Despite their increasing whirl of gigs over the past year, it’s difficult to find performance video of V Ä L V Ē besides these gnomic little fragments: glimpses of feet and harps, pedals and synths, shuffles and patch wires. They’ve been rapidly evolving far beyond their beginnings as Chlöe Herington’s vehicle for musical jokes, chance theory and post-Zappa woodwind patchworks and her experiments with samples and homemade instruments. Now, they’re a live, surprisingly accessible avant-everything trio with Elen Evans and Emma Sullivan – reeds and microsynth, melodica, harpstrings and bass, RIO/Raincoats-style vocals that inhabit both the forthright and the naïve – and they’re getting pieces in ‘The Quietus’ about how they’re expanding on synaesthesia and spacework and the disjunction of time, and mining the weird yet archetypal templates of Chlöe’s recurring dreams.
While we’re waiting for more evidence to emerge, here are a couple of pieces which represent a couple of V Ä L V Ē’s varied polarities – the avant-rock all-in wrestle match of Rhythm Strip (based on an EEG reading from Chlöe’s mum) and the warming songwork of the more recent Lights – plus one of those distracted fly-on-the wall videos (this time, of Chlöe negotiating a keyboard, pretty much literally).
V Ä L V Ē’s next show (just over a week before Chlöe pops up again with the Lindsay Cooper Songbook) is this coming Sunday, supporting the Monkey Puzzle Trio – which unites perpetually/perversely-journeying art-rock and improv drummer Charles Hayward, Pinski Zoo bassist Nick Doyne-Ditmas and longstanding sound-and-place voice artist Viv Corringham. It’s a post-jazz music of deformed rounds, ranging chatter and a kind of reimagined dub focus, via Charles’ assured yet regularly broken-up and disrupted drum cycles, Viv’s cavernous range of vocal effects (stippled by loop pedal and flexible larynx, augmented by mini-disc abuse) and Nick’s bass, which seems to be travelling at two-thirds of the thinking speed of the voice and drums but always knows where to settle and lean on the moving beat.
V Ä L V Ē and Charles Hayward present:
Monkey Puzzle Trio + V Ä L V Ē
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Sunday 10th June 2018, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
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Charles Hayward shows up again just under a week later when he guests at Laura Cannell’s ‘Modern Ritual’ show at LSO St Lukes, performing a self-explanatory experimental piece called ‘30 Minute Snare Drum Roll’, an “improvisational piece that sees him develop a rudimental drum technique into something more complex, subtlety changing density, pressure and volume before our ears.” There are precedents for this kind of thing – people like Max Roach or Art Blakey keeping an audience enthralled by a quarter of an hour of carefully modulated hi-hat – but any excuse to see Charles thinking hard behind a drum kit is a good one.
In many respects, this is a revisitation of the ‘Memory Mapping’ show which Laura brought to Daylight Music in November 2016. More to the point, it also revives an event at Cafe Oto last March, with repeat appearances for Charles’ drum roll, for ‘Wire’/Resonance FM/Arc Light Editions mainstay Jennifer Lucy Allan and for Suffolk-based “edgelands” musician Andre “Hoofus” Bosman.
Hoofus’ experiments in FM overlaps, raw-formed percussion and drifting oscillators “(explore) the uncanny beauty of the intangible, the occult and the arcane seeping through into the post-industrial 21st century world of reason and corporate compliance” resulting in “music of eerie wonder, where oscillating melodic loops meld with distorted rhythms.” In contrast, Jennifer presents her combined talk and performance ‘Foulis’s Daughter: Social and Cultural History of the Foghorn in 30 Interrupted Acts’ accompanied by “the ghost of a long de-activated foghorn which is on a fifteen-second loop”: Jennifer’s history is narrated during the gaps between blasts, tracing “a rhythmic history of the foghorn at the edges of the Atlantic: along the fog-bound Labrador Coast; at a bend on the Firth of Clyde; on the tip of The Lizard and from the cliffs at the South Foreland in Kent.”
In keeping with this drift into New Weird Britain ambience, writer, filmmaker and ‘Quietus’ co-founder Luke Turner explores his own world of liminals with a talk on “urban forests, family, death and sexuality”. This is based around his forthcoming “spiritual memoir” ‘Out Of The Woods’ – a study of Luke’s own coming-to-terms with his bisexual identity and his past experiences with sexual abuse and a religious upbringing, alongside his investigations of “memory and experience in the context of landscape and the natural world”. It’s a journey framed by the trees and the history of Epping Forest, which for Luke seems to have become representative of an ur-forest which allows for the expression of “a wilder, truer, more spiritual self” (and brings those wood-woses, drones and leafery which have threaded through ‘The Quietus’ into fuller perspective). Laura, meanwhile, keeps up her own traditions of reinvention, refurbishment and recontextualising on double recorder and bow-threaded violin: generating eerie, often-violent sonic landscapes of folk melodies and sharp-minded post-classical noise, each calibrated to the particular place where it’s being performed.
The evening will be topped off by a large group collaboration involving all of the named performers plus additional guests.
Laura Cannell: ‘Modern Ritual’
LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England
Saturday 16th June 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
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More assorted improvisations and explorations come on the 22nd, when Ashley Paul and Tom James Scott team up as a duo at The Old Dentist in Homerton. Both have a fair amount in common, as multi-instrumentalists heading up small exploratory record labels (Ashley with Wagtail, Tom with Skire). Equally, there’s enough distinction between them to make for some interesting friendly frictions as Ashley’s American background, reeds leanings and free-form tastes interact with Tom’s Cumbrian background and the process that’s taken him from classical guitarist to experimental minimalist.
In support are improvising trio Glowering Figs, made up of venerable Ya Basta! free jazzers Ivor Kallin and Dave Fowler (on electric upright bass/vocals and drums, respectively), plus Ivor’s London Improvisers Orchestra comrade and ex-Astrakan member Jerry Wigens on guitar. Come for bilious, awkward avant-power-rock noodlings topped with Ivor’s authoritative stream-of-conscious rantings: here’s an example…
Opening the show is Ben Pritchard – not to be confused with the former Fall guitarist, he’s a London-based artist, songwriter, experimental musician and Ashley Paul bandmember who writes disintegrating-shack instrumentals for prepared acoustic guitar and percussion – strangely compelling pings, scrapes, rattles and string noise with an emotive visual quality as well as a knack for summoning in illusions. You can somehow hear impressions of ghost fiddles, a whittler’s workshop, or vocal chords tweaked by breeze gusts. When he wanders into song, it’s along the frail, fluttering-shirt lines of end-of-the-road Talk Talk, or the sparsest of Robert Wyatt: spontaneous-sounding experimental folk sketches with an undertone of parched, amnesiac blues.
Muckle Mouth presents
Ashley Paul & Tom James Scott + Glowering Figs + Ben Pritchard
The Old Dentist, 33 Chatsworth Road, Homerton, London, E5 0LH, England
Friday 22nd June 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Misfit City 