few days, I’ll post up something on the London Jazz Festival and on The End – failing that, more November gig news to follow.
As the opening concert of the South East Asian Festival 2015, there’s a performance at the Forge by My Tricksy Spirit, a new musical project which fuses the shimmering sounds of gendér wayang – Balinese gamelan instruments – with dub, electronic, ambient, trip-hop, and psychedelic rock. The Forge’s writeup is below (tweaked a little by me).
My Tricksy Spirit (The Forge , 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Monday 26th October 2015, ) – £10.00
Performed on the bronze-and-bamboo “gendér” metallophones which gives the music its name – and featuring intricate, interlocking melodies played with mallets and damped with the wrists – gendér wayang is a subset of Balinese gamelan music. Involving between two and four players (a small number for a gamelan ensemble) it is used in the island’s Hindu rituals including life-cycle ceremonies, temple festivals, purification rituals and cremations (as well as in the sacred wayang kulit shadow-puppet dramas, based on ancient Indian epics).
The My Tricksy Spirit project was started by Nick Gray, who teaches south-east Asian music at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London, and who runs the gendér group that forms the basis of the band. Using Ableton Live, several synths and effects, guitar, bass and drums, the music is played through a mixing desk – much like dub – to create an intense psychedelic journey through sound.
Tonight’s band features Nick Gray (violin and vocal), Paula Friar and Rachel Wilcox (gendérs) and four other musicians: Tomoya Forster of Pumarosa (bass guitar, effects, mixing desk), Julian Vickary of General Skank (synthesizer and effects), Charlie Cawood of Knifeworld (bass guitar, sitar, guitar) and Rob Shipster of Buttress Root Drumming (electronics, drums), who also produced My Tricksy Spirit’s upcoming album.
Support comes from electronica/world-house act Wax Wings and from another of Nick Gray’s SOAS gendér wayang ensembles, Segara Madu (who mostly play repertoire pieces from the Balinese village of Sukawati, as taught by the late I Wayan Loceng). More information and gig tickets are here, with the Facebook event page here.
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Arguably, there’s not been enough pop or R&B in here recently. Let’s set that straight.
Kill J + Loveless + Maasai (Ja Ja Ja @ The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, UK, Thursday 29th October 2015,) – £5.00/£7.00
Straight from the publicity:
Founded in 2009, Ja Ja Ja is the definitive Nordic website and club night celebrating the very best new music emerging from Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Denmark. Each month at London’s The Lexington, Ja Ja Ja hand-picks the finest emerging talent from the Nordic countries, making sure that only the best music is filtered through to your ears.
KIll J (a.k.a. Julie Aagaard) has been turning heads the past two years with her signature blend of dark experimental pop. A devastating one-two-punch with debut singles Phoenix and Bullet set the blogosphere buzzing, also catching the keen eye of ‘The Guardian’, ‘Indie ‘, ‘Stereogum’, ‘Pigeons and Planes’ and landing airplay on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 6music. Deliciously diverse, the sugary sweet Cold Stone revealed a more innocent and naive side of KIll J, whilst Propaganda burst forth as “a bombastic, fangs-bared snarl at sexism” (‘Stereogum’). There’s more to come too, with an EP promised this fall.
Prominent identities in their own right, Eirik Tillerli and Filip Kollsete teamed up late 2013 to form Norwegian beat crooners Loveless. Following back-to-back remixes, debut single How To Love You was instantly added to national radio. Clocking in excess of 500K streams last year, their music has picked up attention from blogs, magazines and DJs all over the world; also landing them on some of the biggest festivals in Norway, not to mention their own club night in Oslo, Klubb Loveless (where guests include Artful/Artful Dodger and NVOY). New single They Don’t Know was recently hailed Record of the Week on BBC Radio 1xtra, serving the first taste of upcoming project ‘Relationships’.
Maasai is a Stockholm-based duo consisting of Dominique Teymouri and Zackarias Ekelund. Together they create soulful sound landscapes with a cinematic touch and lyrical depths. The pair broke on to the scene with debut single Memories, pulling inspiration from varied and abstract constructs – places, people, surroundings and everywhere in between. Follow-up tracks The Healer and Forgive Me have since held a captive audience; also hinting to the fearless, fragile and all-the-while dreamy atmosphere inhabited by MAASAI’s upcoming debut album – set for release later this year.
Resident DJs Project Fresh Socks are along for the ride in October; having also spun up a storm at Ja Ja Ja’s first club night of the season last week at The Lexington with CHINAH (Denmark), The Fjords (Norway) and Axel Flovent (Iceland).
Up to date information for this particular Ja Ja Ja night is here and tickets are here.
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Flapping-in-the-wind time… here’s what looks like a very interesting gig, but the colourful cloud of information around it keeps changing shape. Here we go..
Subterfuge presents Samhain Special/Labiatory New Year’s Eve Party with Rude Mechanicals + NiMBUL + Bad Suburban Nightmare + We Are A Communist + Jane Ruby + Milky Sugar (Subterfuge @ The Others, 6-8 Manor Road, Stoke Newington, London, N16 5SA, UK, Friday 30th October 2015, 7.00pm) – £3.00 to £6.00 and upwards
Run by arch, arty but heartful prank-rockers anarchistwood (whose own ingredients span post-punk cantatas, skeletal lo-fi garage pop, silly voices and quickfire sampler collages), this is the last Subterfuge club night of the year (hence the split between a Halloween/Samhain night and a New Year’s Eve shindig) and promises a fabulous musical sprawl – a right old grab-bag of this and that, in the best way. anarchistwood themselves are playing, though at the moment it’s unclear whether or not they’re teaming up with dysfunctional Chatham polymath and Stuckist art brute Sexton Ming (as the anti-supergroup called Nimbul), or playing as themselves. I guess that whichever way it goes you could expect a roughly equal mix of distracted behaviour, political protest, self-absorbed memory jigsaws and détournements with echoes of Beefheart, Crass, The Raincoats and the high point of a Pride parade. But that’s all it is – a guess.
Compared to Earth and Neil Young at their most dogged and noisy, Dan Hrekow – a.k.a Bad Suburban Nightmare – plays “impossibly slow and melancholic” grunge-drone instrumentals on a minimal setup of distorted guitar and pedals. In violent contrast, Rude Mechanicals play party music for paranoid schizophrenics, fronted by the peroxide-beehive rantings of Miss Roberts (who looks like a doubled-back-drag-queen version of Patsy Stone, and speak-sings like a collision between Dagmar Krause and Holly Penfield), Their songs are rattling hallucinatory-jam sandwiches about sinister neighbours, stand-up arguments and alien mice on the Tube, mixing jazz, punk and cabaret together in equal measures and played with both needle-sharp precision and full glamour oomph.
Of the rest, We Are A Communist provide “trashy guitar-laden sci-fi surf music, with stylophones to boot – a must for Man or Astroman? fans”; onetime Naked Ruby frontwoman (and current Deptford Beach Babes member) Jane Ruby turns up to sing her solo mixture of torch, garage rock’n’roll, flamenco and blues songs with twists of Spanish & Arabic flavours; and Milky Sugar performs “punk go go”… but that’s where I run out of information.
I’ve no actual idea about the order in which everyone’s going on, as the various info and flyers seem to contradict each other: either that or the whole event is morphing too fast for me to keep up with it. Presumably they’re working to some functional anarchist or I Ching method to establish it, or you just turn up and see what happens. Perhaps that’s what they’re doing. Either/and/or DJ Sugarlump SS, DJ KG Lumphead and MC Sadogasm provide some extra noises, punkvertery & Kodek provide visuals, and they’ve got a proactive but generous door price policy – three quid if you’re unwaged, four quid if you’re a student with an NUS card, and six quid if you’re neither but have shown enough commitment to arrive before 9pm. After that, they charge more. More information is here; keep track of developments as best you can on Facebook here; and there’s the usual array of tasters below.
Pausing only to remind you that the last week of October includes two of the Pierre Bensusan acoustic gigs at the Half Moon in Putney (which I mentioned in the previous post), here come the last of my selected London gigs for the month, and the first for the start of November. As ever, it’s just a small sampling of what’s on in town, but it’s what’s caught my attention.
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Bitchin’ Bajas + Tomaga + Demian Castellanos (Baba Yaga’s Hut & Hands in the Dark @ Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, UK, Monday 26th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £9.00
I’ve heard Chicago trio Bitchin’ Bajas described as “psychedelic easy listening” – presumably by someone who insists on being shouted at in conversation. Despite that swaggering faux-dumb name (the one that makes them sound as if they play manic Tejano to be drowned out by fist-fighting oil workers) they’re more ‘Bitches Brew’ than cathouse. They spin out protracted rhapsodic instrumentals drawing on a variety of introspective, mindful influences and parallels, looking back to the hallowed bucolic trance of Harmonia and Cluster, the ecstatic modular pulses of Terry Riley, the breezy but depthless Pacific cool of West Coast jazz, and perhaps the dissolving pastoralism of Talk Talk. Though they’re multi-instrumentalists, they wear their skills lightly, working wind instruments and mallet percussion into their mists of keyboard and workhorse organ and their landscape of lively rolling, rilling glissandi and drone chords. Sometimes overlapping into ambient electronica, they’re never quite dilute enough to fit into it: even at their most vaporous and transparent, they’re the smoke that never quite fades, the tang that holds your attention. As the clip below shows, they’re perhaps a little too diffuse to work at an open air festival: embraced by the Oto space, they should do just fine.
Synth/sounds looper Tom Relleen and drummer Valentina Magaletti keep in step – just about – as Tomaga, an impressionistic improvising duo drawing on drone music, free jazz and modular synth work hanging off the edge of rock. Simple oscillating melodies percolate loosely over a syncopated jazz lope with hanging coffee-can taps and rattles and shortwave radio whines; sometimes a synth organ hangs by itself, burbling, while the percussion sways and alarms like an approaching freight train. It’s music of preoccupation, with brief flashes of bright sunlight through the pressing focus.
Best known as the figure behind London psychedelic/kosmische projects The Orichalc Phase and The Oscillation, Cornish-born loop guitarist Demian Castellanos steps out under his own name for his most personal work so far. Like Fred Frith or G.P. Hall, Demian’s had a history of playing guitar with implements – paper, cutlery or whatever else came to hand – and feeding the sounds through volume swells and sundry pedals: like Hall, he’s also possessed of a nature-inspired, painterly view of music. For this current work, he’s going back to his formative years of woodshedding as a cottage-bound teenager at the isolated southernmost tip of the British coast; creating rich, portentous and melodious sound layers drawing on early-‘90s shoegaze, on raga and drone, and on echoing, guttering British, Indian, American and German psychedelic influences.
More gig info is here, and tickets are available here.
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On the first day of November, there’s a double bill of Japanese heaviness at Corsica Studios.
Zeni Geva (or Zeni Gaiva, depending on how you translate the phonetics – conceptually, it translates as “money violence”) have been around since 1987. Led by guitarist/singer/noise-chopper KK Null, and currently backed up solely by drummer Tatsuya Yoshida to make a quake-strength power duo, they have initial links to legendary noise-Dadaists The Boredoms (and even the venue-destroying pre-Boredoms chaos act Hanatarash, which featured Mitsuru Tabata, until relatively recently Zeni Geva’s second guitarist). You’d expect them to have an abrasive side, and you’d be right. Their default musical setting is one of boiling, barking aggression, with tight and furious knots of threshing machine guitar; their records have savage, sadistic titles like ‘Total Castration’ and ‘Desire For Agony’; their progressive hardcore approach takes assorted forms hostage (aside from the obvious, there’s math and noise rock, psychedelia and death metal in the tangle) and makes them jump like puppets.
And yet, in spite of this, there’s a world of difference between Zeni Geva and your average long-lived heavy-thunderfuck band. It’s mostly in the way they use calm – little, perfectly-formed lacunae of space in between the blurs and blows, bringing their bursts of frenzy into focus (Steve Albini is both fan and sometime collaborator, and you can see why). It’s a terrible cliché to compare Japanese musicians to martial artists, but in this case there’s some substance to it. The brutality is sheer craft rather than an end in itself, every movement seems considered and purely executed; and live, in between each flurry of songblows and each ugly song name, they seem enormously humble, friendly and pleased to be there.
Acid Mothers Temple have taken twenty years to set themselves up as a revered psychedelic institution, but it seems as if they’ve been doing it for much longer, such is leader Makoto Kawabata’s talent for back-engineering himself into the culture. Part of this is down to the way he and his cohorts have mastered the ingredients, including the tearing metallic squalls, mellow blues tracery and starry smears of Hendrixian guitar, the whispering lapping Gong synths, the Pink Floyd mantra riffs and Zappa-esque air sculpture solos, and the zoned-out post-James Brown grooves (with the addition of Japanese chanting and noise-squalls). Much of the rest of it is to do with AMT’s open, overlapping community approach. Their musical impetus has utilised multiple faces and names, from their own simpler reconfigurations (the heavier trippier playing of Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno, the Sabbath-y sludge of Acid Mothers Temple & Space Paranoid) to the friendly absorption or co-opting of contemporaries (Acid Mothers Temple SWR, with Ruins, and Acid Mothers Afrirampo) and of heroes from the original psychedelic generation (the team-up with Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth as Acid Mothers Gong, and with Mani Neumeier as Acid Mothers Guru Guru). If old heroes are unavailable or disinclined to pool resources, AMT have simply shrugged and continued anyway (such as when they took up hurdy-gurdys and acid folk and briefly became Acid Mothers Temple & the Incredible Strange Band).
If this makes Kawabata and co sound like slick chancers (and even if AMT album titles like ‘Starless and Bible Black Sabbath’ do suggest both avid, nerdy fandom and piss-taking on a Julian Cope level), I’m selling them short. Acid Mothers Temple might be a brand as much as an ethos, but that hasn‘t stopped their project and record-releasing ethics being continually dedicated to possibilities and continuance,rather than simply banking a following (or colonizing someone else’s). Their communal origins may have been two decades behind those of their inspiration but were hardly any less sincere; and their exploration of less obvious musical areas en route (including opera, Terry Riley minimalism, Nepalese folk and southern European Occitan culture) have led them into interesting places and opened further doors to anyone following them.
First and foremost, anyone who’s seen AMT play will vouch to their talent of both mastering their sources and creating music which lives, thrills and involves in the moment. This week’s London concert features the more space-rock inclined Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. lineup – probably the easiest entry point to an increasingly rewarding musical world. See below for a full-length concert clip of the band in action.
More gig info is here, and tickets are available here.
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Also on the Sunday, it’s time for the monthly LUME gig: more jazz in Dalston…
Tom Taylor/Rob Luft and Cath Roberts/Seth Bennett/Andrew Lisle (LUME @ The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8JH, UK, Sunday 1st November 2015, 7.30pm) – £10.00
For our November Vortex gig, we welcome a duo and a trio to the stage, for a night of improvised music.
Tonight sees the first meeting of a new improvising trio featuring LUME’s co-director Cath Roberts (baritone saxophone), Seth Bennett (double bass) and Andrew Lisle (drums). Andrew is known for being one of the drummers in heavyweight Leeds anarcho-sextet Shatner’s Bassoon, and as a prolific improviser working with a multitude of musicians on the free scene (Colin Webster, Alex Ward, Daniel Thompson, Tom Wheatley and more). Seth leads his own ensembles Nut Club and En Bas Quartet, as well as being involved in many other projects across musical styles including Fragments Trio, Metamorphic and The Horse Loom. He and Cath play together as a duo, as well as in Word of Moth and Cath’s quintet Sloth Racket. In addition to this and her LUME work, Cath also leads Quadraceratops (a septet) and has a duo with guitarist Anton Hunter, Ripsaw Catfish.
The new duo featuring Tom Taylor and Rob Luft is a recent collaboration borne out of a mutual love of improvised music. The music draws attention to the many common features of the two instruments, and mixes high-intensity improvisation with more tender and reflective textures.
A former award-winning classical piano graduate at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Tom is now a rising British jazz star, having transferred to London in 2009 to pursue a Masters in jazz piano at Trinity College of Music (studying with Simon Purcell, Liam Noble and Nick Weldon). Since then he’s played the main jazz festivals in Manchester and London and Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway. He’s a member of the Jack Davies Big Band and of Southbound (both of whom have recorded for V&V Records) and also plays in the collaborative electro-acoustic trio duck-rabbit with saxophonist Joe Wright and double bass player James Opstad. Rob began his career as a jazz guitarist in Sevenoaks, where he took lessons from Mike Outram and turned professional at 15. He has been a mainstay of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra for many years, having been its guitarist since 2010 and having played in the associated NYJO Nonet. He currently co-leads the band Organism and plays with various groups on the London jazz circuit; including positions with Nigel Hitchcock, Gareth Lockrane and the Callum Au Big Band.
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
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