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May 2020 – single & track reviews – MultiTraction Orchestra’s ‘Emerge Entangled’; Stuart Wilding’s ‘Spaces’ and ‘Horns’

Conceived during coronavirus lockdown, MultiTraction Orchestra is the latest brainchild of cross-disciplinary Sefiroth/Blue-Eyed Hawk guitarist Alex Roth (currently pursuing new avenues and familial roots in Kraków). It’s his way of fighting the entropy, fear and disassociation of the times: part-corralling/part-embracing a cluster of diverse yet sympathetic musicians, recruited via friendship and open-source callups on the web. ‘Emerge Entangled’ is the first result: twenty-seven players working from Alex’s initial two-and-a-half minute pass of treated, multi-layered minimalist guitarwork. If the video accompaniment (a graceful come-and-go conference call featuring most of the players) is anything to go by, Alex played the part of benign/mostly absent god for this recording. There are no solos, no aggressive chord comping. In the few shots in which they feature, his guitars and pedals sit by themselves in a system loop creating the drone with no further intervention. Instead, Alex acts as the invisible mind on faders, reshuffling the instrumental echoes and response which came back from his loop broadcast.

MultiTraction Orchestra: ‘Emerge Entangled’

It’s an eight-city affair; although the majority of musicians hail from Alex’s other base, London (including his percussionist brother and Sefiroth bandmate Simon, trombonists Kieran Stickle McLeod and Raphael Clarkson, Rosanna Ter-Berg on flute, Madwort reedsman Tom Ward on clarinet, drummer Jon Scott and effects-laden double bassist Dave Manington), the MultiTraction net spreads wide. Finnish cellist Teemu Mastovaara, from Turku, is probably the most northerly contributor; Mexico City saxophonist Asaph Sánchez the most southerly; and Texas-based glockenspieler and touch guitarist Cedric Theys the most westerly. (Muscovian tuba player Paul Tkachenko and Lebanon-based iPad manipulator Stephanie Merchak can battle out as to who’s holding it down for the east).

Instrumentally, although there’s a definite slanting towards deep strings, brass and rolling-cloud drones, there’s plenty of variety: from the vintage Baroque flute of Gdańsk’s Maja Miró to the Juno 6 colourings of London soundtracker Jon Opstad and the homemade Coptic lute of Exeter-based Ian Summers. Alex’s other brother, saxophonist Nick, features in the Dublin contingent alongside the accordion work of Kenneth Whelan and cello from Mary Barnecutt. Most of the remaining string players are dotted around England (with double bassist Huw V. Williams and James Banner in St Albans and Leeds respectively, and violinist Alex Harker in Huddersfield). There’s a knot of contributory electronica coming out of Birmingham from Andrew Woodhead and John Callaghan (with virtual synthesist Emile Bojesen chipping in from Winchester), and some final London contributions from jazz pianist/singer Joy Ellis and sometime Anna Calvi collaborator Mally Harpaz bringing in harmonium, timpani and xylophone.

Alex’s past and present work includes jazz, experimental noise, soulfully mournful Sephardic folk music and dance theatre; and while his guitar basework for ‘Emerge Entangled’ seems to recall the harmonic stillness and rippling, near-static anticipatory qualities of 1970s German experimental music such as Cluster (as well as Terry Riley or Fripp and Eno), plenty of these other ingredients swim into the final mix. I suspect that the entanglement Alex intends to evoke is quantum rather than snarl-up: a mutuality unhindered by distance. From its blind beginnings (no-one hearing any other musicians apart from Alex) what’s emerged from the experiment is something which sounds pre-composed; or, at the very least, spun from mutual sympathy.

There are definite sections. An overture in which increasingly wild and concerned trombone leads over building, hovering strings and accordion (gradually joined by burgeoning harmonium, filtered-in glockenspiel and percussion, dusk-flickers of bass clarinet, cello and synth) sounds like New Orleans funeral music hijacked by Godspeed! You Black Emperor; the first seepage of flood water through the wall. With a change in beat and emphasis, and the push of drums, the second section breaks free into something more ragged and complicated – a muted metal-fatigue trombone part protesting over synth drone and subterranean tuba growl, which in turn morphs into a double bass line. Various other parts make fleeting appearances (a transverse flute trill, Alex’s guitar loops bumped up against jazz drumkit rolls; a repeating, rising, scalar/microtonal passage on lute, like a Holy Land lament). Throughout, there’s a sense of apprehension, with something ominous lurking outside in the sky and the air and elements; the more melodic or prominent instruments an array of voices trying to make sense of it, their dialects, personalities, arguments and experiences different, but their querulous humanity following a common flow.

Via touches of piano, theme alternations come faster and faster. A third section foregrounds the tuba, moving in and out in deep largo passages while assorted electronics build up a bed of electrostutter underneath. During the latter, watch out in the video for benign eccentronica-cabaret jester John Callaghan, quietly drinking a mugful of tea as his laptop pulses and trembles out a gentle staccato blur. It’s not the most dramatic of contributions, but it feels like a significant one: the mundaneity and transcendent patience which must be accepted as part of lockdown life, an acknowledgement of “this too will pass”. For the fourth section, a tuba line passes seamlessly into a bass clarinet undulation with touches of silver flute; accelerations and rallentandos up and down. Initially some spacier free-jazz flotsam makes its presence felt – electronics and cosmic synth zaps, saxophonic key rattles, buzzes and puffs, fly-ins of cello and double bass. The later part, though, is more of a classical meditation: beatless and with most instruments at rest, predominantly given over to the dark romance of Teemu Mastovaara’s lengthy cello solo (apprehensive, heavy on the vibrato and harmonic string noise, part chamber meditation and part camel call). The finale takes the underlying tensions, squeezes them in one hand and disperses them. An open duet between Jo Ellis’ piano icicles and Asaph Sánchez’s classic tenor ballad saxophone, it becomes a trio with Jo’s glorious, wordless vocal part: hanging in the air somewhere between grief and peace. A moving, thrilling picture of the simultaneously confined and stretched worldspace we’re currently living in, and a small triumph of collaboration against the lockdown odds.

* * * * * * * *

Although ‘Emerge Entangled’ has a number of masterfully responsive drummers and percussionists in place already, it’s a shame that Cheltenham/Xposed Club improv mainstay Stuart Wilding isn’t one of them. His Ghost Mind quartet (three players plus a wide world picture woven in through field recording) have proved themselves to be one of the most interesting listen-and-incorporate bands of recent years. However, he’s continued to be busy with his own lockdown music. ‘Spaces’ and “Horns” are personal solo-duets – possibly single-take, in-situ recordings. Both created in the usual Xposed Club home of Francis Close Hall Chapel, they’re direct and in-the-moment enough that you can hear the click of the stop button. Stuart’s apparently playing piano mostly with one hand while rustling, tapping and upsetting percussion with the other. By the sound of it the main percussion element is probably his lap harp or a zither, being attacked for string noise and resonance.

Assuming that that’s the case, ‘Spaces’ pits grating, dragging stringflutter racket against the broken-up, mostly rhythmic midrange exploration of an unfailingly cheerful piano. Sometimes a struck or skidded note on the percussion prompts a direct echo on the piano. As the former becomes more of a frantic, swarming whirligig of tortured instrumentation (as so frequently with Stuart, recalling the frenetic and cheeky allsorts swirl of Jamie Muir with Derek Bailey and King Crimson), picking out these moments of congruence becomes ever more of a game: while in the latter half, the piano cuts free on whimsical, delighted little leaps of its own. About half the length of ‘Spaces’, ‘Horns’ begins with the percussion apparently chain-sawing the piano in half while the latter embarks on a rollicking one-handed attempt at a hunting tune. The piano wins out. I’m not sure what became of the fox.

MultiTraction Orchestra: ‘Emerge Entangled’
self-released, no catalogue number or barcode
Download/streaming track
Released: 1st May 2020
Get it from: download from Bandcamp, Apple Music or Amazon; stream from Soundcloud, YouTube, Deezer, Google Play, Spotify and Apple Music.
MultiTraction Orchestra/Alex Roth online:

Stuart Wilding: ‘Spaces’ & ‘Horns’
self-released, no catalogue number or barcode
Download/streaming tracks
Released: 5th May 2020
Get it from: Bandcamp – ‘Spaces‘ and ‘Horns‘
Stuart Wilding online:

Tags: accordion music, Alex Harker, Alex Roth, Andrew Woodhead, Asaph Sánchez, Austin (Texas - USA), bass clarinet music, Batroun (Lebanon), Birmingham (England), Cedric Theys, cello music, Cheltenham (England), Dave Manington, double bass music, Dublin (Ireland), Emile Bojesen, Exeter (England), flute music, Gdańsk (Poland), guitar music, harmonium music, Huddersfield (England), Huw V Williams, Ian Summers, James Banner, John Callaghan, Jon Opstad, Jon Scott, Joy Ellis, Kenneth Whelan, Kieran Stickle McLeod, Kraków (Poland), Leeds (England), London (England), lute music, Maja Miró, Mally Harpaz, Mary Barnecutt, Mexico City (Mexico), Moscow (Russia), MultiTraction Orchestra, music for electronics, Nick Roth, Paul Tkachenko, percussion music, piano music, Raphael Clarkson, Rosanna Ter-Berg, saxophone music, Simon Roth, Stephanie Merchak, Stuart Wilding, Teemu Mastovaara, Tom Ward, touch guitar music, trombone music, tuba music, Turku (Finland), violin music, Winchester (England), xylophone music

November 2019 – Daylight Music 2019 autumn season continues – Bex Burch with Beanie Bhebhe and Tom Herbert, Çiğdem Aslan & Tahir Palalı, Maria Chiara Argirò & Jamie Leeming (2nd); New Music from Wales with Gareth Bonello, Toby Hay, Georgia Ruth, Accü and Richard James (9th); jazz strands with Nils Økland, Kaidi Akinnibi & Lorenz Okello-Osengor, Helena Kay & Sam Watts (16th) and with Jherek Bischoff, Robert Stillman & Anders Holst and Rosie Frater-Taylor (23rd); Matthew Bourne’s vocal showcase with Seaming To, Keeley Forsyth,Polly Gone Wrong, Andrew Plummer and Dorothy Lehane (30th)

27 Oct

Moving into its final half, the Daylight Music autumn 2019 season reaches November with a selection of duo/trio encounters (both longstanding and spontaneous), October Daylight’s piano star Matthew Bourne returning to curate and direct his own positional/vocal-orientated event, and an afternoon of current Welsh music.

* * * * * * * *

The first of the gigs, on 2nd November, involves a number of collaborations. The headlining ensemble is a trio put together by percussionist Bex Burch, a specialist in the gyil (or Ghanaian/Dagaare xylophone) and the bandleader for the Ghanaian minimalist/jazz/post-punk group Vula Viel. She’s picked “soulgaze” drummer Beanie Bhebhe (whose roster of colleagues and employers across dance, funk, indie and dream pop includes Rudimental, Bastille, Paloma Faith and Action Beat) and former Polar Bear bassist Tom Herbert.

Bex says “I wanted to curate a band to play together for the first time. Tom is a bassist I’ve known since watching Polar Bear as a teenager, and we will both be meeting Beanie for the first time on stage. I’m excited to play with two incredible voices in the U.K. scene. This will be a one-time performance: the music that comes through never to be heard again.”

“Three Strings & Two Breaths is the duo of Çiğdem Aslan (voice and frame drums) and Tahir Palalı (Turkish kopuz and bağlama lutes). They focus on Alevi songs from Anatolia – mostly songs of love and mysticism from the fourteenth to the twentieth century.

“As a belief system, the Alevi path is based on love and respect for all people, attitudes, knowledge, sharing and science. Oral tradition is directly relevant… an important source of Alevi beliefs and thoughts are the mystical poems and musical ballads (deyisler, nefesler) that have been passed down from generation to generation, many of which have not been recorded in writing. Alevis believe that one must respect and have knowledge of nature, and the principles of love, tolerance and humanism are significant to Alevi philosophy.

“A meeting of kindred spirits, the music of pianist Maria Chiara Argirò and guitarist Jamie Leeming is a dialogue between two unique artists inspired by jazz, Latin, classical and folk music. At the heart of the duo is a vibrant sense of spontaneity, which embraces the myriad of colours, textures and sounds they create between them. Combined with free improvisation and an intuitive level of interplay, each performance is a one-off experience. They will be presenting music from the upcoming duo album entitled ‘Flow,’ which will be out in 2020.”

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The 9th November concert provides “a rare opportunity to hear new music inspired by the landscape and culture of Wales. Expect an afternoon of carefully crafted pieces that blur the boundaries between contemporary Wales and the otherworldly delights of Annwn.

“Based in Cardiff, Gareth Bonello is and has performed for over a decade under the stage name The Gentle Good. Known for his intricate guitar playing and captivating acoustic arrangements, Gareth was awarded the Welsh Music Prize in 2017 for his fourth album ‘Ruins/Adfeilion’. This concert sees him working in a new trio project with fingerstyle guitarist Toby Hay and singer/harpist Georgia Ruth.

“Toby writes beautifully evocative instrumentals that instantly transport the listener to the mountains and rivers of mid Wales. Twice nominated for the Welsh Music Prize, Toby has toured the UK and Ireland extensively over the last few years and has built a reputation as a captivating live performer. Georgia is a songwriter and musician from Aberystwyth in West Wales. A skilful harpist with a voice of silver, Georgia collaborated with the Manic Street Preachers on their ‘Futurology’ album and was awarded the Welsh Music Prize for her debut album ‘Week Of Pines’ in 2013.”

Also performing is “half-Dutch, half-Welsh singer-songwriter Angharad Van Rijswijk, a.k.a. Accü (who) has been involved in production since her teens and collaborated with writer and comedian Stewart Lee, Cornershop, and Richard James, as well as producing a collage radio series for the BBC. In her music, she brings together a love of production and a turbulent approach to song-writing – which earned her debut album ‘Echo The Red’ the title of ‘Welsh Album of The Year’ by Wales Arts Review. She will be joined at Union Chapel by long-time collaborator and exceptional Welsh songwriter Richard James (formerly of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci).”

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The next two Daylights are being done in collaboration with the EFG London Jazz Festival and present various Daylight-friendly spins on jazz and improvisation.

On the first of these two shows, Norwegian Hardanger fiddle player Nils Økland will be playing “instrumental melodies (which) will react and resonate with the chapel’s nineteenth-century space, taking us on a hushed, deep journey far beyond our resting place in the pews.” From Tomorrow’s Warriors, improvisers Kaidi Akinnibi (saxophone) and Lorenz Okello-Osengor (piano, keyboards) “constantly search for new inspiration, as can be seen in their recent collaboration with the Urdang dance company. They will for the first time incorporate the chapel’s Henry Willis Organ.”

Opening the show, saxophonist Helena Kay and pianist Sam Watts “marry their wildly eclectic backgrounds and influences and give us an opportunity to eavesdrop on a conversation between their two instruments.”

On the second show, Jherek Bischoff will be headlining: “a Los Angeles-based composer, arranger, producer, and multi-instrumental performer whose numerous collaborators include the likes of Kronos Quartet, David Byrne, Neil Gaiman, and Robert Wilson. Bischoff is currently composing music for two new theatre productions and scoring for film and television. His most recent album Cistern, released on the Leaf Label, contains a suite of string-drenched instrumentals.”

One of the latter, from a previous Daylight Music visit, is showcased below.

Also on the bill, the performance of saxophonist Robert Stillman and 12-string guitarist Anders Holst “will draw upon the chapel’s resonant acoustics as a platform for their own works alongside those of Ornette Coleman, John Fahey, and Moondog”. Rosie Frater-Taylor (singer-songwiter, jazz guitarist and ukuleleist) will provide lapping, warm, skilful songcraft to warm everyone up.

* * * * * * * *

Much is made of the Union Chapel’s terrific acoustics: pianist and improviser Matthew Bourne (relatively fresh from his recent Daylight collaboration with Keith Tippett) is intending to make full use of them on the 30th November when he presents his “voix outré” project of handpicked collaborators, stationing them at different points throughout the building (to present a concert that’s as much about sound spacing as the notes produced) while acting as both audience guide and artist accompanist.

“Seaming To is a composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who has performed and recorded with Robert Wyatt, Jean Claude Vannier, Punchdrunk, Leila, Leon Michener, Larry Goves, Snack Family and Matthew Bourne. She has studied opera at the Royal Northern College of Music and began her career as part of Manchester supergroup Homelife and Graham Massey’s Toolshed.

“Keeley Forsyth is a composer, singer and actor from Oldham. Built upon sparse arrangements, her music is centred around a singular, emotionally raw and magnetic vocal delivery, by turns devastating and uplifting. The characters who populate her songs tell stories of the high and low tides; of freedom and entrapment, of hard won triumphs and the darker corners of domestic life.

“Polly Gone Wrong is an all-female vocal trio singing original songs baked with folk, blues, elements of playful obscurity, and close harmonies. Sometimes they are accompanied by a saw, a bass, a drum, or even beatboxing; sometimes they’re just three female voices in harmony and unison.

“Andrew Plummer is a vocalist, guitarist and composer-producer from Exeter, Devon. Plummer has been the creative force – composing, performing and touring nationally, producing nine albums under his own name, with his musical leviathan World Sanguine Report and with Snack Family (the avant-rock trio co-founded in 2011). He draws on a wealth of influences and pens music that reinterprets musical genre, loaded with visceral tales from the dark side of life, love and death.

“Poet Dorothy Lehane (the author of three poetry publications and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent) will read selected sonnets from her latest publication, ‘Bettbehandlung’.”

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All gigs are at Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England, with a suggested donation of five pounds. Dates below:

Daylight Music 320: Bex Burch/Beanie Bhebhe/Tom Herbert Trio + Three Strings & Two Breaths + Jamie Leeming & Maria Chiara Argirò – Saturday 2nd November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 321: Atsain Priddin: New Music from Wales (featuring Toby Hay + Georgia Ruth + Gareth Bonello + Accü) – Saturday 9th November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 322: EFG London Jazz Festival (featuring Nils Økland + Kaidi Akinnibi & Lorenz Okello-Osengor + Helena Kay & Sam Watts) – Saturday 16th November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 323: EFG London Jazz Festival (featuring Jherek Bischoff + Robert Stillman & Anders Holst + Rosie Frater-Taylor) – Saturday 23rd November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 324: Matthew Bourne presents ‘voix outré’ (featuring Dorothy Lehane + Seaming To + Keeley Forsyth + Polly Gone Wrong + Andrew Plummer) – Saturday 30th November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here

More on the last two DM gigs of the year will be posted up closer to December…

Tags: Accü, Anders Holst, Andrew Plummer, Arctic Circle (promoter), Çiğdem Aslan, Beanie Bhebhe, Bex Burch, Daylight Music (event), Dorothy Lehane, Gareth Bonello, Georgia Ruth, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, hardingfele (Hardanger fiddle) music, Helena Kay, Jamie Leeming, Jherek Bischoff, Kaidi Akinnibi, Keeley Forsyth, listening to women, London (England), Lorenz Okello-Osengor, Maria Chiara Argirò, Matthew Bourne, Nils Økland, Polar Bear, Polly Gone Wrong, Richard James, Robert Stillman, Rosie Frater-Taylor, Sam Watts, Seaming To, Tahir Palalı, Three Strings & Two Breaths, Toby Hay, Tom Herbert, Vula Viel, women of heart and mind

October 2019 – upcoming London rock, pop, noise, dancetronic gigs – Hurtling, Stephen Evens and Junodef (17th October); Gum Takes Tooth and Hyperstition Duo (18th October); Bunny Hoova, Gribs, J.B. Glaser and Halfs (18th October)

8 Oct

Alt-rock trio Hurtling (fronted by My Bloody Valentine tour noisemaker Jen Macro) have a debut record to offer you – ‘Future From Here’, on Onomatopeia Records – and are launching it at north London’s The Islington in the middle of October. Their sound’s relatively easy to peg – post-Pixies, post-grunge, post-dreampop – but difficult to dismiss. There’s a full cupboardful of familiar indie rock ingredients to hand, but all reshuffled and re-examined via Jen’s particular perspective and inspired by the disorientations of touring, the displacement of emotions, the waywardness of health: the bumps and setbacks of a bright, questioning human organism pushed into too much motion. Sometimes, despite the noisy ethic, it’s surprisingly gentle; sometimes sludgy guitar parts pile up like rainbow cement ooze; sometimes it’s all about the vocal harmonies.

Once upon a time, most of Hurtling were part of cunningly witty indie/artpop sloggers stuffy/the fuses, and their glowering former employer (and current Onomatopeia labelmate) Stephen Evens is also on hand for the evening: ostensibly in a support slot, but probably to keep a dyspeptic jaded eye on them and to crush their remaining youthful dreams beneath his tapping boot. He’s playing solo – probably with guitar, microsynth and anything else portable which he fancies and which comes to hand – and is still working his own 2017 debut album, ‘Bonjour Poulet’. Which is fine, since it was excellent: a mordant larderful of creaky treats which revealed themselves to be gappy armour-plate wrapped around a surprisingly tender heart. He’ll probably give you all that sardonic, seen-it-all expression: actually, he’ll be pleased to see you.

London-based Swedish “post-death music” quartet Junodef fill the other support slot. Their debut single, a soft-strummed slice of spectral folk with additional Gothic guitar boom and the bleakness of a death metal song, was called Make You Die. Subsequent work hasn’t travelled too far from those initial emotional roots, although they’ve toyed with spooky progressive rock keyboards, acid rock shadings and lingering dark-country embellishments (the latter suiting both the paired vocals of Tyra Örnberg and Karin Grönkvist and their admiration for Emma Ruth Rundle and Chelsea Wolfe).

More recently Junodef have been feeding in noirish elements from trip-hop and droning electronica, citing inspiration by Portishead and Young Fathers. At the same time, they’ve upped their Bad Seeds clang and their clarity and put greater emphasis on their visual work, resulting in their most vividly fleshed-out songs and atmospheres yet. Don’t expect floppy Goth ragdolls: this band has a tough core, and a storytelling streak that’s just beginning to come into its own.

* * * * * * * *

In the same week, on the following day, relentless psychedelic noise-fosterers Baba Yaga’s Hut are putting on a Bethnal Green gig for block-party-inspired thunder-twosome Gum Takes Tooth. Singer/electronic bombardier Jussi Brightmore and wired-up drummer Thomas Fuglesang have been at this for a decade now, producing a music that’s
grinding and urgent, slow yet filled with unnerving impetus.

As with plenty of British acts on the weird/occult cusp, Gum Takes Tooth are fascinated by ritual (attempting to initiate it in both their recorded output and, more significantly, in their live performances) and with the jarring subconscious impact on the human animal from the mechanisms of technology, hierarchy and blunt cultural forces which surround us. Their last record, ‘Arrow‘, focussed on London gentrification from the perspective of those squashed under or flicked aside by its well-heeled, well-polished bespoke shoes; and on the savage simultaneous pressures from above to indulge the inner beast in competition, in nationalism, in a fracturing of common responsibility and empathy. While writing ‘Arrow’, Jussi saw all of this as a kind of cultural intoxication with the emphasis on toxic: it gave the duo a musical and moral focus which they’ve pursued ever since.

A couple of years ago, open-minded Sheffield Afrobeat/noise/dance-pop combiners Blood Sport called it a day. Two-thirds of them – drummer Sam Parkin and guitarist/Octatracker Alex Keegan – have since resurfaced as Hyperstition Duo, a blistering stew of kit-rattles and synth noise smudging and battering the line between live gig and avant-garde DJ electronica. They’ll be supporting Gum Takes Tooth on this occasion: but where the headliners favour slower pace and a ritual weight, the Hyperstitioneers prefer a break-neck-speed informational barrage.

At the end of this past summer, Hyperstition Duo released their debut EP ‘Virotechnics‘. There’s the usual jargonated hype to go with it – “summoning egregors of the Anthropocene, (they) plunge deep to deliver a maximalist collective immersion into their own lysergic phonosphere. Lurching, polyrhythmic pathways crumble and re-assemble; elastic dynamics snap; propulsion sparks from the nerve-centre of machine and corporeal entanglement… templexing, möbius loops and cybernetic subjectivities abound in an attempt to conjure escape vectors in a world of ubiquitous sound.” For once, the texture of the press release – a plunge into lathering, urgent verbalisation – actually fits the texture of the music.

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Overlapping the Gum Takes Tooth/Hyperstition Duo concert, Ben Vince’s south-east London clubnight Ellipsis (blending strands and clumps of experimental dance and experimental pop) ventures up north to Dalston on the same night for an evening of seamless switching between stage and DJ deck. I’ve not encountered Ellipsis before, but I’m impressed with what I’m finding out now.

To headline this time, Ben’s enticed the perplexing Dutch-born Mancunian Bunny Hoova down for her full-band London debut. Her work is simultaneously delightful and frustrating. At its simplest, it’s a kind of fall-apart dream pop – intermittent rhythms, addled guitar chording and bass thumbing, a cloudwork of woven-in samples, and a constant tripping over unvoiced questions, obscured conclusions and the track-loops of the thought-train. But while most dream-pop sinks into a narcotized structural conservatism (strumming away in the same key while admiring the whorls of sound coming through the pedalboard), Bunny’s material seems constantly uncomfortable, actively intelligent, and hovering at the midpoint between insight and misdirection. She’s been yoked in with experimental pop deconstructors/faux-idiot savants like Tirzah and Micachu, and I can see why. There’s that classical conservatoire training: coyly hinted at in the PR, for extra credit, but in practise forced off into the distance like a spurned aunt (even as it’s being used as the counterweight to punkish anti-technique). There’s the idea that the usual rules of pop song and riff culture are being scorned in a meticulous matter-of-fact way via an admixture of free play and cerebral manifesto.

Plenty of the songs on Bunny’s debut album, ‘Longing’, have the sensual drag-and-tug rhythm of slow jams; but rather than focussing a mood or a regular pace, they wander off at instinctive mental tangents or hiccup into a different arrangement; the instruments and samples entwining in a scratchy, bewildered, irregular intimacy. At times she seems to be taking up an erratic desert map scrawled by Captain Beefheart and attempting to apply it to close urban living. At other times, she seems to be spontaneously transposing into song experimental short stories about offbeat relationships, jolting encounters or small moments which change the course of a life; rich in detail and significance, short on conclusion. Plot and flavour are stretched out and split into gobbets, like odd-shaped beads necklaced on a guitar string. Her most-talked-about song, Lazy_Easy, is a scrubbing, slurred, pointed dissection-tract covering both the implicit and explicit links between consumerist culture and animal cruelty: more of a wall-collage with blended-in musical notes than an actual song. The world she flits through feels as rickety as a condemned flat; one that she’s too good for and shouldn’t have to live with, but which she has to accommodate and fit her voice to.

Also playing are a mixed bag of London and Manchester electronic experimentalists with bedroom studios. Gribs is a creative DJ and electronic musician, a label co-boss (Tobago Tracks) who in her own music weaving connections between straight-up dance music (trap, jungle, bass culture) and lo-fi DIY sound-and-voice experiments. There’s a distinct edge of discomfort to her work: not so much or so often that it repels, but her found vocals and implied song characters seem uneasy, morbidly eccentric or disassociated from the music’s rhythmic propulsion or sensual salve.

More DJ-ing and deckmixing comes from J.B. Glazer, another London-based creator of peculiar counter-intuitive dance music: for him, a kind of relentlessly alienated mirror-image R&B, all of its comfort and slickness rusted away into disassociative ennui. In the work of both Glazer and Gribs, there’s an echo of chopped-and-screwed culture: the slowing, the altered-state disconnections and new connections, the sense that they’re using alienation as a kind of gatekeeper (if you like dance but are prepared to discard much of its qualities of release or of socializing, then perhaps you can squeeze through this door).

Rounding things out (or upsetting any remaining unspilled applecarts) there’s the mysterious and performative Halfs – from what I can work out, a try-anything beat-making romper on Manchester’s queer arts scene. I’ve found a very fruity synthdance EP of his/theirs from 2017, so there are a few slurps of its whooping dayglo industrial tones below. There have also been percussion-favouring mixtapes and albums which have been whipped capriciously on and off Soundcloud, but are gone now: other than that, there seems to be involvement with scratch theatre, video and so on. In order to properly keep up with Halfs, you need to subscribe (both literally, and in terms of consistent loyalty) so just consider this vague, semi-accurate plug of mine to be a jumping-on point and take it from there.

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Dates:

Onomatopoeia Records presents:
Hurtling + Stephen Evens + Junodef
The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Islington, London, N1 0XT, England
Thursday 17th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Gum Takes Tooth + Hyperstition Duo
The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here

Ellipsis presents:
Bunny Hoova + Gribs + J.B. Glaser + Halfs
SET (Dalston Lane), 27a Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 9.00pm – information here and here

Tags: Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Bunny Hoova, Ellipsis (event/promoter), Gribs, Gum Takes Tooth, Halfs, Hurtling, Hyperstition Duo, J.B. Glaser, Junodef, listening to women, London (England), Manchester (England), Stephen Evens, Stuffy/The Fuses, women of heart and mind

October 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Retrophonica at the Brunel Museum (13th); Charles Hayward presents Sly & The Family Drone, V Ä L V Ē, Timestretch Alarmsong and Atatat (19th)

5 Oct

Retrophonica is a new, very accessible multi-media performance project; currently focussed on the branching aerials, primal wooo and touch-me-not anticipations of theremin playing. It’s launching itself with an evening of two (identical) concerts in the yawning brick gullet of the Brunel Museum’s Grand Entrance Chamber (also known as the top of the southern Thames Tunnel shaft).

Celebrating the instrument’s centenary, these will be an “immersive evening of music for theremin and full orchestra”, while delving into the story of the instrument’s creator, Léon Theremin. From here, it sounds as if the concerts will be a cross between a pops-orchestra occasion, a slide-show history lesson writ large and a session of nostalgic avant-garde tinkering; all of it enclosed in that bleak, beautiful and magnificently functional Victorian civil-engineering maw.

As they say themselves,“prepare for an immersive audio-visual experience, complemented by cocktails, lightshow, and narration, featuring original and adapted music for theremin by Dmitri Shostakovich, Bohuslav Martinů, Miklós Rózsa, Les Baxter, Claude Debussy and John Williams, performed by Retrophonica with thereminist Charlie Draper, new arrangements and works by Alex Palmer, and bespoke narration from author Ken Hollings.”

You might already know Charlie from all manner of bookings, everywhere, for both theremin and ondes martenot: here’s an earlier mention. Alex has written and arranged extensively for theatre, film and concert hall, and looks as if he’ll be adding the sweeter edge to the evening. As for Ken, although I suspect that he’ll be operating on calmer terms tonight, he’s most likely to be the one to toss in a wild card or two. Having started work in the 1970s as a literary factual editor (how ominous such a description sounds now) he went on to an early-’80s spell as vocalist and cut-up’er in Manchester post-punk band Biting Tongues, followed by an expansion into essays, libretti and experimental fiction (all of which have dipped into and across other disciplines from Japanese films to twentieth-and-twenty-first century politics to data structures).

I’ve no idea who’s contributed the orchestra. As for the cocktails, there’s no further word on them; nor on how you might mix one called a Thames Tunnel.

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Just under a week later, downriver at Deptford, London art-rock/post-punk/improvisation godfather Charles Hayward will be putting together the second of this year’s “genre-fluid” Charles Hayward Presents concerts at the Albany, unfurling “new sounds from the underground and outsider scenes of London and beyond” and massing together elements of jazz/improv, art punk, noise, contemporary classical and electronic music.

According to Charles himself, his own performance centrepiece will be the project-cum-band “Timestretch Alarmsong… a sequence of tunes and sound snakes that I’ve put together with Tom Challenger (Dice Factory/Ma saxophonist), Yoni Silver (multi-instrumentalist with Hyperion Ensemble and many others), Roberto Sassi (Cardosanto/Anatrofobia/Snorkel guitarist), Nick Doyne-Ditmas (double bassist and Hayward collaborator in Monkey Puzzle Trio).

“It’s tightly rehearsed and goes through a wide range of attitudes and (more importantly) emotional energies. To my ears it’s super exciting and I feel like we’ve pushed at a few barriers and come up with something new that has melody, shape and grooves from light to super heavy/dark. There’s no clips available but we will be recording the project for future release. All the players are fantastic musicians and working on the project has been a study in joyful cooperation.”

In the absence of a collective clip, here’s a scatter of solo ones and examples of related projects:

Three other acts join in for the night. ‘Gentle Persuaders’, the latest album from contemporary drum/noise/saxophone ritualists Sly & The Family Drone – is intended as “the politest of bludgeonings”; its creators still merge Ayler-esque free jazz, industrial rock pummel, celebratory machine hiss and the loose-hanging exploratory feel of a bass-less duo. They also still give out drums at their concerts, inviting a congregation of noise.

Also back in the fray is V Ä L V Ē, with music that’s less workshop than workshed. Strongly DIY (featuring reed instruments, electronics, invented gizmos, bass guitar, concert harp and singing women), it’s the sound of a trio of highly trained musical minds phasing back into spontaneity and play. A sort of three-way attempt to become idiot savants via assorted glitchery and boink, semi-spontaneous nursery rhymes and tunelets and musical devices (built out of shelves, tobacco tins, old house bells and similar Branestawmery), but via a female pattern.

Finally, there’s Atatat – a solo project from Liverpool art-freak music mainstay J.C. Barbara (best known as drummer/ranter for aPAtT and Barberos, and here using a very Haywardian array of drums, contact mics, loops and vocals).

Designer Raimund Wong (whose work has adorned posters and releases by Total Refreshment Centre, Church Of Sound and Baba Yaga’s Hut, and who shares Charles’ interest in chance theory and the ingenuity forced on artists via DIY minimalism) will be DJ-ing.

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Dates:

Retrophonica
Brunel Museum, Railway Avenue, Rotherhithe, London, SE16 4LF, England
Sunday 13th October 2019, 6.00pm & 8:30pm – information here, here and here

Charles Hayward Presents… (featuring Sly & The Family Drone + VÄLVĒ + Timestretch Alarmsong + Atatat + DJ Raimund Wong)
The Albany, Douglas Way, Deptford, SE8 4AG London, United Kingdom
Saturday, 19 October 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here

Tags: Alex Palmer, Atatat (J.C. Barbara ), Biting Tongues, Bohuslav Martinů, Charles Hayward, Charlie Draper, Claude Debussy, Dmitri Shostakovich, John Williams (composer), Ken Hollings, Les Baxter, listening to women, London (England), Miklós Rózsa, music for theremin, Nick Doyne-Ditmas, Raimund Wong, Retrophonica, Roberto Sassi, Sly & The Family Drone, Tom Challenger, V A L V E, women of heart and mind, Yoni Silver

June/July 2019 – upcoming London gigs – Jewdas’ summer shindig with Geoff Berner, Fran & Flora and Rokhl Merlot at Balabam (20th June); Sefiroth at JW3 (4th July)

17 Jun

A couple of vibrantly Jewish gigs coming up in London…

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I mostly know about Jewdas thanks to them apparently being among Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite Jewish organisations, and hence having been dragged in the wretched palaver over where and how much anti-semitism might be marring British politics. A determined “radical Jewish voice for the alternative diaspora”, they could probably have done without the blowback; or perhaps they take it as a badge of pride; but they’ll wear and weather it regardless.

In Britain and elsewhere, the internet’s rotting under the feculent, polluted weight of this particular debate, and I’m not going to wrangle the point here (I’ll leave that to the single-issue soapboxers who love it so much) but it would plainly be nonsense to suggest either that Jewdas might not be deeply rooted in Jewish culture, or that they’re not deeply proud of it. If you want to know more of what they’re about (and don’t mind Jonathan Sacks being twitted a bit) you can read about that here: alternatively, you could consider their summer party show at Balabam this week. It’s Jewish to the core – bright and lively, opinionated and warm; pugnacious in intellect and politics and personal engagement; sometimes superbly vulgar; and loaded with music that weaves itself into a shawl of pain, laughter, chatter and living.

They’re hoping to offer “the best in radical Yiddish music” (trigger warning for the humph-y: they tend to favour Yiddish over Hebrew) and it’s certainly going to be left-wing, and anarchic. Headliner Geoff Berner is a Jewish-Canadian punk-klezmernik; a singer, songwriter, accordionist and sometime novelist who prides himself on “dragging klezmer kicking and screaming back to the bars where it belongs. For the past fifteen years or so, he’s travelled the world, garnering a sizable, passionate following of odd, bookish people who like to drink. Clever and literate, Berner’s songs can make you want to weep, laugh, grind your teeth, or kick out a window – often all at the same time. His writing can be overtly political, overtly left wing, leaning towards anarchy, but free of easy slogans or cliches.“ I couldn’t talk him up any better than that, so here he is in action in concert and on video:

I’m better acquainted with one of the other acts on the bill – Fran & Flora – the once-seen, immediately-loved cello-and-violin duo of Francesca Ter-Berg and Flora Curzon, who’ve been bringing string duets from eastern European folk and improvisatory traditions to events like Marchland for a few years now, and who’ve now documented it on record with their debut album ‘Unfurl’. Presumably they’re providing the more serious and sober core to the evening, though I doubt that it’ll dominate if someone called Rokhl Merlot is also providing “Yiddish cabaret on an out-of-tune piano”. I suspect there’s a pseudonym involved and that it’s probably going to be riotously funny. As for DJs, there’s a “tuchas-shaking selection of klezmer, Jewish jazz, kosher blues and circumcised soul” from the Kosher Nostra DJs, who are presumably turning nasty gags about “Jewish mafias” on their heads before spitting them back. (Either that, or it’s a nod to the ghost of Bugsy Siegel.) I can’t track down anything on Mr or Ms. Merlot, but here’s a dose of the other two.

My own favourite Jewish joke? You didn’t ask for it, but it’s from within the community; and it’s about how if you leave a Jewish guy alone in a room for long enough, he’ll start arguing with himself. That’s how it ought to be, and I’m guessing that it’s something Jewdas are more than happy to embrace.

Postscript – I’ve just found out that Jewdas’ response to some wretched fascist pledging to take Stamford Hill (a strongly Jewish area of north-east London, and the place where my own mother worked in Jewish youth organisations on her first arrival in this country, fifty-odd years ago, as a concerned and wandering New Jersey Gentile) and to liberate it from “Jewification” was to stage a ‘Jewification’ party; and to then invite everyone, including Muslims and “everyone who has ever been threatened for being different, everyone who has ever been othered and made to feel like an outsider…. We did not let them pass before (at Cable Street), and we will stop them again – this time with furious dancing.” Now that’s just treasurable.

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If this all sounds a little raucous, there’s also an upcoming chance to catch the (frankly magical) contemporary British Sephardic ensemble Sefiroth out at JW3 at the start of July.

Built up from some of the best young British jazz and folk musicians from the Sephardic Jewish community (the rundown being the Roth brothers – Alex, Simon and Nick – plus Alice Zawadzki, Olesya Zdorovetska, Ruth Goller, Shirley Smart, Alex Bonney and Francesco Turrisi) the band rearranges and revives Jewish songs and melodies from fifteenth-century Iberia where Moorish, Balkan, North African and Mediterranean ideas merged with the music brought out of Israel. The repertoire’s a mingling of ancient love songs, children’s rhymes, dances, songstories and yearning airs; bringing to mind warm winds, scintillating desert nights, homesickness, melodies hummed and murmured in kitchens and tented marketplaces… the entire musical texture of a community.

Sefiroth play all of this beautifully. Over the last few years, I’ve spent several evenings sitting spellbound at their feet as they spun these tunes out of brass, percussion, shofars, Alice and Olesya’s vocals (capturing ache, nurture, memory and desire), Alex’s slips, swells and ebbs of gorgeously understated electric guitar, and barely-perceptible laptop sound mutations. You could, too.

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Dates:

Jewdas presents:
Geoff Berner + Fran & Flora + Rokhl Merlot + The Kosher Nostra DJs
Balabam, 58-60 High Road, Tottenham, London, N15 6JU, England
Saturday 22nd June 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here

Sefiroth
JW3, 341-351 Finchley Road, West Hampstead, London, NW3 6ET, England
Thursday 4th July 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here

Tags: Alex Bonney, Alex Roth, Alice Zawadzki, Fran & Flora, Francesco Turrisi, Geoff Berner, London (England), Nick Roth, Olesya Zdorovetska, Rokhl Merlot, Ruth Goller, Sefiroth, Shirley Smart, Simon Roth

June 2019 – Daylight Music’s summer season in London, continued – ‘From Call to Choir’ with Dominic Stichbury, Ben See, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Archie and a clutch of chorals (15th June), Piney Gir, She Choir and Oly Ralfe (22nd June); Xenia Pestova Bennett, Ligeti Quartet, Snowpoet, Muted Summer Landscape and the magnetic resonator piano (29th June)

9 Jun

The choral ideas touched on earlier in Daylight Music‘s new season of Saturday lunchtime gigs are developed further with the ‘Call to Choir’ event, including a chance for you to join in…

“What happens when the call of one voice captures the imagination of others? Starting with one singer and finishing with hundreds, this edition of Daylight Music will see numbers of voices grow to fill every corner of the Union Chapel.

“Dominic Stichbury (Chaps Choir, Bellow Fellows) and Ben See (La La La Records) are exploring the themes of expansion, commonalty and togetherness through the human voice; and are gathering singers together to celebrate its infectious power. The performance will include an eclectic mix of singers and songs, including new material written especially for the event, featuring female folk/jazz vocal quartet Archie, Ben See, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz and the GrandMother project, Chaps Choir, Bellow Fellows and Brixton-based “all girl, all awesome” close-harmony choir Electric Belles.

“Would you like to join the biggest ever choir to sing at Daylight Music? All welcome. No choir/performing experience is required, just fill in the online form, turn up for the preparation sessions (on Friday 14th) and take part in the final event. You will learn some short songs in harmony by ear and prepare to sing them with hundreds of other voices in the wonderful acoustics of the chapel.”

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More choral covers blend with pianos, pop and psychedelia on the 22nd when Piney Gir gets her hands on the reins…

“Piney Gir’s perfect pop music is dipped in sunshine, so she was an obvious choice to curate a special event inspired by the Summer Solstice as part of our 10th Year celebration. She wants you to get playful, be creative, and come along for summertime inspiration and maybe even do a little white witchy spell with her in honour of The Longest Day.

“Originally hailing from Kansas, but having lived in London for many years, Piney is a prolific and prodigious musician. She has been touring with Gaz Coombes around the UK, Europe and America and is also one of Gaz’s backing singers. She has recently been singing with Noel Gallagher and Danny Goffey, and supported Ride on tour around the UK just before Christmas. She’s gearing up to release her seventh album, ‘You Are Here’, which is a celebration of analogue gear with a sound that nods back to when music was on the cusp of change, just before synth pop and just after punk rock.

“Her allies on this afternoon will be London women’s SHE Choir who sing their technicolour version of songs from Destiny’s Child to Fleetwood Mac.

“Oly Ralfe (Ralfe Band) will present music from his debut solo instrumental piano album. Sitting somewhere between the oscillating patterns of Philip Glass and the reflectiveness of Gavin Bryars, the album ‘Notes from Another Sea’ sounds like music for a film that has yet to be made.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=40nTda6-d_k

“Finally, Piney presents a special acoustic set from Premium Leisure (a.k.a. Chris Barker) who has honed his own sound: a mix of experimental guitars and undulating rhythms reminiscent of late ’60s English psychedelic rock with a bit of early Tame Impala or White Denim thrown in.”

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The last of June’s gigs is a typically Daylight fusion of accessible classical and experimental ideas…

“What if you could play a note on the piano and have it last forever? Pianist, composer and improviser Xenia Pestova Bennett will curate a special afternoon featuring the Magnetic Resonator Piano, an exciting new instrument designed by the radical inventor Andrew McPherson. A grand piano will be completely transformed into a stunning acoustic cyborg with electromagnets suspended above the strings, allowing for control of minute details of shimmering resonance and gorgeous sustained tones. (Click here for an article on the instrument, from ‘Keyboard Perspectives’, and here for a ‘World Piano News’ article on its use in the soundtrack for last year’s film ‘Christopher Robin’…)

“Also performing will be string ensemble Ligeti Quartet who, since their formation in 2010, have established a reputation for breaking new ground through innovative programming and championing of today’s most exciting composers and artists.

“Completing this afternoon line-up, Xenia presents Snowpoet‘s debut at Daylight. The London-based band, led by “mesmerising” vocalist Lauren Kinsella and bassist Chris Hyson, have released two critically acclaimed albums to date, with the most recent being ‘Thought You Knew’ on Edition Records. Blending sweet hook-laden vocal lines with warm and lush arrangements, the music is infectious, delicate and tasteful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia0YtHdcHUU

“Joining the dots this week between the other artists is something a little bit special. We’re pleased to welcome Muted Summer Landscape, an audio/visual collaboration between electronic music composer Brian Robinson and visual artist Steve Lee who transform and shape their audio/visual field recordings, melodies and rhythms into delicate electronic portraits that often reflect the natural environments that surround them. Inspired by the simple and complex patterns that present themselves when manipulating source material, msl create immersive narratives that evoke emotions, stimulate imagination and provoke thought. Taking into account the architectural surroundings and the nature of this event, Brian will deliver a solo performance of live ambient/spectral transformations based on material taken from MSL’s forthcoming audio/visual release, expected later this summer.”

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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 (as ever, an absolute bargain). Dates below:

Daylight Music 309: ‘From Call To Choir’ with Dominic Stichbury & Ben See with Esmeralda Conde Ruiz + Archie (plus members of Chaps Choir, Bellow Fellows, Electric Belles and the Grandmother project) – Saturday 15th June 2019, 12:00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 310: Piney Gir’s ‘Midsummer Madness’ with She Choir + Oly Ralfe – Saturday 22nd June 2019, 12:00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 311: ‘Magnetic String Resonance’ with Xenia Pestova Bennett + Ligeti Quartet + Snowpoet + Muted Summer Landscape – Saturday 29th June 2019, 12:00pm – information here and here

Details on July’s Daylight concerts to follow in due course…

Tags: Andrew McPherson (technologist), Archie, Archie (band), Arctic Circle (promoter), Bellow Fellows, Ben See, Chaps Choir, Chris Hyson, Daylight Music (event), Dominic Stichbury, Electric Belles, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Independent Country, Jam Tarts Choir, Lauren Kinsella, Li Mills, Ligeti Quartet, listening to women, London (England), Loose Tubes, magnetic resonator piano, Muted Summer Landscape, Oly Ralfe, Piney Gir, Premium Leisure (Chris Barker), prepared piano music, Sarah Gonputh, SHE Choir, Snowpoet, The Slowest Lift, Vibracathedral Orchestra, women of heart and mind, Xenia Pestova Bennett

June 2019 – the start of Daylight Music’s summer season in London – The Slowest Lift, Laura Jurd & Chris Batchelor, ORE and Jim Bishop (1st June); Jam Tarts Choir, Independent Country and Sarah Gonputh (8th June)

28 May

Currently in the process of celebrating a remarkable ten years of bringing cuddly/eclectic pay-what-you-can family music events to London (or, more accurately, of encouraging inspiring music to happen with the minimum of cynical compromises while ensuring that there’s a family-friendly space for it to happen in), Daylight Music is back for another season of Saturday lunchtime gigs with all manner of different people playing.

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The summer season launch gig, on 1st June, focusses on experimental brass-themed acts:

“West Yorkshire’s The Slowest Lift (Sophie Cooper and Julian Bradley), present a new chapter in the long-running tradition of radical English music duos. Cooper (an accomplished solo performer and collaborator) and Bradley (from frequent VHF delinquents Vibracathedral Orchestra) play a kind of gentle post-industrial psychedelia, a ghostly tapestry of earthen whirring, phantasmal resonances, sheets of textured skree and touching, hazy vocals. The songs are a blend of straightforward performance and eccentric bricolage, with rude electronic interjections sitting comfortably alongside delicate guitar and keyboard melodies.

“Laura Jurd and Chris Batchelor will perform as a duo. Laura is a London-based, award-winning trumpet player and composer, currently a BBC New Generation Artist for 2015-2017: an active improviser playing regularly in the UK and more recently in Europe, she specialises in writing for hand-picked musicians in her own projects and ensembles. Her band Dinosaur has performed throughout the UK and Europe. Chris is an innovative and creative trumpet player and composer based in London: as well as leading several projects, including the avant-trad band Pigfoot, he is also featured as a sensitive and versatile soloist in many highly regarded groups on the European jazz scene, and is a prominent soloist and composer in the re-formed Loose Tubes.

“ORE is the drone/doom brass sound of tuba player Sam Underwood and baritone horn/trombone player Beck Baker. The pair create weighty dronescapes that evolve at a glacial pace. ORE’s sound rewards the patient listener as their dissonant tones rub together; enhanced by the use of two custom-built resonant gong speakers. The audience slowly becomes awash with the sound of ORE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjBKUXfNCsM

“We’re happy to announce that Jim Bishop will return to play the chapel’s own Gothic synth – the Henry Willis organ, joining the dots between the other main performers. Jim came to Daylight as part of all-male 60’s dance troupe The Action Men, who have returned a couple of times since. He plays in Ancient Egyptian instrumental group The Mirage Men, The Band Who Fell To Earth (who play Bowie in the style of Booker T. and The MGs) and The Fay Hallam Group, alongside another Daylight performer, Andy Lewis.”

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The ‘Come As You Are’ concert on 8th June sees the series dive into comfy covers again…

“Daylight Music goes to the indie disco in its own inimitable fashion with the Jam Tarts Choir and Independent Country, who will be teaming up for an unforgettable rendition of the Nirvana song of the event title, and expect a surprise or two on the Chapel’s organ…

“Independent Country, a six-piece band from Birmingham, play your favourite indie hits in a country music style. Here are songs originally by the Happy Mondays, the Smiths, Blur, Jesus and Mary Chain, Pulp and Oasis as you’ve never heard them before.

“Now into their fifteenth barnstorming year, Brighton’s Jam Tarts are an indie choral collective who perform unique and shimmering arrangements of post-punk, electro, Britpop and artrock classics. Four (or five or even eight) part harmonies, sixty pairs of mighty lungs and six degrees of celebration. Think choirs aren’t your cup of tea? You’ve never heard your favourite songs quite like this before…Their set is likely to include big choral versions of songs by Ezra Furman, The Stone Roses, Tom Waits, Jesus and Mary Chain and Arcade Fire. Hungover commuters on the 8.18 from Brighton can expect the train to be packed with singing Tarts, complete with trumpeters and cellist!

“Indie and alternative music was the natural choice for the choir after director and musical arranger Li Mills bribed John Peel with chocolate to help write her music degree finals thesis on punk, obliterating her early teenage record collection of Dire Straits and Phil Collins albums. Praise be to the late Mr Peel, or Jam Tarts might be singing Another Day in Paradise arranged for sixty voices…

“Sarah Gonputh is a London-based keyboard player for Green Seagull, Manuela, Twink and The Lysergics. She has a special love for vintage organs such as the Vox Jaguar, Vox Continental, Farfisa Compact, The Philacorda and the Hammond Organ. Her keyboard-playing heroes include: Ray Mazareck of The Doors, Steve Winwood and Garth Hudson of The Band. Having performed several times at past Daylight Music events with Green Seagull, Manuela and playing piano for the “in-between” bits last year for The Left Outsiders, this will be Sarah’s Union Chapel Organ playing debut, pumping out some indie hits.”

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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 (as ever, an absolute bargain). Dates below:

Daylight Music 307: The Slowest Lift + Laura Jurd & Chris Batchelor + ORE – Saturday 1st June 2019, 12:00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 308: ‘Come As You Are’ with Jam Tarts Choir + Independent Country – Saturday 8th June 2019, 12:00pm – information here and here

Details on June’s continuing Daylight concerts to follow in due course…

Tags: Arctic Circle (promoter), Beck Baker, Bellow Fellows, Chris Batchelor, Chris Hyson, Daylight Music (event), Independent Country, Jam Tarts Choir, Jim Bishop, Lauren Kinsella, listening to women, London (England), Sam Underwood (ORE), Sarah Gonputh, Sophie Cooper, The Slowest Lift, women of heart and mind

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…”

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’.”

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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.

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.

* * * * * * * *

There’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

Tags: Alessandra Eramo, Amy Hale, Bernhard Living, Bioni Samp, Blanca Regina, Chloe Herington, Chris Speed, contrabassoon, Frank Byng, Fritha Jenkins, Giles Greenway, Hawthonn, Henry Cow, Isn’tses, Johannes de Silentio, John Wall, Kay Grant, Keith Moliné, Laura Netz, Lisa McKendrick, London (England), Lucia Farinati, Mark Durgan, Morphogenesis, multimedia, Nina Power, Overlaps (concert series), raxil4, Rebecca Glover, Rotten Bliss (Jasmine Pender), Slow Slow Loris, Tim Drage, Tim Hodgkinson, Tony James Morton, V A L V E, Vera Bremerton

May 2019 – upcoming experimental gigs – Maryanne Amacher Focus in London featuring Ensemble Contrechamps, Ensemble Zwischentöne, Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini (30th & 31st)

17 May

The last Kammer Klang concert of the current season is slipping its usual moorings, forsaking its usual London home at Café Oto in favour of the ICA, and staging a reconstruction (and UK premiere) of ‘GLIA’, Maryanne Amacher’s work for seven instruments and electronics.

As a fully-formed artist slipping into the realms of avant-garde composition, Amacher was best known for installation work and psychoacoustic ideas… although that’s a little dry and reductive. She was interested in exploring the ways in which humans perceive sound (including ways in which a listener can be subtly deceived by its manipulation and displacement), and in particular the perceptions induced by sounds generated within the ear. She’d use particular high-frequency sounds, volumes and sonic displacements to excite unusual tonal responses within the physical structure of the inner ears of her listeners; in effect, she benevolently transformed them into part of the sonic ensemble (or, perhaps more accurately, into instruments who could perceive themselves being played).

This from the archives at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe:

“The work bearing the title ‘GLIA’ (named after the glial cells in the brain that control the transmission of stimuli between the synapses) was performed once in the Berlin multimedia centre TESLA. This first exhibition was (still) instructed and supervised by Amacher herself in collaboration with the former director of Ensemble Zwischentöne, Peter Ablinger, as well as with current director Bill Dietz.

“In ‘GLIA’, Amacher imagines the audience as a kind of glial cell representing the interface between the electronic and acoustic-instrumental elements of the work. In a narrower sense, she imagined the “otoacoustic emissions” (the sounds within the ear radiating once again from the electronic devices and instruments as if “by magic”) emerging in the audience’s ears as precisely this “neural interface”. This corresponds to the same approach Amacher had previously intended with her piece for the Kronos Quartet in the 1990s which was never performed (and probably never completed). In fact, the material for this string quartet had been partly newly arranged for ‘GLIA’. After the Berlin premier, Amacher returned to Kingston, New York, and took home with her all the material for the performance of this work. In 2009, the Zwischentöne ensemble invited Amacher to return to Berlin to further develop ‘GLIA’. Unexpectedly, Amacher tragically died shortly before this planned reencounter.”

‘GLIA’ has been performed at least twice since then (with Zwischentöne performing it twice in 2012, at ZKM and at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart), but this will be the British premiere; with members of Zwischentöne joining another Swiss New Music ensemble, Ensemble Contrechamps and with Bill Dietz returning to direct. The performance will be preceded by ‘Ghost Written Scenarios & Unnamed Sensibilities’, a discussion between Bill and Amy Cimini, the contemporary music performer and academic historian Amy Cimini whose book ‘Listening in the Future Tense’ “examines the use of biological and ecological sound sources in late 20th century experimental music circles.”

It’s no coincidence that this subject overlaps with Amacher’s work: Amy was a friend and collaborator, as well as being part of the ongoing Supreme Connections collective which reengages with Amacher’s legacy and her back catalogue of music and ideas. Amy’s also a defender against over-casual summings-up of her friend’s intentions and achievements: “(Listeners are) like: ‘O.K., I totally get what this music is about — it’s about this crazy inner-ear sensation, she understood that intuitively, end of story. And that’s not the story, actually.” OK… I stand corrected…)

The concert and discussion will be preceded the previous day with a screening of Charles Atlas’ ‘Torse’ documentary from 1977 – a multiple-camera study of the choreography of Merce Cunningham’s ‘Torse’ dance piece, performed to Amacher’s composition Remainder (1976). As with the performance of ‘GLIA’, there’ll be a pre-screening conversation between Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini.

* * * * * * * *

Kammer Klang/Ensemble Contrechamps/Institute of Contemporary Arts presents:
‘Maryanne Amacher at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 30th-31st May 2019’

Screening of ‘Torse’ (plus pre-screening conversation between Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini) – Thursday 30th May 2019, 6.30pm
‘Ghost Written Scenarios & Unnamed Sensibilities’ (Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini in conversation) – Friday 31st May 2019, 7.00pm
Maryanne Amacher Focus (featuring Ensemble Contrechamps, members of Ensemble Zwischentöne and Bill Dietz) – Friday 31st May 2019, 8.00pm

All events at Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, St James’s, London, SW1Y 5AH, England.

More/ongoing information here, here and here

Tags: Amy Cimini, Bill Dietz, Ensemble Contrechamps, Ensemble Zwischentöne, Kammer Klang (event), London (England), Maryanne Amacher, Merce Cunningham

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Categories 2005, 2019, chamber music, dance music, dance performances, deep listening, documentaries, electro-acoustic music, electronic, experimental music, film & cinema, films, interactive performances

April/May 2019 – upcoming jazz gigs – a massive Barbican celebration of London jazz from the Total Refreshment Centre (13th April); the Steam Down collective hit Shoreditch (24th April); Warmer Than Blood in London and Cardiff (22nd April, 21st May)

10 Apr

When landlords and developers mark a city building for extra, blander profit – and when they put the squeeze on an existing tenant – they don’t only change and narrow the future, they can also asphyxiate the past. I don’t mean that they somehow delete what’s come before, it’s more that they pinch it off and remove its potential for continuance. The meaning that’s associated with a building and what goes on inside it, its history, becomes obscured to people who’ve not had the chance to discover it yet; or to people who might, in the future, grow up nearby never knowing what used to take place there.

For myself, I feel pretty damn ignorant for not having known about Hackney music space Total Refreshment Centre until, ooh, last year. It seems that, in various forms, it harboured and encouraged music for at least half of my lifetime, curating the historical while encouraging the current and never losing touch of the ethos that music should be inherent to and conversant with its community rather than being a little rarified enclave. The fact that sometime, quietly, last summer, the TRC was forced to shut down (presumably to make way for luxury flats or something which can generate a greater ground rent) makes me angry. Fortunately, the place is resilient enough as an idea – effectively, as a movement – not to rely entirely on bricks and mortar. Scheduled gigs have continued (still run by the existing team but moved to other venues), the programs still run; the concept of the place still has legs.

In some respects the people involved with the TRC are making a virtue of their new and more itinerant existence, using it to spread the word a little wider; extending their ongoing work in what ‘Clash Music’ has called “a means of pursing social engineering, a way to build communities up at a time when the political establishment seem content to break communities apart… Music can be used to re-imagine your surroundings, to transform concrete, glass, and brick into something magical.” Still, it must make life a little tougher, a little more challenging, that much more of a forced hack at a time when it’s already pretty exhausting.

With that in mind, it’s good to see that the TRC gets its own jazz tribute – more accurately, its own self-propelled celebratory showcase – this coming weekend at one of London’s more inviolable culture fortresses, the Barbican. There’s an opportunity here to carp about centralization, or about how certain establishments are protected while others are not (and for distasteful reasons – race and class also have a role to play here), but let’s just sound the obvious note here and move on. Better to bounce back and roll on as the TRC are doing; better to celebrate the recognition and cooperation which such a show also represents.

There are still a few tickets available for what’s promising to be one of the events of the London jazz year. Blurb follows:

“Total Refreshment Centre is part and parcel of east London’s recent music history. The building’s musical journey started as a Caribbean social club and studio and evolved into the musical hub that it is today. On April 13th, the Barbican Centre will host Dreaming The City, celebrating a previously untold story in east London’s music history. To mark nearly thirty years of influential music in the building, TRC has teamed up with Boiler Room – the revered global music broadcasting platform – who will broadcast the gig live.

“The concept of the show is a live mixtape exploring three decades of musical excellence that took place inside an Edwardian warehouse in Hackney. The building began life as a confectionary factory and by the 1990s had become Mellow Mix, a Caribbean social club and rehearsal space. In 2012 it began running as Total Refreshment Centre, an influential studio and venue that has played an integral role in the upsurge of new London jazz, which is now gathering worldwide attention. The narrative of ‘Dreaming The City’ is inspired by the history of this building, made special by the communities that inhabited it over the years. This story, researched by writer Emma Warren, is explored fully in her new book, ‘Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre (And All Places Like It)‘.

“Over thirty musicians from the thriving jazz scene (including Cassie Kinoshi and her Seed Ensemble, drummer-producer Kwake Bass, Jazz Warrior Orphy Robinson, Tom Skinner’s Wildflower, folk-crossover artists Rozi Plain, Alabaster DePlume and Joshua Idehen) will team up to perform. Also on the bill – Chelsea Carmichael, Cherise Adams-Burnett, Crispin Spry Robinson, Deschanel Gordon, Donna Thompson, Dylema Amadie, Emma-Jean Thackray, Idris Rahman, James Howard, Joe Bristow, Leon Brichard, Maria Osuchowska, Miguel Gorodi, Mutale Chashi, Noriko Okaku, Oscar Jerome, Patrick Boyle, Rai Wong, Rio Kai, Sheila Maurice-Grey, Shirley Tetteh, Tyrone Isaac-Stuart, Yael Camara Onono, Yohan Kebede and more special secret guests to come. This milestone event will unfold over five chapters, blurring the lines of what jazz is and creating new, exclusive and unexpected collaborations.

“There’s a strong link between club culture and live music in today’s vibrant music scene – what some have called ‘jazz-rave’ – and Dreaming The City will offer an energetic journey through time, space and London’s rich culture. The evening will start with a celebration of Caribbean sounds, recognising the community that first established the space as a musical hub. Following this, we trace the contemporary lineage of jazz music between inner-city London, West Africa, the Caribbean and continental Europe. Expect a session showcasing household names premiering new outfits, dropping old classics and brand new tunes. The music will reflect the diversity of sounds that have been danced to at TRC, from reggae and dub, to Krautrock via jazz and West African grooves.”

Some glimpses…

…and here’s a short film about the state of London jazz (with plenty of TRC-ing) which was released into the wild a few months ago in January…

* * * * * * * *

Back in January I did some praise singing for Steam Down, the south London jazz collective who bring regular African-inspired but London-cooked communal music events to Deptford. For the benefit of those north and east Londoners who for some reason never cross the river, they’re playing Shoreditch’s Village Underground towards the end of the month.

“Join Steam Down as they take over Village Underground, with members on the decks and some very special guests joining them on stage. Jumping off from the sonic springboard of Afrofuturism, grime and future soul, all fused together with the fearless spontaneity of jazz, Steam Down is an arts collective comprised of Ahnanse, Alex Rita, Brother Portrait, Sawa-Manga, Theon Cross, Nadeem Din-Gabisi, Benjamin Appiah, Dominic Canning and “Nache. The collective congregates mid-weekly for a live performance where healing vibes and compulsive dancing are just as important as the music. Previous sessions have included guest appearances from Kamasi Washington, Sampa The Great, Nubya Garcia, members of Ezra Collective, SEED Ensemble and Sons of Kemet. Every week proves to be a co-creative piece of magic where everyone’s participation matters.”

There’s a new Village Underground interview with Steam Down here, but below is part of what I wrote about them three months ago:

“(An) African-inspired collective ethos… a diverse, voluntary hive mind, their individualities fused and encouraged by common purpose… a simmering pot of phuture soul, West African rhythms and cheerful Afrofuturism, the rapid offset breakbeat-splash and electrophonic edge of grime and broken-beat, and (in particular) spiritual jazz. That said, they’re well aware that they should steer clear of romantic oversimplifications about roots. As Ahnanse remarked in an interview with ‘The Vinyl Factory’ last year, “the roots of what we are creating starts outside of that context, jazz is not the only source of improvised music in the world. It happens in many forms and many cultures, we all come from different spaces and cultures, and it isn’t black American culture, none of us were born there, so actually we are bringing all of those other experiences into this… In a society that is so hegemonic and monotonous it’s nice to surprise yourself and be surprised, by people that you know well.” More than anything else, Steam Down work is inspired by the interlocking of Afro-diasporan culture with week-by-week London life – the information-rich bustle and challenges of a world city made up of people from everywhere, many of them sometimes pushing (or knocking heads) against half-invisible restrictions and oppressions as well as providing broad-mindedness and opportunity.”

* * * * * * * *

Also this spring, guitarist/composer Chris Montague revs up his jazz trio Warmer Than Blood (with bass guitarist Ruth Goller and pianist Kit Downes) for a couple of month-apart gigs in London and Cardiff. As I noted when I wrote about them in February, between them they can draw on a massive range of potential influences (including Sephardic music, manouche, punk jazz, Latin folk and Maghrebian sounds, the bouncing imagined world-jazz of the F-IRE Collective, Chris’ six-string avant-mapping in Future Currents) but in practise tend to go somewhere else – somewhere more uprooted and peril-flecked. Compared to the broad communality of Steam Down or the TRC community, they’re coming from a different place – tenser, more abstract and (if we’re being honest) whiter – but it’s still a collective communal effort, just shrunk down to a smaller chamber and a slender triangular format.

As I wrote last time, “all three are longtime friends and collaborators, seeking yet another new approach. They seem to have found it with Chris’ newest batch of compositions and improvisation-seeding situations, which he suggests consist of “intricate textures, dark pools of harmony, layered melodies, kinetic group improvisation and percussive prepared piano… fractious composed passages can inhabit the same sonic space as spare, ambient melodies, often described as melancholic and uplifting at the same time…” Introverted and ominous, their name-track’s a quiet etiolated piano exploration over a minimal pulsing guitar-chord cycle and locked-in bass rumble. The excerpt from a longer piece, FTM, is a gradual evolver in which Chris hovers in menacing sustain/volume-swell textural clouds and momentary dust-devils over ghost-Latin clicks and bass piano thuds (Kit muting the piano at both ends) before the trio expand into what’s partly a kind of haunted country music (like a Bill Frisell ensemble scoured to the bone by plains wind), and partly like a salsa band coming to terminal grief in a badlands dustbowl.”

Here’s a rare recent live recording and an album taster for their imminent debut…

* * * * * * * *

Dates:

Boiler Room and Total Refreshment Centre present:
BR x Total Refreshment Centre: ‘Dreaming The City’
Barbican Hall @ Barbican Arts Centre, Silk Street, City of London, London, EC2Y 8DS, England
Saturday 13th April 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here

Warmer Than Blood:

The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8AZ, England – Monday 22nd April 2019, 7.45pm – information here, here and here
The Flute & Tankard, 4 Windsor Place, Cardiff, CF10 3BX, Wales – Tuesday 21st May 2019, 9.00pm – information here

Steam Down
Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England
Wednesday 24th April 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Tags: Ahnanse, Alabaster DePlume, Alex Rita, Benjamin Appiah, Brother Portrait, Calabashed, Cassie Kinoshi, Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed, Chelsea Carmichael, Cherise Adams-Burnett, Chris Montague, Crispin Spry Robinson, Deschanel Gordon, Dominic Canning, Donna Thompson, Dylema Amadie, Emma-Jean Thackray, Idris Rahman, James Howard, Jazz Warriors, Joe Bristow, Joshua Idehen, Kit Downes, Kwake Bass, Leon Brichard, Maria Osuchowska, Miguel Gorodi, Mutale Chashi, Nache (Edward Wakili Hick), Nadeem Din Gabisi, Noriko Okaku, Orphy Robinson, Oscar Jerome, Patrick Boyle, Rai Wong, Rio Kai, Rozi Plain, Ruth Goller, Sawa Manga, Sheila Maurice-Grey, Shirley Tetteh, Steam Down, Theon Cross, Tom Skinner, Tom Skinner's Wildflower, Total Refreshment Centre (promoter/venue), Tyrone Isaac-Stuart, Warmer Than Blood, Yahael Camara-Onono, Yohan Kebede

April 2019 – upcoming English experimental/pop gigs – Joe Snape on tour in Birmingham, Brighton, London, Bristol and Newcastle with Laurie & Suze, plus guest spots from Maya Verlaak, Blood Stereo, O Yama O, Orxid, Competition and Gwilly Edmondez (11th, 13th, 17th, 18th and 19th April)

9 Apr

Usually busy in New York or Berlin, multimedia musician and performer Joe Snape drops back into England this week and next week for a five-date tour of his ‘Joyrobix’ project – “a suite of nimble, polychrome post-pop songs” which “(pay) weird homage to a musical America that doesn’t quite exist. Part soft-rock guitars, part gospel grooves, part Broadway aria, this is music that’s resolutely strange and oddly familiar at once.”

Amen to that. I might not hear much Hall & Oates or Mahalia Jackson in what he does, but ‘Joyrobix’ is an enchanting experience – pitch-bent fragmentary experimental pop arranged in a jaunty shatter. Joe sings wordlessly in a gentle, sensual welter of jazzy, Autotuned melisma amidst a cavalcade of perky noises and thumbed guitar, echoes of doo-wop and looming noise clouds, kinked brass and woodwind and broken-beat invention. Stemming from “a danceable refix of pieces for chamber ensemble”, its final form is apparently inspired by how his move to America went wrong: a crisped-up experience of “dislocation and burnout… dejection and displacement” which resulted in a sheaf of pieces which are as uplifting as their inspirations were sad.

Consequently, ‘Joyrobix’ is part musical diary, part therapeutic bounceback and part meander: too elusive to pin down easily, but a kaleidoscopic tapestry of complicated feelings expressed through pop tunes which wink and beckon at you around extra-dimensional twists. You’ll find yourself humming along even as you get lost. Live, the music’s being performed by a trio of Joe plus Jethro Cooke (electric guitar, electronics) and Louise Snape (trumpet and vocals), and Joe has collaborated with witty Swiss video absurdist Leonie Brandner to provide a set of ten short films as backdrops.

On all five dates Joe is headlining an evening of mingled multi-media music and performance art. At each gig, he’s joined by Laurie Tompkins and Suze Whaites – a.k.a. simply Laurie & Suze, two of the three co-directors of Newcastle’s hybrid electronic/improvised music label Slip (which is both promoting the tour and releasing much of the music involved in it). As a performing duo, they’re presenting their ‘Coop’ project, a first substantial step into collaboration (though I’m not sure whether that should be ‘Coop’ as in “co-operative” or as in “chicken”). Laurie deals with the music, Suze the visuals, with ‘Coop’ offing “a meshing of Tompkins’ sonic negotiations of pop cultural trauma, ritual self-abasement, and gunky funk, with Whaites’ illusive video renderings of the alien, microscopic, and fleshy.”.

The third act on the bill varies from city to city. In Birmingham, it’s Belgian experimental composer and former Acid Police Noise Ensemble member Maya Verlaak. I’ve heard nothing about what (or how) she’s going to perform, but previous live outings have had her picking and choosing from an arsenal of voice, melodica, keyboards, recorder, light sources, self-built electronics, cow horns, nail violin and bicycle. This – plus her preference for creating contextual compositions around factors of “place, musician, instrument, etiquette, conventions, history” – suggest that she’ll have scoped out the venue (Digbeth’s Vivid Projects space) and created something enigmatically appropriate.

In Brighton, battle is joined by local dark-space “electro-acoustic muck” noiseniks Blood Stereo, who base their disturbing atmospherics around “feral hissing and rumbling tape loops” including field recordings and home conjurings, plus electronics and objects. The object is to voice – or suggest – deep disturbances and anxieties seeping to the surface of the psyche and from there out into the broader world. Should rattle and chip a few teacups over in Hove.

In London it’s performance duo O Yama O, within which a “micro-orchestra” of small domestic objects, toys and mechanisms manipulated by Rie Nakajima ally with the body and voice performance of Keiko Yamamoto. They probe and map a (very) Japanese landscape of everyday life and noises, underlaid and informed by myth, tradition and national folk music, attempting a philosophical marriage of “the non-spectacular and the sublime”; a soundtrack for friendly or indifferent spirits floating across the tatami in a danchi apartment.

On album, O Yama O tend to incorporate more instrumentation and melody in a kind of skittering avant-garde Noh-dub. Live, it’s a strangely matter-of-fact immersive affair, domestic, dramatic and keyed to the performance space, with Keiki alternately tiptoeing, romping and stamping around using a full range of vocalisations (“chanting, incanting, thundering, whispering”).

In Bristol, it’s Orxid, a spinoff of visually-triggered, immediate-response Glaswegian rhythmic randomists Still House Plants, who finesse garage rock and Fine Art influences into something which sounds like neither (and who were once cheeky enough to release a live album consisting solely of them being introduced onstage before a cut to the aftershow chatter: check here for a long breakdown of their complex ethos).

Orxid is a solo project for SHP singer Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, who adds the tattered fragments of song expression to their clangs, hisses and staggers. What she does on her own is less clear, but you could glean some clues from her general art-mission statement of “being concerned with value in the immaterial and everyday… the translation of experience” and by her summary of the project as “Orxid is, Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach is, triumphant when barking, flirting with misdirection, with weak knees, malfunctioning. All brushed up when just-heard through bedroom doors.”

Update, 11th April – I’ve just noticed that there’s a fifth date, in Newcastle, so am adding it in a hurry while I’m supposed to be doing something else… and it looks as if I missed two earlier Bradford and Manchester dates as well… Nuts.. oh well, here’s what’s left. Ripping the Newcastle support acts’ blurbs here…

“Competition (a.k.a. Craig Pollard) makes (mild) pop music and performs live with a sampler and voice. The songs think about smallness and vulnerability, and build hooks from within their own limited means. Most recent tape ‘You Turned Into A Painting’ was released by Slip in November 2018.”

“Gwilly Edmondez is a person-project forced into a pop packaging that inevitably gets mangled up by person-to-person cataclysmics. Because Gwilly is influenced by anybody you can possible think of (Billy Joel, Coil, Lucinda Williams, Laurie Anderson, AIDS Wolf…) there’s no point trying to categorise… Abstract Exhibitionism? Troubled Intimacy? Wild Pop… Gwilly Edmondez represents a coagulation of multiple character strands derived out of one private/public individual whose corporeal manifestation carries it through live shows, albums, videos and numerous collaborations in improvised music. Born in Lake Fear, Pen-Y-Bont, Gwilly has returned. Other incarnations include Radioactive Sparrow co-founder Bill Bargefoot, JRMY PAXMN out of YEAH YOU and the writer/composer/artist Gustav Thomas which is probably his real name. In all guises he is a purveyor of reaLFake Wild Pop, tearing open the terrified quotidian regimes of colonized consciousness (through, and in, his own brain) in order to plunge intensities between the cracks exposed. This doesn’t actually, necessarily, work – per se – but it’s the in engagement of attempts where the drama takes place.”

Finally, Mariam Rezaei is a turntablist and vocalist with a yen for making electronic theatre soundtracks: she’s part of Gateshead DJ-haunt turned mixed-arts incubator TOPH (or The Old Police House). Below is a taste of her esoteric clubtronica, although on this occasion I think she’s just playing other people’s music…

And while I’m making additions, here’s a Snape video from ‘Joyrobix’…

* * * * * * * *

Dates:

Joe Snape’s Joyrobix + Laurie & Suze’s ‘Coop’:

Vivid Projects, 16 Minerva Works, Eastside, Birmingham, B5 5RS, England – Thursday 11th April 2019, 7.30pm (with Maya Verlaak) – information here and here
The Rose Hill, 70-71 Rosehill Terrace, Brighton, BN1 4JL, England – Saturday 13th April 2019, 7.30pm (with Blood Stereo) – information here and here
Stour Space, 7 Roach Road, Fish Island, Bow, London, E3 2PA, England – Wednesday 17th April 2019, 7.30pm (with O Yama O) – information here, here and here
Café Kino, 108 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3RU – Thursday 18th April 2019, 7.30pm (with Orxid) – information here and here
Star & Shadow Cinema, Warwick Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE2 1BB, England – Friday 19th April 2019, 7.30pm (with Competition + Gwilly Edmondez + DJ Mariam Rezaei) – information here, here and here

Tags: Acid Police Noise Ensemble, Birmingham (England), Brighton (England), Bristol (England), Competition (Craig Pollard), Gwilly Edmondez, Joe Snape, Keiko Yamamoto, Laurie & Suze, Laurie Tompkins, Leonie Brandner (artist), London (England), Mariam Rezaei, Maya Verlaak, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (England), O Yama O, Orxid (Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach), Rie Nakajima, Still House Plants, Suze Whaites

April/May 2019 – upcoming English gigs – soul, folk, hip hop, poetry, glimmer pop and more on Lilith Ai’s Bare Radical tour through Cambridge, Bradford, Nottingham, Bristol, Reading and London (9th/14th/19th April, 1st/3rd/9th May) with her assorted support club of singer-songwriters, performance poets, folksters and dream/garage rockers

8 Apr

If you just took Lilith Ai at her word as being the possessor of a “pretty mouth and a dirty tongue”, and you’d also heard that she rapped, you’d be expecting a London version of Nikki Minaj.

Not the case. A more accurate parallel would be a latterday Joan Armatrading, or perhaps a lower-key Lauryn Hill; Lilith’s an accomplished and intimate singer-songwriter drawing subtly on folk, soul, hip-hop and R&B and pulling them onwards. Comparisons will only get you so far, though, since Lilith bypasses Armatrading’s discreet ’70s reticence and instead owns a lippier and punkier streak; and although she shares Hill’s love of a street beat, a bent note and a woke stance, she lacks the latter’s self-righteous, self-sabotaging chippiness. Dirty tongue claims notwithstanding, she’s also less of an out’n’out cusser than she might suggest. The occasion f-bomb strike is part of the no-nonsense, “you-can-stop-right-there-boy” feminism which provides the steely core to what she does: offset by the engaging warmth of an artist who is as much interested in people as in stances.

The British music biz isn’t always kind to talented black girls with guitars – Joan might have done OK, but whatever happened to Peppercorn? – but Lilith isn’t the sort to be eaten alive. Untangling her past provides some interesting complexities and clashes. There’s some fine material for legend-building here – her mingled Afro, Chinese and Indian ancestry, and the fact that she spent part of her early twenties sleeping rough and near-penniless in both Tottenham and Queens (at one point in a wrecked car, later towed away in a scenario that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Tom Waits song). Set against that is her additional background as a music school grad who can hang with and work alongside a surprising breadth of allies, from fearsome bluespunknoise grrlforce Skinny Girl Diet to rising fashion aristocracy in the shape of Georgia May Jagger.

The key to understanding how this all fits together is in how Lilith structures her approach to art and community. With artistic roots in comic-writing geekery, she’s always had a strong sense of mood and detail. Later along the line, as a developing songwriter, she’s allied it to a fervent desire to create a mostly female (and queer-friendly) movement which rejects counterproductive competitive bitchery in favour of an ethic of sympathy and mutual support, stepping up to political solidarity. All of this also needs to be seen through the arty barrier-trashing lens of punk spirit, which explains her Fight Like A Girl crew. A loosely-defined friendship-in-art arrangement, F.L.A.G. is a feminist/LGBT+ art/music collective inspired equally by late ’70s summers of Britpunk, by the political ferment of ’90s Olympia and by latterday movements like #TimesUp. It involves zinework, recording and enthusiastic intimate gigs in makeshift scratch locations, all within a fearless female atmosphere allied to a sense that rigid genre (and rigid gender) boundaries are less important than constructive intent and political engagement.

While Lilith’s upcoming Bare Radical mini-tour isn’t explicitly a Fight Like A Girl event, it bears all of the hallmarks. It’s packed with other female artists (plus assorted sympathetic male players and a hefty proportion of non-binary artists) and takes place in a dissimilar scatter of formal venues and found spaces in bookshops, community centres, cafes and co-operatives up and down England. Lilith will also be laying off on her beats and concentrating on the acoustic/unplugged side of things as she performs and promotes her new ‘Bare Radical’ EP. She’s still budding, still climbing, poised on the lip of the excellence her early work promised. Now is a perfect time to join the event, while she’s still in venues close enough to share breath.

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Along for most of the dates is the delightfully energised craft-popper Myles McCabe (generally best known as guitarist for London pop punkers Fresh), who’s playing at Cambridge, Bradford and Nottingham with his Me Rex project. On the surface Myles has got a pretty high tweeness count. All of his Rex albums and EPs are named after prehistoric creatures from mammoths to stegosauri, most of his pet sounds are cheap ones (synth parps, guitar clunks, snatches of bedroom rave, a little piano), and his voice is sweetly vulnerable, bending under a little rhotacistic twist and folding like paper on the high notes.

On the other hand, there’s a blazing articulate passion to what he does, his songs volcanoing out of an initial small hotspot and expanding into broadening emotional tapestries in which simple ideas link inexorably to others like agitated mercury blobs, layering into a gorgeous pop outburst. He describes himself as “kind of like a cross between Art Brut and Kraftwerk. That started off as a pun about arts & crafts but then I really liked the way it sounded.” It’s a good gag, but self-deflating indie jokes aren’t really what he’s about.

At Cambridge, a couple of singer-songwriters are hoppping on board. There’s local girl Helen Robertson, an enthusiastic music homecrafter and constant collaborator who (although she seems to have been a bit quiet recently) released a twelve-month sprint of EPs across 2014. Hers is an unfussy, chameleonic, DIY hobby-table approach which embraces strummy-or-noisy kitchen-sink indie, blobby instrumental synth pop, pub gig comedy, and various overdubbed a cappella work from solo folk-pop chorales to patter songs. There’s also Sophie Foster, the self-professed teenaged “lever harp megababe” who usually lurks behind the name of The Sunday School. To be honest, I’m baffled about her: this brief appearance on YouTube and the couple of Soundcloud demos below suggests that rather than harping she blip-pongs away on a little keyboard and murmurs reflections on uncertainties and diary notes; while other Soundcloudings suggest a lo-fi guitar trudger, and there’s something else on Spotify which I don’t know about thanks to my still holding out on the platform. Her Twitter presence suggests someone fierce and grrly behind the whispering.

I’m guessing that Sophie’s someone whom you have to discover and to follow live for quite a while, picking up scraplings before you get the full story. As for Helen, attempting to pick a key track seems to be a waste of time, so I’m just throwing three together at random here.

It’s the same at Bradford, where self-propelled onetime busker-for-a-bet Liam Jarvis joins the bill, alongside gently punk-oustic Leeds folkie Sarah Carey (whose music is divided between disaffected urban acoustica and committed folk baroque instrumentals, groping between them for a doorway to somewhere better). I’ve got nothing for Liam, but here’s Sarah:

In Nottingham, Lilith’s supported by both Jemma Freeman & The Cosmic Something and Matt Abbott. Once the guitarist for heavy dream-rockers Landshapes, Jenna now offers up sardonic psychedelic glam-rocking with a band featuring Furniture/Transglobal Underground drummer Hamilton Lee, moonlighting producer/bassist Mark Estall, and Krupa on synth and backing vocals. Wakefield wordsmith Matt runs the spoken word label Nymphs & Thugs and both writes and performs poetry for kids and adults replete with “socio-political commentary, human struggle and kitchen sink realism” (plus, for the kids “playful rebellion (and the) challenging (of) societal stereotypes”).

Matt and Me Rex both resurface for the London date, which also features a junior traditioneer. in the shape of “teenage lo-fi soul singer” Charlie Mburaki (who sang with Lilith on the latter’s recent Warrior Queen) .

https://soundcloud.com/charliemburaki/february-moon-blues
https://soundcloud.com/charliemburaki/glo-szn

There are more fierce, plangent words at the Bristol gig. It’s a free event in a bookshop in which punk and slam poetry have an equal presence to musicin the shape of Bridget Hart (teller of tough, gritty tales and compiler of a poetic “love-letter to women and female solidarity”) and in the sliding, pulsing genderqueer cadences of Aiysha’s accounts and explorations of “mental illness, love, trauma and gender identity”.

Also on hand is the slow, sad, beautiful “shimmer pop” and voiceloops of Georgie Biggins, a.k.a. GINS, who from one angle sounds like a lo-fi gender-swapped bedsit Blue Nile passed through an a capella dream-pop filter and from another like f.k.a. Twigs morphing into ’90s goth-wispers Cranes. Don’t be entirely misled by the soft and introverted textures, though. Underneath Georgie’s apparent mournfulness, the gossamer delicacy and the blurred, haunting visuals there’s both resistance and outright challenge, just framed in a different way; the secret thought that’s a couple of steps away from a marching flag.

GINS is also onboard for the Reading show, where Lilith is joined by the fluttering acoustic pop-soul singing of Amya-Ray; by the sometimes-psychedelic, sometimes-instrumental acoustic-indie-folk of Colours & Fires (who’ve placed themselves firmly on the gender-equality frontlines); and by the mysterious, frankly undocumented RIYA (who could be punk or poet, first-person singular or group, for all the info they’ve provided… but the open-ended mystery’s at least in keeping with the rest of the Bare Radical openness).

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Full Lilith Ai ‘Bare Radical’ tour dates:

The Blue Moon, 2 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, CB1 2LF, Cambridgeshire, England – Tuesday 9th April 2019, 9.00pm (with Me Rex + Sophie Foster + Helen Robertson) – information here and here
The 1 in 12 Club, 21-23 Albion Street, Bradford, BD1 2LY, England – Sunday 14th April 2019, 7.00pm (with Me Rex + Sarah Carey + Liam Jarvis) – information here and here
City Arts, 11-13 Hockley, Nottingham, NG1 1FH, England – Friday 19th April 2019, 7.00pm (with Me Rex + Jemma Freeman & the Cosmic Something + Matt Abbott) – information here and here
Hydra Books, 34 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EZ, England – Wednesday 1st May 2019, 7.00pm (with GINS + Bridget Hart + Aiysha) – free event – information here and here
Reading University Students Union, Whiteknights Campus, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 6AZ, England – Friday 3rd May 2019, 7.30pm (with GINS + RIYA + Amya-Ray + Colours & Fires) – information here and here
VFD, 66 Stoke Newington Road, Shacklewell, London, N16 7XB, England – Thursday 9th May 2019, 8.00pm (with Me Rex + Matt Abbott + Charlie Mburaki) – information here, here and here

Tags: Aiysha, Amya-Ray, Bridget Hart, Bristol (England), Cambridge (England), Charlie Mburaki, Colours & Fires, GINS, Helen, Jemma Freeman & The Cosmic Something, Liam Jarvis, Lilith Ai, London (England), Matt Abbott, Me Rex, Nottingham (England), Reading (England), RIYA, Sarah Carey, Sophie Foster (The Sunday School)

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Categories 2019, acoustic music, acoustic pop, agit-pop, DIY music, folk music, folk-pop, hip hop, interactive performances, LGBTQIA+ music, neo-soul, performance art, poetry, political music, pop, previews, protest songs, rapping, rhythm'n'blues, rock, singer-songwriter, spoken word, synth pop

April 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Kammer Klang celebrates Annea Lockwood with Xenia Pestova Bennett, Nate Wooley, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Diffusions and the Cafe Oto Experimental Choir, plus Evie Hilyer and Amalia Young performing Chiyoko Szlavnics, Laura Cannell performing Peter Hannan and CRiSAP students performing EVOL and Yoshi Wada (6th & 7th)

2 Apr

Another Kammer Klang in Dalston provides a two-day weekend residency for Annea Lockwood; the New Zealand-born composer who started her career in the ferment of 1960s summer-schools at Darmstadt (with their focus on organised electronic composition) but who rapidly went far beyond that. Curated by former ‘Wire’ online editor Jennifer Lucy Allan, the weekend features various Lockwood European premieres alongside work by Chiyoko Szlavnics, EVOL, Yoshi Wada and Peter Hannan.

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For the Saturday event, Jennifer will be reading from ‘Annea Lockwood – Sound Streams’, an essay written by The Wire’s Louise Gray (for the Edition Festival for Other Music) which explores Annea’s ethos through from her early Darmstadt days to the present. En route, it touches on her playful Fluxus-influenced piano stunts, such as floating a tiny, tinkling musical box, attached to a bright childlike bunching of helium balloons, out of the body of a grand and into a the space of formal concert hall; or kitting out an old upright with integrated, foregrounded toys which not only made avant-garde noises but also visibly kept their toy nature.

The essay also delves into Annea’s later approach of mapping sound and space as a listener, mapper and translator – having ditched electronic sound-sources as master tone generators (while retaining electronics for processing), she moved to reconfiguring and (crucially) interacting sympathetically with natural environmental sounds. Even while imposing her own will on those sounds as recordings and as material, she’s consistently respected and illuminated their original sources and context, including the functions which they represent and the continuance which they embody.

There will be audio playbacks of two entirely electroacoustic Lockwood pieces. 2012’s ‘Dusk’ presents a mixture of “low frequency sounds generated by seafloor black smoker hydrothermal vents, transposed bat calls, and percussionist William Winant playing a tamtam”. Initially, 2013’s ‘Bouyant’ seems to travel from the pastoral to the sinister to comfortingly aural wit, as dipping, paddling water noises alternate with sinister low-frequency drones, haunting frictional creaks and indistinct faraway howls, which in turn give way to cheerful, pastoral farmyard animals bleating and babbling in the middle distance. It’s as if a canoeing trip (filmed in rapid disassociated jumps between panoramic scene shots and extreme close-ups, and between air and underwater) had started out being stalked by eldritch forest monsters and emerged in the millflow beside Old McDonald’s farm.

https://soundcloud.com/recitalprogram/annea-lockwood-buoyant

I’ve just read that last bit back and am laughing at myself again for the splats of fancy that I came up with. Maybe I’m just too trapped in a habit of floridly verbalising what I hear, as I try to shift my impressions from incoming sound to outflowing text. I suspect that in doing so I’m missing the point of what Annea does with her compositional process and what her intentions are when she brings it out of the sound lab and to the listener. Jamming a corny, boyish narrative of external horror-movie threat and cartoon silliness onto what I’m hearing isn’t the right approach. What I should be doing is dropping the whimsy and listening to the sounds as they were made and processed, without my input. It’s probably more accurate to interpret ‘Buoyant’ as a full-range representation of a segmented river journey passing through inscrutable wildernesses and the managed densities of rural agriculture (each of them with their differing environments and functionality) while realising that my listening human ears impose subjective meaning and story onto what they hear; as those of any listener might.

If you’re interested in the purest end of Annea’s interpretations of field-recordings, her four-channel sound installation, ‘A Sound Map of the Housatonic River’ will be open to the public at Cafe Oto Project Space throughout the weekend. It’s another water piece – extracted from a hundred-and-fifty-mile stretch of New England waterway via recordings made at points from river source to river mouth, both underwater and on the surface. Subsequently, it’s been formed into a polyphonic tricklerushflow of noises, crafted to capture the character of a river made up from the sum of its users, denizens, dynamics and fluid functions: a character which available to the ears if you know how to sit back and absorb it. You can listen to a downloadable excerpt here.

Saturday also provides the opportunity to listen to another strand of Annea’s music: two piano pieces performed by Xenia Pestova Bennett which are closer to the concert hall, building on bedrock conceptual carvings more akin the deconstructions of John Cage and the rumbles of James Tenney. In 1993’s ‘Red Mesa’ clustered drips of piano notes, gently sophisticated chordings and zither-strums inside the case result in something (to these misleadable ears, at least) strangely close to a Bill Evans jazz romance. 2001’s ‘RCSC’ takes the same principles and techniques but pursues them somewhere much darker and more reverberant, where the piano body becomes a roiling haunted canyon of clangs, stutters and trapped lashing stiflings, or perhaps just an objective map of unforgiving terrain. There’s an earlier interpretation of ‘RCSC’ below:

Supporting the Lockwood work will be a pair of duets played by emerging violinists Evie Hilyer and Amalia Young. ‘This Is Only Here’ and ‘HC91’ are both composed by electroacoustic specialist Chiyoko Szlavnics, who devises her pieces (in part) through drawings, and whose work has a focus on the “beating” phenomenon which occurs when two imperfectly tuned pitches interact with each other in an oscillating throb.

The Fresh Klang contribution for Saturday will be ‘Three hundred grams of latex and steel in one day‘: a 2011 spatial performance piece being restaged by students from the CRiSAP program (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, at the University of the Arts London). Using groupings of balloons and hex nuts at varied distances from the observer, it was originally composed/conceived by EVOL (the dual-composing, music-squashing, party-hooligan-cum-research-science team of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp) as a way of exploring a modelled algorithmic process in perverse, potentially frustrating real-world terms. In practise, it’s mostly about EVOL’s fondness for deformatory music, and about the inspiring, embraceable awkwardness and randomness of trying to get an avant-garde composition off the ground by molesting blown-up latex. Squu-u-u-u-u-arr-r-r-r-r-kk-k-k….

* * * * * * * *

The Sunday event starts with a free afternoon Q&A session with both Annea Lockwood and composer/improviser Nate Wooley. During the evening concert, Nate will be performing the European premiere of his 2018 co-composition with Annea, ‘Becoming Air’, on trumpet and tamtam. It made its debut at Nate’s own FOR/WITH festival, and uses circular breathing, an effects pedal and a constantly-fiddled-with miked-up trumpet to capture overtones: it’s been noted for “using much of his improvising electro-acoustic vocabulary (while being) absolutely an Annea Lockwood composition: performative, shamanic, and with an attention to the naturalness of sound that makes the audience rethink their aural surroundings.” as well as containing sounds which (as ‘The Information Superhighway‘ put it) are “suggestive of a sprinkler system that’s gained consciousness.”

The other Lockwood composition for the evening will be the vocal piece ‘Water & Memory’, again receiving a European premiere. Based around hums and reiteration of water-words in Hindi, Thai and Hebrew and spacing a group of voice performers all around the venue, it’s conceived for amateur musicians and requires audience participation. This is billed as being performed by the “Cafe Oto Experimental Choir”. In practise – and on the night – I guess that that means you as well.

In addition to the evening’s Lockwoodia, there’ll be a visit from iterant Early/avant-music specialist Laura Cannell (see passim), interpreting ‘Rsrch 4/83’ by electro-acoustic orientated composer Peter Hannan; himself a former recorder player who wrote the ‘Rsrch’ series to explore, express and comment on musical and technical problems with the instrument. For this one, the recorder and the performer’s voice go through electronic delay system to pursue and realise “a rich texture of overtones” resulting in an incantatory buzzing reminiscent of throat singing.

More overtone work is provided by the CRiSAP students, returning for another Fresh Klang piece. This time they’re reviving ‘Lament for the Rise and Fall of Handy-Horn’, a (probably) deafening 1990s composition by Japanese Fluxus/drone composer Yoshi Wada. For this one, a set of nautical air horns are triggered and left to blare until all the compressed air has blown out of their tanks.

The impact of ‘Lament’ has relatively little to do with planned pitches, and everything to do with other factors such as the oppressive volume (which helps with the overtones), the sense of situational alarm (springing up even in a prepared audience), and the increased air pressure in the room (which comes with the discharging of the horns). I just hope that the performance of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ next door at the Arcola Theatre will already be particularly noisy, rowdy and oblivious…

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Dates:

Kammer Klang presents:
Jennifer Lucy Allan/Diffusions/Xenia Pestova Bennett perform Annea Lockwood / Evie Hilyer and Amalia Young perform Chiyoko Szlavnics / CRiSAP students perform EVOL
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Saturday 6th April, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Kammer Klang presents:
Annea Lockwood/Nate Wooley/Cafe Oto Experimental Choir perform Annea Lockwood / Laura Cannell performs Peter Hannan / CRiSAP students perform Yoshi Wada
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Sunday 7th April 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Tags: Amalia Young, Annea Lockwood, Café Oto (promoter/venue), Chiyoko Szlavnics, CRiSAP (sound research programme), Evie Hilyer, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Kammer Klang (event), Laura Cannell, listening to women, London (England), Louise Gray (writer), Nate Wooley, Peter Hannan, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, Stephen Sharp, women of heart and mind, Xenia Pestova Bennett, Yoshi Wada

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…

“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

Tags: Abel Selaocoe, Adrian Freedman, Alice Zawadzki, Anúna, Ayanna Witter Johnson, Beatrice Harrison, Bill Barclay, Blood Moon Project, Builth Wells (Wales), Cambridge (England), Canterbury (England), Caoimhin O'Raghallaigh, Chartwell Dutiro, Christo Squier, Colchester (England), Cosmo Sheldrake, Coventry (England), Deep Throat Choir, ESKA, Extinction Rebellion (protest group), Fergus "Faró" Cahillane, Georgia Ruth, Helen Vidovich, Heloise Tunstall Behrens, Highnam (England), John Baily & Veronica Doubleday, Kadialy Kouyate, Kate St John, Lewes (England), Lisa Knapp, London (England), Lucy Farrell, Luisa Gerstein, Marsyas Trio, M’anam, Oxford (England), Paul Cheneour, Pete Judge, Sam Lee, Serafina Steer, Shadoxhurst (England), Shoreham-by-Sea (England), Spithurst (England), Stroud (England), Tanya Auclair, The Quorum, Totnes (England)

March/April 2019 – upcoming British experimental gigs – Sarah Angliss’ eerie Air Loom on tour in Britain (26th March to 8th April, various) – also featuring Noize Choir, Kate Arnold, Thomas Stone, Embla Quickbeam, Good News From The Future, Ben Gwilliam and Cath & Phil Tyler

23 Mar

The Air Loom project is on tour across England (with appearances in Scotland and Wales) during the end of March and early April.

Headed up by electro-acoustic composer and inventor Sarah Angliss, the project also features soprano vocalist Sarah Gabriel and Ensemble Bash percussionist Stephen Hiscock; but the vision is entirely an Angliss one: one of “phantasmagoria” and “electrical mysticism” which can incorporate“robotic carillons, telephonic counterpoint and a new instrument made from the salvaged parts of a Welsh chapel organ.” A former folk-club performer, Sarah is steeped and classically trained in the music of the baroque and Renaissance eras, and spends much of her time constructing and delivering music for theatre and for live film soundtracks. She’s also part of a generation of composer-performers who re-examine the archaic and antique from both a present-day perspective and a feeling of questing connection.

This kind of thing doesn’t always work out (folktronica’s a fine idea but often gets reduced to the cliché of just playing folk music on synths), but Sarah’s approach is a fresh one – folding the process over with technological visions which themselves are deliberately selected for their own innate antiquity in order to explore “resonances between English folklore and early notions of sound and machines.” Possessing traditional Early Music instrumental skills (on recorder and ancestral keyboards), she mates them with contemporary jiggery-pokery: the latter covering the kind of twentieth-century technology now acquiring a museum patina (theremins, analogue telephones, radiophonic devices) and more virtual twenty-first century tech such as current custom MAX patches and apps.

Backed up by Stephen and by Sarah G, the Air Loom tour and album features Sarah performing on a mixture of recorders, electronics, theremin and the clavisimbalum (a “sonorous, fourteenth-century Latvian cousin of the harpsichord” – in this case one that’s been connected to custom synth processing). The other things to mention are the eerie, enchanting robotic instruments which she conceives, designs and then brings on tour to operate, building them out of bits of abandoned acoustic instruments and sundry homely/associative objects. Some are more anthropomorphic and animatronic – a drum-playing 1960s shop mannequin; a handbag playing triple duty as a heart and a drumbox; a theremin-playing doll called Clara; a disembodied ventriloquist’s-dummy head operating as a spycam; a robot crow. Others present more clearly as machines, such as the automated, radiation-sensitive, hyperspeed bell carillion built with technologist Dan Stowell which was the centrepiece of her previous ‘Ealing Feeder’ album and the “wheezing, robotic Shruti box” that’s the centrepiece of ‘Air Loom’.

The resulting music is enthralling and a little displaced. Rumbles, chimes and airs adding up to hauntology-in-the-machine stuff; all of it in line with Sarah’s desire to create work which captures the “disquieting and uncanny” and “the crackle of the galvanic on the telephone wire.” While there isn’t currently any grabbable Air Loom work online for me to show you, here’s something a little similar – Sarah in the grand baroque Hawksmoor space of St Anne’s Limehouse two years ago, performing her ‘Ealing Feeder’ piece A Wren In The Cathedral along with Stephen Hiscock, Colin Utley and her animatronics. Echoes of the unearthly, the mundane and the dignified run through the performance: summonings, weaving, the patience of listening, the trances of spaces.

As you’d expect, a tour like this draws in interesting supports.

In Brighton and in London, Kate Arnold from Fear Of The Forest will open the Air Loom shows with a solo hammer-dulcimer-and-voice set of the kind with which she’s been tremendously busy over the past year (see passim). Looping full-range contrabassoonist and sound-triggerer Thomas Stone supports at Bristol, providing his usual slow-evolve sonic immersion from reed tones, beat and hiss.

At the Yorkshire art-nexus of Todmorden, Air Loom are joined by a couple of field-recording and sound collage artists – Embla Quickbeam (who opts for a naturalistic approach, overlaying and engraining recordings of places with homemade sonics) and Ben Gwilliam, who prefers to affect and manipulate similar recordings via open tape reels, magnets and a mingling of technical performance art with a kind of deconstructive electrophonic storytelling which can vary from absolute obliqueness to narrative snagging. This time he’s working with “super 8 projectors, ice and homemade electronics in an attempt to amplify the space between microphone and medium.”

At Newcastle, support comes from local avant-garde vocal performance collective Noize Choir, who wield an extended human-voice approach “free of the traditional restraints of typical choral settings, language or musical notation” in which singing, breathing, coughing, wailing, humming or any other vocal excursion has equal merit. They also investigate and reflect on the venues which they perform at via “phenomenological explorations (or) imaginings of our geological past” while pegging themselves firmly to a very North-East England post-industrial perspective in which science, landscape and culture merge. On this particular evening everyone’s performing in an award-winning conversion of a former carpet warehouse, now housing an independent cinema company first based on the quayside and then in a squatted abandoned prop store, and with an eye on delivering a future community spirit in ominous times…. so they’ll have all that to unpack with a click and a whoop. Anyhow, here’s them vocalising Lindisfarne (the holy island and bird sanctuary, not the folk rockers).

At the Swansea date (for Welsh art-music initiative NAWR) there’s another double support. The first is Newcastle folk duo Cath & Phil Tyler, latter-day exponents of traditional folk narratives, American mountain banjo and full-voiced Sacred Harp singing, which they strip down to its most minimal and concentrated folk, able to bewitch anything from the most cramped little folk club to the vast arena of the Albert Hall. The second is Welsh music-and-movement project Good News From The Future, a collective of mature performers (in their fifties or older) co-ordinated by Mike Pearson (once of 1980s Cardiff avant-garde site-specific theatre company Brith Gof, now emeritus professor of performance studies at the University of Aberystywth). It’s unclear about exactly what they’re doing this time around: some sources say a spoken-word piece, others a movement piece. By all accounts they’re equally skilled at telling a story either way. Here’s something of what – and how – they performed a few years ago at Cardiff’s Chapter venue.

* * * * * * * *

Air Loom dates:

The Marlborough Pub & Theatre, 4 Princes Street, Brighton, BN2 1RD, England – Tuesday 26th March 2019, 8.00pm (with Kate Arnold) – information here, here and here
Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, England – Saturday 30th March 2019, 8.00pm (with Kate Arnold) – information here and here
The Glad Café C.I.C, 1006A Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow, G41 2HG, Scotland – Wednesday 3rd April 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Star & Shadow Cinema, Warwick Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE2 1BB, England – Thursday 4th April 2019, 7.30pm (with Noize Choir) – information here and here
The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Engine House, Chorlton Mill, 3 Cambridge Street, Manchester, M1 5BY, England – Friday 5th April 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
The Golden Lion, Fielden Square, Todmorden, OL14 6LZ, England – Saturday 6th April 2019, 8.00pm (with Embla Quickbeam and Ben Gwilliam) – information here
The Cube, Dove Street South (off top-left of King Square), Kingsdown, Bristol, BS2 8JD, England – Sunday 7th April 2019, 7.30pm (with Thomas Stone) – information here and here
NAWR#35 @ BBC Hall at Swansea Studios, 32 Alexandra Road, Swansea, SA1 5DT, Wales – Monday 8th April 2019, 7.00pm (with Good News from The Future and Cath & Phil Tyler) – information here, here, here and here

…and here’s Sarah’s robot carillon again, this time transmitting bird song (to the audible delight of a baby)…

Tags: Air Loom, Ben Gwilliam, Brighton (England), Bristol (England), Cath & Phil Tyler, Dan Stowell, Embla Quickbeam, Glasgow (Scotland), Good News From The Future, Kate Arnold, listening to women, London (England), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (England), Noize Choir, Sarah Angliss, Sarah Gabriel, Stephen Hiscock, Swansea (Wales), Thomas Stone, Todmorden (England), women of heart and mind

February/March 2019 – upcoming British folk/experimental gigs – Bell Lungs on tour with Raiments (20th February to 2nd March, various) with appearances by Despicable Zee, Michael Clark, The Nature Centre, Halcyon Jane, Tara Clerkin Trio and various DJs. Plus sundry other Bell Lungs shows in March including a København evening with Hugh Tweedie and Tanja Vesterbye Jessen, a show with David Toop and Rashad Becker, a date with Gaze Is Ghost.

16 Feb

Working with a multi-instrumental, device-heavy palette which includes guitar, harmonium, Omnichord, electric violin, lyre, bouzouki, saz, voice and a host of effects pedals, avant-folk singer/writer/sometime promoter Ceylan Hay (a.k.a. Bell Lungs) sits at the middle of a host of possible routes. Her sound incorporates post-folk and drone, dream pop, noise and free improv, psychedelia and site-specific realisations, while her psychohistorian subject matter takes in the ancient, the near-ancient and the presently numinous: probing prehistoric spaces, the ghosts of the industrial age, day-to-day feelings and the slide into a new virtual existence space via online culture.

Reflecting these overlaid levels (and what might be, at different perspective points, either shockingly near or completely occluded), her vocal delivery steps between ornamental trad-folk crenellations, feathery ambient warbles and horrific screams. You can never quite tell whether she’s going to lull you or scare you, but you know she cares about what she’s ferrying across to you.

With a new EP, the wintry ‘Wolves Behind Us‘, to promote (apparently it’s a return to folk and landscapes after recent science fiction/site-specific digressions, and is “Joan Aiken’s ‘Wolves of Willoughby Chase’, Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’, caravan living in the Highlands and the ancient cosmology idea of dividing the year into two halves; the opening and closing of the wolf’s mouth”), Bell’s embarking on five weeks of touring (primarily alongside Raiments) through Scotland, England, Wales, followed up by other Raiments-less shows in Scotland, England and Denmark. (She’ll also be playing in Wales next month, but more on that later…)

Before taking a look at the tour, let’s take a look at her tourmates. Formed on the Berlin avant-garde scene, Raiments are fronted by sing-murmurer/left-field guitarist Mano Camatsos, and they sound like a soft-stepping muttering blend of Lou Reed and Momus fronting a band that mixes lurking dark-jazz styling (hardwood clarinet burr and groove-pattering trashdrums) with the DIY rattle of Pram and the dark throb of Morphine. Mano’s wildcard guitar is a clinking noisemaker and pulse generator taking note of hip hop, of avant-garde classical extended techniques and of mysterious instruments and methods gleaned from ethnological recordings. His songwriting voice is a oddball surreal instinct leading inexorably towards songs about ants or baffling seductions.

Tracing their upcoming footsteps on the tour is a joy, like following a plough which turns up small treasures as it reveals what’s in the earth. It’s partly the succession of intriguing off-the-beaten-path venues – squatty art-pubs, recovered eighteenth-century coal basins, pocket cinemas and art centres, diehard folk rooms and out-of-the-way sipperys – but also the revealing of similarly off-the-wall musical talents and enthusiasts they join up with en route.

In Edinburgh, Bell and Raiments are playing with Claquer – previously three-piece improvisers Claque until they spun off their American drummer an unspecified time ago. Now it’s just the Edinburgh contingent: free/experimental guitarist Jer Reid and viola player/speaker Lisa Fannen. They deal in lo-fi clangs, loopings and scrapes and spoken word: momentary moment-music.

In Newcastle, the main support comes from the soft melody murmurs and drowsy, cushioned keens of ambient/improv folk duo Halcyon Jane, a Tyneside/Humberside teamup. Upfront with the voice, guitar and devices is Newcastle performance art polymath Jayne Dent, better known via her own electronic/noisy folk project Me Lost Me, in which she buffers and buffets her singing with concertinas and samplers: when she played Hull back in December, support came from local ambient electronic beatsman Halcyon Neumann, who’s worked with The Body Farmers and with Sarah Shiels and who carries out sonic explorations of “the technological vs. the archaic/the spiritual vs. the scientific/the supernatural vs. the psychological.” Together they tease out a semi-improvised border music, part weird electro-folk and part post-shoegaze wisp.

Also playing is Michael Clark, providing slurred, wise, trepidatious and crepuscular folk music with fogrolls of noise behind an acoustic guitar. Despite being a Londoner, he sounds more like a moor-dweller; or like someone who lives in the kind of port city London used to be, one in which strange tales and intimation billow up the streets with the dock mist: this time out, his strange tales are backed up by a full band.

https://soundcloud.com/michaelclarkmusic/trails-of-ice-1

I’ve encountered The Nature Centre before. Headlining the Club Integral-hosted Birmingham show above Bell Lung and Raiments, they’re an affable rural/suburban pop quartet like a four-person one-man band, sprouting banjos and clarinets and found percussion alongside their drum kit and guitars. Drawn to playing at weirder gigs, they’ve shared bills with people like Bob Drake and have their own batchful of three-minute pop songs avidly reflecting the off-kilter visions of previous English songwriter eccentrics (the Syd Barretts, Robyn Hitchcocks and Tim Smiths). Handling the in-between-bands slot is someone new to me but not new to Brum’s vinyl-istas: Moseley Folk Festival’s house DJ and Moseley Record Fair co-organiser DJ Rome, promising his own selection of crate-dug oddities and inspirations.

In Bristol, the DJ backup comes from “bleary-eyed staggerer” Siegfried Translator of the Grey Area radio show (another haven for intriguingly weird music from all over the globe), but the gig predominantly features the Tara Clerkin Trio: the DIY musical brainchild of a ceramicist who also seems to have a yen for gamelan/minimalist-sounding pattern tinkling sprinkled with voiceloops, friendly saxophonic intrusions and other pitch-ins from whichever musical friends she can rope in for the occasion. (At other times, she creates her own slumberous take on experimental countrified pop.)

The Oxford show (promoted by Divine Schism) is primarily a launch event for the second EP by Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani, a.k.a. Despicable Zee – a live-looper, improviser and conscious patterner of fifteen years standing, mixed Anglo/Irish/Iranian heritage, and a history of drumming in Oxford bands since her teens. Now the drums (plus loopstations and recordings) are used to create live solo tracks in which Zee employs a lo-fi, lo-technique approach to overlapping rhythm garlands and triggered conversations. As an artist (as well as an educator and mother), Zee’s increasingly conscious of the female lines she carries within her: the patched-in samples which wobble her current project along feature the voices of her mother and grandmother, mingling with Zee’s own sing-speak-raps as if they’ve dropped by for some kind of experimental music cross-cultural kaffee klatsch.

The London show (at Paper Dress Vintage) is an evening of music and spoken word put together by promoters Spilt Milk in order to raise money and awareness for North London Action for the Homeless. Shapeshifter experimental pop poet Alabaster dePlume comperes: also in the corner is Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business, who showed up in ‘Misfit City’ a little over a year ago.

Jenny’s another artist whose field extends from the visual and situational into action and music: the Mystic Business involves pulling together friends and strangers into a collective performance event that’s part communal clapalong choir, part percussion workshop and good-natured culture-jamming protest (with food). Guileless and charming, but nonetheless political and détournementational, it’s an attempt to get collective conscience back into the body, containing and encouraging a cheerful but insistent protest.

The Conventry and Brighton gigs appear to feature just Bell Lungs and Raiments on their own, but news just coming in re. the Liverpool date (at dockside art-pub Drop the Dumbulls) says that support there comes from Merseyside “synthwhisperer” and outsider synthpopper Claire Welles. She’s been rolling out her contrary songs for over a decade now, singing increasingly unsettling lyrics in a deep deadpan tone with a sarcastic medicated edge, while the backings deliquesce from elegant ageless Europop into something a little misshapen. It all becomes something like those conversations during which you wake up a third of the way in, not quite sure how you got into them, not quite believing that you’re stuck in there and will just have to ride it out.

* * * * * * * *

Following the Raiments tour, Bell heads off separately for other shows. A mid-March showing at Manchester’s Peer Hat is a solo gig, but there’s also an Argyll event (in the enchanting recording-studio-as-art-nook surroundings of St Marys Space) at which she’s supporting baroque poptronic project Gaze Is Ghost: itinerant Northern Irish singer/songwriter/post-classical composer Laura McGarrigle, noted for “spectral vocals and impressionist piano playing” as well as drifts into harmonium and ambient atmospherics. In recent years Laura’s let Zed Penguin drummer/artist Casey Miller into the project and (following a number of pre-Casey singles), Gaze Is Ghost are finally readying a debut album as a duo.

A return to Glasgow on 28th March sees Bell performing on a talk’n’play bill with musicologist and audio culturer David Toop and Berlin sonicist Rashad Becker (who, having polished over a thousand records by other people spanning noise to techno, has begun stepping out into music creation of his own with the resonant faux-ethnological synthwork of ‘Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol. I’).

On the 30th she’s back in Edinburgh to support another experimental folker, looper and performance artist: David Thomas Broughton, whose brilliantly wayward path has included looping his own heckles, blurring the line between song performance and experimental theatre. Along the way he’s released eight albums of accessible, tremulous, oddly haunting alt.folk delivered in an arresting genderless vocal tone a little reminiscent of Anthony/Anohni, and won the respect and collaborative contributions of (among others) Beth Orton, Sam Amidon, and Aidan Moffat. David will be in the early stages of his own tour, which I really should cover on its own.

Before any of these, though, she’s crossing the North Sea to perform at an experimental folk event in København. Part of the city’s Fanø Free Folk Festival, it’s hosted by local label Dendron Records, specializers in “small runs of abstract electronics, ghostly folk songs and surprisingly hummable tunes.” The concert will also feature two København-based British emigres Hugh Tweedie and Tanja Vesterbye Jessen. Hugh’s been operating for years under various names including The Weave And The Weft and Taiga Taiga, creating shadowy understated mostly-acoustic songs with a literary bent, and he regularly helps out with David Folkmann Drost’s homemade folk project Moongazing Hare. Previously known as a radical electric guitarist in Vinyl Dog Joy, Amstrong and Distortion Girls, Tanja recently struck out on her own with a solo debut, ‘Feeling Love’ in which she embraces and deconstructs pop songs, writing them acoustically before bringing assorted damaged amplification and effects-pedal interference to bear on them, resulting in songscapes covering a field from heavy-lidded noise-folk to cataclysmic “drone-metal disco”.

* * * * * * * *
Dates:

Bell Lungs & Raiments tour:

Henry’s Cellar Bar, 16A Morrison Street, Edinburgh EH3 8BJ – Wednesday 20th February 2019, 7.00pm (with Claquer) – information here
Cobalt Studios, 10-16 Boyd Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE2 1AP, England – Thursday 21st February 2019, 7.00pm – (with Michael Clark + Halcyon Jane) – information here
The Edge, 79-81 Cheapside, Digbeth, Birmingham, B12 0QH, England – Friday 22nd February 2019, 8.00pm – (with The Nature Centre + DJ Rome) – information here and here
Cube Cinema, Dove Street South (off top-left of King Square), Kingsdown, Bristol, BS2 8JD, England – Sunday 24th February 2019, 8.00pm – (with Tara Clerkin Trio + The Grey Area DJs) – information here and here
Fusion Arts, 44b Princes Street, Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1DD, England – Monday 25th February 2019, 7.30pm – (with Despicable Zee) – information here
Paper Dress Vintage Bar & Boutique, 352a Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 1HR, England – Tuesday 26th February 2019. 7.30pm (with Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business + Alabaster dePlume) – information here and here
The Rose Hill Tavern, 70-71 Rose Hill Terrace, Brighton, West Sussex, BN1 4JL, England – Thursday 28th February 2019, 7.00pm – information here
The Tin @ The Coal Vaults, Unit 1-4 Coventry Canal Basin, St. Nicholas Street, Coventry, CV1 4LY, England – Friday 1st March 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Drop the Dumbulls @ The Bull, 2 Dublin Street, Liverpool, L3 7DT, England – Saturday 2nd March 2019, 7.00pm (with Claire Welles) – information here

Bell Lungs standalone dates with various others (tbc):

Fanø Free Folk Festival @ Alice, Norre Alle 7, DK-2200 København N, Norway – Monday 4th March 2019, 7.00pm – (with Hugh Tweedie + Tanja Vesterbye Jessen) – information here
St Marys Space, Fasnacloich, Argyll, Scotland, PA38 4BJ – Saturday 9th March 2019, 7.00pm – (supporting Gaze Is Ghost) – information here
The Peer Hat, 14-16 Faraday Street, Manchester M1 1BE – Thursday 14th March 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
Stereo/The Old Hairdressers, 20-28 Renfield Lane, Glasgow, G2 5AR, Scotland – Thursday 28th March 2019, 7.00pm (with David Toop + Rashad Becker) – information here and here
The Waverley, 3-5 St. Mary’s Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TA, Scotland – Saturday 30th March 2019, 9.00pm (supporting David Thomas Broughton) – information here

Tags: Alabaster DePlume, Amstrong, Bell Lungs, Birmingham (England), Brighton (England), Bristol (England), Claire Welles, Claquer, Club Integral (event), Coventry (England), David Thomas Broughton, David Toop, Despicable Zee, Distortion Girls, Divine Schism (event/promoter), DJ Rome, Edinburgh (Scotland), Fanø Free Folk Festival (event), Gaze Is Ghost, Glasgow (Scotland), Halcyon Jane, Hugh Tweedie (The Warp And The Weft/Taiga Taiga), Jenny Moore's Mystic Business, København (Denmark), Kingston-upon-Hull (England), Laura McGarrigle, listening to women, Liverpool (England), London (England), Manchester (England), Me Lost Me (Jayne Dent), Michael Clark, Moongazing Hare, multi-instrumentalists, New Weird Britain, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (England), Omnichord music, Oxford (England), Raiments, Rashad Becker, Spilt Milk (event/promoter), Tanja Vesterbye Jessen, Tara Clerkin, Tara Clerkin Trio, The Grey Area (radio show), The Nature Centre, Vinyl Dog Joy, women of heart and mind

February 2019 – upcoming experimental gigs – Kammer Klang: Taylor Le Melle’s Afrodiasporic spectrum with Venus Ex Machina, Morgan Craft and Shenece Oretha (5th February)

31 Jan

Bah. I’ve got a swelling head cold and am consequently as thick as a cement omelette. Not the best time to try to preview a complicated experimental evening. Sorry for the vagueness in this post… even more than usual, this is hidden music to be sought out and learned from.

The first Kammer Klang of the year unites various sonic experimentalists from the African diaspora under the curatorship of Taylor Le Melle. That’s probably the best way of putting it: the lack of a portentous event title means it’s not pinned down to any more specific narrative. Though predominantly a writer, Taylor spends a lot of time as a creative enabler (co-running independent publisher PSS and artist/workers’ audio-visual cooperative not/nowhere, and facilitating debate), and this isn’t her first Oto event. I’m assuming that it’s going to throw up ideas from across a broad spectrum of ideas and identities, some of which are outlined here.

Venus Ex Machina (a.k.a. Zimbabwean emigre Nontokozo F. Sihwa) is one of an ever-more visible number of interdisciplinary artists and computer coders eliding non-binary gender ideas into the worlds of music, games and visuals. Interested in “mythical and borderless” radio communication, she’ll be performing her own ‘Anno Lucis’ piece from 2018.

I’ve no idea whether this other Venus piece, ‘Paraquat’, is any reflection of what’s to be performed on the night; but here it is for illumination (with its mixture of Geiger counter industrial twists, ringing friction noise apparently siphoned from the bearings holding up the music of the spheres, and arrestingly vocal synth parts summoning up both heavenly European chapel choirs and complex African alarm whoops).

https://soundcloud.com/venusexmachina/paraquat

Attempting to place solo electric guitarist and sonic mystic/realist Morgan Craft involves multiple questions about geography, roots and discovery. A Minnesota-born African-American, he’s an escapee from the New York experimental scene of twenty years ago; but rather than questing directly into Africa he sought refreshment and new paths in the Tuscan mountains of Italy for over a decade (before settling in Amsterdam, where he works with Giulia “Mutamassik” Loli on the Circle of Light label and the Rough Americana project. Now he’s an “Afro-American Viking futurist”, whatever that means. Drawing on the classical legends and contemporary politics of African, European and American cultures alike, his essays sift and fold his multi-positional overview: an expatriate American black man querying his background, a critiquer of capitalist and street culture, a person with one eye on a new dawn due to rise over the muck.

Morgan’s textural guitar pieces are expansive and questioning personal monologues, abstracting manifold concerns into detailed shades. He will be performing his 2018 piece ‘Godel’: here are several earlier pieces from a big releasing burst in 2016.

Montserrat-born Shenece Oretha mostly concerns herself with polyvocality and immediate listening – as she puts it, “choreograph(ing) layers of music, voice, recordings and noise to shape moments of communion and ceremony.” Land-tilling metaphors of potential and nurturing pervade her definition of herself – “hypothetical gardener, future farmer, speculative horticulturalist.” Her sound work, or at least, that of it which I’ve heard so far, is much less pastoral; simultaneously dicing up and unifying strands of black experience from the wounded and fierce to the ecstatic and congregational, from the lone voice ululating to the whumphing in-your-face assertions of co-opted technology.

In addition to Oretha’s Fresh Klang performance – a piece called ‘to plot together, to breathe together’ – Testing Grounds (her “installation with multiple openings”) makes a temporary home at Oto for three days in advance of the show. With spaces for invited guests available (to “accompany the sound and participate in the sounding out”), it’s a live-performed sonic stew “present(ing) and incorporate(ing) her ongoing research project, black whole…, orchestrat(ing) a series of interruptions/interventions ‘in the breaks’.”

Kammer Klang presents:
Kammer Klang: Venus Ex Machina + Morgan Craft + Shenece Oretha
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 5th February 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
(‘Testing Grounds’ – Saturday 2nd to Monday 4th February 2019, 5-9pm)

Tags: #BlackLivesMatter, London (England), Morgan Craft, Shenece Oretha, Taylor Le Melle, textural guitar music, Venus Ex Machina

January 2019 – upcoming London jazz gigs – the Sound of 2019 with Chelsea Carmichael, Nihilism and Vertaal (9th January); Alexandra Ridout in the first part of the next installment of Jazz Herstory (17th January); Steam Down invite you to be on their debut album (26th January)

6 Jan

On 9th January, tenor saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael (from SEED Ensemble/NYJO Jazz Messengers) jumps into a bigger spotlight at the Jazz Cafe, as part of Tastemakers Jazz’s ‘Sound of 2019’ evening. At twenty-five, the time’s right for her to step out; with recent apprenticeships with Terence Blanchard, Courtney Pine, and Etienne Charles (as well as work with Indo-jazz fusioneer Arun Ghosh and as right-hand reedswoman for SEED’s Cassie Kinoshi) helping to shape whatever she does now. This will apparently be the debut of her first project under her own name: so new that I don’t know who else is in it yet, nor anything bar the fact that it’ll be influenced by Chelsea’s “love of groove and intricate rhythms”, and probably isn’t the Mingus-flavoured quintet she brought to the City Beerfest last summer.

Meanwhile, here’s Chelsea blowing tenor with SEED…

In the middle of the bill is electro-acoustic quintet Nihilism – a tuneful cluster of post-bop hip hop, Grapelli hot jazz, funk, grime and Mahavishnu fusion flickering around a median age of twenty. At the core of it (but not restricting it) is a classic acoustic sound revitalised by latterday British dance music, bedrocked by soprano saxophonist Shango Ijishakin, Berklee-trained pianist Lorenz Okello-Osengor and drummer Benjamin Appiah. Lorenz also dabbles in synths, while bassist Christopher Luu juggles his time between acoustic upright and a batch of electronic devices. Their debut EP ‘Exposition’ surfaced in November 2018, a couple of years after they’d formed and honed themselves with frequent gigging.

Despite Lorenz’ Berklee crown, Nihilism’s true secret weapon appears to be their electric violinist and occasional singer/rapper Saskia Horton, a twenty-one-year-old ball of energy and onetime fiddler for FKA Twigs. With an extra double life in theatre and dance, she choreographs and performs in a variety of street and dance-club styles (including krumping and waacking), and brings an assertive physicality to the band’s music every time she bows a string.

Toting a “spiritual jazz-funk” tag, Vertaal are an open-socketed duo (keyboard player Theo Howarth and drummer Ajit Gill) perpetually plugging in a rich turnover of guest players. Here’s a taste of them, with the core duo augmented on that occasion by bassist Warren Woodcraft, saxophonist Loren Hignell and percussionist Simon Todd. Who knows who’ll be joining Ajit and Theo on the night?

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On 17th January, Jazz Herstory resume their staging of female-led jazz concerts over at Poplar Union. It kicks off this year with a performance by trumpeter and bandleader Alexandra Ridout – still only nineteen, but already packing awards for BBC Young Musician of the Year (in 2016) and as 2017 runner-up rising star in the Jazz Awards, as well as hirings by Clarke Tracy and Dave Holland and time spent with her two-generation family jazz band The Ridouts.

She’s bringing along a quintet of fellow teenagers. Pianist Noah Stoneman and guitarist Miles Mindlin are each a fresh-faced seventeen, while bassist Freddie Jensen and drummer Luca Caruso are both nineteen: fresh-faced they may be, but they have equal facility in classic swing, contemporary post-bop, funk and balladry. (Expect an audience with its fair share of middle-aged jazzers with mingled expressions of inspiration, chagrin and vague – or in some case, actual – parental pride.)

Here’s the quintet at work – admittedly with a Stoneman original rather than the sheaf of Ridout tunes which will be played on the night. Also attached is Alexandra’s Young Musician performance from three years ago.

Jazz HerStory continues over the next couple of months with performances by Rosie Turton and Ms. Maurice, but more on that nearer to February…

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On the 26th, interactively-minded Deptford crew Steam Down have invited everyone down to the Albany to help them record their first album. It’s going to be a live one, caught in full audio-visual with attendees and responders on an equal footing to the band. “There is no audience, we are all the music, everyone’s participation matters. The collective’s sessions are a co-creative experience between the audience and musicians. A mutual exchange of energy and vibes between the groovers and movers, the band and the crowd.”

All of this is in keeping with Steam Down’s African-inspired collective ethos. One-and-a-half years old now, the project was founded by saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Ahnanse and they’ve already reached out beyond their south London base to light up gigs in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Oslo. They’re a simmering pot of phuture soul, West African rhythms and cheerful Afrofuturism, the rapid offset breakbeat-splash and electrophonic edge of grime and broken-beat, and (in particular) spiritual jazz.

That said, they’re well aware that they should steer clear of romantic oversimplifications about roots. As Ahnanse remarked in an interview with ‘The Vinyl Factory’ last year, “the roots of what we are creating starts outside of that context, jazz is not the only source of improvised music in the world. It happens in many forms and many cultures, we all come from different spaces and cultures, and it isn’t black American culture, none of us were born there, so actually we are bringing all of those other experiences into this… In a society that is so hegemonic and monotonous it’s nice to surprise yourself and be surprised, by people that you know well.” More than anything else, Steam Down work is inspired by the interlocking of Afro-diasporan culture with week-by-week London life – the information-rich bustle and challenges of a world city made up of people from everywhere, many of them sometimes pushing (or knocking heads) against half-invisible restrictions and oppressions as well as providing broad-mindedness and opportunity. Occasionally the words “church” and “spiritual warfare” are used.

Steam Down’s shifting but family-loyal cloud of membership has included tuba boss Theon Cross, Maisha/Nérija saxophonist Nubya Garcia and keyboard player Dominic Canning (the latter also contributing at ‘Vocal Classics Of The Black Avant-Garde‘ on the 7th). In the rhythmatist corner are Sons Of Kemet/Nok Cultural Ensemble’s young drum-sage Edward Wakili “Nache” Hick and beatmaker Tilé “D’Vo” Gichigi-Lipere. There’s also a bevy of integral singer-poet-rappers in the shape of CarLi Adams, Norwegian-Philipino And Is Phi, Brother Portrait, sometime DJ/illustrator/maker Alex Rita, and the Afro-liminally-minded polymath Nadeem Din-Gabisi (DJ, artist, poet and broadcaster). Multiple talents are at play, with many members teaching and plenty of them producing. They’re a diverse, voluntary hive mind, their individualities fused and encouraged by common purpose, and there are sub-groups, independent familial endeavours and more (for instance, And Is Phi and D’vo work together as Sawa-Manga in a lineup including Saskia Horton from Nihilism).

This particular gig features a Steam Down line-up of Ahnanse, Alex, Dominic, Portrait, Theon, Nadeem, Nache and Sawa Manga plus Nihilism drummer Benjamin Appiah, singer Naima Adams and crunktronic Leeds beatmaker Wonky Logic. Also in the frame are a ton of integrated name guests from up and down the UK jazz scene – no details yet on who they’ll be, but rest assured they’ll be committed to their seat at the table..

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Dates:

Jazz re:freshed & Jazz Cafe present:
The Sounds of 2019 featuring Chelsea Carmichael + Nihilism + Vertaal
The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Wednesday 9th January 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here

Jazz Herstory presents:
Alexandra Ridout
Poplar Union, 2 Cotall Street, Poplar, London, E14 6TL, England
Thursday 17th January 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here

Steam Down: ‘The Live Album’
The Albany, Douglas Way, Deptford, London, SE8 4AG, England
Saturday 26th January 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here

Tags: Afro-futurism, Ahnanse, Ajit Gill, Alex Rita, Alexandra Ridout, And.Is.Phi, Benjamin Appiah, Brother Portrait, Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed, Chelsea Carmichael, Christopher Luu, D'Vo (Tilé Gichigi-Lipere), Dominic Canning, Freddie Jensen, Jazz Herstory (event/promoter), Jazz re:freshed (event/promoter), London (England), Loren Hignell, Lorenz Okello-Osengor, Luca Caruso, Miles Mindlin, Nache (Edward Wakili Hick), Nadeem Din Gabisi, Naima Adams, Nihilism (band), Noah Stoneman, Nubya Garcia, Saskia Horton, Shango Ijishakin, Simon Todd, Sons Of Kemet, Steam Down, Tastemakers Jazz (promoter), Theo Howarth, Theon Cross, Vertaal, Warren Woodcraft, Wonky Logic

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

As 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

Tags: Baroque At The Edge (event/festival), Biber, Carlo Gesualdo, Ceruleo, Clare Norburn, Claudio Monteverdi, Dave Malkin, David Greilsammer, Dipper Malkin, Domenico Scarlatti, Gabriela Montero, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Henry Purcell, Holly Cullen Davies, Jacopo Peri, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Cage, John Dipper, Liam Byrne, London (England), Luciano Berio, lute music, Marin Marais, men and women singing together, Mike Fentross, Niall Ashdown, Nick Hennessy, Nico Muhly, Nora Fischer, piano music, prepared piano music, Sally Davies, Salvatore Sciarrino, viol music, viola d’amore music

October 2018 – upcoming classical/experimental gigs in London, Manchester and Birmingham – Jack Sheen’s an Assembly tour performances of Louis D’Heudieres, Rowland Hill and Charlie Usher (1st, 2nd, 4th October); Kammer Klang returns with performances of Matthew Shlomowitz, Phill Niblock and Ryoko Akama by Lucy Railton, Evie Hilyer-Ziegler, Jessica Aszodi, Antoine Françoise and Patrick Stadler (2nd October)

28 Sep

At the start of October, Jack Sheen’s experimental music ensemble An assembly embark on a brief three-date English tour including the world premieres of two brand-new, specially commissioned pieces and the London premiere of a third.

“An assembly are a group dedicated to contemporary and experimental music, installation and performance. Conceived as a large, open, and flexible group with no fixed line up, format or personnel, An assembly have appeared in many guises, tackling works from virtuosic ensemble scores to mass group readings, via text scores, graphic notation, long duration performances, one-on-one ASMR installations, physical performance, and wrestling. For this tour, An assembly presents an ambitious two-part programme of new works by emerging composers and artists.

“Field recordings and midi-instruments are internalised, vocalised and imitated by voices and instruments in Louis D’Heudieres‘ ‘Laughter Studies 6b’; four vocalists stand downstage from a small instrumental quintet, describing and imitating their own private soundtracks of synthesised tunes and field recordings, transmitted to them via earphones in a surreal and hysterical collision of subjectivities accompanied by angular melodies and midi-drum solos.

“Award-winning visual artist Rowland Hill continues this process of interpreting found material in a new film and performance commissioned by An assembly. Created as a response to Edwin Denby’s 1959 review of Stravinsky’s final ballet ‘Agon’, Hill uses Denby’s review and its relentless metaphors, references and precise visual shocks as a script for a new work, taking the linguistic articulation of a dance and returning it to a choreographed state through film, live performance and sound in a work which Jack Sheen irreverently describes as the “silliest piece I have ever commissioned.”

“The concert will culminate in the world premiere of ‘An assembly’ by Brussels-based composer Charlie Usher, a forty-five minute meditation on listening, hearing, and duration for large ensemble and audio. A constant wave of fourteen-second miniatures, ‘An assembly’ invites us to eavesdrop on real-time transcriptions of music Usher listened to while writing, and as the piece folds into itself, and unfolds away from us, we trace this vast new work into our evening.”

Dates below: note that the London concert is free, but you’ll need to book a space via a ticket system. Note also that there’s a more in-depth preview of this concert tour on Ben Harper’s ‘Boring Like A Drill‘ blog.

International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Chorlton Mill, 3 Cambridge Street, Manchester, M1 5BY, England, Monday 1st October 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Performance Space, City, University of London, College Building, St John Street, Finsbury, London, EC1V 4PB, England, Tuesday 2nd October 2018, 7.00pm – free event – information here, here and here
Centrala, Unit 4, Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley Street, Birmingham, B5 5RT, England, Thursday 4th October 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

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In the same week, avant-classical/experimental chamber evening Kammer Klang returns to London to start its own autumn series.

The main draw for the October opener is the British premiere of Matthew Shlomowitz’s ‘Lecture About Listening to Music’, 2017 performed by two members of Ensemble Nikel (pianist Antoine Françoise – this time on synthesizer – and saxophonist Patrick Stadler) and by singer Jessica Aszodi. A well-known interdisciplinary singer, Jessica has mastered an unusually wide vocal range: on this occasion, however, she’ll just be talking, delivering the lecture component as Antoine and Patrick traverse a range of musical ideas including unsettling atmospherics and repetition, quotes from 1980s mainstream pop and cerebrally playful and jazzy concepts.

Post-modernism aside, this is an upfront and accessible piece. It’s literally, a talk on how we, with our information-age sweep of unconscious and studied influences, access and process music in the present day (but with Matthew providing lengthy, sympathetic musical illustrations as well as the lecture text). Here’s an earlier performance: also featuring Antoine and Patrick, and with Matthew himself in the role of lecturer.

Kammer Klang’s programmer Lucy Railton will be performing ‘Harm’ by New York minimalist/microtonalist drone composer Phill Niblock; a 2003 drone piece sourced from cello. Here’s an earlier version, with the source tones performed by cellist Arne Deforce, to give you an idea…

The October Fresh Klang piece (performed by violinist and recent Goldsmiths music graduate Evie Hilyer-Ziegler) is Ryoko Akama’s ‘Reaction, for a string instrument’, composed this year. Ryoko’s pieces, sometimes released via text scores and conceived as much as performances as they are compositions, are attempts to create “listening situations that magnify silence, time and space… offer(ing) quiet temporal/spatial experiences.” A performer herself, she works with “tiny aural and visual occurrences that embody “almost nothing” aesthetics“: small items from which miniscule sounds can be coaxed and made microscopically purposeful. A peek at Ryoko’s homepage reveals delicate assemblages (everyday lab equipment, ancient pedal sewing machines, tin cans, glass bottles, kitchenware, paper balloons, woolen gloves) waiting to be played. As regards Evie’s violin interpretation, I reckon it’s fair to expect some very small, quiet violin playing: perhaps a fitful breath on the strings…

Kammer Klang presents:
Jessica Aszodi/Antoine Françoise/Patrick Stadler perform Matthew Shlomowitz / Lucy Railton performs Phill Niblock / Evie Hilyer-Ziegler performs Ryoko Akama
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 2nd October 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here

Tags: An assembly (chamber ensemble), Antoine Françoise, Arne Deforce, Birmingham (England), Charlie Usher, Cooky La Moo (Ben Harper), Evie Hilyer-Ziegler, Jack Sheen, Jessica Aszodi, Kammer Klang (event), listening to women, London (England), Louis D’Heudieres, Lucy Railton, Manchester (England), Matthew Shlomowitz, Patrick Stadler, Phill Niblock, Rowland Hill, Ryoko Akama

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Categories 2018, 21st century classical music, acoustic music, chamber music, classical (Western art music), drone music, electro-acoustic music, experimental music, films, instrumental music, interactive performances, minimalism, New Music, performance art, previews

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.

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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’.

Tags: Audre Lorde, Bishi, Di Mainstone, Gazelle Twin, Lia Mice, listening to women, London (England), Miri Kat, Octavia Butler, Rebekah Ubuntu, Vicky O'Neon, WITCiH (event/promoter), women of heart and mind

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).

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).

Of 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

Tags: Dollboy, Gravesend, Harwich, Hefner, International Lighthouse Heritage Weekend (event), International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend (event), Jack Hayter, lightships, Papernut Cambridge

July 2018 – upcoming gigs – V Ä L V Ē, Stef Ketteringham and Lily Buchanan (of The Graphites) in Margate (29th July)

24 Jul

Details on a show this coming Sunday in one of the smallest, most enchanting venues in Kent (Margate’s Tom Thumb Theatre), featuring an mostly-female bill with three different projects (all adventurous; all, in their way, visionary).

* * * * * * * *

I feel as if I’ve covered V Ä L V E what seems like innumerable times this year. Reedswoman/composer Chlöe Herington’s synaesthesia-slanted experimental music project has spent a year or so evolving into a live collective trio of herself, harpist Elen Evans and bass/synth player Emma Sullivan. Previously known for her bassoon, clarinet and saxophone contributions to Chrome Hoof and Knifeworld (and more recently to The Lindsay Cooper Songbook and Hirvikolari), Chlöe’s solo work has involved shed-tinkering as she builds unlikely instruments from scratch and scrap; and the pulling in of compositional ideas from medical charts, found patterns and (literal) rubbish.

On record, the results have percolated around the realms of electric art-rock experimentalism (post-Zappa, post-Henry Cow), parping chamber wind music intimacy, playfully baffling bouts of improv and bewildering schematics. Live, V Ä L V E has mutated further, drawn on by Chloe’s interest in finding out how to trigger her audience’s minds with an evolving toolkit of sensory input, and by the different dynamic of three women involved in discovery together (happy bouts of lateral thinking, plus moments when they combine in obliquely touching bouts of harmonizing song). It’s a winning combination that’s taken the band all the way to airplay on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Late Junction’ – care of ‘The Quietus’s John Doran – and to the Barn stage at the Supernormal festival.

Formerly with abstract noise-blues trio Shield Your Eyes, guitarist/bass-drum booter/occasional vocalist Stef Ketteringham now works alone. His improvised solo music is a guttering, chattering, restlessly emotive take on exploded electro-acoustic blues, integral to which is his brawling, brutal and fearless guitar technique.

Elastic and vocal, with a gutting-knife timbre, its passing similarities to the pitch-bend avant-howls and tremolo-purrs of Henry Kaiser and David Torn is probably pure coincidence. Stef’s wildly gestural guitar-playing sounds like an instinctive discovery: more punk than professorial, bursting from his gut via his heart to tell its shattered, hollered, mostly wordless stories and personal bulletins without the constraint of manners or moderation. For all that, it’s still got the skeleton of blues rules – the existential moan, the bent pitches and percussive protest that demand attention and serve notice of presence.

Guitar in hand, Scottish singer-songwriter Lily Buchanan usually fronts and voices interesting south London pop-punkers The Graphites (who in turn were formerly her solo project The Graphite Set). The Graphites’ lilting jig rhythms, their echoes of girl groups and Lily’s subtly unorthodox song-structures (recalling both Chrissie Hynde and Nico, but with an understated elliptical focus that’s all Lily’s own) put them several cuts above the competition.

This is hardly surprising: Lily’s work springs out of both folk music and a life spent painting. But while many art-school music spinoffs are happy to lose themselves in arrogant vagueness, vacuity and sonic scurf, Lily’s half-spoken songs make much of their clarity of line; their deceptive ability to digress and orbit while never truly losing sight of the core matter, casting new light on it with each pass.

All by herself this evening, Lily will be performing something new – “a series of folk songs inspired by her recent intrigue into collecting sea fauna.” She’s being billed here as “Lily Of The Graphites”. Such a shame that’s not the actual project name. There’s not enough courtly allotropic geology in the world.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of Graphites songs…

NFA presents:
V Ä L V Ē + Stef Ketteringham + Lily of The Graphites
Tom Thumb Theatre, 2 Eastern Esplanade, Cliftonville, Margate, Kent, CT9 2LB, England
Sunday 29th July 2018, 7:00 pm – information here, here and here

Tags: Chloe Herington, Chrome Hoof, Elen Evans, Emma Sullivan, Hirvikolari, Knifeworld, Lily Buchanan, listening to women, Margate, Shield Your Eyes, Stef Ketteringham, The Graphites, V A L V E, women of heart and mind

July 2018 – upcoming London gigs – Léscines, Oscar Mic, Crooked Weather and Rivers Johansson & The Deemed Unrighteous at Paper Dress Vintage Takeover (26th July); Alexia Chambi, Charlie Draper, Jared Rood, Johnny Crooks, Tom Bright and William. at BOX Live (27th July)

22 Jul

A couple more London gigs in small places…

* * * * * * * *

A distorted rootsy evening, first, at Paper Dress in east London. Léscines have been stirring up and churning out mongrel reggae-rock, cartoon Americana and scrawny blues licks for about five years now, throwing in a touch of psychobilly noir and webbed folk. Jay Fraser’s joyously unhinged songwriting pulls in a palette of people and extra instrumentation from banjo to brass, Wurlitzer organ to djembe, and songs about wolves, crows, border country, assorted dooms. If Ted Hughes and Nick Cave had run away to be cowboys, shared a bottle of toxic mescal together and then co-written a stark children’s book a couple of days later, it might have ended up a little like this. With a new album in the can and expected soon, they’re headlining with gusto.

Expansive rock-tinged folk group Crooked Weather hail from east Yorkshire. Their multi-instrumentalism, and their willingness to take a song idea for an introspective yet expansive run, has seen them compared to The Incredible String Band; but perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch in the wrong direction. For better or for worse, Crooked Weather conspicuously lack several of the ISB’s more outrageous qualities, both good and bad (the saucer-eyed eclectic musical grabbing, the eccentric psychedelic perspective, the baffling sectional song-mozaics… the poisonous family antagonism).

Instead, they’re a soberer breed of folk mystics – content not to burn out their inspirations, and to be diverse while being careful with their craft. It’s difficult to imagine them vanishing down the Scientology manhole, or losing shedloads on money on theatre dance projects. Searchers they may be, but they keep their vision handy and controlled; like a lens tucked away into a pocket, always available to focus in on a subject.Though they’re prepared to pursue a history or a batch of intimations to the horizon, Crooked Weather are less inclined to drop over the edge into another country.

Crooked Weather’s fellow east Yorkshire band, “deathblues collective” Rivers Johansson & The Deemed Unrighteous (at one time “compiled of a villain, a heathen, and a velvet doll” and apparently still “God-fearin’ nectophiles”), are coming down from Hull, bringing their gutter slide, buzzsaw punk bass and preacher warnings of imminent doom. Also racing into place is Seamus Hayes, a.k.a Oscar Mic dubbed “the freakish love-child of The Beastie Boys and Little Richard, birthed at a grunge orgy” and bringing assorted busker-hip-hop ideas to the stage with his verbal flow, his cartoon-spattered guitar, his pedal-board and his beatboxing.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtNU4ZhhsiunEN711FHY2ow

https://soundcloud.com/oscarmicmusic/noise

Roundtable Collective presents:
Paper Dress Vintage Takeover: Léscines + Oscar Mic + Crooked Weather + Rivers Johansson & The Deemed Unrighteous
Paper Dress Vintage Bar & Boutique, 352a Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 1HR, England
Thursday 26th July 2018, 7.45pm – information here and here

* * * * * * * *

About twenty minutes walk from ‘Misfit City’, Crouch End-based recorders and artist developers BOX Recording Studios are coaxing their clients out into the nearby, freshly-refurbished pub for performances this coming Friday.

London-based Danish-Cypriot singer-songwriter Alexia Chambi is just twenty years old, but has already fitted in six years of round-the-world travel, This in turn inspires her footloose songs, with their tussles between fluid freedom and rooting oneself, and her dark-toned jazz guitar. Following previous collaborations with Ralph Taylor and Hotel Avra, Alexia will be releasing her debut solo EP, ‘Bolivia’ in the autumn. Juice You (below) may well be on it. Meanwhile, Tommy Hill (a.k.a. William.) floats in the space between singer-songwriter guitar rock and contemporary R&B, his beat-slink punctuated by bursts of flammable fretboard. He, too, has an EP due for release later this year.

Two members of London urban rockers Tom Bright & The Dynamite – lead singer/songwriter Tom Bright and lead guitarist Jared Rood are also playing. It’s unclear whether they’re going to be working separately or whether this is going to be a two-piece Dynamite: meanwhile here’s the parent band playing a couple of their pieces, demonstrating their upfront protest songs and their growling skimming of the edge of folk punk. A grain of Rory McLeod, a dash of Richard Thompson or Tom Robinson; perhaps a twist of Jason Feddy.

A key member of Bruce Wooley and Andy Visser’s “modular space-age pop ensemble” Radio Science Orchestra, Charlie Draper is a British specialist in the gestures and techniques needed to control the antique electronic whoops of theremin and ondes Martenot. He’s played with just about every theremin/ondes-requiring orchestra and ensemble in the country. Come and hear him extract various classical and pop tones from each of the instruments. German-based beatmaker Johnny Crooks is also going to be playing a separate set of his own aural confections.

https://soundcloud.com/charliedrapertheremin/dissonance-quartet-w-a-mozart

https://soundcloud.com/charliedrapertheremin/why-fumth-in-sight

BOX Recording Studios presents
BOX Live: Alexia Chambi + Charlie Draper + Jared Rood + Johnny Crooks + Tom Bright + William.
The Harringay Arms, 153 Crouch Hill, Crouch End, London, N8 9QH, England,
Friday 27th July 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here

Tags: Alexia Chambi, Charlie Draper, Crooked Weather, Jared Rood, Johnny Crooks, Léscines, London (England), ondes martenot, Oscar Mic, Rivers Johansson & The Deemed Unrighteous, theremin music, Tom Bright, Tom Bright & The Dynamite, William (Tommy Hill)

July 2018 – upcoming London folk and world gigs – Nest Collective’s Campfire Club shows – Abatwa (the pygmy) plus Pete Yelding (26th July); The Young’uns (27th July)

19 Jul

Here’s details on the last two Nest Collective’s Campfire Club shows for July, continuing a season which has already seen a sheaf of singer-songwriters, Western folk traditionalist, griot musicians, choirs, chamber jazz bands, storytellers and folk-rappers temporarily take over London’s more obscure green spaces and playgrounds for various unamplified concert evenings, giving us doses of round-the-globe musicianship, occasional sedition and general acoustic glory.

* * * * * * * *

Easy bit first…

The month’s sixth and final concert, on 27th July, features Teesside folk trio The Young’uns, who “have cemented their reputation at the forefront of the English folk scene in the last few years. As Colin Irwin put it, in ‘The Guardian’, “the harmonies are glorious, the wit is waspish. The songs are powerful, the banter is relentless and the audience is happy. What’s not to like?” Having taken their uplifting voices, powerful songs, spine tingling harmonies and raucous humour to audiences across the UK and around the world, The Young’uns won the title of ‘Best Group’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award in 2015 and 2016. They returned in 2017 with an extensive October UK tour and an eagerly anticipated new album, ’Strangers’ – a collection of folk songs for our times; a homage to the outsider, a eulogy for the wayfarer and a hymn for the migrant.”

The preceding fifth concert, on 26th July, is a little more complicated.

Replacing Anglo-African folk-griot trio Koral Society is Pete Yelding. A cellist and singer-songwriter who grew up as a classical string player, Pete found his true musical self by diversifying into sitar, into playing in rock bands and with rave jam bands, and in his collaborations with Mandinka Griots and Gnawa musicians from west Africa. Rootswise, he comes from a travelling show people background of caravans, off-grid communes and circus pitches. All of this informs the music which he creates now, from prolonged classical-folk song crossovers to jazzy Arthur Russell-ish diary musings to highly processed mingled-instrumental dronework.

Headlining is Abatwa (the pigmy), the project name for a group of genuine Rwandan Pigmies – or, more correctly, Batwa people – fitting in a London show immediately prior to their appearance at WOMAD the following Sunday. Both performances have come about due to last year’s release of the album ‘Abatwa: Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?’, Batwa recordings compiled by Ian Brennan – producer, writer, lecturer, activist and self-taught ethnologist and and someone who’s led a broader and more meaningful life than most, in which twenty years of work in anger management, violence prevention and conflict resolution in various places and situations across the world has run in parallel with socially-conscious music promotion and with record production. In particular, Ian’s been an exemplar for capturing unvarnished field recordings of imperfect but natural performers – ordinary people simply singing and playing the music from their own cultures rather than representing it as any kind of cultural stars.

This partially (although obviously not wholly) explains why I know more about Ian than I do about the Batwa he recorded; or, indeed, whichever particular Batwa are playing at the west London art studios which Nest Collective have taken over for the evening. The ‘Abatwa’ album itself features Batwa singers, Batwa instrumentalists and (overturning any ideas of hermetic cultural purity) Batwa rappers. Ian has described their nation as “one of the most marginalized, voiceless and endangered populations in Africa. In fact, their name is frequently taken in vain as a slur towards unrelated others. Historically, the tallest Abatwa women have attracted outside attention and then been taken as wives by other tribes. This has contributed to the growth of their tribe remaining limited physically. Though for the most part they were left alone during the (Rwandan) genocide, some members of the tribe actually participated in committing acts of genocide.”.

Nothing’s straightforward here; and while the complexity and contradictions of this story and this music are probably more than a single concert will be capable of revealing. We can hope for some of the album’s original performers – including rapper Rosine Nyiranshimiyimana, traditionalist master musician Emmanuel Hatungimana, and Umuduli music-bow family players/voice harmonizers Ruth Nyiramfumukoye and Patrick Manishimine – but whatever shape the show takes, it should at least provide a window onto a neglected, threatened world, and perhaps more.

* * * * * * * *

Dates and links:

Campfire Club: Abatwa (the pygmy) + Pete Yelding – Kindred Studios, 18 Saltram Crescent, West Kilburn, London, W9 3HW, England, Thursday 26th July 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Campfire Club: The Young’uns – Glengall Wharf Garden, 64 Glengall Road, Peckham, London, SE15 6NF, England, Friday 27th July 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here

Tags: Abatwa (the pygmy), Campfire Club (event), Emmanuel Hatungimana, griot, Ian Brennan, London (England), Patrick Manishimine, Pete Yelding, Rosine Nyiranshimiyimana, Ruth Nyiramfumukoye, The Nest Collective (event/promoter), The Young'uns

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Categories 2018, a capella, acoustic music, alternative folk, Batwa (Pigmy) music, folk music, hip hop, instrumental music, interactive performances, political music, previews, protest songs, rapping, roots music, Rwandan folk music, vocal music, world & indigenous music

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Misfit City

May 2020 – single & track reviews – MultiTraction Orchestra’s ‘Emerge Entangled’; Stuart Wilding’s ‘Spaces’ and ‘Horns’

October 2019 – upcoming London rock, pop, noise, dancetronic gigs – Hurtling, Stephen Evens and Junodef (17th October); Gum Takes Tooth and Hyperstition Duo (18th October); Bunny Hoova, Gribs, J.B. Glaser and Halfs (18th October)

October 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Retrophonica at the Brunel Museum (13th); Charles Hayward presents Sly & The Family Drone, V Ä L V Ē, Timestretch Alarmsong and Atatat (19th)

June/July 2019 – upcoming London gigs – Jewdas’ summer shindig with Geoff Berner, Fran & Flora and Rokhl Merlot at Balabam (20th June); Sefiroth at JW3 (4th July)

June 2019 – the start of Daylight Music’s summer season in London – The Slowest Lift, Laura Jurd & Chris Batchelor, ORE and Jim Bishop (1st June); Jam Tarts Choir, Independent Country and Sarah Gonputh (8th June)

May 2019 – upcoming experimental gigs – Maryanne Amacher Focus in London featuring Ensemble Contrechamps, Ensemble Zwischentöne, Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini (30th & 31st)

April/May 2019 – upcoming jazz gigs – a massive Barbican celebration of London jazz from the Total Refreshment Centre (13th April); the Steam Down collective hit Shoreditch (24th April); Warmer Than Blood in London and Cardiff (22nd April, 21st May)

April 2019 – upcoming English experimental/pop gigs – Joe Snape on tour in Birmingham, Brighton, London, Bristol and Newcastle with Laurie & Suze, plus guest spots from Maya Verlaak, Blood Stereo, O Yama O, Orxid, Competition and Gwilly Edmondez (11th, 13th, 17th, 18th and 19th April)

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

March/April 2019 – upcoming British experimental gigs – Sarah Angliss’ eerie Air Loom on tour in Britain (26th March to 8th April, various) – also featuring Noize Choir, Kate Arnold, Thomas Stone, Embla Quickbeam, Good News From The Future, Ben Gwilliam and Cath & Phil Tyler

February 2019 – upcoming experimental gigs – Kammer Klang: Taylor Le Melle’s Afrodiasporic spectrum with Venus Ex Machina, Morgan Craft and Shenece Oretha (5th February)

January 2019 – upcoming London jazz gigs – the Sound of 2019 with Chelsea Carmichael, Nihilism and Vertaal (9th January); Alexandra Ridout in the first part of the next installment of Jazz Herstory (17th January); Steam Down invite you to be on their debut album (26th January)

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)

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

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

July 2018 – upcoming gigs – V Ä L V Ē, Stef Ketteringham and Lily Buchanan (of The Graphites) in Margate (29th July)

July 2018 – upcoming London gigs – Léscines, Oscar Mic, Crooked Weather and Rivers Johansson & The Deemed Unrighteous at Paper Dress Vintage Takeover (26th July); Alexia Chambi, Charlie Draper, Jared Rood, Johnny Crooks, Tom Bright and William. at BOX Live (27th July)

July 2018 – upcoming London folk and world gigs – Nest Collective’s Campfire Club shows – Abatwa (the pygmy) plus Pete Yelding (26th July); The Young’uns (27th July)

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