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January to March 2020 – assorted London gigs – Holly Penfield at 100 Club (8th March) and with Ian Ritchie at the Fiddler’s Elbow (10th January); skewed surf, pop and acoustica with Kenny Process Team, Keith John Adams and The Happy Couple (13th January); Balkan/Gaelic folktronics with Arhai (18th January); plus Minute Taker’s ‘Wolf Hours’ in Manchester (24th January)

7 Jan

Holly PenfieldIf you missed Holly Penfield’s London launch gig for her ‘Tree Woman’ album back at Halloween last year – or if you attended and wanted to see it again – then she’s looping back on herself and staging another one at the 100 Club on 8th March. For those unfamiliar with her, here’s what I wrote (indeed, here’s what I recycled) last time.

“Raised in San Francisco (and a veteran of the 1980s LA pop scene with the scars to prove it) Holly spent much of the ‘90s writing and performing the psychodramatic one-woman pop show ‘Fragile Human Monster’ in London and elsewhere. A show with such troubled and intense undercurrents that it eventually blew itself apart, it’s now spawned a return… but under very different circumstances. The whirling mirror-glass synths and saxophones of the old days have been replaced by a gritty post-Americana rock band (which growls, gnaws and struts through her songs like a Cash or Waits ensemble) while Holly herself has mostly forsaken standing behind a keyboard (except for when a grand piano ballad calls for that set of skills).

“It’s funny, sad, uplifting and stirring all at once. Once the very embodiment of storm-tossed waif and precarious survivor, Holly’s now a wiser and much happier woman. She still absolutely owns the stage, though, helping herself to a big dollop of the jazz and blues flavourings which shaped her initial development, playing a dash of ukulele and engaging in some zestful shimmying (and some delightfully ludicrous party outfits, worn with wit and flair – it seems as if her recent steps away from cabaret involved at least one sly step back).

“What hasn’t changed is the quality of her singing, and of her songs. While old FHM standards like Misfit, The Last Enemy, puddle-of-grief ballad Stay With Me, and slinking fingersnapper You Can’t Have The Beauty Without The Beast have shed skins and made the transition to the new show, Holly’s also been dipping into a trunk of neglected and mostly previously unheard work, including the tremendous state-of-the-world song Confessions (based around a lyrical hook she once dangled in front of an intrigued Joni Mitchell) and the vivacious Tree Woman (a more recent effort in which she vigorously embraces both her own ageing and the resilience that comes with it).”


https://soundcloud.com/user-162790483/passion-flower


 
Holly Penfield & Ian Ritchie, 10th January 2019If you can’t wait until March, Holly and her multi-instrumentalist husband Ian Ritchie (the latter an ex-Deaf School member recently fresh off playing sax on the Roger Waters tour) will be playing another London gig this coming Friday, up at the Fiddler’s Elbow. This one will be an “experimental thirty-minute duo gig of originals with vintage ‘80s drum machine… interesting, quirky,and challenging!”

Although Holly and Ian are going out under their Cricklewood Cats moniker (under which they’ve previously released a few synth-jazz swing songs), theirs has been a long and varied partnership also encompassing cabaret, out-and-out jazz balladry, noisy rock diva songs and the bewitching sequencer-torch-pop of the ‘Parts Of My Privacy’ album. So you could expect takes on all of the above and more, including some of Holly’s newer songs. At the moment she’s on a serious creative upswing, and there’s rarely been a better time to see her than now.


 

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Kenny Process Team + Keith John Adams + The Happy Couple, 13th January 2020On the following Monday, the reunited and reinvigorated Kenny Process Team launch their own new album, ‘Travlin’ Light With… Kenny Process Team’. Actually, it’s an old one, recorded as a live session over twenty years ago with the band’s 1998 lineup but lost in the abstracted shuffle of the band’s history, which has seen members swap out, disappear, impale themselves on fences and even join Oasis.

Part avant-surf, part Afro-prog and compared in their time to both The Ventures and Captain Beefheart (while proggies will also find parallels with Television and The League of Gentlemen), there’s more on the Kenny Process back story here. In the present, with the addition of Rhodri Marsden as new guitarist (replacing the late Simon King) and thanks to his existing connections with Lost Crowns and Prescott, they’re further cementing their links with London’s current crop of art/prog/psych/cellularists.



 
Also playing is KPT labelmate Keith John Adams. Once Rhodri’s bandmate in zestful 1990s avant-skifflers Zuno Men, for twenty years now Keith has been a solo act coming at acoustic pop from a gently skewed angle, buffeting around friendly lyrical ideas like a sozzled housefly bumping against a lampshade and turning out understated little song-gems as he does so. His accidental forebears might include Robyn Hitchcock, Kevin Ayers; you might also pretend that he’d been dreamed up from some lazy Walthamstow afternoon when Leon Redbone shared a sofa with the young Bill Oddie.



 

Opening the evening is The Happy Couple, the languid instrumental duo formed by Kenny Process drummer Dave Ross and his life partner Judith Goodman, born out of two decades of inseparable love mingling with the inspiration of the Epping Forest woodscapes where they live. Judith plays a variety of open-tuned guitars, predominantly a Weissenborn acoustic slide guitar but also a 4-string tenor and a 3-string cigar box model (plus a mysterious “early English” example which suggests a rewriting of instrumental history). Leaving his drumkit behind, Dave plays a variety of mouth-held lamellophones: a classic American jaw harp, Indian morchangs in both brass and iron, a Norwegian Munnharpe and a mouth bow harp created in Devon. As for the music, it’s a relaxed evocation of companionship, glissando and boing and intersecting rhythms: or, as Judith comments, “it’s about the sounds that happen when we put our sounds together. We just create a world we want to be in.”



 
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Arhai, 18th January 2020

The following Saturday, British/Serbian electronic folk project Arhai slip into the little cellar at the Harrison to deliver their own electro-acoustic atmospheres. A two-decade-long project led by singer/composer Jovana Backovic, they were a traditional Serbian acoustic octet for their first ten years, gradually shifting into electric terrain before dissolving and allowing Jovana to form the current duo with British multi-instrumental specialist Adrian Lever (mediaeval dulcimer, hammered dulcimer, guitar, tambura, Bulgarian lute etc). Now they’re Balkan-cum-Gaelic, intertwining ancient and technological: or, as they put it “rethinking the archetypal modes of music performance in the context of modernity”. Which sometimes means they’re ultra-accessible and synth-quilty in the familiar Clannad model, and sometimes means that they’re off and racing like a cross between izvorna and a hyperspatial hip hop track.




 
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All of the above events will be in London: for the next one, you’ll need to head up to Manchester, where singer, songwriter and electronic pop creator Ben McGarvey, a.k.a. Minute Taker, is unveiling his multi-media performance ‘Wolf Hours’. Ben is no stranger to mixing theatre and music, having already presented a love-and-ghosts story on tour with ‘To Love Somebody Melancholy’ featuring animations from Ana Stefaniak. ‘Wolf Hours’ is an even more ambitious undertaking – “a unique performance combining mesmerising film with a dynamic live soundtrack. From forbidden love in the First World War, to the pain and rage of AIDS, to contemporary hedonism and heartbreak, ‘Wolf Hours’ explores the stories of gay men at different points in time through their dreams. This series of stunning new short films (directed by John Lochland, Joe Stringer, Kirk Sylvester, Raphaël Neal and Ben McGarvey) are accompanied throughout by Minute Taker performing an intimate musical and vocal score that both builds the atmosphere and pulls on the heartstrings. Visually explosive and emotionally thrilling, ‘Wolf Hours’ transports the audience through pleasure, grief, lust, joy and our collective historical imagination.”



 
In this interview with ‘Superbia’, Ben expounds on the approach he took when putting together ‘Wolf Hours’, which he describes as “jumbled-up memories, fears and fantasies.. It’s presented a bit like late night TV from back in the ’80s and ’90s (when anything queer was relegated to an after-midnight slot!) with different programmes and images emerging out of the static as you drift in and out of sleep… I also decided to include lots of archive footage in the show, which explores the way homosexuality has been portrayed in the media over the years… all of the stuff that finds its way into the subconscious minds of the characters as they lie awake at night, having an effect on how they view themselves and the gay community.” He’s hoping to take the show out on a broader tour much later this year, but for now this is all that you’re getting…

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Dates:

Holly Penfield & Ian Ritchie: The Cricklewood Cats
The Fiddler’s Elbow, 1 Malden Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3HS, England
Friday 10th January, 2020, 8.20pm – no information links, just turn up…

Kenny Process Team + Keith John Adams + The Happy Couple
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Monday 13th January 2020, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Folk and Roots presents:
Arhai
The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England
Saturday 18th January 2020, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Minute Taker presents ‘Wolf Hours’
Hope Mill Theatre, 113 Pollard Street, Beswick, Manchester, M4 7JA, England
Friday 24th January 2020, 8:00pm – information here and here

Holly Penfield
The 100 Club, 100 Oxford Street, Soho, London, W1D 1LL, England
Sunday 8th March 2020, time t.b.c. – no information links yet
 

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December 2019 – Arch Garrison and Emily Jones on tour together around England – folk, psychedelia and other familial connections featuring The Steven Morricone Tyranny, We Are Muffy, Libbertine Vale, Little Robots, Berlin Horse, Chlöe Herington, Ian A. Anderson and Pete Aves (11th to 17th December); plus a Jones and Garrison contribution to Spratleys Japs’ Winter Wonderland show in Brighton with Panixphere, Matthew Cutts and Hot Sauce Pony (21st December)

2 Dec

Craig Fortnam’s most recent surfacing (as North Sea Radio Orchestra) was a Robert Wyatt tribute event back in June, accompanied by assorted European Canterbury-scene aficionados and former Henry Cow-ers. Increasingly, that Wyatt connection’s cleaving more and more closely to his own work. It’s not that he absolutely takes on board that Wyatt whimsicality, the covers work or the delightful melting song-rambles: it’s more something about the lack of pomp, in particular in the tone of voice. Like Wyatt, Craig sings in an unaffected, unperformed manner – a delicate cupboard-voice, a step up from speech or chat, allowing itself to be frail but unsilenced: a singing style that’s like a confidence quietly shared in the back booth of a pub.

While this has been evident in Craig’s vocal moments with NSRO, it’s always been more present in his smaller-scale singer-songwriter work as Arch Garrison, in which he’s less sheltered behind chamber woodwinds and strings. Originally a trio including bass, subsequently trimmed to the two-man interplay between Craig and the delightfully welling, psychedelic-chapel keyboard work of James Larcombe, the upcoming English tour sees AG as Craig on his own – just his voice and artful nylon-string guitar, fingerpicked in a way which suggests a British answer to John Fahey’s American Primitive style while drawing from classical, flamenco, African stylings and intents. New songs are promised, adding to Craig’s existing repertoire of soft pushings and reflections on family, geological time, bereavement, and contact with one’s surroundings.


 
Craig’s tourmate is Emily Jones – a singer-songwriter who’s a little further underground, with only a single 2014 debut album to her name compared to Craig’s batch of projects (although she’s also made marks via a split woodland-folkadelic album with The Rowan Amber Mill). That said, she’s been making progressively bigger splashes this year; emerging from cottages in Cornwall and Salisbury for a growing number of concert appearances. This tour will be her biggest effort to date – six shows up and down the country bringing her feathery songs of hauntings and lovings which blur in and out of folk mythology and present day magic, accessible and human with a gentle wash of acid dreaming and folk baroque.



 
Winter Warmer @ The Sunfold (featuring Arch Garrison + We Are Muffy + Emily Jones + The Steven Morricone Tyranny), 11th December 2019Along the way, there’ll be various other meetings. In Hexham, it’s just the two of them playing; but in Weston-super-Mare, they’re part of the Winter Warmer event at the Sunfold Hotel, the Weston-super-Mare guest house which is emerging as an occasional local stronghold for music (thanks to the affable-evil presence of Steven Morricone, the more gonzoid of the two Scaramanga Six frontmen, as co-owner). Not only is Steven playing host, he’ll also be spending time onstage maltreating the piano with his Steven Morricone Tyranny solo project, indulging self-confessed “straw man with a fist of ham” tendencies with a clutch of assorted Scaramanga songs (presumably his own more psychobilly offerings, though he’s recently been straying into more obscure and theatrical art-rock set pieces with assorted flavours of Faust, theatre and radio art), plus some new solo stuff and the odd cover.

Also playing are Brum-born but Cornwall-settled duo We Are Muffy, in which The Lilac Time’s Nick Duffy and Ambassadors Of Sorrow leader/frontwoman Angeline Morrison conjure up “poetic narratives of remembered and imagined pasts, combining vocal harmonies with unexpected instrumentation” – somewhere at the country-folk end of the Witchseason sound, with American banjos and fingerpicked guitar dissolving into more British concerns and storytelling styles.


 
In Hereford, Craig and Emily are playing with spooky sometime Omnia Opera/7shades singer Libbertine Vale, who sets aside the psych/prog electric trappings of her bandwork in favour of macabre a capella renditions of melancholic folk songs about oppression, cruelty and general perishing, albeit with “seeds of renewal”. You don’t get to see much of Libbertine outside of Birmingham and Herefordshire (where she contributes to the county’s growing reputation for psychedelic folk and sundry hauntological business by co-running Unorthodox Paradox), and she spends much of her time on subversive textile art rather than on music, so it’s best to catch her when you can. Especially since her solo act has, so far, resisted the pull of the internet – so no videos or soundclips here.

The Garrison/Jones booking at a Buds and Spawn night in Sheffield is supported by guitar-and-banjo-toting female harmony trio Little Robots. Though the latter have been going for about a decade, they’re busy women with a host of other activities and a commitment to the moment, so actual recordings are intermittent. You can scoop up what there is from their Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages: doses of impeccable Appalachian/Yorkshire fusion.

 
In Oxford, the support act is “singer-songwriter-psychedelicatessen” Adam S. Leslie, as his Berlin Horse project, wrapping spiky, silly absurdities, Ray Davies echoes and moments of quirky beauty in unalloyed Pepper-flavoured lushness (like an old Puffin Books joke anthology with extra swirl, wit and Lowrey organ colour)


 
London is the only date for which Arch Garrison will be a twosome, with James Larcombe returning to the fold. They’ll also be meeting up with Chlöe Herington. Temporarily disengaged from pumping regal bassoons and saxophones into the psychedelia of Knifeworld and Hirvikolari, from celebrating Lindsay Cooper in the Songbook project and from the three-headed avant-femme art-music project that her onetime solo outlet VALVE has become, she’s promised to occupy herself in “rebirthing some very old stuff (the vaults have been unsealed!) and reworking some more recent.”

There are no questions about the folky character of the Salisbury gig – it’s being played with Emily and Craig sandwiched between Ian A. Anderson and Pete Aves. Ian’s credentials are impeccable – a veteran British folkster of five decades standing, continuously active since the mid-60s, he’s led the field in acoustic country blues, had a long spell as head of The Village Thing acid folk label, has been a concert promoter and a critic (in particular, as the leading light of ‘Folk Roots’ magazine. Now in his seventies, for the last couple of years he’s been writing and playing solo again. This year’s ‘Onwards’ album compiles, in his own words “fifty years of deathfolk, blues, psych-fi, trad and world twang.”

As for guitarist/banjoist Pete, he too has been returning to solo work after the drying-up of work as regards his role in the currently slumbering High Llamas (and, more seriously, the uprootings and traumas of a divorce and spell of homelessness). Inspired by his recent travails, he’s now turning out simple songs of reproach, road life, and thumbnail character sketches, mostly in an Anglo-American country-folk vein.


 
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Wonderful Winter Wonderland Special 2019 (featuring Spratleys Japs, Panixphere + Hot Sauce Pony + Army Of Moths + Arch Garrison + Emily Jones + Matthew Cutts), 21st December 2019Both Craig and Emily will also be heading down to Brighton on 21st December to play “little guest sets” at the Winter Wonderland concert headed up by Spratleys Japs, featuring yet another joyfully incestuous array of the British psychedelic stew that bubbles around Cardiacs (see passim…).

The event’s already entirely sold out; but assuming that you can manage to prise a ticket from the cold, dead hand of a Cardiacs fan or an eager Brighton psychonaut, what you’ll be seeing apart from Emily and Craig includes the “lo-fi arty ska” of Hot Sauce Pony, a raucous Brixton four-piece with a lineup including the Gilchrist husband-and-wife couple (singer Caroline and bass player Steve, the latter better known as Stephen Evens, as the “Stuffy” in stuffy/the fuses, as a one-tour Cardiac or as the kit-thrasher behind Graham Coxon) and onetime Rat The Magnificent guitarist Ross Davies. They’ve been touting around a Steve Albini-recorded debut album this year. North-western art pop duo Army Of Moths may have had to cancel, but another longterm Cardiacs affiliate, Matthew Cutts, will be spouting some kind of poetry.


 
Probably the big draw this year, though, is the resurrected Panixphere – the elusive Cardiacs-family thrash-rock band who’ve surfaced occasionally over the past four decades to play a frustrating brief handful of blasting sets and then immediately dipped back underground. Inasmuch as they’ve had much consistent about them, it’s been Bic Hayes – the intermittently active, sputtering jewel of a guitarist/singer whose juddery, effects-laden playing (like Keith Levene invading a fiery Hawkwind lineup) has graced recordings and concerts by Cardiacs, ZOFFF, Levitation and Dark Star, Pet Shop Boys, Heidi Berry and Julianne Regan’s short-lived Mice. In Panixphere, though, he’s off the leash and free from the big concept or the psychedelic ritual. Historically, it’s been a band in which to drink too much beer and play music much too fast, in snotty punk-metal tradition (albeit while test-bedding or providing an alternative vehicle for assorted Cardiacs and Levitation material, as well as crunchy cover versions of songs by XTC, Nomeansno and, if suitably distracted, early Genesis).

Now, however, Panixphere seem to be taking things a bit more seriously, announcing their return with a swishy verbal fanfare and too many capital letters. “A Three Piece. Three timelines. Formed in 1984. Re-imagined in 1992. Returning in 2020. Experience The Past, Present and Future, simultaneously, in PANIXPHERE – appearing LIVE for the first time in 25 years – preview titles from the FORTHCOMING album ‘Cryptic’, currently under construction and to be unveiled in 2020. This Show Is A Beginning.”

While the lineup has previously included (at various points), Craig Fortnam, Cardiacs capo Tim Smith, Bic’s Levitation/Dark Star bandmate David Francolini and mysterious south London 1980s festi-freaks “Little Hicky” and “Flat Hat’, the revived version is a power trio including singing/shouting bassist Jon Poole (back for a second stint) and Cardiacs drummer Bob Leith. Here’s a clip of an earlier Panixphere, complete with Tim Smith, banging about onstage in 1993. Whether they’ll be any less unruly a quarter-century further on – well, it’s possible but not guaranteed. All this talk of an album, though, suggests that for the first time ever they’re thinking beyond the present, or following through on plans which have previously stalled in a shower of rude fat sparks.


 
As for the headliners, read here for a more in-depth account of Spratleys Japs’ original life as a Tim Smith/Jo Spratley parallel-to-Cardiacs weird-pop studio project, half-hearted disguised as bizarre pond-scummed Anglo-American swamp rock; and of their recent Tim-less/Tim-blessed live revival, with Jo now fronting a selection of Brighton psychedelic luminaries. Still reanimating the original Smith material, they’re now broadening out with their own new work as well as a couple of unheard Smith treasures.

With Jo now handling all of the vocals – and with Tim’s fuming-friendly/baleful-brotherly presence restricted to an affectionate memory – the band have indubitably lost some of their original charismatic quirk and danger. In return, though, they’ve gained a greater access to the beauty behind the music’s peculiar angles and gurgles, which refracted elements of glam, imaginary folk, tastes of post-Bostonian punkaroo (think Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders) and celestial Mellotron-classical through a skewed Smithian prism… and which still does, dropping it all off into a murky forest pool surrounded by tea-lights, traces of spontaneous ritual and the odd piece of trash. They’re a warmer proposition than they were before – now unrestricted by that Cardiacs tradition of onstage aggro and awkwardness, Jo’s now playing things more as a dancing priestess than the punkette muse she might have been before, blossoming even as the music does.



 
If all of this still seems compelling despite your lack of a ticket, word’s coming through that the whole shebang’s going to be live-streamed worldwide, in order to raise further funds for Tim Smith’s palliative care. More details on the event page, with the streaming link here.

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Dates:
Arch Garrison/Emily Jones tour:

  • ’Winter Warmer’ @ The Sunfold Hotel, 39 Beach Road, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, BS23 1BG, England – Wednesday 11th December 2019, 7.30pm (with We Are Muffy + The Steven Morricone Tyranny) – information here
  • ’Weirdshire’ @ The Babar Café, 31 Union Street, Hereford, Herefordshire, HR1 2BT, England – Thursday 12th December 2019, 7.30pm (with Libbertine Vale) – information here
  • The Vault, 22-24 Hallgate, Hexham, Northumbria, NE46 1XD, England – Friday 13th December 2019, 8.00 pm – information here, here and here
  • ’Buds & Spawn’ @ The Dorothy Pax, Arch 17, Wharf Street, Victoria Quays, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S2 5SY, England – Saturday 14th December 2019, 8.00pm (with Little Robots) – information here and here
  • The Library, 182 Cowley Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX4 1UE, England – Sunday 15th December 2019, 8.00pm (with Berlin Horse) – information here and here
  • The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England – Monday 16th December 2019, 7.30pm (with Chlöe Herington) – information here
  • The Winchester Gate, 113-117 Rampart Road, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP1 1JA, England- Tuesday 17th December 2019, 7.30pm (with Ian A. Anderson + Pete Aves) – information here and here

Wonderful Winter Wonderland Special 2019 (featuring Spratleys Japs, Panixphere + Hot Sauce Pony + Army Of Moths + Arch Garrison + Emily Jones + Matthew Cutts)
The Green Door Store, 2-4 Trafalgar Arches, Lower Goods Yard, Brighton Train Station, Brighton, BN1 4FQ, England
Saturday, 21 December 2019, 5.30pm – information here and here
 

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October/November 2019 – upcoming London classical gigs – ‘Venus, Women And The Guitar’ (27th October); Emily Howard curates ‘Ada Lovelace: Imagining The Analytical Engine’ (2nd November); Echo Collective present Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ’12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann’ plus Félicia Atkinson (3rd November)

21 Oct

‘Venus, Women and the Guitar’, 27th October 2019As part of London Guitar Festival 2019, the International Guitar Foundation presents ‘Venus, Women and the Guitar’ towards the end of October. A concert celebrating women’s relationship with the guitar, and featuring a wide roster of performers including many significant current female classical guitar players, it also showcases an entire programme of guitar compositions by women.

Of the two main composer contributors, Errollyn Wallen has written plenty of works for guitar over the past two decades as part of a career which includes seventeen operas, music for television and assorted works for chamber instrumentation and large-scale ensembles (as well as a musical willingness to explore both standard classical settings and experiments with tape, placement and other media, plus continual rearrangements of the ideas of how we think about music and its intersections with a broader, more diverse culture).

In addition to the IGF-repertoire Wallen pieces which are being played, she’s contributed two new commissions/premieres. The Housden-Tarlton Duo will be performing ‘Two Guitars’, while Tom Kerstens‘ G Plus Ensemble (a two-guitar, string quartet and percussion group, eschewing piano parts in favour of “the unique combination of the guitars’ quickly decaying plucked sounds, the sustained bowed string sound (and) a wide range of vibraphone, marimba and other percussion sounds”) will be performing ‘Road to Strathy Point’. As regards the repertoire pieces, Tom Kerstens returns later in the program to perform the solo Wallen piece ‘Canciones’ while up-and-coming classical guitarist Shannon Latoya Simon will perform a triptych of ‘Three Ships’, ‘Walking Me To Work’ and Night Passage’ (meanwhile, here are the Kerstens versions of a couple of these).



 
The other dominant composer of the evening, Laura Snowden, hasn’t been working for nearly as long but her career’s already moving from strength to strength. Also reknowned as an exceptional and versatile performer on guitar, she’s been described by ‘Classical Guitar Magazine’ as “linking guitar’s past, present and future” and will be performing her own solo piece ‘Anpao; L’étoile et la Rose’.


 
As regards her other pieces, the Mēla Guitar Quartet (Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Daniel Bovey, Jiva Housden) will play ‘My Clock Is Broken’ (which they premiered at the Purcell Room earlier in the year); VIDA Guitar Quartet (Mark Eden, Mark Ashford, Amanda Cook, Christopher Stell) will be joining up with concert saxophonist Amy Green to perform ‘Light Perpetuum’; and two VIDA members will be returning in their other configuration as the Eden Stell Guitar Duo to play ‘Damn everything but the circus!; The Snow Globe’.


 
The work of five other female composers will be performed as part of the concert. VIDA’s Amanda Cook will team with violinist Liz Cooney for Effy Efthymiou’s ‘Two Reflections’ of which “(the) elliptical movement and improvisatory feel are designed to create a seductive ambience – almost like being in a dream. The lilting phrases move easily from one time signature to the next, producing a free flow of sound and a subtle feeling of repose. Light interweaving melodies rotate with rough, percussive sonorities to evoke the whole spectrum of feelings that one might experience through reflection.”

Rather magically, Effy is half of a mutually supportive duo of composing twin sisters, along with Litha Efthymiou, and the two compose both together and apart. Litha, too, is represented in this concert. Her piece ‘States Of Ice: Diamond Dust’ (like ‘Two Reflections’, originally a 2012 IGF commission) will be performed by Johan Löfving. It’s “a poetic representation of the ice phenomenon “diamond dust”… its light, ponderous beginning exploits the guitar’s delicate timbral qualities, while the second, more aggressive section is quite percussive in texture, depicting the full gamut of elements that constitute this elusive state of ice.”

Johan will return with his Flauguissimo Duo partner, flautist Yu-Wei Hu, to play another previous IGF commission, Charlotte Bray’s ‘Here everything shines’ (apparently “largely inspired by Cesaria Evora’s ‘Petit Pays’, sung in Cape Verdean Portuguese. The title comes from the translation of the line ‘ki ca ta brilha’, an idea which resonates throughout. A gritty and impassioned fast section opens the piece, the non-stop flute/violin line dashing around being punctuated by stabbing chords on the guitar/piano. The intensity grows until a lush slow section takes over, the melody singing vibrantly over an arpeggiated figure. Similar material to the opening then returns in an extended version, with the piano taking on the fast energetic figure and violin interrupting. Expressive and very free, a quiet section follows. The pace slows and lines glimmer as if caught by rays of sun bouncing off the ocean. Abruptly, the opening material intervenes one final time, with the lively melodic line heard once again in the flute/violin part, the guitar/piano seemingly edging it on.”)

Opening the concert, G Plus Ensemble will be playing Anna Meredith’s ‘Spook (for string quartet, guitar and marimba); and finally, there’ll be another premiere. Kevin Daniel Cahill (G Plus Ensemble’s other guitarist, and a passionate musical emissary and fosterer in his own right) has commissioned and will be performing a Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade piece called ‘Wallflower’. Unlike the evening’s other pieces – resolutely acoustic – this one will feature electric guitar and electronic looping (perhaps capturing in its sonics Ninfea’s love for composing for “old, new, and damaged musical instruments.”)


 
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At Milton Court on 2nd November, as part of the Barbican’s ongoing Life Rewired season, composer Emily Howard will curate ‘Ada Lovelace: Imagining the Analytical Engine’, an afternoon which she devised as “an uncompromising musical tribute to a woman who united the worlds of 19th-century romanticism and cutting-edge science… thinker, computer pioneer and enchantress of numbers…”

The concert will combine words and music to offer a post-millennial perspective on the legacy and achievement of the woman often considered to be one of the world’s first computer programmers and a considerable Victorian mathematician, as well as someone who enthusiastically united the concepts of maths, music and poetry. The Britten Sinfonia and mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons will be performing various specially commissioned works of “scientifically inspired music by Howard and her contemporaries plus music created by artificial intelligence written in tribute to Lovelace.”

‘Ada Lovelace: Imagining the Analytical Engine’, 2nd November 2019

As well as a brand-new Howard world premiere (which I can’t find anything on, but which, under the circumstances, you can expect to be replete with involved and enthusiastic scientific or mathematical references, as much of her other work is), there’ll be a performance of her 2011 speech-song work ‘Ada Sketches’ (for mezzo, flute, clarinet and percussion, with a libretto by Laura Tunbridge in which Lovelace dreams of Babbage’s Difference Engine producing notes instead of numbers).

 
There will also be world premieres of new works by sound artist/composer Patricia Alessandrini, by composer and turntablist Shiva Feshareki, and by Royal Northern College’s PRiSM Team directed by Emily Howard and on this occasion led by Robert Laidlow. There’s not much news or commentary on these either, yet; but you can expect further intersections of orchestral playing with contemporary technology, and with scientific motifs and themes.

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On 3rd November – also at Milton Court – Belgian ensemble Echo Collective will perform the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann’.

Unfinished at the time of Jóhannsson’s death last year (although an earler or work-in-progress version does seem to have been performed at Conway Hall three years ago), and exploring “arts, politics and unity” and “the communal transfer of artistic ideas beyond borders”, this string quartet piece was inspired by four years of dialogue with Jóhannsson’s friend and German painter Thilo Heinzmann (a sensual minimalist who works with more reluctant materials than most such artists – including unbound pigment, absorbent cotton, styrofoam, fur and porcelain as well as bursts of feather, fossil or other found and planned-in objects – with the aim of expanding technique and of raising the textured work off the flat plane of the canvas to present its details in a more three-dimensional manner). Unusually for a Jóhannsson piece, it doesn’t incorporate electronics, drones or treated instruments; instead relying on the unadorned strings alone.

The work was finished by the Echo Collective under leaders Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermant. Reviewing their studio recording in ‘The Guardian’ last month, John Lewis noted that “the spartan setting often enhances the grave, stately beauty, particularly when Jóhannsson starts to invokes early music. ‘Shell’ resembles a Bach partita played in ultra-slow-motion; ‘Low’ sounds like a Gregorian chant transcribed for strings; ‘Lacrimoso’ is a heartbreaking, Vivaldi-like canon. There are a few moments where Jóhannsson hints at complexity – the baroque waltz ‘Danse’ sees him shifting time signatures to disconcerting effect – and it’s tempting, if a little depressing, to imagine how he might have developed and matured in this setting.”




 
Opening the concert will be French electro-acoustic musician Félicia Atkinson. Previously known as Je suis le petit chevalier, her own compositional voyage was originally rooted in sculpture and visual arts: it has built up from her quiet near-ambient early albums based around guitar and Rhodes electric piano to more detailed and demanding works involving (according to lastmusic.fm) “concrete music, ASMR voices, minimal electronics, field recordings, improvisation with guitar and piano, abstract distortions and infra basses, always held by a strong sense of musical harmony… The problematics of sound installation, multichannel diffusion, and performance are starting to play a key role in her musical practice.”

 
* * * * * * * *
Dates:

International Guitar Foundation & Kings Place present:
Errollyn Wallen & Laura Snowden (Venus, Women and the Guitar)
Hall Two @ Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, England
Sunday 27th October 2019, 3.00pm – information here and here

Ada Lovelace: Imagining the Analytical Engine
Milton Court Concert Hall @ Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 1 Milton Street, Barbican, London, EC2Y 9BH, England
Saturday 2nd November 2019, 6.30pm – information here and here

Echo Collective: 12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann
Milton Court Concert Hall @ Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 1 Milton Street, Barbican, London, EC2Y 9BH, England
Sunday 3rd November 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
 

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October/November 2019 – Moor Mother’s ‘The Great Bailout’ with the London Contemporary Orchestra in Kraków, Gateshead, Ghent and London (6th, 12th, 16th, 23rd October), with Galya Bisengalieva and Klein joining in London. Plus further Moor Mother dates in Utrecht, Helsinki and Madrid with Zonal, Eartheater and Cruhda (7th, 11th, 15th November)

1 Oct

The unnerving, brilliant Afrofuturist beat-poet and sonic manipulator Camae Ayewa – a.k.a. Moor Mother – swings back to Europe for a brace of concerts during October and November, during which she’ll showcase her latest project, ‘The Great Bailout’. This is a collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra (arguably the capital’s most committed ensemble to both new classical concert music and its intersection with other musical forms and disciplines). It follows Moor Mother’s earlier work this year as part of liberation-jazz group Irreversible Entanglements and her recent contributions to the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s fiftieth anniversary album ‘We Are All On The Edge’ (in which she layered her poetry over the exuberant live improvisations of the surviving members of the original resistance jazz band.) For a more in-depth summary of her explosive protest-griot work, click here.

Moor Mother v London Contemporary Orchestra: 'The Great Bailout' tour, October 2019

There’s not much advance publicity regarding ‘The Great Bailout’. What there is lays the ground for performances of “a free-verse poem that acts as a non-linear word map about colonialism, slavery and commerce in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.” Given that Moor Mother’s previous work has consistently exploded conceptual/emotional bombs underneath the economic, social and psychic legacy of slavery and racism in America, you can expect her to have come up with something ferociously critical of the cherished white-British myths and veilings around the history and repercussions of Empire. As the organisers put it, “we can’t help but expect the first few rows… to leave this performance with singed eyebrows and melted glasses at the very least.”

I’m guessing that the project title refers to one of the most miserable semi-secrets of the eventual abolition of British slavery – this being the handsome payoffs eventually delivered (post-emancipation) not to the freed slaves themselves as backpay, apology or recompense, but to their indignant and haughtily entitled British former owners as property compensation. This kind of withering, righteous black interrogation invading white concert halls (in fact, being invited in) is in keeping with the necessary re-examinations of the roots of modern Western culture. I’m reminded of Doris Salcedo’s colossal ‘Shibboleth’ installation at the Tate Modern, in which she slashed the gallery floor with an ever-widening crack standing for the original Tate sugar money, its dirty roots in plantation slavery, and the consequent ethical undermining of the gallery and its history – a microcosm of white Western culture and wealth and the exploitation underneath.

It’s also in keeping with the ongoing rumblings and debate regarding the slave-trading roots of Bristol, the strategic heartland of the Middle Passage’s triangular trade – with the slave trader imprints on the names of its great buildings and statuary (some of which were recently and pointedly encircled with diagrammatics of slave ships and their suffering human cargo). You can’t help thinking that the organisers of ‘The Great Bailout’ really missed a trick by not scheduling a Bristol date, and perhaps a Liverpool one, alongside the London one. Gateshead – which does get a ‘Bailout’ date – has less of a stained history in this matter, along with its sister city Newcastle: distanced from the heart of the trade, and with the Tyneside anti-slavery movement being an early starter. London, though, grew fat on the profits, with its own triangular trade bigger than anywhere else in Britain.

There may be different resonances associated with the two continental European venues on the tour. Kraków is a little detached from diasporan agony, its own kind of historic slavery having been in the form of homegrown serfdom (Poland’s class savagery was traditionally applied to its own peasants, and its colonialist oppressions visited on the nearby Ukraine rather than on Africa). Ghent, on the other hand, hosted and shaped the 1814 treaty in which, in part, Britain and Belgium applied themselves to ending African slavery and the Middle Passage trade (albeit on their own terms, part of the strategic power-plays of the age as much as it was through any humane impulses).

It’ll be interesting to see if Moor Mother will have taken note of these things, dredged up these uncomfortable stains and compromised atonements and woven them in too. Whether each city on the tour route is given its own case to answer – hidden bones coming to light after two-and-a-half centuries of obscuring and snowjobbing.


 
There will be extras at the London show. Experimental violinist and London Contemporary Orchestra member Galya Bisengalieva will be performing an opening set of her own electroacoustic chamber music, duetting live violin with cunningly sculpted electronic sound-shaping. What I’ve heard so far is elegant and highly dramatic: sonic booms, string drones, eerie hard-eyed processional melodies against harshly majestic electronic architecture and steppe-scapes reflecting Galya’s own Kazakh background.

 
A second opening set is being provided by British-Nigerian south London glitch artiste Klein. An abstractioneer for three years, she started out being hailed as a kind of reinventor of gospel. Certainly her early recordings dipped into the form and she’s admitted that for many years it was her only reference point. It didn’t take her long, however, to move far beyond it. Other early tracks came across as a collagist log of the sounds of her community: not straightforward field recordings, but crafted patchworks of impressions and implicit meaning, finding vocal and musical fragments as important, in themselves, as actual complete sentences and phrases. Her ‘Tommy’ album, in 2017, was a kind of vaporously dissolved Afro-London laptop opera.

These days, memories of black church music continue to drift and prowl through Klein’s increasingly adventurous recordings, but they’re only part of her palette. While she keeps a toehold on more mainstream black musical ideas (a track like Changes sidles up to drill music, a shuffling slide of plate over plate, of violent masculine monologue recounted), most latterday Kleinwork is miasmic re-sortings of black vocal fragments over dark ambient dreamquakes and feathertwig beats: sometimes sobs or dramatic breaths, or slivers of story (somehow bigger than they appear, the way that individual black stories so often seem to trail implication entire cultural histories). Either that or they’re ribbons of dirty noise, swirls of demonstration with strange vocal glitches playing across them – gasps, lip noises, inchoate expressiveness.





 
* * * * * * * *

Moor Mother’s own roots are in gospel too, although she’s previously qualified that “my family used to listen to scary gospel—Mahalia Jackson, people who were not just waiting for Jesus to come, but being like, “This is what we’re living with, we’re going to push through. I’m climbing up the rough side of the mountain, and we’re going to get into this chariot and go to a better place”…” There’ll be more evidence of “negro spirituals flipped, remixed, and recaptured” on the second full Moor Mother album, ‘Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes’, which is emerging on 8th November. In keeping with her work so far, the record will cover the themes of “myth, black mothers, vodun, quantum futurism and post-colonial street narratives.”


 
I’m guessing that this material, or spins on it, will be in strong evidence in the three further European dates Moor Mother will be playing in November following the ‘Great Bailout’ events. The first of these will be in Utrecht, as part of the Le Guess Who? Festival. Here, she’ll be rejoining Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick‘s “smacked-out hip hop” project Zonal (as one of two featured vocalists, alongside “fire-and-brimstone dub poet” Nazamba).



 
The second event is her headlining show in Helsinki. There, she’ll be supported by Alex Drewchin – a.k.a. non-binary multi-media art’n’music hopper Eartheater: who, over a five-year span in New York, has graduated from straightforward, deliquescing dreampop covers of Kate Bush songs to flittering unorthodox trance pop and sprawling, deconstructed anti-manifestos of collaged noise and brain-jumps. Beyond the electronics, current Eartheater work reflects the idea of body as instrument, psyche as testbed, ears and memory as record-and-playback devices.

The most recent Eartheater album, ‘IRISIRI‘, is a simultaneous explosion and dismantling of sonic and conceptual ideas across the spectrum. Plunderphonic chamber music samples, scraping noise effects, dance beats and thoroughly masticated chunks of ruined pop spat out and left on New York lamp posts, in apartment stairwells and practise spaces, leaving a scattering of recombinable fragments for other people to get stuck on and to mull over; flitting word associations and deconstructions of gender, of memories, of momentary definitions. There’s even the occasional joke (“I have no metaphor for you today – I’m off work…”). It’s both impersonal and entirely personal in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em running of personal insights and questions through a mill of big city information overload. Yes, it raises more questions than it provides coherent answers, but at least it’s intent on chopping out a space of possibilities in the first place.

https://soundcloud.com/user-654383295/high-tide-prod-acemo-eartheater



 
Moor Mother’s other headliner is in Madrid, where she’ll be supported by emerging Spanish eclectician Cruhda. The latter’s work is softer and in some ways more accessible than that of most of the other people covered in this post, but that’s selling it short. It’s disruptive, just in a subtler way.

Crudha’s debut EP ‘Íbera Morte‘ is founded on selections and deliberate echoes of Spanish folk music, refracted through any number of home-studio cut-up-and-stick-in methods and stylings – musical box clinkings, Dead Can Dance Gothicity; Autotune and didgeridoo buzzes; structural interruptions and glitchtronics. Sylvan organ-drone folk gets carved into by straying intrusive beats like a prowling beast on a campside sortie; by warping bass synth growls; and by vocal cut-ups and lead lines from raw railing roars to dovelike sighs and monastic harmonies. It’d be crass simply to call Crudha a Spanish Björk, but there’s a similar breadth of imagination and reconstructive willpower here, as well as a similar reluctance to abandon melody.



 
* * * * * * * *

Dates:

Moor Mother v London Contemporary Orchestra: ‘The Great Bailout’

Zonal feat. Moor Mother & Nazamba;
Le Guess Who? 2019 @ TivoliVredenburg, Vredenburgkade 11, 3511 WC, Utrecht, Netherlands – Thursday 7th November 2019, time t.b.c. – information here, here and here

Moor Mother + Eartheater
Tavastia Klubi, Urho Kekkosen katu, 6 Helsinki, Finland – Monday 11th November 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here

Moor Mother + Cruhda
Siroco, Calle de San Dimas 3, 28015 Madrid, Spain – Friday 15th November 2019, 9.30pm – information here and here
 

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October 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – a London visit for Asuna’s ‘100 Keyboards’ (2nd); psychonauts UnicaZürn step up to save the Horse Hospital (5th); Andrew Heath & Anne Chris Bakker play an ambient evening with Matt Atkins, Andrew Sherwell and Kevin Buckland (6th)

28 Sep

As part of London ambient sound festival MODE 2019, Japanese sound/drone artist Asuna will bring the occasional travelling installation in which he arranges a hundred battery-powered budget (or toy) analogue keyboards in concentric circles within a studio space (in this case, South London Gallery’s Clore Studio) and plays, sets up or alters single notes or clusters off each of them (usually sticking keys down with Sellotape) to produce “waves of overlapping sound”.

The results are a chorused spatial drone which you can wander through, in which the intention is to “generat(e) an undulating sonic harmony both mesmerising and mysterious. Sound waves on the same frequency multiply and bounce off in myriad directions, creating a complex sonic field of interference and reverberation that swells and changes over time. Subtle acoustic variations emerge, hover and retreat based on your location in the performance space.” The cheapness of the technology, the variability of battery performance and other factors will also provide additional variations to the setup. The three-minute excerpt below gives an idea of its grating shimmer.


 
On 5th October, psychedelic trio UnicaZürn (uniting members of Coil, Cyclobe, Guapo and Shock Headed Peters) will be playing at Bloomsbury avant-garde stronghold The Horse Hospital, showcasing music from their recent ‘Sensudestricto’ album plus brand new pieces created especially for the concert.

UnicaZürn, 5th October 2019

I’ve previously described their work as a “scenic but chilly slow-evolving boil of waterside atmospherics and psychedelic sound-painting”. ‘Sensudestricto’, explicitly based around situational revolt (“has there ever been a better time to fuck off to the stars? Is a prison breakout “escapism”? Crisis carve some wound-space to let the dreams back in…” ) continues to build on that promise, evoking late ’60s oil projections and space rock, ’70s synth patterning and occult counterculture, and various subsequent shades of psych revolt, dark folk and hauntological weirdness.

The Horse Hospital itself (a twist of history, art and countercultural resistance lurking like a bold and salty tattoo in the heart of one of London’s plushest districts) is once again under threat of being priced out of existence via a rent increase demand of over three hundred per cent, plus other bullying gentrification pressures, so this is a benefit gig. Attend, talk, add some cash to the Kickstarter, etc.

 
Having been releasing ambient/drone/experimental atmospheric music for a little under two years now from its Farnham base, not-for-profit independent tape label Rusted Tone Recordings is starting off a live season at IKLEKTIK with a concert by Aqueous keyboard player/piano minimalist Andrew Heath and Dutch ambient bowed-guitarist/slowcore escapee Anne Chris Bakker.

Rusted Tone Recordings Live #1, 6th October 2019

The duo have recently collaborated on an upcoming RTR release (the north-Netherlands-recorded ‘A Gift for the Ephemerist’) which blends both men’s interest in space, sparseness and field recordings into a record which “is overwhelmingly informed both by an open, minimal landscape and a love of process, allowing lower case sounds to form as you would unfold a map – each section revealing a new and uncharted vista…suspended in time and place, are modulating drones, fragile notes, texture and immersive driftscapes which shimmer and pulse with half-glimpsed melodies that seem to hang in the air.”


 
Support slots come from fellow ambientarians and experimentalists Matthew Atkins, Andrew Sherwell, and Kevin Buckland. Although he’s sometimes a drummer for assorted projects he’s encountered or helped form via the London Improviser’s Workshop, Matthew spends most of his time on sound and visual art. When performing his own music he uses percussion, assorted objects, cassettes and laptop for sound collaging which pursues (or more properly, accepts) elements of “reductionism, chance, repetition and texture.” (Usually he’s working in collaboration with someone else; usually, it also seems, he’s providing the odder or more exploratory parts.) Similarly, Kevin is sometimes a solo bassist, but spends more time outdoors as a traveller, photographer and field recordist intrigued by “the underlying intrinsic musical character that I believe is present within the everyday soundscape; whether rural or urban, indoors or outside.” This in turn takes him back to slow-evolving electronic music of his own, often released on his own Quietest Records label and playing dusky subliminal spells with sound he’s captured along his voyages.



 
As for Andrew, he’s found a niche of his own, and sticks to it; but it’s a particularly cavernous, ecclesiastical niche. He marries field recordings from churches and cathedrals from across Britain and Europe with existing choral recordings, plunderphonicised from random choir albums found in charity shops or, when he can, recording the genuine article first-hand. The results are a devotional post-Christian drone, heavily processed from its source material, flooding through an imaginary nave like a ghostly draught.


 
* * * * * * * *

Dates:

South London Gallery/Thirty Three Thirty Three/Laurel Halo/The Japan Foundation present:
MODE 2019: Asuna presents ‘100 Keyboards’
South London Gallery, 65-67 Peckham Road, Camberwell, London, SE5 8UH, England
Wednesday 2nd October 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here

UnicaZürn – A benefit gig in support of the Horse Hospital
The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Saturday 5th October, 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Rusted Tone Recordings presents:
Rusted Tone RecordingsLive #1: Andrew Heath & Anne Chris Bakker + Matt Atkins + Andrew Sherwell + Kevin Buckland
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Sunday 6th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
 

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September-November 2019 – upcoming post-folk, electrop, electronica gigs – tAngerinecAt on tour across Britain (5th/7th/14th/20th September, 17th/18th/26th October, 16th November) with Flange Zoo, DIANE, Experimental Sonic Machines, Ed Dowie, La Rissa, Yorkshire vs. Essex, Factory Acts, Slow Knife, Harbingers Drum Crew, Tin Mole, Clusterfuck, Hallulugenia, SIN/RED, Hypnotique, Otis Jordan, Saint Bernadette and She Robot

2 Sep

“At three I learned what sex was; /at five – death; / at seven – fascism and violence; /at ten – poverty, labour and hunger…” – tAngerinecAt, I Don’t Want To Be A White Master

Despite best intentions, a lot of folktronica can come across as… well, a bit polite and prissy; as something made by a particular breed of tech-headed enthusiasts, scholars and longtime culture-vultures who wear their tidiness and their geekiness openly. Crinkling synths, and flowery linen, kitchen musings and country walks; deep culture filtered through a tiny screen. It’s not that this invalidates it, as such. Folk culture has been, and remains, a broad cauldronful, as fit for constant renewing as it is for drawing from – and upfront electronics have been part of the tools of the trade for three decades now. It’s just that, as subgenres, folktronica and electrofolk seem particularly prone to diluting message with medium, sacrificing bite for texture; in essence, getting so involved with clubfloor, chillout or culture lab that they lose touch with bones, bothy or battlefield.


 
Fortunately, none of this applies to Anglo-Ukrainian duo tAngerinecAt, who sweep through England, Scotland and Wales for assorted dates across the stretch of autumn this year. After ten years cruising through the underground (five of them under the name of Dark Patrick), androgynous singer/hurdy-gurdy player Eugene Purpurovsky and tin whistle/bagpipe-toting electronicist Paul Chilton are still a constantly creative, intelligent and contrary force. Calling them folktronic, or electrofolk, involves upending the term… or stripping it back to the starting point.

Not that tAngerinecAt wear the label with much comfort themselves. They buck at the “folktronica” tag and, as Paul asserts “we don’t associate ourselves as folk, ever, and there is a good reason for that. We don’t play folk music, we compose our own music – not always based on Western scales but that doesn’t make it folk and neither does our choice of instruments. We often get labelled as this, but it’s a stereotype we are trying to get away from. We are only folk in the broader sense that all music is folk. Also, there isn’t one folk festival that would put us on their lineup…”

Certainly compared to most acts under the name, they’re on another level of impact altogether. An embrace of industrial sound (small keyboards and boxes which shout like giants, plus the rippling scathe of take-no-prisoners effects pedals which they add to their armoury and feed their acoustic instrumentation through) gives them the sonic presence of a no-wave or heavy metal act. They dip into frowning Carpathian mountain culture and various wiry varieties of British heath music, but stir in doses of anarchism, industrial sound and swipes at patriarchal violence. At any given time, in addition to the swirling bare-bones rootsiness you can hear echoes of sounds as diverse as Edith Piaf; the electrogoth stadium boom of Depeche Mode or the targeted upsetter-rants of Crass; the skycracking maximalism of The Young Gods and the angry historical weight of Towering Inferno’s ‘Kaddish’. Bizarrely enough, they also manage to capture elements of both ends of Swans – the booming pallet-drag of the early industrial years, the droning neo-folk of the contemporary band.


 
Then there’s the queer aspect. It’s not brought to the forefront of the band’s publicity, but it ripples through the grain of what they do. Eugene was born Eva, and identified as such in the band’s earlier years; the current tAngerinecAt has a genderfluid air in terms of clothing, movement and expression; and between them Paul and (particularly) Eugene summon up a variety of unexpected vocal characterisations which jolt and yell through the songs, upsetting standard ideas about power structures, protest, sources of ideas and about who might actually be singing. That name, too, queerifys and neonises the concept of a wandering animal spirit as band mascot, inspiration and reflection. tAngerinecAt have already won over gender-studies conferences, folk audiences, experimental-loft huddlers and, strangely enough, prog audiences (who might have a reputation for stolidity, but know and appreciate a good use of musical colouring and form-busting when they encounter it).

Despite the uncompromising drama and starkness inherent in their music, tAngerinecAt exhibit a different aspect when they’re acting as promoters, having run their own Cute Owl evenings and tours for several years now. Maybe it comes from the flexibility of vision and the teamwork ethos which Eugene built up from years of theatre work, but Cute Owl is extraordinarily welcoming to a variety of different acts, approaches and mannerisms when it comes to bringing in gigmates and support acts. It seems that as long as you have a yen for electronics and are sincere in what you do, that you’re part of the family. Hence, a Cute Owl event can encompass calls for revolution, playtime events, glamour stances, inclusive-spirited DIY tinkering and frosted electropop introspection; and hence the pleasing, unexpected diversity of the upcoming tour.

The first of the two London dates, on 14th September, is a relatively straightforward headliner but with a performance art buildup. One of the two supports is a previous Cute Owl gig act called Diane (A Walk Through Twin Peaks), in which two musically omnivorous DJs (NikTheDeks from electrobeat punks LOFE, and Andy “Dumb Blonde” McKinna) put down their record crates in order to team up on electronics, devices and effects-laden double bass for a dream-jazz/cryptronic David Lynch tribute (the solo Nik track below might provide a clue or two). The other is “crypto-zoological” animal-masked performance troupe Flange Zoo. Persistently theatrical creators of dank, humming, psychedelic-radiophonic draggings (within which synths rub up against finger bells, zithers, stylophones, turntable tricks and portentous narratives), at the moment they’re concentrating on their Edgar Allen Poe project: a séance-cum-tribute twisted in on itself. Sonorous readings of Poe short stories swim in ponds of improvised electronic twitchings and meditational pings; ritual resurrections turn into mutual back-slapping sessions.

 
The second London date, on 26th October, is a five-act Cute Owl Festival night. Here, tAngerinecAt are joined by flexible and beloved indie/experimental-pop balladeer Ed Dowie (whose 2017 debut album, ‘The Uncle Sold’ involves “a continually evolving, dream-like journey around a non-specified city (and) paints a picture of a range of characters struggling for certainty in a metropolis beset by continually changing forces, be they political, personal or financial”); by Nottingham “eccentronica chansonneuse” Hypnotique (theremins, clarinet and songs about “the apocalypse, post-feminism, erotic narrative and the banality of everyday life”). Also playing is Peter Rollings’ none-more-DIY project in which he ringmasters a clunking song-riot via his own makeshift/make-do invented instruments, robots and other musical machines while dressed in striking homemade ceremonial horned helms, robes and halberds (as if Moondog had been dressed by Mr Maker).

In addition to Peter’s own ESM set, he’ll be sponsoring and guiding another set by ESM’s robot drummer Ernie, a spindly foil-wrapped automaton who plays like a nervous fork-lift truck attempting a Mexican wave and looks like a 1970s primary school project about Martians.

 
The tour’s opening date, in Leeds, features the ominous ’80s synthpop/post-punk revivalist chimes and buzzes of La Rissa, made by “two misfits… in a dim little attic in Leeds” (originator/singing half Larissa Drozd sounding like a Stevie Nicks avatar entirely blanked out by black lipstick) who surface to carry out “dark, spooky” shows wrapped in crepuscular video art.

Also on board, Yorkshire vs. Essex (named not after a north/south feud, but from the founders’ surnames) offer chugging guitars, bass and white-noise synth garlands interrupted by trombones and flutes, all providing rumpled bedding for Simon Yorkshire’s eccentric songspiels on subjects ranging from “fictional toymakers to Sheffield murderers”, as captured on the recent ‘Dismembered Tales’ album. Shades of Peter Blegvad or Tom Slatter as well as YvE’s cited inspiration list of “Robert Wyatt, Current 93, Scott Walker, Miles Davis, Nick Cave, The Residents, Bjork, Death Grips and Iannis Xenakis.”




 
In Manchester, more dark-toned synthpop nostalgia comes from Factory Acts (who sound like Nico fronting a late ‘80s electro-dance outfit). There’s also a prime example of erudite Manc gobbiness on show via Slow Knife’s spoken-word-over-jazzpop- indie scuffle. Initially sounding like The Fall stranded in New Orleans and trying to get in step with the local pimp walk, they finally come across like a sleeker take on short-lived ‘90s beat-dadaists Campag Velocet: Daniel Tasker’s beat-poet outpourings have a similar (though more focussed) effect as he enounces over a cavalcade of horns, double bass, and slack-skinned drums/slide guitar which call up echoes of Can, The The and Dr John while lapsing occasionally into shrieking interludes of tonal and textural anarchy.



 
In Bristol, live-looper Suzy Condrad – under her She Robot alias – pulls together glockenspiel tinkles, mbira, bottle clinks, live beatboxing, passing sounds and layered banks of girlpop doo-wop and then weaves them into the bones of pre-written fully-formed guitar songs. Consequently, the looping comes across as more of a kind of graduated scratch arrangement, honed to a high level. A lot of loop songs can sound wispy, or hung up on their own polyphony: but with Suzy’s work, the song is paramount without the embellishments feeling forced. She’s managed to hold onto that spun-spontaneously-out-of-the-air feeling of loopsong while allying it to a penetrating, literate lyrical sense which challenges with questions and sharp observations rather than getting lost in the atmospherics.

Also at Bristol is ruminative electro-balladeer Luca Macchi, a.k.a Hallelugenia, whose material seems to stem from late-night chillout tunes which take a firm left turn, eschewing delta-wave blandouts in favour of expanding, talkative thought-paths sung in chamois-soft tones across shifting, subtly disruptive harmonic changes.



 
Another two acts are lined up for the Cardiff show, the first being agit-minded techno-pop quintet Clusterfuck who (despite the uncompromising hardcore name) spin out a tuneful, smoothly quaking ravepop sound inspired by and birthed within the current free-festival scene, laced with raps and DJ moves, and frequently graced by guest contributors. The second is Saint Bernadette, the latest in a string of projects from cross-genre voyager Francesca Murphy, a mainstay of ebullient Cardiff female music collective Ladies Of Rage and a singer who’s taken in punk, prog, country, jazz-pop, blues, spoken word and hip hop along her way. There are no clues yet as to what form Saint Bernadette will be taking, but Francesca’s Soundcloud page provides mostly-acoustic singer-songwriter-y examples from her recent past as well as a chance to hear her rich, welcoming voice.


 

The final show, at Edinburgh, features celebratory drumcore industrialists Harbingers Drum Crew – an aggregation of twenty or more assorted drummers inspired by “dance music, drum ‘n’ bass, dubstep and industrial metal” and emerging as being somewhere between a taiko squad, a British marching band, a samba party and a crew of No-Wave warehouse threateners. Meanwhile, Jo Hill’s SIN/RED, brings the electronica-spectrum cycle of support acts back to something resembling tAngerinecAt themselves: it’s not a precise comparison, but Jo’s foreboding mixture of noir-ballad pop, synth drone and cloister-echo raises similar anticipatory hackles and hints at skin-terror, raw feeling and ancient stirrings.

https://soundcloud.com/harbingersdrumcrew/riders
 
* * * * * * * *

Full tour dates:

  • Lending Room @ The Library, 229 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS2 3AP, England – Thursday 5th September 2019, 7.00pm (with La Rissa + Yorkshire vs Essex) – information here and here
  • Gullivers NQ, 109 Oldham Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M4 1LW, England – Saturday 7th September 2019, 7.30pm (w/ Slow Knife + Tin Mole + Factory Acts + Otis Jordan) – information here, here and here
  • The Raven, 218 Tower Bridge Road, Bermondsey, London, SE1 2UP, England – Saturday 14th September 2019, 7.30pm (with DIANE + Flange Zoo) – information here and here
  • Equinox Festival 2019, Chalk Farm, Salters Lane, Wyham, Lincolnshire, DN36 5RS, England – Friday 20th September 2019, 12.00am – information here, here and here
  • The Thunderbolt, 124 Bath Road, Arnos Vale, Bristol, BS4 3ED, England – Thursday 17th October 2019, 7.30pm (with She, Robot + Hallulugenia) – information here and here
  • The Big Top, 11 Church Street, Cardiff, CF10 1BG, Wales – Friday 18th October 2019, 7.00pm (with Clusterfuck + Saint Bernadette) – information here and here
  • Cute Owl Festival @ The Courtyard Theatre, Bowling Green Walk, 40 Pitfield Street, Hoxton, London, N1 6EU, England – Saturday 26th October 2019, 6.00pm (with Ed Dowie + Hypnotique + Experimental Sonic Machines + Ernie) – information here and here
  • Cabaret Voltaire, 36 Blair Street, Old Town, Edinburgh, EH1 1QR, Scotland (with Harbingers Drum Crew + SIN/RED) – Saturday 16th November 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here

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September to December 2019 – upcoming rock/rocktronica gigs – Teeth Of The Sea and The Utopia Strong live in London (5th September) plus further Teethings in Brighton (with Mulholland), Rochester (with Rekkliner and the closer we are to dying) and Brussels (6th/13th September, 4th October); and The Utopia Strong running cross-country with Matters, EWEI and Reidy Scott Duo (8th September, 8th/11th-13th November, 18th-21st December)

30 Aug

Brassy, growling psychedelic/techno/rave-rockers Teeth Of The Sea erupt back up again at Oslo in Hackney, accompanied by The Utopia Strong.

Teeth Of The Sea have long been darlings of the interface between trippy ‘tronica and rock bite. Here’s what I’ve said about them before: “Are they noise? are they rave? are they dream-metal? are they what you might’ve had if Miles Davis had rashly agreed to a Foetus production job?.. a craggy yet celebratory electro-psychedelic throb from a full-band rock lineup embracing techno, polytextured brass, analogue synthwarp, tough corners of metal, and dance imperatives that span Chicago clubs and mud-sodden English field parties… extended brass-laden psych-rock voyages with techno and rave methodology, updated for twenty-first century urban impulses.. driving part-electronic instrumentals packed with wailing guitars, rasping analogue synths and effected kaleidoscopic trumpet ow(ing) equal debts to counterculture techno and to the aggressive end of psychedelic rock (with) the four-to-the-floor beats, the cavernous space echo, and the dark pop shimmer that seals their overall appeal.” They’re currently touring their fifth album, ‘Wraith‘.

The band claim that the album’s haunted: apparent psychic disturbances and psychogeographic slips during the recording sessions. They say that this resulted in a more “vivid and maximalist work”, filled with “alchemised trash, kitchen-sink surrealism, out-of-order intensity and ritualistic overtones… inspiration, irreverence and otherworldly infiltration” and ramping up their influences of science fantasy, hallucinatory welt, horror soundtrack, post-industrial boom and dark-side-folk to new heights. For the recent single – I’d Rather, Jack – they’ve brought in Trash Club/Bugged Out DJ-turned-producer Erol Alkan to grind and polish the original song into an obsidian-smooth trumpet/cyberbeat clash; or, as they put it, “an angular banger equal parts mariachi elegy and electro euphoria.”




 
The Utopia Strong are the latest product of the mutual love-in between ’80s snooker ace-turned-rock promoter Steve Davis and British psych-rock everywhereman Kavus Torabi, which has previously resulted in a radio show, a travelling DJ array and a series of gleeful mutual eggings-on. This, however, is the first actual band that’s emerged out of the friendship – partly as a result of Kavus enticing Steve (at the age of 60) to make the jump from avid music fan to actual music maker, and partly due to Teeth Of The Sea’s Mike Bourne seducing Steve into the block-and-build/sculpted-noise world of modular synthesizers. On paper it sounds like a wheedle too far; in practise it’s actually pretty delightful. Some of this is down to the recruitment of the third man in the triumvirate, Michael J. York, whose previous work (with transgressive ritualists Coil, Shirley Collins-backing folktronicists Cyclobe, interstellar/subaquatic space-rockers The Stargazer’s Assistant and ecstatic droners Teleplasmiste, as well as some live-guest stints with Kavus in Guapo) has expanded his own modular synthwork by winding in enchanting folk elements on skirling bagpipe and woodwind.


 
The music that’s emerged so far – all of it instrumental, but as communicative as a collective crowd singalong – is charged with a beaming, benevolent enthusiasm. Beyond those immediately recognisable Torabi guitar cycles and sundives (sitting generously back in the mix, encouraging the electronics to billow forward), its synthwork and pulsations recall space disco, early Jarre and Cluster, electro-Hillage and the 1981 stars-in-glass futurism of Simple Minds, pre-bloat. Konta Chorus, for instance, isn’t too far off 70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall; a gentle pounding punctuated by electronic drawer-zips and guitar tremulosity, by beatific recorder riffs and piano cycles. More aural beatification comes from Brainsurgeons 3, its beckoning three-note bass riff and sustained guitar anchoring nearly eleven minutes of building aerial-cosmic chitter: a gradual build of ecstatic layering synth bips, whoops and rackets with a bright future in its sights and a sunrise of bagpipes at around the nine-minute mark.

All of this is imbued by an atmosphere of blissful cynicism-slaying love. You can often appreciate friendship within bands. It’s rare, however, to get the kind of opportunity which The Utopia Strong offers: to literally hear what that friendship sounds like.


 
The evening’s bolstered by the efforts of the Black Impulse DJ team: visiting from the Dalston branch of multi-city broadcasters NTS with “the soundtrack of two American friends living in London… transatlantic camaraderie and a laid-back meander though metal, noise, trashy blues, prog, hardcore, hip-hop, free jazz and beyond.”

* * * * * * * *

Teeth Of The Sea have another date lined up immediately afterwards in Brighton, supported by the ringing sweet-surf guitar-and-drums curlicues of translocated Channel Islands experimental post-rockers Mulholland (as well as one other yet-to-be-announced act). They’ve also got a concert in Brussels the following week; and one in Rochester in early October accompanied by experimental rock quintet and “testing band” Rekkliner (proggy post-rockers with a strangely jaunty air and a yen for post-war melodics) and by audio-visually-inclined Medway dronescapers the closer we are to dying (led by Terry Lane with various other musicians drifting through).




 
Utopia Strong, meanwhile are going the whole hog by continuing on a nine-date English tour stretched and peppered across the autumn months and ranging from Cumbria (a slot at British Sea Power’s multi-act Krankenhaus Festival) to Ramsgate. When they have a support act, it’s usually Steve and Kavus themselves playing one of the DJ sets which have put them in demand from Glastonbury to All Points East to the Boiler Room and which keeps alive the memory of their ‘Interesting Alternative Show’: a perky and enthusiastic melange of mind-expanding tunes from avant-psych, avant-tronics, leftfield prog and indeed anything which pings a synapse or two.

In Birmingham, though, The Utopia Strong are supported by “gloomy dystopian” instrumental trio Matters (who, featuring former members of The Wolves allied with current members of Mayors Of Toronto, deliver electronic rock grooves that stretch from meaty guitar chunkalongs to broiling synth-throbs).

Later, in Bristol, there’s a double support. Firstly Louise Brady’s semi-ambient EMEI project: electronica which operates at that New Weird point where the bucolic shades into the neurotic and the mystical, and which regularly works a particular just-on-the-cusp-of-ugliness distortion at the point where a singing tone begins to break down into a pinking whine. Her tracks are like hillside ghosts, built up of hymnal vocal sighs, lapping interference and field recordings (mostly moist, mostly rural); Celtic-tinged accordion passages fed through Raudive wires; glass harmonicas sent through warbling distortion. The second support is the Reidy Scott Duo which unites two distinct Bristolian ambient soloists. Cork-born Aonghus Reidy, better known as Ocean Floor, writes circumstance-triggered burble-to-billow pieces for piano, harmonium, guitar, soft modular synth and other electronics (with sleep deprivation, times of day, and new instrumental discoveries amongst the initiating ideas). Live-looping guitarist John Scott usually trades as Stereocilia, bolstering his densely-effected guitar with synths and drumboxes in search of protracted, slow-wrenching psychedelic drones. This is their first ever duo pairing, so expect it to contain sorted and sifted elements of the varied solo work below…








 
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Dates:

Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Teeth Of The Sea + The Utopia Strong + DJ Black Impulse
Oslo, 1a Amhurst Road, Hackney, London, E8 1LL, England,
Thursday 5th September 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here

The other Teeth Of The Sea dates:

  • The Green Door Store, 2-4 Trafalgar Arches, Lower Goods Yard, Brighton Train Station, Brighton BN1 4FQ, England – Friday 6th September 2019, 7.30pm (with Mulholland + one other t.b.c.) – information here, here and here
  • Witloof Bar @ Botanique, Rue Royale, 236, 1210 Brussels, Belgium – Friday 13th September 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
  • The Billabong Club @ Royal Function Rooms, Victoria Street, Rochester, Kent, ME1 1XH, England – Friday 4th October 2019, 7.30pm (with Rekkliner + the closer we are to dying) – information here and here

The other Utopia Strong dates:

  • Krankenhaus Festival @ Muncaster Castle, near Ravenglass, Cumbria, CA18 1RQ, England – Sunday 8th September 2019 – information here and here
  • The Golden Lion, Fielden Square, Todmorden, OL14 6LZ , England – Friday 8th November 2019, 8.00pm (with Steve Davis & Kavus Torabi DJ set) – information here and here
  • The Cluny, 36 Lime Street, Ouseburn, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 2PQ, England – Wednesday 11th December 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
  • The Hare & Hounds, 106 High Street, Kings Heath, Birmingham, B14 7JZ, England – Thursday 12th December 2019, 7.30pm (with Matters) – information here and here
  • The Cube Microplex, Dove Street South (off top-left of King Square), Kingsdown, Bristol, BS2 8JD, England – Friday 13th December 2019, 8.00pm (with EMEI + Reidy Scott Duo) – information here, here and here
  • The Crescent Community Venue, 8 The Crescent, York, YO24 1AW, England – Wednesday 18th December 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
  • The Deaf Institute, 135 Grosvenor Street, Manchester, M1 7HE, England – Thursday 19th December 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
  • Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England – Friday 20th December 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
  • Ramsgate Music Hall, 13 Turner Street, Ramsgate, Kent, CT11 8NJ, England – Saturday 21st December 2019, 7.30pm (with Steve Davis & Kavus Torabi DJ set) – information here and here

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May/June 2019 – upcoming experimental gigs – ‘Towards A Progressive Magic” at the Horse Hospital with Amy Hale and Hawthonn (30th May); ‘Overlaps’ #2 with Kay Grant, Keith Moliné, Jasmine Pender, Tim Hodgkinson, Frank Byng and Chlöe Herington (5th June); the Sonic Electronics Festival at IKLECTIK (30th May to 2nd June)

26 May

At a time when our politics are tangibly darkening with currents of bigotry and nationalism and vicious, exclusionary stories, you might consider that looking at fascism within magic is a frivolous exercise.

Anthropologist Dr. Amy Hale (Atlanta, US) would disagree with you. She’s delivering the spoken-word part of an upcoming “night of magical resistance” at the Horse Hospital (London’s home of esoterica, underground cinema, public magick and wild frocks) for which the musical aspect’s being provided by Leeds-based Hawthonn, made up of “dual star daemons” Layla and Phil Legard, who specialise in “twenty-first century moon musick… underground spectralism meets edgeland herbalism…”

'Towards A Progressive Magic': Amy Hale + Hawthonn, 30th May 2019

This isn’t necessarily a new thing. Plenty of the frowning white-nativist movements in Europe and the States force parasitic roots into ideas about submerged culture, or ideas of a purity predating Christianity, liberalism and rationalism, into which disappointed or indignant people drift in the hope of finding and defining themselves. If you’ve dabbled in Nordic revivalism, for example, you may well have brushed up against it: racism smudging the runes. Similarly, some sonic pagans have always pushed back (having always associated their own musical explorations with a live-and-let-live freedom or a rejection of the controlling homegenisations of fascism), and even more of them are pushing back now.

Amy’s lecture, ‘Is A Progressive Magick Even Possible?’, examines what happens when “as the world takes an awkward lurch towards right wing authoritarianism, underground and fringe cultures, organisations and scenes are becoming increasingly attuned to the attempts by radical right wing groups to infiltrate and coerce their members… Modern occult practice, for many, relies on structures, ideas, values, and aesthetics that are inherently linked to conservative and reactionary thought. Examples of this are the valorisation of tradition, the idea of an initiated spiritual elite and the notion of a highly-ordered Neoplatonic universe, where everything is in its right place – including people and cultures.

“These conservative traits create opportunities for activists to use the social mechanisms of occult subcultures – for example festivals and conferences, book publishing, the music and fashion industries – to promote radical political and cultural agendas without people even noticing that it has happened. Tonight’s presentations discuss how, and why, contemporary magical cultures have become attractive territories for recruitment and expansion by far right organisations… I will discuss how ideas of tradition and “nature” are exploited, and how the discourses of “free speech” are deployed to create and justify platforms for radical, intolerant politics in an occult milieu… We will also learn to recognise such entryism in action, and how to stop it.”

As for Hawthonn, this is their first London appearance; their first live musical ritual within the M25; and their first chance to present their particular stance to the capital. Delving (in the tradition of Coil) into post-industrial esoteric drones and vocalisations, their work has so far embraced edgeland/feminist associations on ‘Red Goddess’ and implied erotic ritualisations on ‘The Well Head’, with more associations and purposes evolving. I don’t know what they’ll be coming up with on this occasion; but I’m assuming that it’s going to pull on their increasing conviction that ritual needs to engage (if not necessarily with materialism) with the fabric of daily practical necessities and practical history.




 
To quote them – “as esotericists we often believe that we have stepped beyond ‘mere politics’ – that our minds are turned to a higher world, which has little relation to the mundane – despite, paradoxically, believing that our magical actions influence the phenomenal world. Yet many contemporary scholars of esotericism and religion analyse the currents of occultism, paganism and the New Age as socially constructed phenomena: elaborate mythic structures enforcing certain norms, beliefs and practices, while justifying themselves through appeals to authority, lineage and experience, even science and rationality. Such historiographic or sociological approaches have been accused by many practitioners of base reductionism, undermining the authority of their particular traditions.

“Yet, what if practitioners of esotericism were to accept – or at least entertain for a moment – a constructivist, rather than transcendentalist, paradigm? We posit that such an acceptance can lead to another form of practice, which acknowledges the way in which esotericism is inseparable from the historical, social and economic fabric of our lives and which – rather than denying the viscerality of ritual and experience – uses them as tools to question the traditions and assumptions of the esoteric worldview, leading to a fluid and reflexive ‘critical magick’.”


 
* * * * * * * *

Drifting through Kings Cross – away from the cosy confines of the Harrison and back to its spiritual home at Westminster Kingsway College – and still driven by joint organisers Chlöe Herington (V A L V E, Knifeworld, Lindsay Cooper Songbook, Hirvikolari) and Keith Moliné (Pere Ubu, Prescott), the Overlaps “six musicians on the spot” concert series continues to burnish its particular niche. Improvising, but outside of the usual free-jazz grammar; perhaps owing something to art rock, but tearing one end wide open. Assimilating injections of the wilder shaggier side of experimental pop. Tag-teaming, but with a little friendly risk; part-prepared, but mostly of the moment.

'Overlaps 2', 5th June 2019

In addition to Chlöe’s avant-rock reeds and home-made noiseboxes and Keith’s startling bricolage guitarwork, the debut Overlaps evening back in January also featured jazz/art-rock-toned drum-and-bass artist Farz and fringe-pop experimenter/spoken-word persona shifter Merlin Nova; plus another British art rock guitar mainstay in Chloe’s Knifeworld bandmate Kavus Torabi and creative sideslip drumming from Keith’s Prescott bandmate Frank Byng (also of Snorkel and This Is Not This Heat). Chlöe, Keith and Frank are all back for round two, with the remaining three players coming in from other assorted corners of noisework, avant-garde and New Classical – often simultaneously.

While performing her dramatic, noisy electric cello soundscapes, Jasmine Pender usually goes under the alias of Rotten Bliss, sousing her sound in effects and singing along with a terrifying gorgeousness: storm-strings and surreal marine tales. For Overlaps, though, she’s performing under her own name. Perhaps it’s in solidarity with the other, unmasked performers not hiding behind their project names or band tags; or perhaps it means she’s going to be trying something a little different. You’ll need to turn up and see.


 
Originally coming up through the New York downtown arts, in her time Kay Grant has sung pop, jazz, rock, choral classical and opera (and built the ranges for each). She still touches on several of them today – most notably the jazz, with her own vocalise-based Kay Grant All-four and song duo Living Standards, and via guestings with the more standards-slanted Cyril Bass Quartet and Big Swing Big Band. But when she gives herself full improvisatory range her voice is an untethered exploratory device – coasting, feinting and arcing with the full subliminal structural knowledge of her training, but completely free to embrace a scattering palate of noise, tones and intimations.


 
Tim Hodgkinson, of course, is best known for his 1970s work as a founder and consistent member of Henry Cow: foundational art-rock radicalism within which he and his bandmates pursued a continuous course of questioning, dissonance, learning and overturning. Since then (usually armed with reed instruments, tapes, lap steel guitar and keyboards), he’s maintained a core Cow method: exploring, playing and composing via a cerebral and committed musicality which initially challenges and overwhelms his own technical skills but constantly forces him to advance. He’s equally likely to be found at work in art-house shows worldwide or in ferociously experimental British pub gigs, stretching his skills between improvised blowings, committed collaging or the conduction of post-classical chamber music which sounds like the skitterings of unruly ghost feet pursuing an unfinished argument.

Again, I’ve little idea of what he’ll be doing – it could be solo clarinet, it could be something with tapes and counterpoint, it could be something which bridges his interest in shamanic music and cultural anthropology.




 
* * * * * * * *

Sonic Electronic Festival, 30th May to 2nd June 2019There’s also time to mention (in brief) the concerts and chat around the sprawling Sonic Electronics Festival coming up at IKLECTIK and straddling late May and early June. Fascinated by coding and by digital evolution, the event’s as much academic as it is instinctive and will contain far too many ideas, implications and theory to be easily abridged and listed here. So this is a quick sketch of what’s lined up rather than a definitive description.

On 31st May, the evening concert is a London live AV performance incorporating toys/scrabbles/tapeloops collective Morphogenesis (bolstered by audio sculptor John Wall and electro-acoustic/noise performer Mark Durgan), the electronic-junk-assisted dronescapes of raxil4, woodwinder-turned-synth minimalist Bernhard Living and masked audio-visual circuit-building ritualists Isn’tses (the last of whom will also be running a Fort processor building workshop on the morning of Saturday 1st June). The Saturday evening is a pass-it-on event of international live audiovisual performance with VJ and visual/sonics encoder Chris Speed, videomapping performance artists Blanca Regina, extended vocal/multimedia performer Alessandra Eramo and feminine-industrial explorers Slow Slow Loris

The show on the evening of 2nd June involves the 4.1 Soundsystem. Here you can hear and watch a teaming of sound foleyist Rebecca Glover and the squelchy Fritha Jenkins (who’s inspired by shorelines of sand and mud);
spacial-stereo sound artist Bioni Samp (whose work and subject matter is informed by his own beekeeping and by concerns about bee extinction); the “theogynous” industrial/classical polyphonic vocals of Vera Bremerton; “grainyl”-ist Tony James Morton (who takes the cut’n’plunder techniques of hip hop DJs and feeds them through the alterations of granular synthesis); and the deep-listening drones of Johannes de Silentio (a.k.a. Lucius Works Here, a.k.a. Barcelonan sound art DJ Shak Benavides).

If you want to immerse yourself in theory, debate and other verbals, you’ll be wanting to go along to the event launch on the evening of 30th May. Here, there will be talks from Lucia Farinati, Nina Power and Giles Greenaway (about the intersections, overlaps and interferences of audiovisual technology with philosophy and live culture, and about process patterns taken from living creatures). There’ll also be a live AV performance of experimental electromagnetic power noise from Laura Netz, using hand-built technology.

* * * * * * * *

Dates:

Strange Attractor presents:
‘Towards a Progressive Magic’ (featuring Dr. Amy Hale + Hawthonn)
The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Thursday 30th May 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here

Sonic Electronics Festival: Digital Arts & Analogue Devices
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 30th May 2019 to Sunday 2nd June 2019, various times – information here, here, here, here, here and here

Westking Music and Performing Arts presents:
‘Overlaps’ #2: Kay Grant + Keith Moliné + Jasmine Pender + Tim Hodgkinson + Frank Byng + Chlöe Herington
Westminster Kingsway College, 211 Gray’s Inn Road, Kings Cross, London, WC1X 8RA, England
Wednesday 5th June 2019, 6.30pm – information here
 

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May/June 2019 – wayward experimental rock wunderkind Kiran Leonard on tour in England, bumping into Du Blonde, Kermes, Caroline, Humint, Mora Telsnake, Peacetime Romances, Squid, Ichabod Wolf, Don Du Sang and Margate Social Singing Choir en route (5th-10th May); plus a support slot with Soccer Mommy in Berlin (23rd May)

3 May


 
When he first emerged, as a dazzling teenager, out of a Saddlesworth bedroom (singing, drawing on an entire library of exploratory pop and playing every instrument he could get his hands on, as well as drafting in any object that made a useable noise), Kiran Leonard looked set to turn into a latterday Todd Rundgren, or a man hot on the eclectic heels of Fyfe Dangerfield… or, given his self-releasing teething period within homemade experimental electronica, perhaps a second-generation Steven Wilson. His formal debut release, ‘Bowler Hat Soup’ confirmed this: a bursting jumble-sale of home-orchestrated pop treasures, it framed a talent ready for anything from sweaty pub gigs to festival mainstages, and a singer, songwriter, bandleader capable of thrilling anyone from a freshly-hatched indie enthusiast to a committed psychedelic tripper to a long-in-the-tooth Van Morrison fan. It’s not often that someone so universal emerges, still less from such homely beginnings.

As it turned out, Kiran’s instinct for steering means that he’s no less active, no weaker in potential, but less likely to climb the straightforward rungs. Now based in the revived creative ferment of south London (after a spell in Portugal), in many respects, he’s become like the present-day Thurston Moore or the ever-shifting Mike Scott, with his career path now resembling a looping spirograph pattern as he spins from inspiration to inspiration and format to format and back again – ever refreshed, never burned. That melodiousness is still there, but it’s subordinate to (and subverted by) an ecstatically heterogenous enthusiasm for digging into whatever musical shape or form takes his fancy. On record, he’ll turn out simultaneously tight-and-sprawling rock songs packed with loose-limbed cultural critique; looping lo-fi Buckley-esque folk carolling recorded on the hoof between Manchester, Oxford and Portugal; assorted experimental voicings as Advol, Pend Oreille or Akrotiri Poacher; solo acoustic guitar improvisations; themed literary adventures for voice, piano and string trio.

Live, he tends to work as part of a rough-edged four-piece waltzing on the lip of art-rock but playing within the moment, with slick precision utterly sidelined in favour of immediate inspiration or a fringe of incantatory noisepop. Tricky to pigeonhole, at the still-tender age of twenty-three Kiran remains one of our most promising talents while continuing to embrace his own cottage industry rather than sit in the lap of big labels. He’s still working his way around small venues (as he is this month) on a circuit which you’d think was too little to hold him; but which, in many ways, is an ideal continuous crucible for his art, bringing him up close to an audience which fires him up and catches his thrown sparks.



 
In Margate, Kiran and band are part of the third day entertainments of the Caring Is Creepy festival, a new venture between two Margate musical fixtures (promoters Art’s Cool and erstwhile hip London label Moshi Moshi Records, who’ve had an outpost in the town for a while). They’re playing in a bill topped by Beth Jeans Houghton’s Du Blonde, in all of its scuzzy bedsit-punk-blues reflectiveness and its shades of self-aware dysfunction. Also featured are Margate Vocal Studio’s Social Singing Choir, and Brighton/London “underwater boy band” Squid (who add synths, cornet and cello to the usual indie art-rock guitars, drums, bass and sighmurmur vocals to create something stretched-out and oceanic for Margate sunsets); it’s all topped off with DJ work from Rock Solid (Laura Barton and Teri Olins)




 
In Sheffield, they’re on a bill with Midlands singer-songwriter Kieran Smith – a.k.a. Ichabod Wolf – who sings displaced, deracinated Americoustica like Leon Redbone oscillating on the end of an elastic rope. Also on hand are Humint; a brand-new offshoot from jazzy Manchester art-punkers DUDS playing “post-post-robowave” (which translates as choppy noisepop sounding like the young Sonic Youth and the young Devo pecking each other around during an argument over flatpack furniture).



 
In Bristol, they’ll be playing alongside the gently simmering, downbeat-minimal, violin-and-guitar humstrums of London post-rock septet Caroline (through which ghostly inconclusive threads of pemmican-country balladry seep, like a distant campfire duet heard down a winding canyon). There’ll also be dobro-folk from transplanted Frenchwoman Mora Telsnake, who (drawing on ‘60s-to-‘70s solo folk and “80s cheese” and singing in both French and English) delivers an alternating melange of Gallic-accented American Plains music and spindly, blues-infused chansonnerie.

 
In a Berlin date later in the month, the band will be supporting American singer-songwriter Sophie Allison, better known as Soccer Mommy and for the string of Bandcamp releases which eventually led to last year’s full-blown debut album ‘Clean’ with its tales of assorted yearnings and emotional jumbles amongst the young and stoned. Her work’s a peculiar but affecting mixture of detached musicality with feelings spiralling and jagging inside it; thoughts too active and too pointed – too much in need of saying out loud – to submit to the dull rumble of low expectations.


 
The London and Manchester shows are Kieran-and-band only; and the Nottingham one’s a lone Kieran solo appearance, sans band. I’m not sure whether this is due to logistics or to personal choice: I rather hope that it’s the latter, the fervour of the other bands on the bill inspiring him to a more naked and liberated statement than he might have otherwise delivered. Local wonk-poppers Don Du Sang provide murmuring cut-up dance songs with a pleasing wobble, part-sourced from stolen snatches of vinyl, but are rather overshadowed by the political and personal fervour of the two bands providing the rest of the evening’s music.

Outright queerpunk man/woman duo Peacetime Romances actually offer up a kind of broiling, rediscovered underground folk music; toasted with drum clatter and electric guitar wire-rattle, and drawing on twenty years of “every kind of close”, their relationship and perspective has resulted in a batch of songs about “bad men” of all kinds, emotional threshings tinged with nightmare and redolent of resistance. Leicester power/punk-poppers Kermes are even more ferocious, a muscular roil of a band broadcasting a storm of noisy, melodious flechettes showcasing the belligerent, angry stubbornness of trans singer Emily Rose Teece as she wrestles with the weight of heteronormativity, of other people’s boorishness, of struggling to establish her own space while being crushed and bumped by the crude blocks of expectation and restriction.

With Sleater-Kinney and Spook School already floating in the pool of musical comparisons, Kermes’ debut album ‘We Choose Pretty Names’ is also striking in its literary articulacy (inspired by immersion in writers such as Maggie Nelson and Imogen Binnie). In a recent interview with ‘The Four-Oh-Five’, Emily’s described the prime drivers of the album’s songs as “feeling ugly, feeling like a freak, and peacefully existing in a way that make people viscerally hate you.” That’s as may be, but the music Kermes creates is far from lachrymose, whiny or martyrish. It’s constantly buzzing and blurring between dysfunction and self-assurance, with Emily increasingly emerging as someone to follow rather than pity; a tough, tattered-banner leader with dried tear-tracks and a set jaw.




 
* * * * * * * *

Dates:

  • Caring is Creepy Festival 2019 @ Elsewhere, 21-22 The Centre, Margate, Kent, CT9 1JG, England – Sunday 5th May 2019, 6.30pm (with Du Blonde + Squid + Margate Social Singing Choir + Rock Solid DJs) – information here and here
  • Paper Dress Vintage Bar & Boutique,, 352a Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 1HR, England – Monday 6th May 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
  • The Old England, 43 Bath Buildings, Bristol, BS6 5PT, England – Tuesday 7th May 2019, 8.30pm (with Caroline + Mora Telsnake) – information here and here
  • Gullivers NQ, 109 Oldham Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M4 1LW, England – Wednesday 8th May 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
  • Delicious Clam Records, 12 Exchange Street, Sheffield, S2 5TS, England – Thursday 9th May 2019, 7.00pm (with Humint + Ichabod Wolf) – information here and here
  • JT Soar, 2 Aberdeen Street, Nottingham, NG3 1JB, England – Friday 10th May 2019, 8.00pm (solo, with Kermes + Peacetime Romances + Don Du Sang) – information here and here
  • Musick & Freiden, Falkensteinstrasse 48, 10997 Berlin, Germany – Thursday 23rd May 2019 2019, 7.30pm (supporting Soccer Mommy) – information here, here and here

 

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May/July 2019 – upcoming classical/experimental gigs – multimedia string quartet work – Solem Quartet in London, Liverpool and Manchester (2nd, 9th, 10th May); Kronos Quartet & Trevor Paglen’s ‘Sight Machine’ in London (11th July)

29 Apr

Some quick signal-boosing for those of you who might enjoy augmented string quartet music…

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Solem Quartet, 2nd/9th/10th May 2019“In the first of a brand new series, Solem Lates, the Solem Quartet present ‘batózeyal’: a night of music for string quartet and electronics.

“Excitingly, ‘batózeyal’ will feature two specially commissioned premieres, from Larry Goves and Aaron Parker, alongside Anna Meredith‘s ‘Tuggemo’ (a dance-inspired romp mixing the sounds of live string quartet with synth electronics), and other exhilarating recent works from Jonathan Dove (‘Quite Fast’ from his 2001 string quartet ‘Out of Time’) and Paul Zaba (‘Sidechains’, a dizzying musical incarnation of the electronic effect of the same name).

“In the context of this contemporary music, we will also be performing Bartók’s 3rd Quartet which sounds as fresh and visceral as it did at its conception, almost one hundred years ago.

“The title of the night shares its name with the piece by Aaron Parker, which responds to and interacts with the Bartók Quartet (while incorporating electronics and film). So come and join us for sparkling new music and a masterpiece of twentieth-century chamber music!”

There were no initial details for what the Goves piece was called, but talk on Twitter has confirmed that it’s a nine-minute composition called ‘Two-Way Mirror’. Meanwhile, here’s the Solem playing the Bartók (along with a Paul Zaba Soundcloud clip of ‘Sidechains’ and a performance of ‘Quite Fast’ by the Eurasia Quartet).


 
* * * * * * * *

“Artist Trevor Paglen and the ever-inventive Kronos Quartet present Sight Machine, a multimedia performance putting a string quartet under the gaze of machine-vision and artificial intelligence.

Kronos Quartet/Trevor Paglen: ' Sight Machine', 11th July 2019We live in a data-driven world, but is it really possible to quantify human emotion? This concert puts that question under surveillance. While the Kronos Quartet perform works by Terry Riley, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Egyptian electronic musician Islam Chipsy and others, the musicians are monitored by cameras feeding into a suite of artificial intelligence algorithms. The software turns this abstracted information back into images, which are then projected onto the screen behind the performers, showing us how machines and their algorithms perceive what we are seeing.

“Utilising algorithms ranging from consumer-grade facial detection to advanced surveillance systems and even guided missiles, ‘Sight Machine’ is a fascinating and unsettling illustration of the discrepancy between what we experience as human beings and what machines ‘see’.

“This is part of Life Rewired – the 2019 Barbican season exploring what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.”

 

This work was originally performed in New York back in 2017 – read some more about that here. No extra details on the setlist yet…

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Dates:

Solem Quartet: ‘batózeyal’

  • The CLF Art Café, Block A, Bussey Building, 133 Copeland Road, Peckham, London, SE15 3SN, England – Thursday 2nd May 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
  • The Invisible Wind Factory, 25 Carlton Street, Liverpool, L3 7BX, England – Thursday 9th May 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
  • Soup Kitchen, 31-33 Spear Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M1 1DF, England – Friday 10th May 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here


Serious presents:
Kronos Quartet & Trevor Paglen: ‘Sight Machine’
Barbican Hall @ Barbican Arts Centre, Silk Street, City of London, London, EC2Y 8DS, England
Thursday 11th July 2019, 8.30pm – information here and here

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Also, I guess it’s worth mentioning that the Markus Reuter string quartet record I previewed back in February is now out. Here are some promotional clips for those of you who missed out on the previous post…




 

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April 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Sonic Imperfections at Telegraph Hill Festival with Darkroom, Handäoline, Jo Thomas and Minus Pilots (5th) and your chance to jump into some more of their Festival work yourself (13th)

1 Apr

Having inveigled their way into a second home in a hilltop church a stone’s throw from New Cross (and half a klick away from their usual home at the Montague Arms), south London experimental evening Sonic Imperfections are presenting an early April sound’n’space gig at the end of the coming week, continuing their ongoing work with the Telegraph Hill festival. It features various contributions from Darkroom, Handäoline, Jo Thomas and Minus Pilots, all endeavouring to fill up the nave and the arch with reverberance of one kind or another.

Sonic Imperfections, 5th April 2019

Despite now being geographically split between Hertfordshire (where guitarist Michael Bearpark lives) and Edinburgh (where synthesist and reedsman Andrew Ostler is making solo inroads into the Scottish improvisation scene), the Darkroom duo remain tightly loyal to each other even as they stay conceptually loose, artistically inscrutable and absolutely in command of their vivid, grand scale abstractions after twenty years of making them. The boiling, heavy-ambience starstuff of the early years (with its post-prog wails, stepped pyramids of piled-up textures and the pulses which snaked alongside club music while never being shackled to it) has long since given way to something different: Darkroom now sound woody, or deep-carved and ancient, even as their music takes place behind winking lights and modular plug-ins.

Still underrated as one of Britain’s top guitarists in that rarified field where commanding emotion meets marvellous texturology, Michael’s playing exudes both confidence and a broadminded framework; sometimes stirring up a broody hauntological fog, sometimes exuding a cobweb of ominous data, sometimes licking at the music with the fiery tongue of a melodic soloist on a tight leash. Os (increasingly drawn to his bass clarinet booms and voicings) brings the wind through the bracings and the horns to the shoreline even as he runs Darkroom’s complex instinctive sonic architecture through his custom preamps and plugins. Any Darkroom performance is an ear-opener, and this should be no exception.



 
Handäoline is a new-ish familial teaming of Death In Vegas founder-turned-experimental sonics journeyman Steve Hellier, ‘Late Junction’-eer Freya Hellier and (in a sense) Steve’s late great-uncle Wally, a soldier killed in action during the World War II offensive in Italy. The inspiration is Wally’s old melodeon (rescued from his possessions after his death and kept in the family) and his handwritten notes for a piece of 1940s pop called ‘The Chocolate Soldier’s Daughter’. On accordion, Freya recreates and acknowledges some of this history while Steve passes her playing through sound processors and adds his own contributions via laptop and mixing: laced with further sound samples from the Hellier family archives, it’s a different kind of album project, surrealizing and loosening familial memory and once-or-twice-removed community history.

It’s all new enough to stop me from being able to bring you a soundclip or two, so you’ll just have to imagine your own way into this one. As compensation, here’s the original version of Wally’s old favourite…


 
Freeforming with “raw and sensitive sonic matter” (and working mostly from her own processed voice, tabletop electronics, found sounds and a Chapman Stick), electronic instrumentalist Jo Thomas explores the world around herself in a matter-of-fact manner which emerges as suggestive, obliquely sensual abstractions. By this I don’t mean erotic-sensual (although that shouldn’t be entirely ruled out). I mean that she records her impressions of atmospherics, situational weight and association, weighs them and returns them to us transformed or blanketed in evocative, unearthly, sometimes confrontational noise.

By some distance the most experimental act on the bill, Jo’s an abstract expressionist of sound. Her music takes varied shapes – the slow-evolve fluting-organ drones of 2017’s ‘Random Feathers’ (electrophonically realising her reflections on Emily Dickinson); the conglomerations of large-scale equipment hiss and rumble from a particle accelerator, as recorded and reworked on 2011’s Crystal Sounds Synchrotron; the recent Radiophonic inspirations of Natures Numbers (in which Jo follows in the blip-and-ghost-ridden footsteps of Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, and adds a few of her own, a fellow traveller). At the input stage, her inspirations are clues: by the output stage, they’ve become mysteries.


 
Minus Pilots are bassist Adam Barringer and percussionist Matt Pittori: post-rockers who’ve drifted far from rock. Their sounds are gentle, post-industrial, even a little reverent. They’re the kind of holy minimalism you might get from an allegedly reformed psych-rocker sitting quietly and shaggily among the congregation towards the back of the church, secretly tonguing a decal of blotter acid as he eyes the rose window and daydreams of the ruins of an old chocolate factory. Expect hum and crackle, expect frayed fences and distant boom; expect the sound of a parched-out spiritual rinse; expect, too, the shatter of free jazz as Matt cuts a little loose.



 

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Sonic Imperfections, 13th April 2019

Continuing their Telegraph Hill Festival work this month, Sonic Imperfections are also running a sign-up and turn-up immersive event for improvisers in Telegraph Hill Park on 13th April, as part of the Festival’s 25th Anniversary Spectacular. This involves a shifting, spontaneous play-along to a silent film or two as well as providing the sonic backdrop to an audience being led around the park. If you’re interested in playing, you can put your name down here on the Facebook page.

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Dates:

Sonic Imperfections presents:
Darkroom + Handäoline + Jo Thomas + Minus Pilots
St Catherine’s Church, 102a Pepys Road, Telegraph Hill, London, SE14 5SG, England
Friday 5th April 2019, 8.00pm – information here

Sonic Imperfections presents:
Sonic Imperfections @ Telegraph Hill Festival 2019 – 25th Anniversary Spectacular
Telegraph Hill Park (Lower Park), Pepys Road, Telegraph Hill, London, SE14 5TJ, England
Saturday 13th April 2019, 8.30pm – information here
 

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April/May 2019 – upcoming folk/experimental gigs – Sam Lee’s ‘Singing With Nightingales’ season

30 Mar

Details on the upcoming season of Sam Lee’s ‘Singing With Nightingales’ – slightly massaged press text follows…

'Singing With Nightingales', April/May 2019

“Join folk singer, song collector and nature lover Sam Lee in the forest, sit by the fireside and listen to intoxicating song, as some of the finest musicians in the land duet with the sweet sound of the nightingale. Immerse yourself in the folklore and ways of our native birds, savour the music of world-renowned guest artists from folk, classical, world music, and jazz arenas. Join us in a rare and thrilling journey as darkness falls upon the springtime woodlands of Kent, Sussex and Gloucestershire from 18th April to 26th May.

“Each year, for a few months from mid-April, a few thousand nightingales fly to the southern UK from Africa. They can be heard in just a small number of special locations, taking up songful residence after dusk. The territorial males serenade loyally each night for no more than six weeks among the blackthorn and forest margins, giving unbelievable privilege to those who know where to go. Inspired by infamous recordings of cellist Beatrice Harrison playing with nightingales as far back as 1924, Sam has been hosting reverent celebrations of this endangered bird each spring since 2014. These events have spanned multiple events at four different sites, a ‘Pick of The Year’ BBC Radio 4 documentary, a critically acclaimed adaptation for theatres and concert halls, and many broadcasts on BBC Radio 3.

“As well as the outdoor night shows, you can also enjoy the sound of the nightingales’ song in the comfort of concert halls across the UK from 14th April. After a hugely popular run in 2018, our ‘Singing With Nightingales: Live’ tour is back, bringing you diverse musicians in relaxed, low-lit settings improvising in collaboration with live birdsong via live broadcast feed from the countryside. Joining Sam on stage will be a duo (depending on the date) of either violin-playing jazz world/folk singer Alice Zawadzki plus kora-playing Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyate, or Welsh folk-singer/songwriter/harpist Georgia Ruth plus Bristolian post-jazz trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Pete Judge. In addition, an abridged version of ‘Singing With Nightingales: Live’ will feature at London’s South Bank as the late show in the ‘Absolute Bird’ concert (a night of classical music inspired by birdsong).


 
“Brand new for this year, we are launching a mini festival experience with the nightingales at Fingringhoe Wick , Essex, on 27th April. Hosted by Sam, the night will feature three performances from Irish 10-string drone fiddler Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh and from experimental songwriters and instrumentalists Serafina Steer and Cosmo Sheldrake, all joined in song with the nightingale.

We’re offering return travel from London for selected events; and we’re very happy to say that we have received some funding from Arts Council England which means we’re able to put a number of concessions tickets on sale for selected events. These are strictly for people on low income. We also have a number of concession tickets available for our Singing With Nightingales Festival event at Fingringhoe Wick nature reserve, Essex on April 27th.”

Other musicians involved in the open air concerts come from a variety of different genres. There are classical and jazz flautists (Paul Cheneour; and Marsyas Trio‘s Helen Vidovich) and assorted polygenre players (eclectic South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, post-classical/post-folk chamberist Kate St John, Globe Theatre music director Bill Barclay, multi-instrumental composer Christo Squier). There are singers from various strands of contemporary folk (Lisa Knapp, Furrow Collective’s Lucy Farrell, ESKA) and soul-jazz singer-cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson. There’s the choral work of vocal trio Blood Moon Project (featuring Heloise Tunstall Behrens, Tanya Auclair and Luisa Gerstein). There are also representatives of music from further afield (Zimbabwean singer/mbira master Chartwell Dutiro, travelling shakuhachi-ist Adrian Freedman, Afghan music specialists John Baily & Veronica Doubleday and Dublin vocalist Fergus “Faró” Cahillane, the latter known for Irish and Irish/Viking acappella folk work with Anúna and M’anam).


 
Update, 13th April – in the latest development, ‘Singing With Nightingales’ is linking up in London with the Extinction Rebellion movement, on 29th April, for a “peaceful sit down intervention” in central London, called ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square‘:

“In the midst of the heightened attention to climate change and environmental catastrophe we want to bring people together in celebration of the musical beauty of the natural world. Poets, musicians and nature lovers will join together to perform the most romantic rebellion.

“Written in 1939, the renowned ballad tells of the impossible moment when a now critically endangered nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) sings in Mayfair’s famous garden square. Nightingales have not been heard in Central London, let alone Mayfair, for several hundred years. However, through the magical power of people and technology this April 29th, XR, Sam Lee, The Nest Collective and a pop-up flash mob of nature enthusiasts, musicians and supporters will gather to rewild nightingale song back into Berkeley Square.

“Through synchronised streaming of the nightingale’s mesmeric yet seldom heard courtship song via mobile phones and mobile speakers, our pop-up action will fill the park and surrounding streets with the song of a creature nearing extinction on this island. The birdsong will be accompanied by offerings from musicians, singers, poets and anyone who wants to collaborate with the finest singer in the world. This central London rewilding action aims to bring poetic focus to the shocking demise of our own native species and give Londoners the opportunity to hear a once ubiquitous songbird, now near extinct in the UK, in its mythic notional home.”

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Full dates for everything:

Open-air shows at Green Farm Kent, Church Lane, Shadoxhurst, Kent, TN26 1LS, England

  • Friday 19th April 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Bill Barclay) – information here and here
  • Saturday 20th April 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Paul Cheneour) – information here and here
  • Sunday 21st April 2019 (featuring Sam Lee & Christo Squier) – information here and here
  • Friday 17th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Helen Vidovich) – information here and here
  • Saturday 18th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Abel Selaocoe) – information here and here
  • Sunday 19th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Blood Moon Project) – information here and here

Open-air shows at a secret location near Spithurst, Lewes, Sussex, BN8 5EF, England

  • Thursday 25th April 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh) – information here and here
  • Friday 26th April 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh) – information here and here
  • Friday 3rd May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Lisa Knapp) – information here and here
  • Saturday 4th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Kate St John) – information here and here
  • Sunday 5th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Ayanna Witter-Johnson) – information here and here
  • Monday 6th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Lucy Farrell) – information here and here
  • Saturday 25th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee + ESKA + John Baily & Veronica Doubleday) – information here and here
  • Sunday 26th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Fergus Cahillane) – information here and here

Open-air shows at Highnam Woods, Highnam, Gloucestershire, GL2 8AA, England

  • Thursday 9th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Pete Judge) – information here and here
  • Friday 10th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Chartwell Dutiro) – information here and here
  • Saturday 11th May 2019, 6.30pm (featuring Sam Lee & Adrian Freedman) – information here and here

‘Singing With Nightingales: Live’ (indoor concerts)

  • Ropetackle Arts Centre, Little High Street, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, BN43 5EG, England – Sunday 14th April 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee + Alice Zawadzki + Kadialy Kouyate) – information here and here
  • The Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, Oxford, OX1 2AQ, England – Tuesday 23rd April 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee + Alice Zawadzki + Kadialy Kouyate) – information here and here
  • Warwick Arts Centre, University Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL, England – Wednesday 24th April 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee + Alice Zawadzki + Kadialy Kouyate) – information here and here
  • Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon, TQ9 6EL, Tuesday 30th April 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee + Alice Zawadzki + Kadialy Kouyate) – information here and here
  • Wyeside Arts Centre, Castle Street, Builth Wells, LD2 3BN, Wales – Wednesday 8th May 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee + Pete Judge + Georgia Ruth) – information here and here
  • St Laurence’s Church, Church Street, Stroud, GL5 1JL, England – Wednesday 15th May 2019, … (featuring Sam Lee + Pete Judge + Georgia Ruth) – information here and here.
  • Gulbenkian Theatre, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NB, England – Wednesday 22nd May 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee + Pete Judge + Georgia Ruth) – information here and here
  • Junction II @ Cambridge Junction, Clifton Way, Cambridge, CB1 7GX, England – Thursday 23rd May 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee + Pete Judge + Georgia Ruth) – information here and here
  • ’Absolute Bird: Translating Nature’ Queen Elizabeth Hall @ Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, Waterloo, London, SE1 8XX, England – Friday 24th May 2019, 8.00pm (featuring Sam Lee, Alice Zawadzki plus selected members of City of London Sinfonia) – information here and here.

Singing With Nightingales: Festival (with Sam Lee + Serafina Steer + Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh + Cosmo Sheldrake)
Visitor Centre @ Fingringhoe Wick Nature Reserve, South Green Road, Colchester, Essex, CO5 7DN, England
Saturday 27th April 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here

Extinction Rebellion: ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’
Berkeley Square, Mayfair, London, W1J, England
Monday 29th April 2019, 6.00pm – information here
 

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March 2019 – music and theatre as ‘The Marchlands Arms’ takes over London’s transmigrational pub Ye Olde Mitre for a couple of evenings of border culture (23rd & 24th March)

19 Mar

A little way into the western edge of the City of London, between the jewellers’ quarter of Hatton Gardens and the gated enclave of Ely Place, there’s an inviting little alleyway – a tuckaway court still marked by Victorian streetlights, a little like an urban Narnia portal. As you wend your way up it, negotiating the gentle kink in the middle, a pub appears – a pub which gives the damnedest impression of having materialised from elsewhere and wedged itself into the cut-through.

Ye Olde Mitre (photographer unknown)

Ye Olde Mitre (photographer unknown)

This pub, Ye Olde Mitre, has actually been around in some shape or form since the middle of the sixteenth century – and for a long time it was perhaps London’s only example of a place which was in another place. Specifically, it was legally a part of Cambridgeshire. The beneficiary of a legal agreement regarding land jurisdiction set up around the London estate of the Bishop of Ely, it was the drinking establishment for his London servants. There are tall tales about people on the run from the City of London coppers claiming sanctuary in there, and arguing that the City police had no jurisdiction within the pub walls; no more than the Met did either.

Obviously this is a quirk of law, power and accommodation – mostly a long-standing in-joke for pint-supping conveyancers dropping in from the Inns of Court. Nonetheless, visiting Ye Olde Mitre always feels like taking a step into another kingdom, one which disregards standard unities of time and place in favour of fashioning its own. There’s the mythic touch added by the resident cherry tree, of course (which dates back to Elizabethan times and comes complete with its own Queen Elizabeth legend); but even when you’re not looking for magical signifiers – and long before you’ve become swimmy-headed on beer – the pub has the relaxed, self-contained air of somewhere entirely separate from the London bustle. Many pubs strive to become places in their own right; friendly drop-in nations. Content as its own little capsule of peace, Ye Olde Mitre manages it much better than almost anywhere else I know.

The Marchland Arms, 23rd & 24th March 2019

It’s unsurprisingly that such a place – one that flaunts and celebrates its quirky liminality – has drawn the attention of Marchland, the music-and-theatre production alliance which fixes and thrives on ideas of history and borderlines (as evidenced in their previous festival at the Bridewell a year ago.). This coming weekend, they’ll be taking over the pub, recasting it as “The Marchland Arms” and filling it with nine performances in three separate sections, turning the different spaces within the pub into murmuring, discursive rooms within which performance, music and song will gently ricochet.

* * * * * * * *

Marchland Arms - 'Once & Future Europe'

Marchland Arms – ‘Once & Future Europe’

Three pieces make up the ‘Once And Future Europe’ section, triggered by Marchland’s “fascinat(ion with) the cultural history of the legendary states that once straddled Europe’s borders. For the three shows that make up this session we asked the artists involved to, in the words of Rimbaud, remember Europe and her ancient ramparts. This is work that explores the influence of those half-imaginary places on the European psyche, and how their legacy continues to influence our notions of identity and belonging.”

The first of these pieces, ‘Lyonesse’, appears to be (at root) a conceptual celebration and exploration of the mythical drowned kingdom between Cornwall and Brittany – in other words, the sunken link in the geographical continuity of the broader Celtic nation. On spec, that sounds like a dusty old disinterral of Edwardian romanticism; but judging by the participants and their preoccupations, it won’t be. Poet-ecologist Dom Bury will, I guess, be mingling Lyonessean legend from his own West Country roots with contemporary concerns about flooding and dissolution, bolstered interjections and engagements from Katharina Engel, a German academic and theatre director whose preoccupation with hills and climbing may also feed into the work. The two will be accompanied by music from singer Sophia Brumfitt and veteran percussionist/hammer dulcimer player Dhevdhas Nair in a rich blend of European Early Music, Indian subcontinental music, jazz and African elements: Euromyth interfolding with full-world diaspora.

 
The pub snug will house ‘The Capital of Europe’ in which Charles Webber – whose two-decade-plus career as a sound artist has seen him write multimedia sound/light-and-music operas (he’s the artistic director of operaNCV), plus work with Crass’ Eve Libertine and innumerable experimental musicians and theatre companies – and Strasbourgian poet/Théâtre Volière co-director Mick Wood collaborate on “an installation of treated sound, found objects, and cut up poetry”, providing “an unguided tour through the abandoned corners, quiet squares and restless banlieues of an ideal, unreal city on the Rhine.” Sounds delightfully like an old pub story, but one which unfolds into multiple additional dimensions and textures; like that European flaneur’s collaboration between Johnny Morris and China Miéville which never actually happened.

Transforming the lounge, the last of the three ‘Once And Future Europe’ pieces – ‘Ionic’ – asks us to reimagine the space as“a café in fin de siècle Alexandria” in which a new dance theatre piece will play out. Rambert School graduate Janacek Wood choreographs an episode of interweaving texts and movements based around the work of Cairo-based, Alexandria-born Egyptian-Greek poet Constantin Cavafy, whose early life saw his family relocate between France, England and Constantinople in their own mournful, economically-driven private diaspora.

Cavafy himself ended up writing a body of work that’s a Hellenistic re-examination of what Wiki summarises as “uncertainty about the future, sensual pleasures, the moral character and psychology of individuals, homosexuality, and a fatalistic existential nostalgia.” The best-known of these poems is the sardonic Waiting For The Barbarians, in which an external exotic threat serves as both spice and hollowing-out of a moribund politics: I can’t think what that reminds me of now. Music comes from two Greek musicians – singer Savina Yannatou and classical guitarist Nikos Baroutsakis – and from electric guitarist/composer/personal ethnologist Alex Roth, who’s recently been pursuing his own Jewish diasporan heritage on a three-cornered journey that’s taken in Manchester, London and his current dwelling place of Warsaw.

* * * * * * * *

Marchland Arms - 'Customs & Duty'

Marchland Arms – ‘Customs & Duty’

Three more pieces make up ‘Customs & Duty’, “a session of shows exploring the interaction between folk culture and high art, and how identities shift when the lines between arbitrarily imagined communities are blurred… Must we declare our customs at the customs post? Is it our duty to pay duty on them? To whom do they belong? Who decides what they’re worth? What will they cost us when they’re taken away, dissected, repackaged, and sold back to us?”

For this, there’ll be a variation on the ‘Before and After Schengen’ piece which was one of last year’s Marchland centrepieces: Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes responses to Spanish photographer Ignacio Evangelista’s photos of border facilities, with guests and actors from the Marchland Arms Company contributing to a staging of the outcome, making the room “the Kafka-esque border post of a once or future East-European regime.”

Last time around at Marchland, Carneval String Trio’s viola player Shiry Rashkovsky contributed the ‘Shengen’ music. This year, she’s reviving a nineteenth-century middle-European tale with storyteller James Peacock in the shape of ‘Fritz and the Bohemian’ a tale of kindness, cyclic events and wanderings (“each year, on the first day of Spring, an itinerant musician comes to play beneath Fritz Kobus’ window…”).

Rounding off this section is a new Théâtre Volière play, ‘Goethe in Alsace’ – a one-act historical tale of cultural enrichment, “careless play-acting (and) casual cruelty” set around the border region of France and Germany, and questioning the assumptions and entitlements surrounding nascent male artists and the women whom they select as muses.

* * * * * * * *

Marchland Arms - 'The Northern Marches'

Marchland Arms – ‘The Northern Marches’

The three final Marchland Arms pieces comprise ‘The Northern Marches’ and focus specifically on the Scottish and English border country “(a) region, rich with the history of the Border Reivers of the debatable lands, the Roman garrisons of Hadrian’s Wall, and dramatic elopements to Gretna Green, has other, fresher stories to tell. How does its often romanticised past inform the Scottish borders’ present, and to whom do its stories old and new actually belong?” For this section, there’s a play (of sorts), a talk and a musical session.

Théâtre Volière return – teamed with poet Katie Hale and singing, fiddle-playing Scottish music specialist Lori Watson – to deliver a preview of ‘Gretna’: an actors/reciter/musician performance and ongoing project “exploring the culture of the region from the perspective of the women so often written out of its history.”

On the trail of linguistics and naming, University of Glasgow professor Eila Williamson provides ‘The Meaningful Merse’; throwing a little light on her REELS project work (Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland) in “a fascinating look at how history’s great, long term shifts in ethnic and cultural identity are often written in to the localised place-names, folk memory and dialects of Europe’s border regions.”

Finally, Lori Watson returns with her own set, performing in duo and bringing Scottish coastal and border folk music to close out the section in “a haunting collision between traditional music and found, ambient sound, in a performance ranging from the intimate to the epic.”

* * * * * * * *

There’s a general preview here:

 
Dates and times:

Marchland presents:
‘The Marchland Arms’
Ye Olde Mitre, Ely Court, off Ely Place/Hatton Garden, Holborn, London, EC1N 6SJ, England

January/February 2019 – upcoming London rock/noise/eclectic gigs – BYH’s Fun House show with Gum Takes Tooth album launch extravaganza (25th January); from guitar crunch to harp’n’dulcimer chime with fifteen bands at 9 Years of Chaos (2nd February)

19 Jan

A couple of gigs happening at Electrowerkz demonstrate that the noisy, beaty, psychedelic end of things is alive and in rude health in London. In such rude health, in fact, that I’m not even sure that they need me to provide this last-week/last-fortnight push, but I’ll just briefly go through the details anyway…

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Fun House: Gum Takes Tooth etc, 25th January 2019Ripping the can open on the 25th January is Baba Yaga’s Hut’s Fun House show, an expansion of the launch of the third album by noise-band-cum-two-man-sound-system Gum Takes Tooth (keyboardist/vocalist Jussi Brightmore and percussionist Tom Fug). Preoccupied by the ravenous, toxic/intoxicated development frenzies which envelop contemporary cities (and not least the Aldgate neighbourhood where Jussi’s been working), ‘Arrow’ is a turnaround from GTT’s previous cosmic flights, dropping back to street level and to a more urgent, less indulgent headspace which they define as centring around “gentrification, uncertainty, self-empowerment” as well as meditations on the incitements to tribal violence and competition which become ever louder in the current environment.

More on all of that in this recent ‘Wire’ article; a sample of what’s to come is below.


 

Gum Takes Tooth, 2018

Gum Takes Tooth, 2018

In support are growling, echoey sax-and-clang drone-rockers Sex Swing, whom I described last time around as “inhabit(ing) a post-Can, post-Suicide hinterland of hell, spring-echoed and tannoy-vocaled – a sinister quotidian landscape of blank anomie and oppression; a Los Alamos penal colony haunted by uranium ghosts, ancient Morse telegraphs, metal fatigue and the zombie husks of Albert Ayler and Ian Curtis.” (I must have been feeling a bit excitable.)


 
Also on hand are made-up-on-the-spot dirty-techno act Coldnose (acid house turned sharling acid factory), Factory Floor/Kaito/Carter Tutti Void person and cut-up industrial electronicist Nik Colk Void; plus the mysterious Michael (one of those unknown acts whom Baba Yaga regularly pluck out of the darkness which only they know about).

 
Over in the side room there’s a cluster of successive DJs from sympathetic bands and labels – Rocket Recordings’ own Chris Reeder, plus Rikard from Flowers Must Die, Valentina Magaletti from Tomaga, G&T (from Luminous Bodies / Melting Hand) and what may well be the whole of avant-techno rockers Teeth Of The Sea.

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On the 2nd February, noisejazzmetalprogfolkoustic promoters Chaos Theory (responsible for the Facemelter, Whispers & Hurricanes and Jazz Market) spend a day celebrating their nine-year-anniversary. Remarkable to think that they’ve been going that long without burnout – it must have something to do with the fact that main Chaosician Kumal Singh’s personal outlook seems to be as sunny as his bill choices are often gnarly, dark and/or earshredding. Loudness therapy, perhaps. At any rate, Chaos Theory has two rooms full of their favoured freaks; lit and otherwise illustrated by Emily Bailey, dotted with artwork by Sagui and also featuring a virtual reality installation by Nicola Plant.

9 Years of Chaos, 2nd February 2019Unsurprisingly, the fourteen-band lineup they’ve prepared feature a number of acts who’ve danced through previous ‘Misfit City’ posts. I’m already familiar with drums-and-noise “happenings” inciters Sly & The Family Drone (with their all-in approach to audience drumming participation), the triple-headed avant-garde women’s sketchpad V Ä L V Ē (with their scope running from reed-honking prog to post-punk glee singalongs to homemade instrumentation – see multiple posts passim), and convoluted Zappa-esque stunt-brass rockers The Display Team (who take the business of living up to their name pretty seriously, but don’t take much else very seriously). Among those I haven’t covered yet, I know that Medway post-rockers Upcdownc have been plying their grand noise since 2005: always looming on the sidelines. I also now know that although Cold In Berlin‘s name makes them sound as if they’re an earnest neoprog band trying to rip off John Le Carre, they’re actually grand-scale post-punkers adding hallucinatory body to their songs via textural guitar like a muezzin’s nightmare.






 
I’m less familiar with the knot of assorted metallics in the middle. Heavy Essex doomproggers Earthmass; cosmologically/geometrically-preoccupied Sheffield mathboys Body Hound (featuring former members of Rolo Tomassi and Antares); sludge-stoners Prisa Mata, female-fronted slowgrinder duo Bismuth; cross-country prog-metallers PSOTY. But for me, a little metal generally goes a long way, and I’m more interested in the other sounds spicing the mix. Enigmatic, theatrical electronic performer UKAEA (half of Gun Cleaner) seems to swing wildly between pelting techno dance sets on the one hand and ranting performance art (complete with masked violinists) on the other. Then there are the acts which have spilled in from acoustic-ish CT clubnight Whispers & Hurricanes – hammered-dulcimer-toting Fear Of The Forest frontwoman Kate Arnold and jazz harpist Tori Handley. Experimental mood cellist Jo Quail flits mysteriously between gigs in churches and disreputable art cellars like this one, has fairly recently put out a heavy-metal-influenced album called ‘Exsolve’ and will be working up a new project for the 9 Years show (although, given the involvement of various people from Wren, it will presumably be some kind of stately sludge-tone…)





 
Central to the occasion, though, is Gothic dream-pop siren Evi Vine, who’s using the occasion to launch her ‘Black/Light/White/Dark’ album (including contributions from various Cure men and Nephilim-ites, if you’re familiar with your hats’n’backcombing icons.)


 
A wall of Chaosnoise follows for those who wanted to keep up with the metal from earlier in the post…






 
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Dates:

Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Fun House: Gum Takes Tooth + Sex Swing + Nik Void + Michael + Coldnose + various DJs
Electrowerkz, 7 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Friday 25th January 2019, 9.00pm – information here and here

Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
9 Years Of Chaos Festival
Electrowerkz, 7 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Saturday 2nd February 2019, 2.00pm– information here, here and here

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January 2019 – upcoming London classical gigs – Marin Allsop and the LPO bring a batch of premieres to ‘Here and Now’ (16th January); Philip Thomas, Richard Craig and Damien Harron perform Morton Feldman’s ‘Crippled Symmetry’ (22nd January); Phaedra Ensemble and friends play Meredith Monk, Caroline Shaw, Jamie Hamilton and Fred Thomas (29th January)

11 Jan
Marin Allsop, 2018

Marin Allsop, 2018

As well as interlocking with the Southbank’s SoundState festival, next Thursday’s ‘Here and Now’ concert, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Marin Allsop, is part of the orchestra’s year-long ‘Isle of Noises’ series featuring three hundred and thirty years worth of “landmark classics inspired by the British Isles.”

While other concerts in the series are likely to feature Handel, Purcell, Vaughan Williams and other longstanding canon composers influenced (in some cases) by their migration to the islands or (in others) by their responses to its landscapes, this early-stages concert is packed with – read, entirely composed of – premieres of brand new pieces. On offer are the world premieres of Arne Gieshoff’s ‘Burr’, Helen Grime’s ‘Percussion Concerto’ (with Colin Currie as soloist) and Anders Hillborg’s new twenty-minute concerto-for-orchestra ‘Sound Atlas’ (also including a battery of percussion, from the more familiar timpani and tubular bells to Chinese opera gong, vibraslap and paint tin).

In addition, there’s the British premiere of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür’s ‘Solastalgia for piccolo and orchestra’ (featuring piccoloist Stewart McIlwham). There’s also the European premiere of Louis Andriessen’s ‘Agamemnon’, a kind of actorless, wordless instrumental opera composed by Andriessen for his own 80th birthday celebration concerts in New York last autumn, and described by him as “a war-like piece, full of fast music and nervous terror” constructed (as mythology usually is) by a babble of competing voices. Here’s a little snatch of it from the New York rehearsals…


 
Earlier in the evening, Marin Allsop will provide a free “Behind the Baton” discussion on the evening’s music and on her thoughts on classical music’s future.

Isle Of Noises, 2019

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Over the next couple of weeks, there are two interesting free concerts in the City, University of London Concert Series at the City campus in Finsbury.

Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman

The first, on the evening of the 22nd, is a performance of Morton Feldman’s ‘Crippled Symmetry’ by percussionist Damien Harron, flautist Richard Craig and Philip Thomas on piano and celesta. One of the composer’s late works (from 1983), it’s “a haunting exploration of stillness, tonal and temporal ambiguities, and musical patterning.” As presented to players, it’s a slightly disassociated triple-part score: each individual part fully notated but deliberately not synchronized with the others (leading to fascinating opportunities for uncertainty and chance).

As with many Feldman pieces, ‘Crippled Symmetry’ is also a long, attenuated listening challenge, lasting an entire hour-and-a-half. Here’s the 1991 version recorded by Eberhard Blum, Jan Williams and Nils Vigeland from Feldman’s original ensemble:


 
The second concert – a week later on the 29th – features string-quartet-plus-collaborators Phaedra Ensemble. In this case, they’re performing a programme of New York- or London-composed string-based pieces inspired by the human voice.

Phaedra Ensemble, 29th January 2019

From the American side, Roomful Of Teeth member, composer-violinist and sometime hip hop collaborator Caroline Shaw provides 2011’s ‘Entr’acte’: in part, a humorous deconstruction and reconstruction of Haydn in which his sublime classical-era tone shifts struggle to place and reassert themselves within the unruliness of twenty-first century music.

In parallel, NYC loft music veteran and intuitive voice music doyen Meredith Monk contributes her 2005 piece String Songs. Originally premiered in London by the Kronos Quartet almost exactly thirteen years ago, it’s the piece which she transposed and translated her idiosyncratic and individual vocal ideas into string quartet context for the first time. Examples below:



 
The first of the pieces from the British side – the crinkling, conversational ‘Taking a nap, I pound the rice’ (with its quinpartite nods to the compositions and thoughts of composers from the aforementioned Feldman and John Cage to Anton Webern and Thelonious Monk, and of transformative British nature writer/‘Peregrine’ author J.A. Baker – comes from Fred Thomas, one of F-IRE Collective’s multi-instrumentalist composers. Fred himself joins Phaedra for the piece on prepared piano, accompanied by percussionist Maurizio Ravalico. As with the previous performance of the piece – listen below – narration is provided on tape by rising black British actress Ronke Adekoleujo.

 
The last piece, ‘Remainder for vocalising string quartet’ is a world premiere from composer/mixed-media artist/Phaedra co-director Jamie Hamilton. It explores “the many techniques that were developed with him incorporating speech, singing and vocalisations with instrumental playing” and continues to pursue his interest in how humans use sound as a measuring medium.

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Dates:

London Philharmonic Orchestra presents:
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Marin Alsop: ‘Here and Now: Isle of Noises’
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, Waterloo, London, SE1 8XX, England
Wednesday 16th January 2019, 7.30pm – information here (‘Behind the Baton’ talk info here)

City, University of London Concert Series presents:
Philip Thomas + Richard Craig + Damien Harron perform Morton Feldman: Crippled Symmetry
Performance Space @ City, University of London, College Building, St John Street, Finsbury, London, EC1V 4PB, England
Tuesday 22nd January 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here

City, University of London Concert Series presents:
Phaedra Ensemble: Monk, Shaw, Hamilton, Thomas
Performance Space @ City, University of London, College Building, St John Street, Finsbury, London, EC1V 4PB, England
Tuesday 29th January 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
 

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January 2019 – upcoming London classical gigs – baroque, folk and present-day music intertwine at the second Baroque At The Edge festival (4th to 6th January)

2 Jan

Baroque At The Edge festivalAs regards classical music, this month appears to be opening with London’s second annual Baroque At The Edge festival across the 4th, 5th and 6th January. Dividing its time between the Clerkenwell classical-church venues of LSO St Lukes and St James Clerkenwell, it starts from a baroque basis but roughly postulates (as it did last year) along the genre-blurring lines of “imagine if Bach was a jazzman, Purcell a folk-fiddler, and Monteverdi a minimalist…”

Following on from 2018’s debut festival, there’ll be a return engagement with concert dramatist Clare Norburn. Having tackled the murderous guilt and glory of Carlo Gesualdo last time around, Clare’s new work ‘Burying The Dead’ (premiered in the West Country last May) is another deathbed dream drama: this time set in 1695 and focusing on the final protracted thoughts and hallucinations of Henry Purcell as “dream-like memories of the Plague, the Fire of London, family life and the vibrant Restoration stage merge seamlessly with his exquisite vocal and instrumental music.” Said music will be provided by London-based baroque ensemble Ceruleo, who commissioned the play, while actor Niall Ashdown features as Purcell.


 
There’s more Purcell-related goings-on via Cecil Sharp House choir director and Wing-It Singer leader Sally Davies, who with her chorally-minded pianist daughter Holly Cullen Davies is running an open-to-all English folksong workshop, focussing on the songs Purcell would have known and referred to. In a similar spirit, the festival’s closing concert features a team-up of Dipper Malkin (John Dipper on fourteen-string viola d’amore, Dave Malkin on guitar and vocals) and singing storyteller Nick Hennessy – all three keen folk-steeped reinventors, on this occasion exploring how “the sophistication of Purcell meets the soul of English folk.”



 
Several more cross-disciplinary players are taking part. Violist Liam Byrne promises a concert in which you can “expect anything, anyhow, from (Marin) Marais to (Nico) Muhly”, although he’s keeping schtum on whether he’s playing pure and acoustic or with the electronics or conceptual tricks which make up the other side of his playing. Path-forging post-classical singer Nora Fischer, accompanied by theorbo lutenist Mike Fentross, will delve into the world of seventeenth century song with “intimate and exquisite re-imaginings of works by Purcell, Peri, Monteverdi and others.”




 

Elsewhere in the festival, vigorous violinist Elicia Silverstein will join the dots between Bach and Biber (representing the baroque) and Luciano Berio and Salvatore Sciarrino (representing the contemporary), as demonstrated on her 2018 debut recording ‘The Dreams And Fables I Fashion’. Replacing a planned baroque piano concert from Gabriela Montero (after she had to drop out following surgery), her fellow pianist David Greilsammer provides his ‘Scarlatti:Cage:Sonatas’ dual keyboard programme which constantly interlaces the music of Domenico Scarlatti with the twentieth-century prepared piano compositions of John Cage (hardware, wood and rubber resonating and burring between the strings).




 
Less compressed information, plus full dates and ticket info, can be found at the festival’s homepage and Facebook page.

‘Baroque At The Edge’
LSO St Luke’s, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England
St James Clerkenwell, Clerkenwell Close, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 0EA, England
Friday 4th January to Saturday 6th January 2019 (various times) – information here and here
 

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October 2018 – more Daylight Music sessions in London – Caoilfhionn Rose, Tomorrow’s Warriors StringTing and Abimaro (6th October); Terry Edwards, Seamus Beaghen, Douglas Dare and Deerful for ‘Organ Reframed’ (13th October)

1 Oct

Daylight Music‘s autumn season of free family-friendly Saturday lunchtime gigs continues with organ music, singer-songwriters, brass, jazz strings and synthpop…

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Daylight Music 290: Caoilfhionn Rose + Tomorrow's Warriors StringTing + Abimaro - Saturday 6th October 2018The 6th October show features Caoilfhionn Rose, Tomorrow’s Warriors StringTing and Abimaro.

“Caoilfhionn Rose has an eclectic range of influences, including the Mummers, Polly Paulusma, Broadcast, Rachel Sermanni and Peter Broderick. She featured on The Durutti Column’s 2014 album ‘Chronicle LX:XL.’ She is currently recording her debut album with Matthew Halsall of Gondwana Records.


 
“Tomorrow’s Warriors StringTing is a flagship ensemble from Tomorrow’s Warriors, the celebrated hothouse for young jazz talent in the UK, led by violinist Rhiannon Dimond. Blazing a wide trail for women and strings in jazz, their musicians are core players in Tomorrow’s Warriors’ acclaimed Nu Civilisation Orchestra and are ones to watch as they begin to make an indelible mark on the London jazz scene.


 
“Abimaro is a singer and songwriter from London who is inspired by life, faith and stories. Having previously lent her vocals to bands such as Zero 7, Cinematic Orchestra and The Free, Abimaro released her debut solo EP in July 2017. Abimaro is also a Music Facilitator, regularly leading projects for organisations including The Roundhouse, Spitalfields Music and the Southbank Centre.”


 
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The 13th October show is another in the Union Chapel’s ‘Organ Reframed‘ series, in which a variety of musicians play, interact with or are accompanied by the Chapel’s resident Willis pipe organ. In Daylight Music’s case, a variety of singer-songwriters from different disciplines are involved. On this occasion, the performers are Terry Edwards (with Seamus Beaghen), Douglas Dare and Deerful.

Daylight Music 291: 'Organ Reframed' - Terry Edwards (with Seamus Beaghen) + Douglas Dare + Deerful - Saturday 13th October 2018

“Jazz and rock multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards has performed and released records both as a solo artist and in collaboration with artists such as Madness, PJ Harvey, Spiritualised, Nick Cave and Tindersticks. For this special performance, he will be joined by composer Seamus Beaghen on Union Chapel’s Henry Willis organ. Seamus has played with Iggy Pop, Death in Vegas, Madness and Morrissey, to name but a few. The performance is going to be semi-improvised in four interlocking sections. A multi-genre musical offering, wind-based without electronics – the improvised giddy sound of pipes, trumpet and saxes (occasionally two at once!).


 
“Douglas Dare is a London-based singer-songwriter, originally from the coastal town of Bridport, South West England. His live sound combines acoustic instrumentation including piano and percussion with glitchy electronic elements. Inspired by the likes of Portishead, Elliott Smith and James Blake, Douglas combines a rich and haunting vocal with lyrics crafted from his own poems and short prose. For this performance he aims to play the organ as sensitively as he can, reworking some of his older material and introducing some new as he explores the organ’s sonorities in the chapel, singing tenderly with this powerful machine for the first time.


 
“Deerful is Emma Winston, a keyboard player, singer and producer based in London. She writes lush, sad, romantic electropop about feelings on synthesisers small enough to use on the bus. For this performance, Emma will combine the chapel’s Henry Willis organ with electronics.”


 
Daylight add “to get you in the mood for this show, we did an organ playlist from previous years and other related shows. It took a lot of organ-ising so we hope you’ll pull out the stops to make time to listen…ahem…”


 
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All gigs are at the usual place – Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England – with a suggested donation of five pounds (go on, it’s worth it…) Dates below:

  • Daylight Music 290: Caoilfhionn Rose + Tomorrow’s Warriors StringTing + Abimaro – Saturday 6th October 2018, 12:00pm – information
  • Daylight Music 291: ‘Organ Reframed’ – Terry Edwards (with Seamus Beaghen) + Douglas Dare + Deerful – Saturday 13th October 2018, 12:00pm – information

Details on November Daylight concerts to follow in due course…

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September 2018 – upcoming London experimental gigs – eight for WITCiH’s ‘The State of Gender?’ festival (26th to 28th September) – Bishi, Chagall, Miri Kat, Di Mainstone, Lia Mice, Vicky O’Neon, Rebekah Ubuntu and Gazelle Twin

17 Sep


 
Music tech initiative WITCiH (positive, feminist, genderfluid, multicultural) returns to its regular canalside home at the end of the month, for its first work as a full commissioning platform. ‘The State of Gender?’ is a full festival following several standalone WITCiH concerts over the past few years. While open to all genders, skin tones and persuasions, the three nights of the festival present, foreground and celebrate WITCiH’s central preoccupations – women, technology and creativity. In additional, they continue to promote WITCiH’s extended interest in teasing out and broadening (and, where necessary, seizing) opportunities generally only offered to the male, the straight and the white, and sharing them out across a wider community.

If this sounds like a revolution, it’s a charming and positive one. The people in and around WITCiH are unafraid to critique and push against orthodoxy, and are equally unafraid of their own strength and potential; but this is primarily a celebration rather than a catharsis. Enthusiastic about its geekery, revelling in dressing up and performance, it seems to call into being a place and time in which the worst of patriarchal glowering and rigidity has been dispelled or dissolved; where the culture wars have been won from dance and crafting studios, and from workshops and sheds where electronic components are used to reel in the future. A place and time in which people are just free to get on with open-ended, humanitarian tech-play.

As regards how to get there, there’s a good interview here, at ‘Wyldemag’, in which WITCiH co-founder (and living, walking, proactive “giant culture clash”) Bishi points out her cultural-creative ethos, and that of WITCiH. “People are deciding – especially women and people of colour – that the simple answer is that you have to invest. I mean, it’s great that there’s more awareness and blah blah blah, but it’s really simple, with the minority groups in society, it’s not just about building awareness; it’s the sustained investment that comes with that. And, of course, all the social media and stuff is helpful, but living in a city is so expensive, and politically, everything is so rough and uneven and uncertain, and there’s something powerful about a collective of people coming together physically.”

On this occasion, it’s eight women (or, to be more precise, seven women plus a non-binary person with a female name) coming together. In amongst the music, three of them are going to be providing lectures – physical-pop explorer Chagall, “movician” Di Mainstone and conceptual wildcard Gazelle Twin.

Amsterdam-born but London-based, Chagall is an electronic music singer-songwriter, producer, and performer inspired by a wide-ranging collective-culture range of influences including “nature, Greek poetry, Bjork, James Blake, Beethoven, Nina Simone, Erykah Badu, Joni Mitchell & Miriam Makeba.”. Her particular musical approach embraces gestural and reactive technology: she was an early adopter of a key gestural synth controller, the Mi.Mu Gloves, and her performances involve choreography and triggered interactive visuals.



 
Chagall’s interest in body-gestural sound sourcing is shared – and then some – by “movician” Di Mainstone: artist-in-residence for Queen Mary College at the University of London, and one of the “new generation visionaries” of the international digital arts scene (according to the ‘New York Times’). Working with researchers from QMC’s Centre for Digital Music and Media Arts & Technology, Di creates musical instruments as wearable technology for dancers: electronic extensions of the human body, triggered by movement. These include the Human Harp (which she uses to play suspension bridges), the spring-based Whimsichord, the squeeze’n’jig Hydrochordion, the limb-like “choreophonic prosthetic” Serendipitichord and – outside of music – the Scorpions (a set of kinetic garments with a life of their own). Di also coined the “movician” term – a name for a player of her devices, “a hybrid artist who explores and composes sound through movement.”


 
Earlier on, I suggested that WITCiH was predominantly utopian. The work of Gazelle Twin provides a hellish counterpoint indicating that there’s still plenty of struggles to go through, whether it’s from sinister social forces or our own unacknowledged darknesses.

Beneath her alarming/exciting dual skins of latex costumery and processed sound, Gazelle Twin is Elizabeth Bernholz – composer, producer, incantationeer, framework-overturner and time-traveller. Via loops, sampling and processing, her work jams and transforms acoustic and Early Music sources (recorder, harpsichord, female chorus) against found sounds and electronic “shades of ‘90s house and the once-thriving rural rave scene, albeit recalled as a watery, second-hand memory.” The results buck and bray, ripple and snarl; delivering disturbing, liberating dreamscapes and warning fables with a violently physical component. In her videos, we see hissing ferocious folk devils battling it out; or blank-masked hooded figures capering and proliferating, barking and twitching like dysfunctional maenads. Much of it comes across as mingled summoning, exorcism and terrible warning. There’s rather a lot of teeth, and an underlying exploration of specific modern sicknesses via primeval mythology (redressed in manmade synthetics).

Elizabeth’s lecture promises to unpack and reveal the complex vision of one of Britain’s most unsettling and unexpectedly timely artists: it will cover the creation of the latest Gazelle Twin audio-visual project ‘Pastoral‘, including the influences and ideas behind this year’s Hobby Horse single and video (the aforementioned devilfest). En route, it will branch out into related fields exploring “fascism and horror in the English landscape past and present, (Elizabeth’s) own creative process from writing to recording/production, and her identity as a working artist and mother.”



 
Other musicians will be performing newly commissioned audio-visual music pieces. Bishi herself is performing in the middle of the bill on all three nights. There’s no specific clues as to what she’s doing, but on past form expect a melange of some or all of the following:

  • interlocking pop forms (from classic English to Eurosynth to Hindi filmi songs).
  • a headlong, full-on involvement with the intersection of grand costume and high fashion.
  • sitars, ukeleles, extended voice and Ableton synth controllers.
  • traditional folk material from the Balkans to Bengal; classical ideas from Hindustani tradition to contemporary opera.
  • vocal inspirations from Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono.
  • fervent and earnest positive politics (including song cycles about immigration, and a long-standing loyalty to queer club culture).
  • and finally, Bishi’s own strong and self-willed musical identity, which never rules out a willingness to interact or integrate with anyone from Sean Lennon to the London Symphony Orchestra (and with anything from interactive wind-harps to Christina Rosetti poems and giant floating holograms of Tony Benn).



 
By day, Miri Kat works as a Novation Music engineer, designing and finessing electronic musical instruments. She’s also a combined audio-visual artist and music producer, interested in algorithmic music, webtech and generative visuals, with further interests in hacking, live coding and immersive multimedia in general. Mainly composed with Max/MSP Supercollider (and with found sounds live-coded from open ecosystems with open-source tools), her productions provide “hyperactive textures (and) ephemeral collages, in turns frenetic and and lyrical, in a unique brand of glitchy grindcore for a post-Internet age.”


https://vimeo.com/159042254
 
Lia Mice‘s work covers multiple bases: live electronic artist, producer, DJ and instrument designer. Sometimes she’s to be found applying her live analog sampling skills across “high energy vinyl-hybrid” DJ sets of electro, Italo, tech noir, acid and “weird-pop”. At other times she applies them to live sets of original music alongside “self-hacked” instruments and Max/MSP, while her recordings can stir in eight-track tape mangling alongside influences from Laurie Anderson, BBC Radiophonics and electronica across forty years from German pioneers to American outliers. Live sets also feature both live voice sampling and Lia’s own custom-designed tactile-interface instruments – such as the Delia Derbyshire-inspired Reeltime sound manipulator (based on a broken reel-to-reel tape recorder) and the suspended tap’n’tilt/swing/spin ChandeLIA (designed to blend the organic bell-like sound of tapping on a metal chandelier with the sound of the electricity powering its lights).

A major WITCiH supporter, Lia also designs sonic sculptures, is a contributor to the Augmented Instruments Lab in the Centre for Digital Music and is “forever taking refuge in the mysteries of the sonic universe.” Her third solo album, ‘The Sampler As A Time Machine’, is a selection of “experimental dance x wave-y industrial x parallel-dimension pop tracks”. For the festival, she’ll be presenting a lecture based on the album and its studio experiments (themselves inspired by time travel writings by philosophers, physicists, neurologists and psychologists from Mark Fisher to Oliver Sacks to Stephen Hawking).



 
An explosively enthusiastic character (and WITCHiH regular), Vicky O’Neon performs in a dazzle of beats plus shocking day-glo costumery and makeup. Born Vicky Österberg in Finland, she was originally a class-topping, award-winning drummer and percussionist at the British Institute of Modern Music. She went on to work around the world as sessioneer and tour-band member for the likes of Pharell Williams, Johnny Marr, Hans Zimmer and assorted live-set DJs. Since summer 2017, she’s gone solo, buoyed up by the success and positivity of her parallel work in tech/instrumental teaching and in co-founding girl-promoting music initiatives Girls Rock London, Rock Donna and Racuma.

Vicky characterises herself as a “relentlessly optimistic Riot Grrrl multi-instrumentalist, with fluoro-glowing intentions to inspire the masses with harmony, laughter and love … on a mission from a higher plane of consciousness, devoted to the elevation of human vibration.” Her one-woman show involves her making a delightful proactive racket via drum pads, loopstations, acoustic percussion, body-worn percussion triggers and MicroKorg synth, plus her own “tongue-in-cheek lyrics and visuals”. As the founder of the Electric Vegetable Orchestra she also mixes tech with vegetable husbandry, carving new instruments from fruit, tubers and other root vegetables, then playing them through loops and effects to create “catchy tunes and singalongs with the audience.” However she chooses to entertain you at WITCiH, she’s certainly got plenty of options to choose from.



 
Vicky’s fellow BIMM graduate Rebekah Ubuntu is a multimedia performance artist, musician and culture scholar experimenting with “ideas of futurism, rebellion, and paradoxes” filtered through queer, non-binary, black and feminist perspectives. Their work spans synthwave, glitch music, techno and various forms of Afro-futurism (including reference to black poets and writers such as Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler, black rock and punk statement, and Afro-orientated pop/house/trap/beat forms) as well as electronic soundscapes and vocal manipulations.

As with most of the other participants, Rebecca’s got a strong allegiance to (and grounding in) club culture, and they’ve recently played sets at black pride, queer and general futurist events from Berlin to Norwich and Birmingham’s FLUID festival. Outside of clubwork, previous work has included last year’s ‘trans.mission.Q’ sonic installation project for Tate Britain (in which Rebecca posed as an extra-terrestrial DJ encouraging gallery visitors to “add your voice(s) to the live soundscape as we broadcast our earthly messages to the remotest regions of outer space”. They also recently guest-edited new music webzine ‘The Sampler’, interviewing five queer, trans & non-binary sound-and-music artists about the intersection of their identities with their music.

 
* * * * * * * *

Full dates:

  • WITCiH presents ‘The State of Gender?’, evening 1: Chagall (lecture) + Bishi + Miri Kat – Wednesday 26th September 2018
  • WITCiH presents ‘The State of Gender?’, evening 2: Di Mainstone (lecture) + Bishi + Lia Mice + Vicky O’Neon – Thursday 27th September 2018
  • WITCiH presents ‘The State of Gender?’, evening 3: Gazelle Twin (lecture) + Bishi + Rebekah Ubuntu – Friday 28th September 2018

All events are at The Barge House, 46a De Beauvoir Crescent, De Beauvoir Town, London, N1 5RY, England at 7.00pm. Further information is here, here and here.

Note that on the evening of the 27th – the day before her appearance at the festival – Gazelle Twin will also be making a live in-store appearance at Rough Trade East off Brick Lane, performing tracks from ‘Pastoral’.
 

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September 2018 – upcoming rock gigs – Rumour Cubes, Agathe Max and Dream Logic in London (14th September); Major Parkinson’s European autumn tour (various dates, 26th September to 6th October)

9 Sep

Rumour Cubes + Agathe Max + Dream Logic, 14th September 2018

Like progressive rock before it, post-rock ended up disappointingly short of genuinely inspiring exponents. The blueprint was all very well: retaining rock’s technology and what remained of its countercultural drive while dissolving its rigid methods, its predictable narratives and textures and its conservative exclusions In practise, few could reach (or be bothered to reach) the heights of the movement’s most inspired figures and their new paths: such as Tortoise’s integration of jazz, dub and electronica; Slint’s taut, grinding refusals; Godspeed’s sprawling/brooding scapes of punk-cinema-versus-conservatoire-grandeur; Talk Talk’s mendicant, increasingly hermetic passage from synth-pop to a dissolution of blues, prog and folk into distressed noise and silence; Moonshake’s abrasive post-everything groove and careening samples; Disco Inferno’s angst-ridden music concrete and social challenge. Most post-rockers, then and now, have stuck with a glowering reduction, a boiling-out of rock posturing leaving a glum muted residue of passive riffs and patterns… actually, more of an opt-out than a boil-out; in which say, the impact of Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit Of Eden’ is much-cited but rarely remembered in terms of how it can inform and colour the music, much less for the intimations it can throw up.

Though they’re not overturners – at least, not in the tradition of the bands I’ve cited above – third-generation London post-rockers Rumour Cubes are a welcome exception to the procession of drab refuseniks that make up the bulk of the post-rock movement. It’s probably partly because they’re proud and self-confessed “counter-revolution(aries)”, founded from the start around violin, guitar and electronics and obtaining their rock instrumentation later rather than using and rebelling against it from the start. Their origins, too, stick in post-rock’s teeth. Violinist Hannah Morgan lied about her knowledge of the genre in order to bluff her way into the starting lineup, while guitarist/main composer Adam Stark and drummer Omar Rahwangi were already impatient with its dour restrictions. In an interview with Chaos Theory, Adam’s stated that “as a band we are painfully aware of how boring post-rock can be… what we are trying to do is take what we find amazing about those bands that have influenced us and that are part of our community, and do something new with it.”

What Rumour Cubes have done is in as much in the in the lines of good prog rock as good post-rock – opening the gates to a variety of ingredients and described as a “luminous re-imagining of very many constituent parts” by ‘Louder than War’. As with underrated Aussie unit Apricot Rail, the toned-down interweave of guitars and the Krautrock groove bass often aim for a slow-building pastoral ecstasy while the band seeks a sweet spot that’s more country and roots than graphs and laboratory. The dancing interplay, in particular, between Hannah and viola player Terry Murphy ducks lemony-minimal string textures in favour of something that’s more country hoedown or folk fiddle. Rumour Cubes often hit their own delightful merge-point between the rustic and the highly technological, performing on bowed banjo and (the ubiquitous) post-rock glockenspiel in addition to the guitars, strings, keyboards and percussion, adding brass and harps where they can, and regularly bringing in instruments like the gestural technology of mi.mu gloves, new uses for joystick controllers, software-synchronised video displays and a battery of custom effects pedals to create new textures. Their gigs are, in consequence, joyous and open-ended experiences: collaborations, on and offstage with poets and filmmakers result in the music never stagnating.

Following two years of silence, and four without new music, Rumour Cubes return to live work via a gig at the Underdog Gallery near London Bridge, in order to premiere a batch of new music (including upcoming single ¡No Pasarán!, which will be out in a few week’s time). Meanwhile, here are some previous bits of Cubery to whet the appetite.



 
A couple of other acts are joining the show – firstly, amplified French acoustic violinist Agathe Max, who fled classical music around twenty years ago in favour of improvised sonic textural music and electrically-enhanced string-drones. Currently playing with Kuro and Mésange, she’s appearing alone on this occasion in order to offer a set of solo violin works. Secondly, Dream Logic: the recent solo project from Adam Fulford (previously known as the guitarist for Bristolian post-rockers This Is My Normal State) It’s pealing, cool-busting stuff which sees Adam all but drowning his own plagent piano lines, guitars and basses in eager tides of yearning orchestral strings and feverish noise clutter, bringing him comparisons to Nils Frahm and to A Winged Victory for the Sullen. This is Dream Logic’s third show (following previous support slots for Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment’s rulebreaking alter-ego the Night Shift and for rebranded ambient post duo VLMV (previously ALMA) and live arrangements usually involve a string quartet: let’s hope he comes up with the goods on this occasion, too.





 
Echoes And Dust presents:
Rumour Cubes + Agathe Max + Dream Logic
The Underdog Gallery, Arch 6, Crucifix Lane, Southwark, London, SE1 3JW, England
Friday 14th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here

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A little later in the month, jumpy and unpredictable Norwegian art-rockers Major Parkinson are dipping into England as part of an autumn European tour presenting their new ‘Blackbox’ album (and which also includes Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands). A jaggedly muscular alternative pop proposition, Major Parkinson’s music recalls a host of eclectic forebears such as The Monochrome Set and Faith No More: most notably, they’ve become a hit with the sometimes partisan (and often hard-to-impress) Cardiacs fanbase, who appreciate unrestrained complex melodicism and truckloads of energy, and have been up and yelping about this band for a while now.

I can’t really top this for an intro…

“Major Parkinson write tunes. But with influences from across the rock and classical genres (from The Beatles to Cardiacs) and a warped vision of the musical world, their tunes are like no other. You may hear a snippet of an East European folk song, a nursery rhyme, a stage musical, even a rock anthem, all played out on a range of instruments that a symphony orchestra couldn’t muster – synths, strings, old typewriters, brass and reputedly a decommissioned jet fighter engine. The musical scores behind their songs are both monumental and breathtaking – explosive synth and guitar sections that pound at your heart and then instantly make it melt with beautiful choral harmonies, and then drawn in you will dance and sing along as if centre-stage in a West End show.

“With songs too that cover subjects as diverse as Pavlovian hounds to ducks in the pond, the sheer scale and absurdity of the Norwegian band’s extraordinary musical world can only be truly appreciated by seeing their seven-piece stage performances live.”



 
All of the upcoming shows appear to be solo flights for the Major, other than London, Berlin and St Gallen. No news yet on the Berlin guest, but in London support comes (bizarrely, but delightfully) from Sterbus, the quirky Anglophile Italian art-popper similarly beloved of Cardiacs fans and who’s sitting on what promises to be one of 2018’s sunniest and most enjoyable rock albums: he’ll be playing with a band including longterm woodwind-and-vocal sidekick Dominique D’Avanzo, Pocket Gods’ keyboard wizard Noel Storey and Cardiacs drummer Bob Leith. In St Gallen, the gig’s being opened by bouzouki-toting Dutch psych-exotica rockers Komodo, whose music also draws on raga, hip hop, desert blues, rumba and ’60s harmony pop and surf rock.



 
Full dates:

  • The Hare & Hounds, 106 High Street, Kings Heath, Birmingham, B14 7JZ, England, Wednesday 26th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • Exchange, 72-73 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EJ, England, Thursday 27th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • The Water Rats, 328 Grays Inn Road, Kings Cross, London, WC1X 8BZ, England, Friday 28th September 2018 7.30pm (with Sterbus) – information here and here
  • Soup Kitchen, 31-33 Spear Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M1 1DF, England, Saturday 29th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • Hafenklang, Große Elbstrasse 84, 22767 Hamburg, Germany, Monday 1st October 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
  • Cassiopeia, Revaler Str. 99, 10245 Berlin, Germany, Tuesday 2nd October 2018, 7.30pm (with support t.b.c) – information here, here and here
  • Backstage München, Reitknechtstr. 6, 80639 München, Germany, Wednesday 3rd October 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
  • Grabenhalle, Unterer Graben 17, 9000 St.Gallen, Switzerland, Thursday 4th October 2018, 7.30pm (with Komodo) – information here, here and here
  • Orange Peel, Kaiserstraße 39, 60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Friday 5th October 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
  • ProgPower Europe 2018 @ Jongerencentrum Sjiwa, Hoogstraat 1a, 5991 XC Baarlo, Netherlands, Saturday 6th October 2018, 8.00pm – information here, here and here


 

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September 2018 – more Woodburner world/acoustica/pop sessions at Dalston Eastern Curve Gardens – Rum Buffalo Trio, Joe Corbin and Lorkin O’Reilly (4th September); M w S, Boe Huntress and Equal Echo (11th September); The Age Of Luna, Marine and Desert Rain (18th September); Choro Alvorada, Max Baillie and Li Alba (25th September)

27 Aug

More outdoor summer Woodburner gigs at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, as the season moves into its final month: holding autumn at bay while it can.

* * * * * * * *

The 4th September show features festival legends Rum Buffalo, bluesman Joe Corbin, and touring NYC artist Lorkin O’Reilly.

“Rum Buffalo fornicate with forgotten songs. They mingle in many genres but feed off the rich antique roots of swing and moody blues infiltrated with hip hop beats and filthy synth lines. It’s a surreal, vaudevillian show with outrageous costumes, twisted vocal harmonies, powerful beats and outrageous horn sounds. On the night expect a stripped-off trio show, revealing the core of their beastly natures.


 
“Joe Corbin is a blues and soul musician from South London. An accomplished guitarist, powerful singer, and true performer, watching Joe play is bound to blow you away.


 
“Since arriving in Hudson, NY from his native Scotland, Lorkin O’Reilly has been making a name for himself on the New York folk scene with his delicate guitar technique and deft lyricism. This year has seen him share stages with the likes of Charlie Parr, Nadia Reid, Willy Mason, Mick Flannery and Ciaran Lavery. His debut album ‘Heaven Depends’ was released on 24th August on Team Love Records.”


 

* * * * * * * *

The 11th September gig features R&B/soul collective M w S, North London songstress Boe Huntress, and new electronic collaboration Equal Echo.

“M w S is a London-based duo formed in Italy in 2013. Their musical influences are artists from soul, R&B and nu-soul (such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill) mixed with contemporary neo-jazz artists like Tom Misch and Masego and electro-influenced artists like Vallis Alps and Louis Matters. Their first EP ‘Swim’ is a mix of pop, contemporary R&B and nu-soul with lyrics that sometimes recall their home country; their latest release, Island, produced by Grammy-award winning London producer Aamir Yaqub (Rihanna, Ne-yo) is a soulful chilled track full of tropical and summery vibes. M w S are currently working on their next EP, due out in 2019.


 

“Boe Huntress grew up in Kent, playing and writing music from an early age. Her first job was writing songs for an online magazine, reviewing video games in song-form: a crash course in the art of songwriting, recording and producing, as well as in receiving immediate response to her work online. Studying Literature at university, Boe was inspired by both myth and feminism: beginning to play live, she was soon chosen by the IC Music Network as one of twelve up-and-coming artists to tour across Europe.

“Boe’s debut EP, ‘A Female Power’, is an earthy, epic debut reminiscent of both Kate Bush and Bjork. The EP is inspired by four female mythological figures (“we’ve been deprived of certain ways of seeing woman – this EP is an exploration of the darker, more unexplored aspects…”) and Boe’s taken it one step further by creating an immersive audio-visual show alongside the record. The EP is brought to life onstage by Aletta Dina on drums and Melanie Powell on synths and electronics, while Boe fronts the band with her raw, ethereal vocal and electric guitar.


 
“Equal Echo is a new collaboration from Londoners Hector Plimmer (DJ and producer/creator of last year’s acclaimed ‘Sunshine’ album of broken beat, trip hop, instrumental soul and field recordings) and Alexa Harley (fellow producer, songwriter and collaborating singer for Hybrid Minds, Tom Misch and Mt. Wolf). The pair initially started working together with a one-off collaboration in mind: however, once they started, it soon became clear this would be more than just a feature project. For the last year-and-a-half Harley and Hector have been meeting two days a week, almost every week, creating music that shares an equal input of musical ideas from one another.

The amalgamation of styles and musical backgrounds blend together to make a sound unlike either Harley or Hector produce alone, whilst still retaining the best attributes from both. Not only are they musical partners, they are also best friends. Over the last two years the dynamic live show has been previewed at Archspace and Ghost Notes, with their premier festival appearances at Brainchild and Glastonbury Festivals.”

 
* * * * * * * *

The last show, on 18th September, features London-based hip hop/R&B trio The Age Of Luna, sensual pop mythologists Marine and atmospheric Finnish world-folkers Desert Rain.

“The Age of Luna – “average joes with powerful minds” – number Butch Arkas, his schoolmate Kyote Noir and singer/saxophonist Daniella Wizard. Each brings their own influences and sensibilities to the table, and the end results reflect not just the four different musical personalities but the blend of tradition and technology that saw them get together in the first place. Despite their relative youth, the band has played over a hundred shows with festival plays at the likes of Glastonbury, Wireless, Secret Garden party and Live At Leeds. Their debut, self-titled album was released earlier this year to great acclaim and the band are busy working on new music due for release later this year.

 
“London-based Marine – formed in 2014 by Cara Sebastian (vocals and guitar), Beth Dariti (bass) and Kaja Magsam (drums), and described by ‘The Line Of Best Fit’ as “the musical equivalent of a creamy post-coital blush” – have just released their debut album ‘Fable Electric’, via The Vinyl Factory (following the beguiling singles Mount Olympus and Sirens).

“Produced by Rob Ellis (Anna Calvi, PJ Harvey, Cold Specks), ‘Fable Electric’ is an album that brims with exploratory wonder and bridges the gaps between spectral pop, dreamy grunge and ambient folk. Both wild and elegant, it is framed by intuitive beats, bass hypnosis that playfully counters melody, and a deep love of contrast. The vocal lines braid together over hooky guitar lines in a complex plait of old and new, understated and operatic, light and dark. The songs of Marine crystallized from mythology and fables, mingling with personal words and emotions to form tales of the ordinary and extraordinary. Their songs reference the underworld, seal demons, mighty Kraken, werewolves, witches and Gods, and even question the very nature of storytelling itself.


 
“Jyväskylä quintet Desert Rain are songwriter Ville Lähdepolku on guitar and vocals, Alex Lee on drums, Farshad Sanati on santour and vocals, Petri Pentikäinen on tabla and darbouka, and Ville Määttä on bass, keyboards, voice and a cluster of international wind instruments including Armenian duduk. They play hypnotic world-folk music that tends towards the mystic. From Finland to Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, just for you.”


https://soundcloud.com/user-140301247/nay-zam
 

* * * * * * * *

The last show, on 25th September, features choro band Choro Alvorada, international violin virtuoso Max Baillie, and the Latin-inspired songwriter Li Alba.

“Choro Alvorada is a London-based group who play Brazilian choro music of all styles, including lesser-known works and original compositions. Choro emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century as a mixture of European harmony with African rhythm and improvisation, in a similar way to jazz and ragtime. The name comes from the Portuguese verb “chorar”, which means “to cry”, and indeed choro music certainly has its fair share of tear-inducing laments. But choro is mostly known for its lively, playful and syncopated melodies in the traditional setting of a “roda”; that is, with musicians playing informally around the table (drinking plenty of beer – provided by the loving fans, of course!).

“Choro Alvorada have the traditional instrumentation of the ‘regional’ choro ensemble: clarinet (played by Andrew Woolf), flute (played by Rachel Hayter), 7-string guitar (played by Luiz Morais), cavaquinho (played by Jeremy Shaverin) and pandeiro (played by Alua Nascimento). They play a wide variety of styles of choro, exploring influences from all over Brazil (and London). They play with the irresistable swing of samba from the south and baião from the north-east, and even in the style of frevo, a carnival dance from the north-east! Many of the choros they play are their own compositions, so you may find a Cockney twist to them. They famously continued to play through a thunderstorm at the Curve Garden in Summer 2017, bringing a portion of the audience onto the stage with them in the style of the traditional roda.


 
“Maverick violinist and violist Max Baillie is truly one-in-a-million. Born to the sound of his twin sisters practising scales and argeggios, raised by his concert-cellist father and violin-teacher mother, before travelling the world and gaining a first-class degree from Cambridge University in… Politics. Apart from that short sabbatical, Max’s whole life has been music. Yet when you watch and listen, there is a spontaneity in his playing that makes you realise that in spite of all the history, education, and practise, a Max Baillie has to be born rather than made. Max-in-a-million is an international artist, having performed in Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, France, Australia and many other corners in the last twelve months, both as a concert soloist and with other projects including ZRI, who fuse sounds of Brahms with gypsy and Hungarian folk. Witness.


 
“Singer. Linguist. Lover of Latin, jazz and folk traditions. Voice of velvet and force of nature. Li Alba grew up in London, listening to traditional Spanish and Greek music whilst training as a classical singer. Graduating from Guildhall juniors in music and RADA in acting, she fell away from opera and into wild Easter European theatre arts, as a professional member of the Gardzienice Theatre Company. Partaking in independent arts projects around the world she has worked through music and staged mediums with global practitioners including Katie Mitchell, Mark Ravenhill, James Brennan and Julian Maynard Smith.

“Li has contributed to London’s night life scene by supporting in the launches of two venues, Kansas Smitty’s and Juju’s Bar & Stage, and is now embarking on her solo career with a plethora of musicians with global flavours and feels. She is accompanied by guitarist Telmo Souza who has played for Rhythms Of The City and Ines Loubet (amongst many others), and who leads the astonishing Afro-samba ensemble Caravela.”


 
* * * * * * * *

All events are at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, 13 Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England on Tuesday evenings. Dates below:

  • Rum Buffalo Trio + Joe Corbin + Lorkin O’Reilly – Tuesday 4th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • M w S + Boe Huntress + Equal Echo – Tuesday 11th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • The Age of Luna + Marine + Desert Rain – Dalston Curve Garden – Tuesday 18th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • Choro Alvorada + Max Baillie + Li Alba – Dalston Curve Garden – Tuesday 25th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here

 

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August 2018 – husk, rime and lanterns – a double dose of Jack Hayter in a Gravesend lightship (18th August)

14 Aug

I like the idea of a mobile arts venue. A seabound one is even better. LV21, a forty-metre decommissioned former lightship, once kept other ships from foundering on the rocks along the Kentish coast. Now it’s a floating art space and performance facility, moving intermittently between Thames estuary towns. Although it’s been resting at a long-term Gravesend mooring since summer 2016, LV21 still fits the measure for art-on-the-move (while its sister vessel, LV18, performs a similar function at a similar mooring up the coast at Harwich).

International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend @ LV21, 18th August 2018

Wherever it happens to be at the time, LV21 opens up in full each summer for the overlapping International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend and International Lighthouse Heritage Weekend, allowing visitors to explore the vessel and immerse themselves in lightship and lighthouse history from around the world. Also on offer at the event this year – this weekend – are lessons in tying sailor’s knots, a soldering and radio workshop (build your own pocket amplifier and speaker) and Nicola Pollard of stripped-down drama company Up The Road Theatre inviting discussion for the next UTR production, ‘Peril At Sea’ (set to explore “stories, memories, myths and songs of smuggling, shipwrecks and survival” and to tour around English coastal towns including Lowestoft, Portsmouth and Wells-next-the-Sea).

Jack Hayter @ ILLW 2018, Gravesend, 18th August 2018Of course, it’s music rather than knots that’s attracting my interest. Also on hand is Jack Hayter – wandering multi-instrumentalist, onetime Hefner member, ex-Dollboy-er, Ralegh Long and Papernut Cambridge collaborator; the writer and performer of memorable contemporary folk songs and a relatively recent new Gravesend resident. He has two interesting – and very different – nautical music productions going on in the bowels of the ship.

The first of these is ‘Flashes & Occultations’, a sonic installation in the generator room comprising “a seventy-seven-minute-long sonic improvisation on lighthouse life.” It was originally released by London indie label Where It’s At Is Where You Are in 2017 as part of their ‘Seven@77‘ compilation, on which it loomed massively over the thirteen other pieces (each of them clocking in at a measly seventy-seven seconds). In typically dry and witty fashion, Jack describes it as a salvage job on a foolhardy, ambitious effort to sidestep the requested seventy-seven-minute pedal steel improvisation in favour of an attempt to make “a transient sound sculpture from the identification patterns of distant lighthouses, buoys and light vessels; to convert their flashes and occultations into small voltages using telescopes, light-sensitive resistors and photodiodes, then to use those derived signals to trigger samples and control analogue synths. I was overambitious and my experiments were largely a technical failure. I also got cold and muddy while recording foghorns. Worse still, those supposedly unique and exciting light patterns often turned out to be “one flash every twenty seconds” or “red occulting thrice every minute on a Tuesday. Then I ran out of time.”

Salvaging the project wreckage, Jack returned to the original brief – improvising on pedal steel around field recordings, stirring in documentary dialogue, eight-bit synth pads and calling in a few friends and favours to obtain further ingredients: poetry, wordless harmony singing, harmonium drones and electronic oscillator. Despite his disclaimers, he came up with an effective, charming piece – at different points lulling, humorous and lyrically haunting – which absolutely deserves its second life amongst the Gravesend solenoids and gauges, where Jack claims he might play along with it “from time to time” on live fiddle. Here’s a short excerpt with accompanying video (filmed up at the Firth of Forth) – also, if you’re curious but can’t make it down to LV21 this Saturday, here’s the whole piece in audio.



 
Jack’s second musical contribution of the day is the one-off free live gig he’s performing in the ship (on deck? in the hold?) during the evening, in which he’s going to be performing “a set of my songs and stories which will loosely follow the river from Deptford down to Gravesend finishing up at Margate, with diversions.” Here’s where you get to see Jack in the raw – a rangy, weatherbeaten feller with a voice as chewed-up and resilient as an ancient poster still clinging onto a seafront fence. His recent album, ‘Abbey Wood‘, is one of 2018’s under-the-radar triumphs, a compelling song collection recorded in defiantly threadbare folk fashion but with infusions of avant-garde turn-up-and-play instrumentation. Its ace in the hole, however, is Jack’s songwriter vision. As ever, he writes with a documentarian’s timing and eye for sparse, telling detail; with a poet’s knack for sifting detritus and forgotten trash to find significance; and with a determination to tell stories from those broad, deliberately ignored margins of society which actually make up its overlooked majority.

Jack’s songbook includes tales of post-war slump and of the rural working class swept into conflict; the hopes and dreams of sewage workers; the luckless POWs sunk with the SS Andora Star; the fumblings of early love under the shadow of the Cold War. Crucially – and despite his sharp, assured literacy – he always writes these from the inside and on the level, rather than as booky preachings from above. These are stories about people on lean means, living within strung-together moments: a compassionate, sometimes subtly angry cinema of life’s grain outside the slick and aspirational. They vouch and voice for the itinerate, the sidelined; the workers who just get on with it; the kids with foggy futures stirred and impelled by vast indifferent forces.

Jack’s delivery of these tales, meanwhile, is battered, warm, inclusive, strangely dignified, and mesmeric. Check out an earlier review I did of one of Jack’s previous live performances; or have a dip into the selection of tracks below.





 
Jack Hayter @ International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend 2018
Light Vessel 21, (currently moored at) St Andrews Quay, Royal Pier Road, Gravesend, Kent DA12 2BD, England
Saturday 18 August 2018
• ILLW full event duration: 12.00pm-11.00pm
• Flashes & Occultations installation: 12.00pm-4.00pm
• Jack Hayter free live set: 7.00pm-11.00pm
– free event – information here, here, here and here
 

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August 2018 – more Woodburner world-acoustica sessions at Dalston Eastern Curve Gardens – Solomon’s Garden, The Hungry Mothers and Miranda Joy (7th August); Sannie Fox, Harvey Causon and Gus Harvey (14th August); Whiskey Moon Face, Meïkhâneh and Tommy Ashby (21st August); Gnawa Blues All Stars, James Riley and Michael Sebastian (28th August)

2 Aug

More outdoor summer Woodburner gigs at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, as the season moves into its third and penultimate month.

Here’s what they say they’re offering…

* * * * * * * *

The 7th August show features neo-soul collective Solomon’s Garden, Brighton-based Americana band The Hungry Mothers, and the singer-songwriter Miranda Joy.

“Solomon’s Garden is a collective of three university friends who came together to make music with cleverly worded and thought-provoking lyrics, and soulful, catchy, head-bopping beats. After spontaneously releasing their first song ‘Sand Dunes’ in January 2016, the group had an incredible reaction from the general public and within a short period of time the song hit its first thousand plays. It was then that the group knew they were on to something special. Two years, one hiatus and three EPs later the band continues to thrive as a dynamic four piece. Between landing a slot at Latitude festival ‘17, being chosen for BBC Introducing’s record of the week, and becoming a favourite with Sofar Sounds London; the band are fast becoming a name to be recognised on the emerging music scene, with a distinct and resonant sound that continues to evolve.


 
“Producers of feelgood Americana residing within the south-east of the UK, The Hungry Mothers immediately began winning fans since their birth last year as a four-piece comprised of warming harmonies, laid-back roots and country blues. Their debut single Tiger Song (released on At The Helm Records) is the confident and mature start for a band who are inviting everyone on their journey.


 
“Miranda Joy is a twenty-two-year-old singer-songwriter currently based in London. She performs her meaningfully-written songs with a powerful and soulful voice with moving piano accompaniment. She has performed at many venues, festivals and events, including the Vortex Jazz Club, The Village Underground, Rye International Jazz and Blues festival, the Great Escape Festival and Nasty Women UK. Last year one of her original songs, The Fall, was featured on BBC1’s coverage of the NFL Super Bowl highlights. Currently, she is continuing to perform at venues across the UK and working on releasing her first EP.”


 
* * * * * * * *

The 14th August show features South African blues artist Sannie Fox, electronic/jazz from Harvey Causon, and trip hop act Gus Harvey.

“Sannie Fox is a singer and guitarist who has released two critically acclaimed albums and will release her third studio album ‘My Soul Got Stranger’ this year. With her voracious voice, and her fingers to her electric guitar, Fox sways across an evolving sonic tapestry of desert blues, soul and psychedelic rock sounds. Last decade, Fox formed the blues-rock 3-piece Machineri and released a self-titled album in 2010; in 2015 she released her debut solo album ‘Serpente Masjien’. She has toured South Africa, the UK and Asia and is currently based between the UK and South Africa.


 

“Calm and understated, Bristol’s Harvey Causon is turning heads with his deft take on contemporary R&B and percussive electronica, and with the powerful, brooding vocal that sounds far more world-wearied than his twenty years. After moving to Bristol last year, Harvey quickly released his ‘Introspect’ EP’, a collection of songs that he had been sitting on for a while. Eclectic but polished, the stand out song from the release, ‘Systems’ was given a remix from rising hip hop duo Cabrakid (earning Harvey an appearance at Cabra’s support slot with Loyle Carner after the rapper heard the track).

“In October, Harvey released his single ‘Frisson’ with local Bristol label Leisure Records: ‘Worn You’, his most recent release with production collaborator Gabriel Gifford, was playlisted by Radio 1 as the BBC Introducing Track of the Week and added to the Burberry and Radio 1 Spotify playlists. With nods to other contemporary artists the ambient piano ballad has a nervous energy but its dub tinged rhythm, clever lyrical content and fragile yet soothing vocal set it apart. Having already played sold-out shows supporting Tokio Myers, Puma Blue and Porches as well as Dot to Dot and 2000 Trees festivals, the summer bookings are shaping up to be just as imposing with The Great Escape, The Downs Festival and All Points East all in the pipeline. His impressive live set features both Gabriel Gifford and drummer Ben Toon.


 
“Gus Harvey is a London-born soul singer with roots in hip hop and jazz. This August she releases debut EP ‘? History (1 of 4)’ on her own label. Her first single – Witches – was pure hip hop and received radio acclaim from DJs including Lauren Laverne and Nemone on BBC Radio 6 Music, as well as being Clash Music’s Track of the Day. The new EP exhibits four different styles; acoustic soul, jazz-hip hop, trip hop and bi gbeat (from collaborations with Audiobullys’ Tom Dinsdale). ‘? History’ is Harvey’s self-portrait and DIY protest against an industry squashing emerging artists into one genre. As sole mistress of all her ships, Harvey creates her visuals with close friend and London visionary Netti Hurley. Tonight she performs a unique, stripped acoustic soul set especially for Woodburner.”


 
* * * * * * * *

The 21st August show features transcontinental jazz-folkers Whiskey Moon Face, Persia/Mongolia/Eastern Europe-influenced folk trio Meikhaneh and sessioneer-turned-ancestral-folkie Tommy Ashby.

“The result of a thousand drunken nights, countless dreamy days, and years of musical adventuring, Whiskey Moon Face take you on a voyage into a bohemian underworld which you never knew existed. Born into a puddle of whiskey beneath a stark winter moon and raised by cold winds, schooled in the warming spirits and hungry for more, Whiskey Moon Face manage a natural, graceful sound built from many ports. Always innovating and improvising with stark originality, Louisa Jones’ troupe of underground musicians play with a virtuosity you could never expect. Songs which speak of the unspeakable, with understated humour, captivating storytelling and a transcendent spirituality. ‘Folk Radio UK’ compared them to “having been at one of those wild and joyous youthful parties in somebody else’s parents’ house that you’ll remember for years.”


 
“Meïkhâneh’s compositions are fed by imagination, improvisation and traditional music from Europe, Mongolia and Iran. The luminous and captivating voices carry the power of East European singings, the aerial melodies of the great spaces, as well as the depth of the khöömii, Mongolian overtone singing. One can hear traveling cords recalling the steppes of Asia and Andalusia. The chiseled rhythms of percussion draw on the Persian tradition. Meïkhâneh takes us to the heart of a music without borders that caresses the soul. Its name borrowed from Persian poetry means the «House of Intoxication». We let ourselves be carried…


 

“Tommy Ashby’s childhood was always going to be musical. Travelling the country playing guitar in his father’s traditional blues band and raised on the Scottish pub singaround culture, his initial musical experiences were immersive and natural. His teens were spent pouring over his parents record collections of American songwriters such as Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings and Jeff Buckley. The eclectic mix of American roots, blues and country, combined with his Scottish folk roots, all seeped into his music.

“After acquiring a PhD focussed on studying and modelling the human perception of sound, Tommy cut his teeth behind the scenes as a session musician for the likes of Nina Nesbitt and Holly Macve, toured the UK and Europe as support act for Rhodes and Tom Speight as well as playing a number of headline sell-out shows in London this year including events curated by Communion, Never Fade and the Southbank Centre. His debut EP, produced by Chris Bond (Ben Howard) was self-released in late November 2016 and entered at No.5 in the iTunes singer-songwriter chart. His new EP, Restless Love, was recorded and mixed with Grammy award winner Sam Okell in his home studio near the wild North Cornwall coast.”


 
* * * * * * * *
The 28th August show features Moroccan guimbri sensations Gnawa Blues All Stars, Anglo-American guitarist James Riley, and improvisation/loop wizard Michael Sebastian.

“Simo Lagnawi is an ambassador of Gnawa culture in the UK. This charismatic creator is the leader of Gnawa Blues All Stars and has featured on BBC World service, CNN World, BBC 3, Vox Africa, & many more radio shows and magazines around the world. He has performed at a host of festivals including Glastonbury, Secret Garden Party, Latitude and Boom Town. Playing traditional Gnawa music from Morocco, this sacred trance music forms the core of his work with his bands Electric Jalaba, Gnawa Griot, and Gnawa Blues Allstars. Simo continuously pushes new boundaries fusing Gnawa with music from countries such as Gambia, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, India, Japan, Venezuela and the Caribbean. Look out for special guest musicians playing with the band!


 
Born of a transatlantic relationship, James Riley grew up in south-east London listening to the folk and soul sound of ‘70s America and wrote his first melody at the age of four. His first guitar, acquired at the age of nine, became the tool for surviving the tumult of a nowhere place, and helped James find somewhere he felt he belonged. In his early twenties, he took off, alone once again, hitchhiking and busking through Europe from Amsterdam to Istanbul, writing songs along the way. Back in the UK, these songs became a band, but eventually James had to shed another skin, and disembarked in Nashville, Tennessee. Here he found his producer and they set about making the album which had travelled with him to his maternal homeland, where it could finally get free.


 
South African-born, Edinburgh-educated, and living in London, Michael Sebastian is a musician and loop-artist who improvises to uplift the capital. Whenever possible, Sebastian is on the streets of London, improvising with a loop-pedal, a mic and a bright pink guitar. He will attest that this has been the most important part of his musical education, and has taught him to speak to people through his instrument. he creates music from a broad range of experience and styles. His affinity for groove and feel allows for conflicting styles to fluidly co-exist, feeling human and natural. His most recent album, ‘Kayanda’ demonstrates him harnessing live, improvised looping onto record. After developing the recording software himself, Sebastian went into a shed in the country for two weeks to improvise an album, and came out with fourteen tracks. The album is written with the sensibilities of modern dance and electronic music, and retains the freedom, rawness and depth of world music and jazz, while still creating melodies that are hard to forget.”


 
* * * * * * * *

All events are at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, 13 Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England on Tuesday evenings. Dates below:

  • Solomon’s Garden + The Hungry Mothers + Miranda Joy – Tuesday 7th August 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • Sannie Fox + Harvey Causon + Gus Harvey – Tuesday 14th August 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • Whiskey Moon Face + Meïkhâneh + Tommy Ashby – Tuesday 21st August 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • Gnawa Blues All Stars + James Riley + Michael Sebastian – Tuesday 28th August 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here

 

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July 2018 – some post-Doran thoughts on smaller music festivals; and next week’s EppyFest in Cheltenham (27th & 28th July)

21 Jul

John Doran of ‘The Quietus’ wrote a pithy, on-the-nose article a while back about the ongoing corruption of big music festivals, lambasting them as “unsatisfying money hoovers designed to deplete your bank account for minimal return… a heavily branded and patronisingly over-mediated experience – with little in the way of the rough round the edges, unexpected, challenging or genuinely exciting experience that makes being a music fan worthwhile; just a massive spoonfed dose of the ubiquitous, the hyped and the monolithically popular.”

As a follow-up punch, John slashed a hole in the backdrop in order to expose the ethics behind the festival business: how, even as you’re frolicking in a ludicrously overpriced facsimile of countercultural free-spiritedness, your ticket money wriggles its way into the war chests and “shockingly regressive campaigns” of suspect billionaires intent on crushing any genuine counterculture that’s little more than a cheery mask on a product, funding a host of life-killing causes including anti-LGBTQ, anti-union and anti-immigration initiatives. Unsurprisingly, he concluded “personally I’d sooner go to a smaller, more grass-roots independent festival and have a clutch of genuinely odd, uplifting, joyous and memorable experiences on a smaller, freer scale.” He lists plenty of smaller, more conscientious festivals which might better suit your ethics or your conscience – Supersonic, End of the Road, many more. Modestly, he didn’t mention ‘The Quietus’s own efforts .

I might lack John’s edge, but I’ll still say amen to all that. There’s also always the option of going further off the map, seeking out festivals beyond the tents’n’burgers belch. I’ve covered some such here… Marchlands’ annual musical/theatrical celebration of reaching across borders and understanding history; the composer-driven London New Wind Festival; New York’s wonderfully brainy and diverse Ecstatic Music Festival. On a more domestic level, there’s next month’s Whole World Window 2 in Preston, raising urgent money for psychedelic hero Tim Smith’s health care while also functioning as a focussing lens for assorted rock and pop acts existing in a rowdy, complex continuum outside ot the mainstream. The staunchest supportive and communal ethics, unsurprisingly, still hover around punk events, those pass-around-a-donation-bucket battles for big values in small places (I might often be bored by the music, but I profoundly admire the commitment and the generosity of spirit).

* * * * * * * *

As regards the coming week, Gloucestershire’s EppyFest – just a week away now – is the epitome of a pocket festival. Now heading in its seventh year, it also pretty much defines “boutique”. Its amiably knitted-together selections of psychedelic rock and pop, folk, electric and acoustic chamber music and accomplished instrumentalist is undeniably cosy, but in the right way – unashamed and unaggressive, slightly specialised while toting an inclusive audience ethic. There’s a rosy English glow to it, alright, but not the kind which shoulders out differences while indulging a truculent and moneyed bucolic fantasy. The Eppyfest England is one which is comfortable in itself, but not too smug to look outwards: mostly white, but not bleached and angry. In the best sense and intimation, it’s a liberal parish.

Gong, 2018

The Friday lineup, starting in the evening – is the briefer concert, with just two sets of performers. The headliners are the current and ongoing version of cosmic-rock libertine troupe Gong, still romping along after the death of founding holy prankster Daevid Allen. This isn’t the first time there’s been a post-Allen Gong: percussionist Pierre Moerlen floated a de-hippified mid’-70s jazz-rock version around Europe which had little to do with Allen’s mischievous space rock parables, while the band’s original feminine-mystiquer Gilli Smyth led a sporadic Mother Gong version at points in the ’80s. This, however, is the first Gong that’s been a direct continuation of Allen’s work: thumbing its collective nose at his departure from music and from life, and mourning him by celebrating his ethos.

This Gong iteration is helmed by delightfully wayward, larger-than-life Anglo-Persian prodigy (and ‘Misfit City’ favourite) Kavus Torabi, who established himself as one of the premier, most open-eared British psychedelic talents while with The Monsoon Bassoon and Cardiacs, has continued it with Knifeworld and Guapo, and who has in effect been rehearsing for Gong leadership for the whole of his musical life. Expect the same applecart-overturning riffs, the mingled brass and electric strings, the space-dust party atmospheres. The old firm’s still a family.



 
In support, Liverpudlian guitarist Neil Campbell is arguably one of the most gifted musicians still unknown to the general public. An omnivorous stylistic polymath, he’s mastered contemporary classical, progressive rock, jazz and assorted other styles to the point in which he can pass seamlessly between and through them; and he comes trailing awestruck references from guitar scholars and crossover music master musicians alike. Working off nylon- and steel-strung acoustic guitars (with a chain of echoes, loop pedals and other processors) he creates detailed, fiery electro-acoustic tapestries when playing solo: given the opportunity, he’ll also roll out orchestral concerti, small ensemble pieces, vital building-block contributions to the larger works of other, and site-specific concerts in venues of all kinds.



 
North Sea Radio Orchestra headline Saturday’s seven hours of music – as ever, they draw together Anglo-pastoral classical, a stolen kiss or two of folk melody, crossover chamber music and English art-rock. (They’ve covered Robert Wyatt, as well as old Christmas carols and Vernon Elliot). Sixteen years in, they’re a little smaller and tighter than they used to be – the choir is long gone and the ensemble streamlined, with most of the Victorian poetry settings consigned back to the bookshelf in favour of more personal lyrics of chalkhills and children, lost loved ones and the make-do-and-mend of life.

North Sea Radio Orchestra, 2nd June 2018

They’re still a quietly enchanting proposition, gently webbed together by a deceptive fragility, a village-singer tone and Craig Fortnam’s elegant compositions, and they grow ever more comfortable in themselves as the years pass. From German kosmische, they bring in that cosmic powerplant throb: from Frank Zappa and Canterbury, the somersaults of harmony and tinkle of xylophone (with the lyrical coarseness and silly whimsy gently steered out of the picture); from English chamber music, the gentle green ache. All soft borders, all subtle mind.



 
Second down the bill is Doris Brendel. The Vienna-born multi-instrumentalist daughter of concert-piano legend Alfred Brendel, she originally made her mark in ‘90s neoprog and underground AOR providing vocals, guitar, sax and flageolet to The Violet Hour: when that didn’t last, she applied herself to whatever was going while cultivating her own records in her own time. She’s refined her earlier approach, but what you get now is still pretty much what you got then – a singer who can go from a dream-folk murmur to a gutsy rhythm-and-blues blast, who puts on an assured show of muscular rock and costumed pizazz. An old-school rock chick, but one who’s taken control and honed it to excellence. There might be differences in tone, but latter-day ladyrockers like She Makes War and Ciara Clifford might look to her and immediately see a spiritual older sister.



 
Via a shifting gambler’s hand of interrelated projects – and a proven ability to survive practical and artistic disruption – the persistently thoughtful Oxford prog-rock collective Sanguine Hum have explored music for nearly twenty years now. In many respects, they’re a back-to-first-principles prog-initiative. Rather than constructing vast vanity pieces (as if to impress their aspirational Mellotronic forebears), the Hum are based very much in a lush’n’lambent ’70s pop mode – as least as much Neil Young, Steely Dan or David Bowie as Genesis, Zappa or Canterbury – which they can then wilfully and logically expand to bigger and broader things (engulfing and building upon later influences such as Boards Of Canada along the way).

For this acoustic-slanted EppyFest slot, lead singer/guitarist Joff Winks and keyboard player Matt Baber (the latter fresh from last month’s release of his “ambient prog minimalism” solo album ‘Suite For Piano and Electronics‘) will play as a duo; exploring at least one track from each of the project’s scattered albums and personae, with new material as a bonus.



 
Electric chamber group Firefly Burning were to have held the middle of the bill but had to pull out. To replace them, in comes a harder noise in the shape of the explosive wit, ominous chording and multi-layered songwriting of London’s Thumpermonkey. I described them a while back as “the missing link between Peter Hammill and Neal Stephenson”: a tag which they really seemed to like, so let’s run with it. A motley crew of brainiacs, meticulators and fast friends with their heads in lofty places and their toes sunk in dirty post-metal, they have the kind of esoteric preoccupations (and the wherewithal to communicate them) which encourage interest rather than eye-rolling and detachment. Unshamedly weird-fictional, the songs have covered Nigerian email fraud, Aztec hauntings, bizarre medical conditions and Victorian explorers amongst many other topics, all via a rich filter of literary and cinematic techniques and dark, sophisticated humour.

As for the music, Thumpermonkey play within that increasingly rare strata of hard rock in which there’s room to breathe, think, listen and explore beauty as well as nail down a predatory riff. Michael Woodman sings like an athletic college don moonlighting as an operatic priest, while his cohorts Ben, Sam and Rael construct a moving fortress, observatory and interdimensional vessel for him to stand on. They’re the kind of band that either make you proud to be curious, or will magnetize your brain into a state of curiosity. In effect, they’re the ‘Infinite Monkey Cage’ of British post-prog and we’re bloody lucky to have them.



 
Bristolian progressive-grunge rockers Lord Of Worms cite Meshuggah, Soundgarden, Tool and Ufomammut as influences, and there’s certainly some roiling springy punktone bass and restless post-hardcore rhythmic shifts in the mix. Their folk lilts and Zoie Green’s burnished-silver vocals simultaneously tie them into a tradition of female-fronted folk-rock acts like Renaissance and The Morrigan. Judge for yourselves…



 
Like Sanguine Hum, Dutch/American crossover prog poppers Fractal Mirror will be playing under reduced circumstances as regards personnel, but probably not in terms of the music. While the band can rely on the assistance of Echolyn polymath Brett Kull, among others, in the studio, this live date will just feature their core duo of singer/guitarist/keyboard and recorder player Leo Koperdraat and lyric-writing drummer Frank Urbaniak. Expect intimate expansions on their recipe of dove-soft Mellotronics and pastoral post-Porcupine Tree moods, with their hidden freight of darker, reflective lyrics.



 
Sonic Bond Promotions & The Epileptic Gibbon Podcast present:
EppyFest 7: North Sea Radio Orchestra + Gong + Neil Campbell + Sanguine Hum + Doris Brendel + Thumpermonkey + Lord Of Worms + Fractal Mirror
St Margaret’s Hall & Annex, Coniston Road, Hatherley, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL51 3NU, England
Friday 27th July 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Saturday 28th July 2018, 1.00pm – information here and here

* * * * * * * *

It would be stupid of me to represent EppyFest as some kind of absolute template for festivals. It’s its own little Gloucestershire gem, it has its context and its taste-palette, and while it’s a fine refresher there’s far more to contemporary music – to a nourishing cultural diet – than even a thoughtful slipped-weekend like this one can provide.

What I am advocating is a spreading of its care-filled cottage ethos; its preference for building a relatively equal, mutually supportive community of performers and audients in a warm and humble space, rather than driving a rush of drainable, soakable human cattle through the money-mill. Events like this are worth the seeking-out, worth the effort that goes into their creation. Go find some. Go make some. Come tell me about them.
 

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July-September 2018 – upcoming London jazz gigs – part three of the Jazz Herstory series at Poplar Union with Shirley Smart (22nd July), Francesca Ter-Berg (16th August, with Poppy Edwards, Ashley Paul and Simon Roth) and Cassie Kinoshi’s SEED Ensemble 5tet (20th September)

16 Jul

More shows for jazzwomen as the third set of gigs for Jazz Herstory come up at east London’s Poplar Union (following the Nerija, Laura Jurd and Yazz Ahmed gigs at the start of the year, and the Ruth Goller, Cath Roberts and Alison Rayner shows during spring and early summer).

* * * * * * * *

“The July gig is provided by Shirley Smart, one of the UK’s most versatile and creative cellists, and a rare exponent of jazz cello. She draws on a unique background that incorporates classical music, jazz and world music from North Africa, the Middle East, Balkans, and South America. As well as original compositions, she presents a fresh, new approach to the cello. Originally trained in classical cello Shirley subsequently moved to Jerusalem, where she stayed for ten years, studying and performing a wide variety of world music from the Mediterranean and Middle East, as well as being highly involved with the jazz and improvised music scene. Since returning to the UK, she has quickly become known as one of the most creative cellists on the music scene and has worked with many leading jazz and world music groups, including Antonio Forcione, Gilad Atzmon, Neil Cowley, Julian Ferraretto, Robert Mitchell, Kosmos Ensemble, Shekoyokh, Maciek Pysz, Maurizio Minardi, and Alice Zawadski, as well as leading her own projects.

For this concert (a late afternoon performance), Shirley’s bringing her own trio with pianist John Crawford and Demi Garcia Sabat on drums and percussion.


 
“For the August gig, cellist Francesca Ter-Berg (one half of Fran & Flora) takes influences from Eastern Europe (including Klezmer, Transylvanian and Romanian music) and blends them with experimentation in order to explore a world of sound, improvisation and live electronics. Her collaborative experience and diverse musical background has led Francesca to be one of the most versatile and in demand session and studio musicians in the UK. She has collaborated and performed with artists including Sam Lee, Talvin Singh, Floating Points, Portico, Sophie Solomon, Cosmo Sheldrake, Tanita Tikaram, Roger O’Donnell, Riz Ahmed, Hejira, Katy Carr, Lisa Knapp, Gerry Diver, The Unthanks, Kate Young, Bombay Dub Orchestra, Frank London, London Klezmer Quartet, Soumik Datta, Jyotsna Srikanth, Ahmed Mukhtar, Maverick Sabre and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

“Francesca will be inviting some musical friends on to the stage to perform two sets for this Jazz Herstory special. For the first set, she’ll meld her cello, voice and electronics in an improvisation with London-based songwriter, sound designer and Poppy Edwards on electronics, voice and keyboard (Poppy’s own main project, CRØM/LUS, should be releasing its own debut EP ‘Altered States’ shortly). For the second set, Francesca will be joined by jazz drummer Simon Roth (Sephiroth, Land Of If) and by American émigré and free-form wildcard Ashley Paul on saxophone, guitar and vocals.


 
“For September’s Jazz Herstory performance, Cassie Kinoshi brings the quintet version of her SEED Ensemble to Polar Union. A London-based composer, arranger and alto saxophonist also known for her work with all-female jazz septet Nérija and Afrobeat band Kokoroko, Cassie uses SEED to combine jazz with inner-city London, West African and Caribbean-influenced groove, exploring a blend of genres through both original compositions and arrangements.

“Usually performing as a ten-piece, SEED Ensemble presents a stellar line-up featuring some of London’s most up-and-coming young jazz musicians and has been making waves in the contemporary British jazz scene. The quintet lineup is Cassie on alto saxophone, Sheila Maurice Grey on trumpet, Shirley Tetteh on guitar, Rio Kai on bass and Patrick Boyle on drums.”


 

All concerts are at Poplar Union, 2 Cotall Street, Poplar, London, E14 6TL, England. Dates as follows:

  • Shirley Smart – Sunday 22nd July 2018, 4.30pm – information here and here
  • Francesca Ter-Berg – Thursday 16th August 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
  • SEED Ensemble 5tet, Thursday 20th September 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here

 

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July 2018 – two eclectic London music evenings – SOIF Soiree with Society Of Imaginary Friends, Jennifer Bliss Bennett, Dekay Ex, Stone Deep, Outre Dan Steele and William Summers (6th July); Rude Mechanicals with John Callaghan, Hypnotique and Rotten Bliss (13th July)

3 Jul

SOIF Soiree, 6th July 2018

The last Society Of Imaginary Friends Soiree for the summer is cartwheeling into view. I smashed two or three of their Beat-y burbles together to bring you this:

“Friday 6th July is our 21st Century Avant Garde Soiree at Karamel, N22. We have in store for you a magnificent exploration of 21st Century new and experimental music with incredible performers already lined up. The fabulous, supremely talented Jennifer Bliss Bennett will be performing master composer Martin Gaughan’s pieces for voice and bass viol: a must hear. There’ll be an appearance from the one-and-only Dekay Ex (queen of the underground urban music arena, virtuosic battle rapper superstar) with guest musician Gerard; and brand new dark intriguing soul music from Stone Deep.

“The multi-talented Darren and Isobel Hirst will be performing as the fascinating, spellbinding duo Outre Dan Steele, and the amazing William Summers (Circulus, Princes In The Tower, Mediaeaval Baebes and innumerable period/Baroque ensembles) will be performing 20th century recorder music. Plus us, the Society Of Imaginary Friends, and that’s just for starters. Delicious vegan food and unbelievably free entry.”

Society of Imaginary Friends presents:
21st Century Avant Garde Soiree: Society Of Imaginary Friends + Jennifer Bliss Bennett + Dekay Ex + Stone Deep + Outre Dan Steele + William Summers
Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Friday 6th July 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here

A few examples of the evening’s entertainment:




 
* * * * * * * *

There’s no August Soiree (since the Society will be either on holiday or concentrating on their appearances at the Green Gathering festival in Chepstow), but there should be more of these evenings in the coming autumn.

However, you can make up for their upcoming London summer absence with an evening of music and video hosted by Cos Chapman’s Rude Mechanicals, and taking place in a onetime Dalston dance school turned into arty pub and hangout space…

Rude Mechanicals + John Callaghan + Hypnotique + Rotten Bliss, 13th july 2018

“The art-rock inspired Rude Mechanicals have been compared to Nick Cave, The Tiger Lillies, early Roxy Music and Can and described as post-punk, swamp blues and dark cabaret – altogether creating a music that was best be described by Tom Robinson (on BBC6) as “wild, wicked weirdness… a little bit Flying Lizards, a little bit Native Hipsters and a great deal like nothing you’ve heard before…” The evening will feature the premiere of MHG Music Videos’s animated video for Rude Mechanical’s ‘Paperwork’.”

Meanwhile, here’s something a little older…


 
“Originally hailing from Birmingham, John Callaghan is an unusual songwriter and performer of thoughtful and spiky electronica. His self-directed video for ‘I’m Not Comfortable Inside My Mind’ aired on MTV. His live performances are energetic and imaginative, and range from one-man auto-karaoke shows to specially-written dancefloor sets. Recent well-received shows have included London’s Spitz, Ginglik and Electrowerks, Cambridge’s Portland Arms, Crystal Palace Bowl and last year’s jaunt around Germany, including Berlin’s Club 103 and Bar 25 and Hamburg’s Golden Pudel. He is 173cm tall, weights 73kg and has a blood pressure of 110/60Hg.”


 
“Hypnotique is a thereministe, electronic musician and auteur based in London whose lyrical subjects range from the apocalypse, post-feminism, erotic narrative and allotments. She’s performed solo shows at Edinburgh Fringe, worked with Gong and The Heliocentrics, toured the Amazon and annoyed Simon Cowell. She’ll be performing her live sound design for Georges Méliès 1902 film ‘Voyage de la Luna’ (‘Trip to the Moon’)…” …which she’s previously and recently also done at a Colliding Lines film evening: find out more about that here.


 
“Described last year as “a thing of disquieting dark beauty rolling in through a ghostly fog on timeless ripples whose ebbing wash peels back the years to reveal a vintage crafted in archaic folk tongues” by Mark Barton of ‘The Sunday Experience‘ (and, by ‘The Wire’ as a writer of “coarse and beautifully heavy songs (betraying) hallmarks of folk, metal and classical without subscribing to any particular tribe”), Rotten Bliss is the violent, warm and weird visions of London based avant-garde electric cellist and vocalist Jasmine Pender. Equally inspired by the wild physicality of Jacqueline du Pre and the shrieking glory of a cello played through FX pedals, Rotten Bliss packs diverse influences into an elemental voyage of outer-limits FX-laden drones, weird folk and sound art, raging from tender a capella lyrical fantasies through to ecstatic nihilism.

“Jasmine performs regularly around London, also playing in 11th Hour Adventists (with Jowe Head, ex-Swell Maps) and False Echo (with Tim Bowen, ex-Chrome Hoof) and has toured England, France, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. Her debut album, ‘The Nightwatchman Sings’, was released in October 2017 on the Reverb Worship label.”

 
Also on hand for the inbetween bits are DJs Enri, Blue and MJ Ultra, and Rude Mechanicals are bribing any advance tickets buyers with the promise of a “free unique, special edition CD and badge”.

Rude Mechanicals present:
‘Paperwork!’ – featuring Rude Mechanicals + John Callaghan + Hypnotique + Rotten Bliss + DJ Enri + DJs Blue & MJ Ultra
Farr’s School Of Dancing, 17-19 Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England
Friday 13th July 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
 

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Organized sounds. If you like.

Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

...wandering through music...

mapnewz

When The Horn Blows

...wandering through music...

:::::::::::: Ekho :::::::::::: Women in Sonic Art

Celebrating the Work of Women within Sonic Art: an expanding archive promoting equality in the sonic field

Ned Raggett Ponders It All

Just another WordPress.com weblog

FLIPSIDE REVIEWS

...wandering through music...

Headphone Commute

honest words on honest music

The One-Liner Miner

...wandering through music...

Yeah I Know It Sucks

an absurdist review blog

Obat Kanker Payudara Ginseng RH 2

...wandering through music...

poplifer.wordpress.com/

Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Good Music Speaks

A music blog written by Rich Brown

Do The Math

...wandering through music...

Archived Music Press

Scans from the Melody Maker and N.M.E. circa 1987-1996

The World's Worst Records

...wandering through music...

Universal Horse

Soundscapes

...wandering through music...

OLD SCHOOL RECORD REVIEW

Where You Are Always Wrong

FRIDAY NIGHT BOYS

...wandering through music...

Fragile or Possibly Extinct

Life Outside the Womb

a closer listen

a home for instrumental and experimental music

Bird is the Worm

New Jazz: We Search. We Recommend. You Listen.

...wandering through music...

Life Just Bounces

...wandering through music...

Lucid Culture

JAZZ, CLASSICAL MUSIC AND THE ARTS IN NEW YORK CITY

Aquarium Drunkard

...wandering through music...

eyesplinters

Just another WordPress.com site

NewFrontEars

...wandering through music...