“I get broken, I get mended by my love for you.” Yes, things can be fixed, but if what was broken was and is something that runs deep, you need a memory of that fracture. You have to have it that way in order not to get fooled again, or to ensure that justice is highlighted, or perhaps simply to know yourself.
Under her light, knowing blues-y vocal, Sug Daniels‘ ‘Kintsugi’ has gently bouncing ukelele, soft bops of bass and gentle burbling punctuations of Leslie-fied electric piano. It’s also got a name taken from Japanese art. Kintsugi is the practise of picking up a broken piece of pottery and repairing it, but not with transparent glue and the deception that nothing happened. Instead, the repairs are done with lacquer blended with precious metals – gold, silver, platinum – making burnished veins and patches for the points of damage and the former fractures. Fixed, but highlighted. Mended but remembered.
For Sug, kintsugi serves as a personal metaphor for “the botched relationship between America and a black woman coming into her own.” It’s also a perfect metaphor to build a bruised-yet-hopeful love song around. Here, she does both; and you can read ‘Kintsugi’ as either thing. Sug doesn’t dig too deeply into the hurts, exploitations and callousness doled out, but ensures that you know that they happened and that she’s unbowed. “When you need me, / know I’ll be there, / ‘cos I grew up poor-tough, darlin’, / and I ain’t never, never scared… / When you gonna do right by me? / Glad I’m on this side of history. / I just want a fighting chance, you see. / Don’t leave me here in misery.”
It’s unfooled, it’s mindful and it’s tinted with the lightest shade of blues; but it’s upbeat and choosing a hopeful mutual path. “I‘m willin’ to try, I’m even willin’ to die. / Got nothin better to do, ‘cept I want to do it with you.” Some might quibble at the shortage of killer lines, or that there are jabs left unlanded; but Sug seems to take all such matters as known and read. Instead, this is a low-key plea – and manifesto – for a step away from bullying, from neglect and bad treatment, perhaps from mutual destruction. It’s all there, reading between the cracks.
Emerging just as Covid-19 takes its third bite out of British life, Manchester singer-songwriter Jesse D’Kora makes his debut appearance via a softly melancholic song about long-distance relationships and break-ups. Topical. However, it’s not Covid-driven capsule pop: not enhanced by quarantine, anomie and angst; not languishing over forced separations. ‘Far from Home’ comes from an earlier, more innocent age – one in which distance was something regularly travelled, even to the point where it became a daily irritation.
“If only you had moved closer to me,” sing-sighs Jesse, as if that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back; and perhaps it was. Love does, after all, founder on mild, cumulative delays; on small over-stretchings; on gradually worn-down patience that can’t be patched. Jesse is soft-voiced, kind-toned, but he’s clearly slipped past the point where he has enough willpower to keep things going. “I’m going home, I need to find another way – / ‘cos I’ve been with you too long now, / and I can’t erase the words that stained us yesterday.”
In terms of tone, ‘Far from Home’ could have emerged at any time in the past twenty years – at any point in which someone felt like blending upbeat jangle-pop with a Milky Way dream-pop swoosh (or imagining what might have happened had Chris Bell foisted a more galactic production style on The Go-Betweens). Gently propulsive narcotism and solipsism turn alienation and numbness into heavy-lidded grace, letting life puff away into car-wakes and distant flame-ups. “I’m driving through a valley just to be with you, / and I’m falling asleep now at the wheel,” Jesse laments over the jangling yearn of his own guitars, a light-bodied baby Glenn Campbell lost in the Pennines. “And I crash and burn like there’s any other way. / Cracks in the windscreen lead me back to home. / It’s where I go and where I’m coming from. / It’s where I feel that I belong. / It’s liberating now you’re gone – / now it’s time that I moved on.”
Perhaps he’s a gentle romantic turning back to his roots; perhaps he’s a plausibly soulful bastard worming his doe-eyed way out of a commitment. Either way, he’s made a good first impression.
More psychedelic factors bleed into ‘Chorus’, by No Thee No Ess, although in this case it’s more like eructation than decoration. The Cardiff psychedelicists have recently upped their game by collaborating with onetime μ-Ziq and Rocketgoldstar guy Frank Naughton, who gleefully brings his own toys to the game. Consequently, ‘Chorus’ sounds like a series of dogged mid-air collisions – first Hawkwind smacking into a cluster of seagulls, with the resulting airborne contusion then clipping a seaside amusement arcade, and finally the whole mass exploding through the kind of rootless, genderless ’90s post-rock consciousness you’d get from A.R. Kane.
No Thee No Ess have put out some driving weirdness before (punctuating and puncturing the clarity of their usual acid folk/acid pop explorations) but never anything quite so gleefully liberated from gravity or from containment. If the history of British psychedelia was a set of sequential smoke rings, ‘Chorus’ would also be the charged and speeding particle stunting its way through all of them. Swamp-bubbling synth bass, white-noise scurf, and little piled-up analogue-electronic foldings all play their part alongside the guttural guitar chug, but what really puts the cherry on the cake is the singing, in which falsetto vocals are bricolaged with carolling voicetone samples in an undulating cable of studded sound. It sounds as if someone’s waylaid and spiked a minor angel, who’s now hurtling through the skies on its own, singing in tongues, blurting out an incomprehensible paean.
I’ve tried to pick out the lyrics and failed twice; first practically and then philosophically, feeling that trying to comb this glorious voice-stream into straightforward sentences would somehow undo its spell. As a phalanx of synthesizers swing into place and then joyously fragment, like Cian Ciran and Tim Blake in a happily turbulent wrangle with a young Vangelis), I decide not to pin anything down any further than that. Sometimes you’ve just got to let things sing away, and be blown ahead of them.
Shug Daniels: ‘Kintsugi’ Weird Sister Records(no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 12th July 2021
The personal, and the political. Flip a coin next time you walk out of doors. If it falls the wrong way, imagine that at some point you’re going to be the target of some kind of abuse while you’re out there – aggressive attention, or being boxed in, or physically assaulted. Possibly murdered.
Loud Women: ‘Reclaim These Streets’
If you’re male (and if you’re taking this seriously), you’re probably feeling slightly paranoid at imagining this sort of a world. If you’re female, you don’t even need me to tell you that you’re already dealing with it – often the actuality, but always the ever-lurking fear and concern, and the rage that comes because of the way that this situation just grinds on and on forever… and of how it not only stalks the street, but seeps into the home, smothers the protest, blocks the initiative.
Spurred into action by two particular deaths, those of Blessing Olusegun and Sarah Everard (two outcroppings of this collective outrage, the first of which has highlighted the relative dismissal which the deaths of black women receive; the second how gynocidal murder can be dealt out even by those who are duty-bound to protect), a choral swarm of female musicians have come together under the umbrella of the Loud Women collective for ‘Reclaim These Streets’. In part it’s a well-deserved fund raiser for Women’s Aid. In part, it’s a righteous kick against this horrible cloud of threat and complacency.
On top of all that, as a protest song it works both in message and in form. Written by Loud Women founder Cassie Fox (of Thee Faction and I, Doris) it sits tight in the crossover pocket of punk and guitar-pop, with perhaps Deb Googe’s ferocious dragster-thrum bass as its prime component. Pounding along, fiercely and hungrily, it simultaneously finds room for a whole spectrum of female thinking, emoting, flavourings and positioning. The assured and assertive whomp of punk protest to the bruised-but-unbeaten notes of confessional; the hookiness of girl-group vigour and the whisper-to-gale push of the female chorale; the empowered party zest of women in solidarity; through to the roar of collective rallying.
As for the words, they’re forthright in their abraded, angry sketching of trepidations and injustice (“From the age of thirteen / I’ve known the fear of dark streets. / I’ve known my body’s danger / – can he hear my heart beat?.. / From the age of thirteen, / been told that it is my fault. / Blamed for male violence, / better watch where I walk… / Every woman’s got a story, / breaks silence with a whisper… / Text me you when get home; / keys between your fingers; / staying close to streetlights – / fear of shadows lingers…”). They’re equally forthright in their call for something better, something more just. “We have a right to safety / She was just walking home / Too many women share a story / You are not alone… / Daring to tell her truth / Calling to her sisters… / Till every woman’s safe from harm in her own home / Till every woman’s safe to live her truth / Till every woman’s safe to walk on every street.”
Perhaps its strongest impression, though is the coming-together – the commonality – of so many female musicians from across nearly five decades. A tranche of 1990s indie queens include Debbies Googe and Smith, Salad’s Marijne van der Vlugt and journalistic ground-breaker Ngaire Ruth; Brix Smith adds a gawky-but-gutsy rap in the middle;. latterday rock journeywomen Charley Stone and Jen Macro serve as guitar backbone. Elder voices (with lippy and lippiness) include Siobhan Fahey and that steadily-evolving, she-punk/polymath-auntie Helen McCookerybook.
As for the extended hand-to-hand patchwork of the Loud Women community choir, it contains among others MIRI, Lilith Ai, Laura Kidd (of Penfriend/She Makes War), Julie Riley, Lee Friese-Greene, Estella Adeyeri (Big Joanie) and Cassie’s I, Doris bandmate Abby Werth; plus dive-ins from assorted members of fierce female and female-slanted bands (such as Dream Nails, The Pukes, The Tuts, Desperate Journalist, Gender Chores, Slut Magic, Deux Furieuses, Berries, Muddy Summers & the Dirty Field Whores), all of them asserting and persuading together. It’s a reminder that few things are as naturally formidable – as naturally authoritative – as adjacent generations of women in full agreement, and who are forcefully letting it be known.
From material certainties to something metaphysical. In ‘Blood Moon’, Penelope Trappes imagines herself as Isis (protecting goddess of women and children, divine healer) but also as struggling against present-day burdens which have grown too heavy, too deadening. In the Agnes Haus short film which accompanies the song, a silver car pulls skittishly into a multi-story car park at night and Penelope-as-Isis (tumble-haired, teary-eyed, all too human in her distress) drags the unresponsive body of another woman across the concrete. The other woman’s face is unseen. Her leopard-print coat is snagging, her mass a dead weight.
There are flickers of power in Isis yet – she summons lightning and snow from her fingertips, and is dogged in her hauling efforts – but the film ends unresolved. Having dragged her burden all the way to the moon-shrouded docks, and with both the lifeless other body and her own wig of blonde curls now discarded on the roadway, the exhausted goddess stares angrily into the camera in a smear of kohl and sweat. Around her, the world continues, part-asleep, part-unregarding; a freight lorry cruising slowly past as if all too aware of damaged and brutalised women, and indifferent to them.
Visually, it’s all a bit didactic: besides Penelope’s goddess-role, there’s the fact that that anonymous dragged woman is eventually identified only as “societal expectations” (like something out of a mummer play for …feminism) It makes up for this with its mingled air of dread, fear, resolve and resentment as Isis shudders, pulls together strengths and repurposes fear, tries to function in the face of a massive injustice which billows between the mythic and the material. Likewise the song, which sounds as if it’s been stitched together from shreds and rags of weariness and resolve. The beats are like sparse, distant artillery; the piano sounds as if it’s been dropped from a great height before Penelope could pick a tune out of it.
Her own voice is a denatured wisp heard round a corner, delivering shadowy ambiguous lyrics. Groundings and splinterings mingle with prayers and protest and, somewhere, deep down, the shards of a mangled love song.“Centre body and guide, /show me what to do. / Serve grace with trebles eye, / turn must push on through. / I , I won’t lose. / I’ll tear up our love… Blood moon rising above… / Lover remember / repurpose fear within / along heated lines. / Can’t hear if you are fine. / I’m strong enough, / I’m strong enough…” The picture never becomes entirely clear. Perhaps it’s something which is felt over time… or in a pull-back. Too many congregating factors which rip a hole in the side of strength. Too many furious stitchings-up.
Bay Area baroque popper Spellling delivers a clearer message, somewhere between the fulsome protest of Loud Women and the abstracted one which Penelope favours, but hovering with purpose in a place of her own. You’d think you’d know what’s coming with a song called ‘Boys from School’ – either girl-group coo left as it is or flipped over to express rage at classroom and playground sexism. Spelling touches briefly on the latter (“I hate the boys at school / They never play the rules,”) but she has bigger fish to fry.
It’s not just the boy-runts who are failing her as a person. Admittedly, there’s a hint at dealing with disinterest and thwarted desire with “the body is the law and I’m only human after all / Wanted to bе the one that you need…”. But mostly it’s the whole institution that’s failing her as she drifts, purposefully, through its corridors while gradually disconnecting from its expectations and requirements. “Take me to the Lord before the boredom takes me over.” she hiss-whispers. “I am waiting on his move. I’m going under the floor. / What am I waiting for? / Floating down the hall / through all the voices, through all the walls. / Thought you could be the one to set me free.”
As a song, it’s in keeping with the genre-fluid approach that Spellling’s shown before: it’s a theatrical, near-orchestral shape-changer incorporating gusts of New Orleans funeral jazz, Kate Bush keenings, blended-in Chinese motifs, glam-prog riffs and chilly synthpop flourishes while always keeping to the pace and poise of trip hop soul. As a manifesto, it’s playful but forceful – an out-and-out rejection of being shaped, not just from the outside but also by pressures coming from the inside. “Tomorrow I turn sixteen years and I don’t want to grow older” sings Spellling, a black Pippi Longstocking; turning a retreat, rejection and revolt against adult expectation into a biting political resistance, ‘Tin Drum’-style. She’s called this a “step back into my younger self, my teenage self to voice my angst, desires and disillusionments,” and she’s taking this all the way, unfinished edges and all.
There’s ambiguity here, for certain, but she wields it with deliberate intent. “Shut out the sun until I’m small again,” she demands, embracing the need for aloneness and self-reliance. “I’m way too tired to climb out of bed. / Four walls is all I need of friends.” Yet there’s also no self-pity here, and she’s always completely clear and centred. “I’m meaner than you think, and I’m not afraid of how lonely it’s going to be./ If I change my mind I’ll go walking outside, / just to see how the law is in place still.” Blending ambitious art-pop with a dose of that original black-girl wokeness, it’s a prologue to further choice and action; a kind of witchy taking-stock. It’s very rewarding.
Loud Women: ‘Reclaim These Streets’ Loud Women(no catalogue number or barcode) Download/streaming single Released: 14th May 2021
After their gently atmospheric piano overture earlier in the month, it’s proper debut-single time for Gloucester’s The Powdered Earth: time to find out what they’re actually about. Their ethos is apparently one of writing “little fictions… bringing storytelling to the fore” with a backdrop of “minimalist, melodic melancholia”. With a spec like that, and the previous evidence, you’d expect something like a more genteel piano-based Arab Strap.
Well, not quite… or not yet. Initially, ‘Hold Your Breath’ goes for what seems to be a much bigger and non-fictional story – that of the struggle against deforestation in Brazil – but they tell it in an understated way. In Brazil itself, this tale would probably have come through first-hand, via rap consciência or funk carioca, or possibly as some kind of mournful retro-fado. In the United States, it would probably been plunked or punked out over a banjo as a raucous post-Seeger tale of injustice visited on the working man. From their quiet corner of England, The Powdered Earth tell it in their own soft and sober way, trying to stay true to their instinctive sound while letting the story tell itself.
It sounds like a minimalist piano lieder, sung by Shane Young in a small, precise, discreet voice. George Moorey’s bolstering of synths (squashed brass, mechanical choirs) is similarly small and discreet. The lyrics, too, have the simplicity and directness of a pared-down folk song: “there were many of them. / They were gathered near the wood. / We had only handmade tools / and the clothes in which we stood… The ruling party wielded / the means to terrify, / but evil only triumphs / when we good men stand by.”
Listening to this is an odd experience, since it’s both detached and authoritative. You’re pulled into the gaps in the arrangement, into the void where the anger should be raging, as The Powdered Earth clarify that this is an outrage that occurs over and over again. “Miners brought the mercury / that made the river bend,” Shane pronounces. “Bolsonaro’s loggers / will leave nothing to defend.” The title itself is never mentioned; an unspoken warning to be decoded once you move out from the local outrage and start considering it as a small sign of a bigger problem.
Broads & Milly Hurst: ‘Happinsburgh’
Over on the other side of England, Norwich ambient ramblers Broads have teamed with kindred spirit Milly Hurst for an album of music inspired and partially built from field recordings made throughout the county of Norfolk. Named after a coastal village, ‘Happisburgh’ is a preview of that work; in itself, with its emphasis on widely-spaced reverberant piano, not too different from what The Powdered Earth are doing.
It’s wordless, though – their own sparse Debussian piano part backed up with a little glitch-static and a growing sweet, subliminal agreement of harmonium. The video is a sequence of slow pans across, and sustained shots of Happisburghian scenes: tumbled groyne stones on the sand, the red-banded lighthouse, blue-brown breakers under the wide Norfolk sky; a solitary cliff bench. The second part picks up speed with a rolling piano arpeggio, the sound of feet running through sand and gravel picked up, glitchified and looped. Towards the end, the footstep loop corrupts and stutters, becomes intermittent, vanishes.
Probing gently into location and inspiration, like an archaeologist with a fine brush, unlocks some of the messages. Like much of the Norfolk coast, Happisburgh is eroding, dropping fragment by fragment into the sea. It’s shored up by groynes and by its inhabitants’ reluctance to let it go; but has now been abandoned by government, its support withdrawn. It’s a vanishing village which also happens to be the oldest human settlement in Britain, with ancient flint tools in its earth strata, and with the earth’s oldest human footprints outside of Africa once discovered on its beach. Knowing this, the meanings of the sounds come into sombre and beautiful focus – the currents and tides in the shifting piano; the recorded footsteps, once clear as a bell, becoming obscured by time and processing, ultimately disintegrating out of the picture. Our history, even our deep history, vanishes in front of us.
Lifeboats: ‘Hurt’ (featuring Rena)
While Lifeboats‘s ‘Hurt’ doesn’t share much musically with either ‘Happisburgh’ or ‘Hold Your Breath’ (being a piece of noisy post-shoegaze guitar pop) it does sort of fit in here by dint of a shared initial and a shared theme of loss, relinquishment and resistance. Lifeboats are a new teaming of Prod Pritchard (main songwriter for Oxfordshire bands Flow and Airstar, as well as being a right-hand man for Owen Paul) and Austrian singer-songwriter Rena (the latter listed as a guest on this single but, so far, very much part of the sound and craft).
‘Hurt’ bustles along on ahead-of-the-beat guitar thrums, not a million miles away from Ride, the Velvets or from Bowie’s “Heroes”. The last, in particular, serves as inspiration, since Rena’s vocal sings out a weathered but hopeful anthem of taking the blows but remaining resilient – “hurt is just a part of living / just like breathing. / We ache before we are – / and fate is beyond all reason; / and then, every season, / above what we control… / This life / we are born to live in, / and the darkness hiding / but the morning’s coming.” She imagines herself propelled, strengthened, along the airwaves, singing “though I’m cracked and shaking, / I will not be broken. / When life is taking its best shot, / say “is that really all you’ve got?” It’s a simple, solipsistic resistance compared to those implied or required in ‘Hold Your Breath’ and ‘Happisburgh’, but it’s there.
The Powdered Earth: ‘Hold Your Breath’
The Powdered Earth (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 31st January 2020 Get it from: now part of the ‘Singles’ EP on Bandcamp The Powdered Earth online:
Broads & Milly Hurst: ‘Happisburgh’ Humm Recordings, HUMM08 (no barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 31st January 2020 Get it from: download from Bandcamp or Amazon; stream from Deezer or Spotify Broads online: Milly Hurst online:
Lifeboats: ‘Hurt (featuring Rena)’ Nub Music (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 31st January 2020 Get it from: download from Qobuz or Amazon Music; stream via Soundcloud or Spotify Lifeboats online:
Alt-rock trio Hurtling (fronted by My Bloody Valentine tour noisemaker Jen Macro) have a debut record to offer you – ‘Future From Here’, on Onomatopeia Records – and are launching it at north London’s The Islington in the middle of October. Their sound’s relatively easy to peg – post-Pixies, post-grunge, post-dreampop – but difficult to dismiss. There’s a full cupboardful of familiar indie rock ingredients to hand, but all reshuffled and re-examined via Jen’s particular perspective and inspired by the disorientations of touring, the displacement of emotions, the waywardness of health: the bumps and setbacks of a bright, questioning human organism pushed into too much motion. Sometimes, despite the noisy ethic, it’s surprisingly gentle; sometimes sludgy guitar parts pile up like rainbow cement ooze; sometimes it’s all about the vocal harmonies.
Once upon a time, most of Hurtling were part of cunningly witty indie/artpop sloggers stuffy/the fuses, and their glowering former employer (and current Onomatopeia labelmate) Stephen Evens is also on hand for the evening: ostensibly in a support slot, but probably to keep a dyspeptic jaded eye on them and to crush their remaining youthful dreams beneath his tapping boot. He’s playing solo – probably with guitar, microsynth and anything else portable which he fancies and which comes to hand – and is still working his own 2017 debut album, ‘Bonjour Poulet’. Which is fine, since it was excellent: a mordant larderful of creaky treats which revealed themselves to be gappy armour-plate wrapped around a surprisingly tender heart. He’ll probably give you all that sardonic, seen-it-all expression: actually, he’ll be pleased to see you.
London-based Swedish “post-death music” quartet Junodef fill the other support slot. Their debut single, a soft-strummed slice of spectral folk with additional Gothic guitar boom and the bleakness of a death metal song, was called Make You Die. Subsequent work hasn’t travelled too far from those initial emotional roots, although they’ve toyed with spooky progressive rock keyboards, acid rock shadings and lingering dark-country embellishments (the latter suiting both the paired vocals of Tyra Örnberg and Karin Grönkvist and their admiration for Emma Ruth Rundle and Chelsea Wolfe).
More recently Junodef have been feeding in noirish elements from trip-hop and droning electronica, citing inspiration by Portishead and Young Fathers. At the same time, they’ve upped their Bad Seeds clang and their clarity and put greater emphasis on their visual work, resulting in their most vividly fleshed-out songs and atmospheres yet. Don’t expect floppy Goth ragdolls: this band has a tough core, and a storytelling streak that’s just beginning to come into its own.
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In the same week, on the following day, relentless psychedelic noise-fosterers Baba Yaga’s Hut are putting on a Bethnal Green gig for block-party-inspired thunder-twosome Gum Takes Tooth. Singer/electronic bombardier Jussi Brightmore and wired-up drummer Thomas Fuglesang have been at this for a decade now, producing a music that’s
grinding and urgent, slow yet filled with unnerving impetus.
As with plenty of British acts on the weird/occult cusp, Gum Takes Tooth are fascinated by ritual (attempting to initiate it in both their recorded output and, more significantly, in their live performances) and with the jarring subconscious impact on the human animal from the mechanisms of technology, hierarchy and blunt cultural forces which surround us. Their last record, ‘Arrow‘, focussed on London gentrification from the perspective of those squashed under or flicked aside by its well-heeled, well-polished bespoke shoes; and on the savage simultaneous pressures from above to indulge the inner beast in competition, in nationalism, in a fracturing of common responsibility and empathy. While writing ‘Arrow’, Jussi saw all of this as a kind of cultural intoxication with the emphasis on toxic: it gave the duo a musical and moral focus which they’ve pursued ever since.
A couple of years ago, open-minded Sheffield Afrobeat/noise/dance-pop combiners Blood Sportcalled it a day. Two-thirds of them – drummer Sam Parkin and guitarist/Octatracker Alex Keegan – have since resurfaced as Hyperstition Duo, a blistering stew of kit-rattles and synth noise smudging and battering the line between live gig and avant-garde DJ electronica. They’ll be supporting Gum Takes Tooth on this occasion: but where the headliners favour slower pace and a ritual weight, the Hyperstitioneers prefer a break-neck-speed informational barrage.
At the end of this past summer, Hyperstition Duo released their debut EP ‘Virotechnics‘. There’s the usual jargonated hype to go with it – “summoning egregors of the Anthropocene, (they) plunge deep to deliver a maximalist collective immersion into their own lysergic phonosphere. Lurching, polyrhythmic pathways crumble and re-assemble; elastic dynamics snap; propulsion sparks from the nerve-centre of machine and corporeal entanglement… templexing, möbius loops and cybernetic subjectivities abound in an attempt to conjure escape vectors in a world of ubiquitous sound.” For once, the texture of the press release – a plunge into lathering, urgent verbalisation – actually fits the texture of the music.
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Overlapping the Gum Takes Tooth/Hyperstition Duo concert, Ben Vince’s south-east London clubnight Ellipsis (blending strands and clumps of experimental dance and experimental pop) ventures up north to Dalston on the same night for an evening of seamless switching between stage and DJ deck. I’ve not encountered Ellipsis before, but I’m impressed with what I’m finding out now.
To headline this time, Ben’s enticed the perplexing Dutch-born Mancunian Bunny Hoova down for her full-band London debut. Her work is simultaneously delightful and frustrating. At its simplest, it’s a kind of fall-apart dream pop – intermittent rhythms, addled guitar chording and bass thumbing, a cloudwork of woven-in samples, and a constant tripping over unvoiced questions, obscured conclusions and the track-loops of the thought-train. But while most dream-pop sinks into a narcotized structural conservatism (strumming away in the same key while admiring the whorls of sound coming through the pedalboard), Bunny’s material seems constantly uncomfortable, actively intelligent, and hovering at the midpoint between insight and misdirection. She’s been yoked in with experimental pop deconstructors/faux-idiot savants like Tirzah and Micachu, and I can see why. There’s that classical conservatoire training: coyly hinted at in the PR, for extra credit, but in practise forced off into the distance like a spurned aunt (even as it’s being used as the counterweight to punkish anti-technique). There’s the idea that the usual rules of pop song and riff culture are being scorned in a meticulous matter-of-fact way via an admixture of free play and cerebral manifesto.
Plenty of the songs on Bunny’s debut album, ‘Longing’, have the sensual drag-and-tug rhythm of slow jams; but rather than focussing a mood or a regular pace, they wander off at instinctive mental tangents or hiccup into a different arrangement; the instruments and samples entwining in a scratchy, bewildered, irregular intimacy. At times she seems to be taking up an erratic desert map scrawled by Captain Beefheart and attempting to apply it to close urban living. At other times, she seems to be spontaneously transposing into song experimental short stories about offbeat relationships, jolting encounters or small moments which change the course of a life; rich in detail and significance, short on conclusion. Plot and flavour are stretched out and split into gobbets, like odd-shaped beads necklaced on a guitar string. Her most-talked-about song, Lazy_Easy, is a scrubbing, slurred, pointed dissection-tract covering both the implicit and explicit links between consumerist culture and animal cruelty: more of a wall-collage with blended-in musical notes than an actual song. The world she flits through feels as rickety as a condemned flat; one that she’s too good for and shouldn’t have to live with, but which she has to accommodate and fit her voice to.
Also playing are a mixed bag of London and Manchester electronic experimentalists with bedroom studios. Gribs is a creative DJ and electronic musician, a label co-boss (Tobago Tracks) who in her own music weaving connections between straight-up dance music (trap, jungle, bass culture) and lo-fi DIY sound-and-voice experiments. There’s a distinct edge of discomfort to her work: not so much or so often that it repels, but her found vocals and implied song characters seem uneasy, morbidly eccentric or disassociated from the music’s rhythmic propulsion or sensual salve.
More DJ-ing and deckmixing comes from J.B. Glazer, another London-based creator of peculiar counter-intuitive dance music: for him, a kind of relentlessly alienated mirror-image R&B, all of its comfort and slickness rusted away into disassociative ennui. In the work of both Glazer and Gribs, there’s an echo of chopped-and-screwed culture: the slowing, the altered-state disconnections and new connections, the sense that they’re using alienation as a kind of gatekeeper (if you like dance but are prepared to discard much of its qualities of release or of socializing, then perhaps you can squeeze through this door).
Rounding things out (or upsetting any remaining unspilled applecarts) there’s the mysterious and performative Halfs – from what I can work out, a try-anything beat-making romper on Manchester’s queer arts scene. I’ve found a very fruity synthdance EP of his/theirs from 2017, so there are a few slurps of its whooping dayglo industrial tones below. There have also been percussion-favouring mixtapes and albums which have been whipped capriciously on and off Soundcloud, but are gone now: other than that, there seems to be involvement with scratch theatre, video and so on. In order to properly keep up with Halfs, you need to subscribe (both literally, and in terms of consistent loyalty) so just consider this vague, semi-accurate plug of mine to be a jumping-on point and take it from there.
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Dates:
Onomatopoeia Records presents:
Hurtling + Stephen Evens + Junodef The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Islington, London, N1 0XT, England
Thursday 17th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Gum Takes Tooth + Hyperstition Duo The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Ellipsis presents:
Bunny Hoova + Gribs + J.B. Glaser + Halfs SET (Dalston Lane), 27a Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 9.00pm – information here and here
Purveyors of a limpid and extroverted dream pop, Pete Lambrou and Ciaran Morahan previously operated as ALMA. Now, since the advent of a certain “BBC-Sound-of-2018-nominated green-haired Finnish pop star“, they’re known as VLMV. Apparently it’s pronounced much the same way, but murmured through hushed lips, presumably to sneak it past the lawyers (just because your lips are compressed, it doesn’t mean that you can’t thumb your nose at the same time).
At the tail-end of a European tour, VLMV are playing a London show at the Rosemary Branch Theatre. A former music hall (currently slanted towards hosting comedy and improv), within its recent history it’s frequently been the home of passionate gay drama, or of chansons – so, loosely speaking, there’s some kindred resonance with VLMV’s epicene falsetto romances; the kind of resonance you might not get at the Water Rats or the Underworld.
To be fair, you need theatres for this kind of music. No matter how many slo-mo/light-show pianos, loops and strings they pile under Pete’s voice, this is blushing drama-pop at root. If you’re taking in one of the Tim Bowness gigs this coming fortnight but suspect it still might not entirely slake your appetite for stricken empathetic romance, maybe you should give these guys a try too.
In support, Thomas Stone also serves as a signifier and reminder of VLMV’s experimentalist sympathies. An increasing presence on the London avant-instrumental scene (in which he won NonClassical Records’ Battle Of The Bands in 2015), he creates strong but delicate slow-reveal improvisations for contrabassoon, loop pedals, backup samples and (occasionally) bass guitar; tapping into the grace of classical chamber music and threnodic jazz, and stirring in noise, incidental distortion and other dysfidelities.
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Westking Music & Performing Arts, who are putting on next Wednesday’s ‘Overlaps‘ concert, are bookending it with a couple of other gigs as part of their Summer Series (which also includes performance showcases for various graduates).
It’s easy enough to own a varied music collection; to shuffle quickly and smoothly between folk music, noise, synthtronica, experimental psychedelia, arthouse sound design, prog, proto-punk, pseudo-Zeuhl and the rest. It’s quite another to work, as a creative musician, across all of these: inevitably some purist will call you out as a fraud or a daytripper. Daniel, however, has made a name for himself as one of the few people who can apparently flit and slide between the scenes without being stalled by suspicion or rejection. Formidable multi-instrumental skills help, as does his apparent willingness to be a utility man as often as a leader. Over two decades, he’s piled up a pyramid of projects – his own Mothlife and Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses; duo work with Miracle or Grumbling Fur; a stint effectively directing Guapo; contributions to live and studio work with Ulver, Sunn O))) and This Is Not This Heat; plus sound installations and soundtracks in the fine art and cinema worlds. During the course of this, no-one’s fingered him as an interloper; no-one seems to have frozen him out. It’s a rare talent to be so ubiquitous, so flexible – or so insidious.
Daniel’s most recent album, ‘Folly’, is the second one he’s released under his own name, pursuing something more intimate and personal. Written around the death of a friend and the birth of a son, it sees him continuing to tack away from the experimental rock he made his reputation with in favour of hushed, rich-textured chamber folk, burnished like a picture window by the warm depth of Thighpaulsandra’s production. Still ,a psychedelic perspective follows in its wake, like a contrail of blossom; easily found in the swirl of instrumentation and in the way that Daniel dips in and (more often) out of straightforwardness like a flying fish, offering transient reveals and kaleidoscopic digressions. Live, he’ll be performing solo and won’t be able to dodge behind the arrangements, but will be inviting up a couple of special guests to play along.
There’s some tie-in between Daniel’s work and Tega’s; they currently share a taste for a dreamy sheathing of instrumentation, but rather than chamber folk Tega follows on from the quiet storm soul-pop currently exemplified (in Britain, at least) by Lianne La Havas and Laura Mvula, and previously in the States by Roberta Flack and Minnie Riperton. On record, she displays a knack for deepening re-harmonisations of established songs; live, she works on a nourishing and playful full-band exploration of the assorted moods and genres that she touches on. It’s still early days for her, with not much more than a handful of Soundcloud songs to show yet, but even with her musicality still on a slow stir there’s a lot of promise here.
The musical love-child of onetime trash-rocker Charlie Finke (who sang sleaze with Penthouse in the mid-90s) and Justine Armatage (formerly pianist, composer and violinist with ill-fated ’90s theatrical indie types Gretchen Hofner), The Cesarians are virtually ambassadors for the hope of “older, wiser, sexier and funnier”. A loose troupe centred around houseboat life on the River Lea, they encompass showband horns, cabaret, puckish and sometimes self-deprecating wit, via enormous pop hooks which sweep glam, art-punk, chanson and singalong onto the table. They somehow manage to be down-to-earth while still being splendidly glamorous, by dint of turning their lives into theatre: following their songwriting inquisitiveness wherever it leads them and inviting you along.
For today’s crop of twentysomething band players, The Cesarians could (and should) be like anarchically cool uncles and aunts – the kind that zoom in and out of the family on their own orbits, winking as they swing past; cheerfully using inappropriate language and carrying handfuls of intrigue. They’re people whom you feel you could learn from: learn how to be naughty and to be wise; how to smoke and to make mistakes, but also how to become yourself. For us older dogs closer to their age, they’re more about an irrepressible spark persistently pushing up; there’s something luminous about them, as if they’d thrived on misspent youths and come through it all broader and happier as people. For what it’s worth, I get bored by musicians who embrace or act out too much debauchery, but occasionally I meet some whose mental vividness transcends the partying, and when I do I can’t stop talking to them; and generally, they turn out to be a lot like The Cesarians.
The songs? Well, the songs sound a bit like this…
The rural post-folk compositions for The Silver Field start off in Coral Rose’s bedroom. A digital delay inherited from her musician father serves as the cauldron for her own multi-instrumental inventiveness on a cupboardful of instruments, within which guitar, harmonica, mandolin, small drums and harmonium make room for cello, double bass, bagpipe chanter and electronics, plus loops captured on a rackety antique reel-to-reel tape recorder bought for a quid at a car boot sale. Assisted on occasion by Vanishing Twin’s Cathy Lucas and by Kiran Bhatt of Red River Dialect, It’s a kind of rough-edged chamber-folk shunting yard, in which plangent instrumental melodies are nudged by noise interference and spatial effects woven in from smartphone field recordings.
Live, Coral calls in more instrumentalist friends (Kiran again, plus Rachel Horwood from Bamboo and Trash Kit, Rachel Margetts from Yr Lovely Dead Moon) to help her recreate and reconsider her work: not absolute reproductions of what’s on record, but pickings-up and hand-ons, the instrumentation and looping shuffled under the requirements of necessity and community and of keeping the music as a living thing. Her debut album ‘Rooms’, meanwhile, comes complete with its own sonic metaphor of growing up, moving on and moving out; of both dispensing of childhood homes and coming to terms with departing from them.
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Closing off May, there’s a triple-threat art-rock show from Thumpermonkeyc, Lost Crowns and Kavus Torabi – all of whom I’ve already written about so frequently in here that I’m constantly, increasingly in danger of repeating myself. So I’m going to pre-empt myself by collaging some of the things I’ve already said into a new mashup, for the benefit of any of you who might be new readers or just new to any of these people…
Thumpermonkey – “mordant, tricksy brilliance… the missing link between Mastodon and China Miéville (or perhaps between Peter Hammill and Neal Stephenson)… One of Britain’s most ambitious rock bands, deftly striding and shifting between different musical kernels from prog, dark pop or experimental metal to a kind of science-fiction cabaret, languidly licking up and stirring in any intriguing nugget or story fragment they birth or encounter… A latterday Thumpermonkey song’s more like a contemporary classical song: protracted, a lyric-driven musical wandering from thought to thought, but always with that solid rock foundation, that return to purpose… Michael Woodman’s voice (is) pure theatrical cordon bleu hambone, from the bottom of its ominous deep-tenor declamations to the top of its horror-struck falsetto…
“The music, meanwhile, is an ever-flexing full-spectrum crunch and hush, full of stalking shapes and hovering convoluted melodies… Unpacking their decade-plus back catalogue of recordings is like getting trapped in one of those clever-dick contemporary polymath novels written about everything and anything, stitched together with a little magic and mystique – they’ve sung about computer games, Nigerian fraudsters, Mexican acid westerns and strange diseases and made it sound as if it were all part of the same complex semi-submerged story… Game-playing geeks for sure, and clearly ones who are proud of their astonishingly broad armoury of sly references, veiled jokes and fantastical imagery; but also geeks who revel in their absolute mastery of those most un-geeky of rock qualities – muscle and poise… The particular genius of Thumpermonkey is that they can unroll these kind of parodic slipstream plots without ever toppling into cute whimsy.”
Lost Crowns – “a barrage of word-dense songs overflowing with full-on prismatic structures and outright rock drive, as if Lewis Carroll and Flann O’Brien had called on the massed forces of Henry Cow to help them hijack Battles… A vortex of influences funnel around (Lost Crowns leader) Richard Larcombe, including Chicago math, witty Daevid Allen psych rampage, contemporary classical music and skipping, tuneful folk singalongs. Shaped by his particular persona and thought processes – as well as his innate Englishness – it all emerges as a kind of prog, but one in which the fat and the posturing has all been burned off by the nerves and the detail, and in which his dry, melodious wit winds around the work playing mirror-tricks, theatrical feints, and the conspiratorial winks of a master boulevardier…
“If he is icing his work with gags, it’s partially because something so musically demanding needs a little judicious sugaring… Imagine a cocktail which didn’t dilute as you built it up, but instead made all of its ingredients stronger, brighter and brasher… A rich, unfolding master-craftsman’s confection… complex, artfully-meandering songs built from delightfully byzantine chords and arpeggios that cycle through ever-evolving patterns like palace clockwork; accompanied by rich, lazy clouds of hilarious, hyper-literate, wonderfully arcane lyrics; all sealed by an arch, out-of-time English manner which (in tone and timbre) falls into a never-was neverworld between Richard Sinclair, Stephen Fry, Noel Coward and a posh, Devonian Frank Zappa.”
Kavus Torabi – ” (His) dusky psych-folk EP ‘Solar Divination’…. perhaps draw(s) some influence from (his) other lives in Gong, Cardiacs, Guapo and others, but not nearly as much as it draws from ominous imagined dusk rituals and mysterious old ghosts on the darker hippy trails… A darker, more agrarian take on his psychedelic homeground, this time it’s drumless, bassless, hornless – rinsed clear of the capering squirrel energy he’s shown for twenty-odd years, in order to reveal muted, angsty bones… (It’s) a holiday from the jewelled and roaring intricacies of his main gig with Knifeworld, but it’s certainly not an escape from the psychedelic shadows which nightwing their way through the band’s apparently celebratory rainbow arcs.
“For this isolated, darker, more grinding work, Kavus strips the flash-bangs away and leaves us with the droning echoes: the meditative bruises, fears and queries, many of which nonetheless contain their own seeds of determination and a kind of celebratory acceptance…. Mostly based around slow, smoky-lunged harmonium stretches and sparse flotsam drags of guitar chording, this is a more foreboding turn of song, haunted by deaths, loss and disintegrations… (It’s a) sullen, trepidatious, post-nova ember-glow… trawling through shimmering webs of harmonium, effected drones and knell-clangs of acoustic guitar, exploring a forbidding hinterland of vulnerability and permeable spirit-space… the gravel-grain in Kavus’ voice welling up from deeper, ghostlier territories than before.”
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Dates:
VLMV & Nice Weather For Airstrikes present:
VLMV + Thomas Stone The Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Road, De Beauvoir Town, London, N1 3DT, England
Thursday 30th May 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Thumpermonkey + Lost Crowns + Kavus Torabi The Victoria, 186 Hoe Street, Walthamstow, London, E17 4QH, England
Friday 31st May 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
Daniel O’Sullivan (& special guests) + Tega Mendes Westminster Kingsway College, 211 Gray’s Inn Road, Kings Cross, London, WC1X 8RA, England
Tuesday 4th June 2019, 6.30pm – information here
The Cesarians + The Silver Field Westminster Kingsway College, 211 Gray’s Inn Road, Kings Cross, London, WC1X 8RA, England
Thursday 6th June 2019, 6.30pm – information here
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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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”.
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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
More outdoor summer Woodburner gigs at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, as the season moves into its final month: holding autumn at bay while it can.
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The 4th September show features festival legends Rum Buffalo, bluesman Joe Corbin, and touring NYC artist Lorkin O’Reilly.
“Rum Buffalo fornicate with forgotten songs. They mingle in many genres but feed off the rich antique roots of swing and moody blues infiltrated with hip hop beats and filthy synth lines. It’s a surreal, vaudevillian show with outrageous costumes, twisted vocal harmonies, powerful beats and outrageous horn sounds. On the night expect a stripped-off trio show, revealing the core of their beastly natures.
“Joe Corbin is a blues and soul musician from South London. An accomplished guitarist, powerful singer, and true performer, watching Joe play is bound to blow you away.
“Since arriving in Hudson, NY from his native Scotland, Lorkin O’Reilly has been making a name for himself on the New York folk scene with his delicate guitar technique and deft lyricism. This year has seen him share stages with the likes of Charlie Parr, Nadia Reid, Willy Mason, Mick Flannery and Ciaran Lavery. His debut album ‘Heaven Depends’ was released on 24th August on Team Love Records.”
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The 11th September gig features R&B/soul collective M w S, North London songstress Boe Huntress, and new electronic collaboration Equal Echo.
“M w S is a London-based duo formed in Italy in 2013. Their musical influences are artists from soul, R&B and nu-soul (such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill) mixed with contemporary neo-jazz artists like Tom Misch and Masego and electro-influenced artists like Vallis Alps and Louis Matters. Their first EP ‘Swim’ is a mix of pop, contemporary R&B and nu-soul with lyrics that sometimes recall their home country; their latest release, Island, produced by Grammy-award winning London producer Aamir Yaqub (Rihanna, Ne-yo) is a soulful chilled track full of tropical and summery vibes. M w S are currently working on their next EP, due out in 2019.
“Boe Huntress grew up in Kent, playing and writing music from an early age. Her first job was writing songs for an online magazine, reviewing video games in song-form: a crash course in the art of songwriting, recording and producing, as well as in receiving immediate response to her work online. Studying Literature at university, Boe was inspired by both myth and feminism: beginning to play live, she was soon chosen by the IC Music Network as one of twelve up-and-coming artists to tour across Europe.
“Boe’s debut EP, ‘A Female Power’, is an earthy, epic debut reminiscent of both Kate Bush and Bjork. The EP is inspired by four female mythological figures (“we’ve been deprived of certain ways of seeing woman – this EP is an exploration of the darker, more unexplored aspects…”) and Boe’s taken it one step further by creating an immersive audio-visual show alongside the record. The EP is brought to life onstage by Aletta Dina on drums and Melanie Powell on synths and electronics, while Boe fronts the band with her raw, ethereal vocal and electric guitar.
“Equal Echo is a new collaboration from Londoners Hector Plimmer (DJ and producer/creator of last year’s acclaimed ‘Sunshine’ album of broken beat, trip hop, instrumental soul and field recordings) and Alexa Harley (fellow producer, songwriter and collaborating singer for Hybrid Minds, Tom Misch and Mt. Wolf). The pair initially started working together with a one-off collaboration in mind: however, once they started, it soon became clear this would be more than just a feature project. For the last year-and-a-half Harley and Hector have been meeting two days a week, almost every week, creating music that shares an equal input of musical ideas from one another.
The amalgamation of styles and musical backgrounds blend together to make a sound unlike either Harley or Hector produce alone, whilst still retaining the best attributes from both. Not only are they musical partners, they are also best friends. Over the last two years the dynamic live show has been previewed at Archspace and Ghost Notes, with their premier festival appearances at Brainchild and Glastonbury Festivals.”
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The last show, on 18th September, features London-based hip hop/R&B trio The Age Of Luna, sensual pop mythologists Marine and atmospheric Finnish world-folkers Desert Rain.
“The Age of Luna – “average joes with powerful minds” – number Butch Arkas, his schoolmate Kyote Noir and singer/saxophonist Daniella Wizard. Each brings their own influences and sensibilities to the table, and the end results reflect not just the four different musical personalities but the blend of tradition and technology that saw them get together in the first place. Despite their relative youth, the band has played over a hundred shows with festival plays at the likes of Glastonbury, Wireless, Secret Garden party and Live At Leeds. Their debut, self-titled album was released earlier this year to great acclaim and the band are busy working on new music due for release later this year.
“London-based Marine – formed in 2014 by Cara Sebastian (vocals and guitar), Beth Dariti (bass) and Kaja Magsam (drums), and described by ‘The Line Of Best Fit’ as “the musical equivalent of a creamy post-coital blush” – have just released their debut album ‘Fable Electric’, via The Vinyl Factory (following the beguiling singles Mount Olympus and Sirens).
“Produced by Rob Ellis (Anna Calvi, PJ Harvey, Cold Specks), ‘Fable Electric’ is an album that brims with exploratory wonder and bridges the gaps between spectral pop, dreamy grunge and ambient folk. Both wild and elegant, it is framed by intuitive beats, bass hypnosis that playfully counters melody, and a deep love of contrast. The vocal lines braid together over hooky guitar lines in a complex plait of old and new, understated and operatic, light and dark. The songs of Marine crystallized from mythology and fables, mingling with personal words and emotions to form tales of the ordinary and extraordinary. Their songs reference the underworld, seal demons, mighty Kraken, werewolves, witches and Gods, and even question the very nature of storytelling itself.
“Jyväskylä quintet Desert Rain are songwriter Ville Lähdepolku on guitar and vocals, Alex Lee on drums, Farshad Sanati on santour and vocals, Petri Pentikäinen on tabla and darbouka, and Ville Määttä on bass, keyboards, voice and a cluster of international wind instruments including Armenian duduk. They play hypnotic world-folk music that tends towards the mystic. From Finland to Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, just for you.”
The last show, on 25th September, features choro band Choro Alvorada, international violin virtuoso Max Baillie, and the Latin-inspired songwriter Li Alba.
“Choro Alvorada is a London-based group who play Brazilian choro music of all styles, including lesser-known works and original compositions. Choro emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century as a mixture of European harmony with African rhythm and improvisation, in a similar way to jazz and ragtime. The name comes from the Portuguese verb “chorar”, which means “to cry”, and indeed choro music certainly has its fair share of tear-inducing laments. But choro is mostly known for its lively, playful and syncopated melodies in the traditional setting of a “roda”; that is, with musicians playing informally around the table (drinking plenty of beer – provided by the loving fans, of course!).
“Choro Alvorada have the traditional instrumentation of the ‘regional’ choro ensemble: clarinet (played by Andrew Woolf), flute (played by Rachel Hayter), 7-string guitar (played by Luiz Morais), cavaquinho (played by Jeremy Shaverin) and pandeiro (played by Alua Nascimento). They play a wide variety of styles of choro, exploring influences from all over Brazil (and London). They play with the irresistable swing of samba from the south and baião from the north-east, and even in the style of frevo, a carnival dance from the north-east! Many of the choros they play are their own compositions, so you may find a Cockney twist to them. They famously continued to play through a thunderstorm at the Curve Garden in Summer 2017, bringing a portion of the audience onto the stage with them in the style of the traditional roda.
“Maverick violinist and violist Max Baillie is truly one-in-a-million. Born to the sound of his twin sisters practising scales and argeggios, raised by his concert-cellist father and violin-teacher mother, before travelling the world and gaining a first-class degree from Cambridge University in… Politics. Apart from that short sabbatical, Max’s whole life has been music. Yet when you watch and listen, there is a spontaneity in his playing that makes you realise that in spite of all the history, education, and practise, a Max Baillie has to be born rather than made. Max-in-a-million is an international artist, having performed in Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, France, Australia and many other corners in the last twelve months, both as a concert soloist and with other projects including ZRI, who fuse sounds of Brahms with gypsy and Hungarian folk. Witness.
“Singer. Linguist. Lover of Latin, jazz and folk traditions. Voice of velvet and force of nature. Li Alba grew up in London, listening to traditional Spanish and Greek music whilst training as a classical singer. Graduating from Guildhall juniors in music and RADA in acting, she fell away from opera and into wild Easter European theatre arts, as a professional member of the Gardzienice Theatre Company. Partaking in independent arts projects around the world she has worked through music and staged mediums with global practitioners including Katie Mitchell, Mark Ravenhill, James Brennan and Julian Maynard Smith.
“Li has contributed to London’s night life scene by supporting in the launches of two venues, Kansas Smitty’s and Juju’s Bar & Stage, and is now embarking on her solo career with a plethora of musicians with global flavours and feels. She is accompanied by guitarist Telmo Souza who has played for Rhythms Of The City and Ines Loubet (amongst many others), and who leads the astonishing Afro-samba ensemble Caravela.”
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All events are at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, 13 Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England on Tuesday evenings. Dates below:
Rum Buffalo Trio + Joe Corbin + Lorkin O’Reilly – Tuesday 4th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
M w S + Boe Huntress + Equal Echo – Tuesday 11th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
The Age of Luna + Marine + Desert Rain – Dalston Curve Garden – Tuesday 18th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Choro Alvorada + Max Baillie + Li Alba – Dalston Curve Garden – Tuesday 25th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Sometimes it’s particularly rewarding to see a new band emerge. I’m feeling that way about Great Dad. Springing from the chrysalis of genderqueer punk-poppers Worm Hears (who, however interesting their component people, pronouns and propositions may be, maintain an unsurprising musical approach), they are currently breaking out – humming, carolling, blurring – into something far more promising. They’re making journeys into avant-pop, approaching it with a thin-skinned sense of wonder and detournement via a multiplicity of FX-sculpted vocals and the implication of an identity whose fluidity moves even beyond gender, and by soundbuilding which flitters between different pop forms, different cultural tones.
I’ve previously tagged them as “electronic bricolage”, but they’re also like some kind of tiny relentless broadcast drone, flying precariously between much bigger, looming shapes ideas and experiences; crashing into them and rebounding, reporting back in half-processed bursts. Some day they’re going to land and clarify, even if it’s only for a moment. Until then, I’m enjoying the buffeting ride and what I also tagged as “free-associating mashups of love, political paranoia, consumer anomie, salty language and an ever-strange out-of-step physicality half-trapped between distress and wonder.”
Great Dad are appearing next week on the bill for a Multi-Storey show which makes a lot of noise about being one to attend “if you unashamedly love indie” or “if you want reckless, guitar-led, drum-heavy aural delight”. Unless there’s been some new shift in language and I’m too dull to pick up on it, Multi-Storey are wantonly taking the piss. This is an unabashed weird pop evening, collaged together out of DIY electronica and from increasingly pixellated and fluid performance identities. The guitars (when they’re present at all) are struggling their way through Ballardian refractions or assorted studio fuckery. If you’re out for mediocre-white-hope guitar rock, look elsewhere.
Headlining are post-disco/art pop/glam crooner sextet Famous fronted by blazer-sporting singer Jack Merrett. They’ve been gigging for at least a year and a half, but I don’t know much about them. Like the enigmatic Black MIDI (and like Sistertalk, Multi-Storey headliners from earlier in the week) they’re a band who save their promotional energies for their live shows, percolating a word-of-mouth campaign that pretty much relies on your ears being around the right mouths (which mine often aren’t).
Famous’ web presence is matter-of-fact, minimal – almost disdainful. Single videos pop up on Youtube and are whisked away; the Soundcloud page just features a ‘Fitter Happier’-esque four minutes of spoken-word manifesto delivered by the Fred speech synth. Odd bits of gig promo blurb have pegged Famous as “combining pop craftsmanship with a penchant for the theatrical”; and back in April, ‘Not Another Music Blog’ sketched them out as “stylistically look(ing) like six strangers that wouldn’t even talk at a bus stop” and as delivering a set of “Joy Division, disco, and punk-influenced indie-pop bangers”. So we’ve got a shape, we’ve got faces and we’ve got a peg… the rest you’ll need to discover for yourself.
One thing’s for certain: Famous are the straightest band on the bill by far – the cement that holds the other acts in place and provides a link to standard underground pop.
A while ago, Gus Lobban (one-third of up-and-coming bitpop/dancehall act Kero Kero Bonito) played a solo gig as Augustus. Now it’s the turn of his bandmate Jamie Bulled, who – for a while now – has also been writing and performing as Wharfwhit. Under this fresh alias, he gobs out waywardly explosive, dynamically physical digital pop stunts involving a variety of collaborators. A typical Wharfwit piece might features sampled body noises – motions, grunts, wheezes – plus a deliberately inconclusive/confused hank of rapping from some emergent South London MC, or a shrill cutesy barrage of Mandarin from an Asian underground pop act.
There’s something a little lightweight about Jamie’s post-vaporwave/post-chop-and-screw stunts, but that’s part of the point. They’re divorced from any concept of gravity. They’re meticulously giddy, apparently still in love with a coalescing teenaged mindset of consumer-tech connection and sensual disarray (Skype hook-ups, the fading narcotic contrail of purple-drank culture) while still being able to comment on it… inasmuch as there’s any comment apart from arranging these chunks of experience, connection and distraction together into one pumping track: the components of a spread of options too busy happening to invite analysis. Log on and go.
No less fractured are the works of spectral deconstructer Bianca Scout – loose, yawing things clinging onto the edge of pop by a casual fingertip. Beats struggle like cocooned insects; synthesizers billow slo-mo smoke-clouds and kitchen metals scrape like a knife-drawer ballet… it’s a kind of timeslip electronica, in which the listener always seems to be nodding out into split-second blackouts. Bianca’s own voice winds intermittently and erratically through the mix, sometimes sounding like a Raudive voice – an incomprehensible ghost on the wire or muttering in between radio stations, now slipping to the foreground. At other times, her narcotic girlsing piles up like sediment; her voice pillow-muffled, her message prolonged and complicated by fuzzy detailand disintegrating enunciation, sliding from her murmuring lips. Other tracks are swaying, tide-tossed arrays of new age atmospherics mingling with urban air currents and sounds drawn around tower blocks. Unpicking all of this will be a long job, like teasing out a knotted tangle you’ve found in the back of a forgotten drawer.
Also back from a couple of otherearlier Windmill gigs is enigmatic cheapsynth narrator and electronicist The Guest, unspooling low-budget electro/techno and odd little faux-stream-of-consciousness stories and commentaries. A touch of blank, owlish humour to season the mysteries.
Multi-Storey presents:
Famous + The Guest + Wharfwhit + Bianca Scout + Great Dad The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, England
Tuesday 24th July 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
“Dictionary Pudding are hugely proud to welcome the long-awaited return of Kings Heath legends Pram. With a new album out shortly on Domino Recording Company – these are very exciting times for Pram, one of the most uniquely enthralling underground artists of the last 30 years – their return in these troubling times is extremely welcome!
“Birmingham’s Pram craft fairytales from concrete reality. The second city’s spin cycle of perpetual renovation, from the slum clearances to its current cosmetic upgrade, is etched in Pram’s restless groove, an endearing and gently refusenik mix encircling early Rough Trade innovators The Raincoats, astro jazz, sci-fi soundtracks, creepy Victoriana, tropical analogue and tumbledown funk.
“To say Pram have always ploughed their own furrow is to underestimate the breadth and scale of their music. To listen to this record is to hear a group who have learned to play together whilst teaching each other a new language. The Moving Frontier is Pram at their most widescreen, they’ve created a mysterious and wonderful landscape that’s sky-wide open.”
And here’s a slightly trimmed version of what I wrote for when they resurfaced quietly for their British comeback almost exactly a year ago, back in Birmingham with the park installation ‘Under the Blossom that Hangs on the Bough’…
“This isn’t quite the same Pram that charmed us and subverted pop for a surprisingly long stint in the ’90s and noughties across a string of albums which included ‘Dark Island’ and ‘Sargasso Sea’ and a sound that seemed to be part child’s murmur, part clinking post-kosmische stroll and part friendly haunted house. Most obviously, singer and lyricist Rosie Cuckston (she who used to mount her keyboard on an ironing board at concerts) is absent, having moved on into academia and a more direct form of the social activism which the band’s eclectic inclusiveness and tendency to take philosophical side roads only hinted. That said, the rest of the band’s original creative core (multi-instrumentalists Matt Eaton, Sam Owen and Max Simpson) are all present, having spent the interim years of Pram downtime working with wonky loops as Two Dogs, creating film and theatre sound and making sonic art out of books with the Sound Book Project.
“This also isn’t the first time that the post-Rosie Pram’s reappeared. Earlier in May they made an appearance at Imaginary Musics in Switzerland, playing a “music for Kopfkino” audio-visual set in a festival dedicated to “cinematic, recomposed and fictional musics”, and it seems as if losing Rosie’s quiet reflective voice and cocooned lyrics has shifted them further over into the areas suggested by Matt’s sound design and by Sam and Max’s live sound art. On-spec, it seems as if they’ve succeeded in becoming a kind of “post-band”, with a foot in their old live work, song-structures and performance coherence, but leaning towards something far more abstract and ego-free. ‘Under the Blossom That Hangs On The Bough’ sounds as if it will be something fascinating to be immersed in – an urban psychedelic afternoon stroll with the family, an aural refraction of Birmingham through leaves, greenery and company.”
Here’s a minute or so of the ‘…Blossom…’ project:
And here are some more moments of Pram past: rattle-pop, glows and musings…
I’m rushing this one into post, since I’ve only just heard about it. No apologies for the excessive cut-and-paste here, nor for the absence of much personal insight (although I will say that when a shortage of information meant that I had to dig deeper, I found more).
“While touring the world as guest multi-instrumentalist with Mogwai, Luke Sutherland (Long Fin Killie, Bows, Music A.M.) used the downtime to sketch a bunch of songs. Once he got home, he wrote a handful more and recorded them with the help of a few friends at his cottage on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. The result was an album’s worth of material with references ranging from My Bloody Valentine to Teebs, Lemmy-era Hawkwind to ABBA, Vaughan Williams to Boulez.
“Keen to translate the radiant chaos of the recordings into a live setting, Luke put together Rev Magnetic, featuring Audrey Bizouerne (Gift Horse), Sam Leighton (Live w/ Prides, St MARTiiNS) and Gregor Emond who played with Luke in a band called Hynd, way back before the birth of the internet. Combining elements of dream pop, shoegaze, R&B, and post rock, their first single, Like No Girl That Ever Was/Don’t Let Joy Destroy You is the sound of summer at full pelt.”
Imminent Scottish and English tour dates are below:
Neu! Reekie @ St Andrew’s Church, 410-412 Easter Road, Leith, Edinburgh, EH6 8HT, Scotland, Friday 25th May 2018, 7.15pm (with Salome Benidze + Helen Mort + Erin Friel + The Honey Farm) – information here and here
Stereo, 22-28 Renfield Lane, Glasgow, G2 6PH, Scotland, Sunday 27th May 2018, 7.30pm (supporting Superchunk) – information here and here
The Hug & Pint, 171 Great Western Road, Glasgow, G4 9AW, Scotland, Tuesday 29th May 2018, 7.30pm (with Nova Scotia The Truth + Caitlin Buchanan) – information here and here
The New Adelphi Club, 89 De Grey Street, Kingston-upon-Hull, East Yorkshire, HU5 2RU, England, Thursday 31st May 2018, 8.00pm (with Foolish Atoms + others t.b.c.) – information here, here and here
Conroy’s Basement, 51-53 Meadowside, Dundee, DD1 1EQ, Scotland, Friday 1st June 2018, 8.00pm (with Stonethrower + winterThieves) – information here
It’s probably accidental, but when you take a look at the finer details of the tour, it’s almost like an exploded reflection of Luke’s influences and sympathies; the cultural and artistic breadth he’s shown throughout a career voyaging through books and music. Indie rock and dance chemistry, hip hop and poetry; filtered and transformed Scottish folk; literacy and blasting noise. The balancing of multiple cultures in one evening, or just in one person.
Regarding the Glasgow shows… if you’ve been hitting on indie-punk playlists and festival lineups for the past twenty years, you’ll need little introduction to Superchunk. Headlining over Luke and co. at Stereo, they’re early ‘90s favourites who helped define a Carolina DIY punk sound. They were all over the inkies back in the day more or less during the same time that Luke first was; they founded Merge Records, and have kept their place in indie rock affections ever since. On the other hand, the two support acts at the Hug & Pint show are still thrumming – just – under the radar.
Originally from Aberdeen, Caitlin Buchanan is an emerging acoustic singer-songwriter working towards her first EP and taking Angel Olsen, Laura Marling and Kate Bush as influences. Perhaps Angel’s the most obvious one – the slowcore tempos, the collapsing drapes of melody – but Caitlin has little of Angel’s narcotic slur. She also isn’t as propulsive or as easy-to-follow as Laura, and (despite her own musical theatre background) isn’t as brilliantly hammy as Kate.
That’s not actually a string of negatives. Rather, it’s a suggestion that, even at this early stage, Caitlin’s already sloughed off her initial inspirations and found a voice of her own: a folded, cleverly elusive literary one which makes you sit up and take notice, full of double-take lyrical moments. Nestled in strong hammocks of folk guitar, and in gorgeous transplanted curves of Scottish melody, her songcraft is often a series of strange elisions and non-sequiturs somehow coalescing into stories, delivered in a velvety softness which makes it all the more jolting when she drops a perfectly-enunciated precision F-bomb into the crook of a tune – “I fucked up your favourite song, and this is why I don’t do imitations. / Betrayed by the idea of God, we are her most hated creations / Dressed for the office but underqualified, / express my gratitude between her slender thighs…”
I suspected that Nova Scotia The Truth might have picked her name as a ScotNat political assertion. It seems that I was half right. A “queen of sample-based electronic music”, active in the Scottish hip hop scene since her teenage years (and now stretching out as a producer-performer), Nova might well be representing a rising strand of modern Scotland, but not necessarily one which will cradle comfortably in the old-school saltire. Her preoccupations are with feminism and of people of colour: a pavement-and-club engagement with embedded and intersectional inequalities, mapped out in whip-crack sonic edits and shifts.
Nova’s recent ‘Al-Haqq’ EP is a determined but bewildering mash of pointers and unrest. Cyber-mimetic R&B, corbies and round-chamberings; blasts of rap and dancehall chat; industrial-grime sound collage; all mixed in with found speech from black culture and protest and faith (some of it tweaked and repurposed, but much of it left free to run). The follow-up, Zoom, is a half-hour of rapid sonic cross-cuts in a similar vein: it’s intended as a backing track for a live rap story of love and talk gone wrong, ultimately, broadening out to a wider exploration about power imbalances in relationships, silencings and language. As with a lot of underground hip hop, there’s plenty packed in there: I’m guessing that onstage, this flies.
The Dundee show could have been created as a vast-contrast tribute to Luke’s own willingness to be broad in listening. Rev Magnetic aside, it’s a truly strange, rather brave pairing of opposites. “East coast ecossemo” band Stonethrower bring “monolithic slabs of lead-heavy riffage, angular rage-filled spiky melodies and frantic jazz-core arrangements to blast our faces off”; while Edinburgh/Dundee duo winterThieves are a sacramental ambient act “pool(ing) their varied musical backgrounds to craft a sound that is in equal measures melancholic and euphoric, featuring vast ambient swells, lush guitar and piano melodies, and crashing drums,”, playing wordless slow-reveal post-rock hymnals to an empty sky. The angry hammer and the lonely quilt.
South of the border, the London show features Ilk, whose “colourful and dreamy songs unravel against a collision of psych pop influences and scruffy, found sound warmth… the band’s songs and sketches are somehow both grandiose and playful, upbeat and melancholic” plus the “psychedelic jazz-infused” songwriting of rising folk-rock favourite Jack Cheshire in solo mode.
Supporting at Hull, Chris Norrison – a.k.a. Foolish Atoms – is a solo performer who “dreams up droning acoustic swamps in his sleep… creating music so delusional and pain numbing, audiences peacefully drown in the sweet rustic guitar tones and his strained vocals.” Other acts will be added at Hull over the course of the next few days: let’s see what the city’s recent pop-cultural renaissance has produced…
However, it’s the Edinburgh show which looks like the pick of the crop. It’s a packed-to-the-gills mass of words, music and beats put together by “Scotland’s favourite avant-garde noisemakers” and high/low art boundary-smashers Neu! Reekie, as a partial benefit for the Save Leith Walk community crowdfunder.
As well as Rev Magnetic, on hand for performance are poets Salome Benidze and Helen Mort and a couple of Scottish hip hop acts. Onetime Deadlife Crew member Erin Friel (part of a wave of Scottish hip hoppers who stick, refreshingly, to their own accents and cadences) recently opened for rapper/activist Loki at his sell out King Tuts event for Poverty Safari. The Honey Farm – Scotland’s only all-female rap crew – are self-confessed East Lothian rap bumpkins who “simultaneously skewer and celebrate rap stereotypes with their unapologetic, take no shit attitude” and whose recent debut release L.A.D.S. is “a dragged-up pussy-grabs-back takedown of laddish, bullshit behaviour.”
It’s not quite the fierce textured outrospection of Nova, and perhaps the Farm sometimes let their drama school backgrounds show a little, but it’s all fine. Wit over pose; and plenty of rap’s supposed to be accessible, youthful and funny, including the bit of cross-cast fun with which the Farm kick off the roll of verbiage below…
Five Nineteen presents:
Tides of Man + Coldbones The Black Heart, 2-3 Greenland Place, Camden Town, London, NW1 0AP, England
Sunday 13th May 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here, here and here
Floridan rock sextet Tides Of Man claim to be “kind of in the middle of an identity crisis, but we’re loving it”. Once a prog band with a singer, they’re now a post-rock band with no vocals: running off the slightly unusual combination of three note-worrying guitars and a piano (no synths or organs) over a rock rhythm section, they dangle the possibilities of a junior Iron Maiden or Molly Hatchet over us and then wipe them away as soon as they start playing.
You can look back across the web for their initial outrightly proggy period and their later transitional phase following the departure of founding singer Tilian Pearson, but what you have now is a chivvying glacier-sky euphoria, their sit-on-the-single-note post-rock streams energised by a proggy excitement. So, far it’s a pretty harmonious juxtaposition.
Tides Of Man are supported by Kentish post-rock trio Coldbones, who draw similarly on elements of metal, jazz, prog and dream pop to found their own euphoric, skip-and-sway summer-surf take on the form. Their debut album, ‘Where It All Began’, took wing back in April.
Just added to the fray are Blackpool quartet Blanket. While they’ve just got one 12-inch EP behind them – 2016’s ‘Our Brief Encounters’ – they’re taken seriously enough to have been signed to Music For Nations last year, and have recently taken pride in having made, soundtracked and premiered the short Blackpool community/history-themed film ‘Fragments Of A Dream’, complete with live soundtrack performance.
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Quella + Vrona + Aren Drift + Death Ingloria The Scream Lounge, 20 South End, Croydon, London, CR0 1DN, England
Thursday 25th May 2018, 7.30pm – information
Down in Croydon, towards the end of the month, there’s a free-entry hard-rocking meeting of assorted metal bands, hosted by prog-punk-metallers Quella (who are launching a new EP, ‘Fantastischen!’.) As an event, it resembles one of those affable gangs of kids who really ought to be in other gangs but prefer to hang together (which to be honest is pretty true of the chummy environment of metal fandom).
On the bill with Quella are two Brightonian bands – the twitchy contralto prog metal of the newly emergent Aren Drift (featuring Czech musician, artist and photographer Radka Nemcova) and the more established shifting textures of ambient metallers Vrona, “devout disciples of textural harmony and the abstract, ever changing mechanics of life and its effect on the individual” who are already veterans of Bloodstock, Mammothfest and various British tours, with an EP and album – ‘Impermanence’ – behind them.
The show’s rounded off by London’s Death Ingloria, an ambitious multi-media act creating latterday science fiction rock operas via lovingly assembled packages of live music, animation, comic books and photography. They’ll be bringing an integrated concert version of their debut album ‘The Wolf Onboard’.
Although they were a ‘Misfit City’ mainstay for a number of years, it’s been a while since I’ve put up any previews for Daylight Music‘s free Saturday noontime concerts at the Union Chapel. Blame this on the slapdashery that passes for “method”, back here at ‘Misfit City’ HQ; blame concentration or distraction by other things, but for goodness’ sake don’t blame Daylight Music themselves.
I suppose that it might be possible for a regular attender to sometimes feel as if you’ve had enough of Daylight’s particular cosiness – that warm wooly-sweatered whimsicality, the cake stall, or the feeling that you might just crack if you see another community choir singing alt.pop cover versions. But ultimately it’s churlish to take swipes at them for the side trappings when what really counts is the musing intelligence and the well-honed curatorial instincts underneath the family-friendly fuzz. In the end, there are precious few regular gigs in London that can match Daylight for unassuming stealth education: few that will host a baroque quartet alongside rustling sampledelia, set guileless acoustica off against arch indie, season your ears with sudden rushes of Baltic sound or pipe organ interludes; introduce you to musicians and songwriters who leave you astonished and blinking about the fact that you’ve never heard of them before; and all the while balancing the kiddie-friendly with the uncompromising and actually pulling it off. There are few gigs that are just so plain generous.
So, without more ado, here’s a quick signal-boost for the first few gigs of their imminent summer season…
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“The 12th May show features Green Seagull, respectfulchild and Twenty Three Hanging Trees. Green Seagull are the latest band to burst out of London’s burgeoning neo-psych scene. Their harmony-laden baroque/freakbeat sound draws upon influences such as the Left Banke, the Kinks and the Association. respectfulchild is the solo instrumental project of Gan from Saskatoon on Treaty 6 Territory. Their music is electronic in nature while being acoustically created, building experimental ambient soundscapes through slow progressions of meticulous improvisation. Their sound has been likened to Brian Eno, Nils Frahm and Owen Pallett.
“Twenty Three Hanging Trees is the meditative modular synth exploration project of Xavier Watkins (Fuzzy Lights/Violet Woods/Red Red Eyes.) The project’s progression from hazy guitar drones to electronic-based explorations with dusty, contemplative tonalities has been a transformative one. Learning to express himself with synthesis was like learning a new language, each step having to be carefully planned and executed so as to maintain the fragile equilibrium created. While 2016’s ‘Nocturne’, released on the Sacred Tapes label, had a contemplative, embryonic stillness, 2017’s ‘Prémonitions’ has a deeper, more emotional heart, tempered by subtle rhythmic buzzing, shimmering oceanic drones and solemn arcs of melody.
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“The 19th May show features Firestations, Seán Mac Erlaine and Hatchie. Firestations are an alt-pop band who write simple songs then paint over them with drones, vocal harmonies, electronica and unusual rhythms. Their second album ‘The Year Dot’ has recently released by Lost Map Records. Séan MacErlaine is a Dublin-based woodwind instrumentalist, composer and music producer, recognised as one of Ireland’s most forward-thinking creative musicians. His work intersects folk, free improvisation, jazz and traditional music.
Hatchie is the world of Harriette Pilbeam. To hear her music is to step inside her mind; a dreamy landscape where cascading synths, jangling guitars, propulsive rhythms and white noise undulate beneath undeniable and irresistible pop melodies. This will be a special acoustic set.
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“The 26th May show features Vesperados, Guastalla Quartet and Marcus Corbett. Award-winning composer and jazz musician James Brady first formed Vesperados in 2011, bringing together musicians to explore African, Caribbean and Latin American influences in jazz through original music. Formed in 2013, The Guastalla Quartet brings together musicians from the finest conservatoires in Europe to form a chamber music group dedicated to the exploration of the string quartet repertoire from its roots to as yet unwritten works. Between them, they have performed at world-famous venues including the Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Katara Opera House and the National Concert Hall of Taiwan.
“The Guastalla Quartet will also join Vesperados for an octet set during their performance: the use of strings will allow the full expression of rich jazz harmony alongside the rhythmic engine of Vesperados’ Latin-infused grooves.
“Completing the lineup, Marcus Corbett is a singer, acoustic guitarist and composer based between the UK and Pune, Maharashtra, India. He has been studying Indian classical music and working with musicians in India for over 10 years, skillfully combining the worlds of Indian classical and British folk music and producing a string of albums. He will perform with one of his key Indian collaborators, Tabla maestro Nitin Gaikwad.”
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As ever, all gigs are at Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England and are free, though it’s good form to donate a fiver on the way in or out. Dates below:
Daylight Music 280: Green Seagull, respectfulchild + Twenty-Three Hanging Trees, Saturday 12th May 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 281: Firestations, Seán Mac Erlaine + Hatchie, Saturday 19th May 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 282: Vesperados, Guastalla Quartet + Marcus Corbett, Saturday 26th May 2018, 12:00pm – information
Three more gigs to add to the early April London grab-bag…
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Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
The Facemelter: Kusanagi + Masiro + Iran Iran The Black Heart, 2-3 Greenland Place, Camden Town, London, NW1 0AP, England
Friday 6th April 2017, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
From Chaos Theory…
“Superbly intricate math rock, mindboggling prog and spacious post-rock at this month’s edition.
“Kusanagi sound nothing short of grandiose every time we see them play. This Liverpool-based band seamlessly fuse electronics, post-rock and shimmering guitar, occasionally flirting with metal. We’ve loved watching them get better and better over the years as they’ve performed alongside the likes of Tera Melos, Svalbarduk, Employed To Serve, VASA, Cleft, VLMV, Adam Betts – Music, and we’re delighted that they’re finally gracing the stage at The Facemelter.
“It’s a huge joy to see Masiro launching an album after they’ve been teasing us for over a year with sublime live performances of their latest material. Combining punchy grooves, complex rhythms and catchy headnodding riffs, this instrumental trio has found a sound that sits comfortably between prog, tech metal and math rock.
“Iran Iran are a band that’s developed a sound so unique, it barely could be described as fitting into any genre. Back with us for the first time with their current lineup, the Bristol-based trio produce astonishingly complex noise, not always easy to follow, yet somehow still rife with chuggy rhythms that keep our heads nodding and feet tapping.”
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Society of Imaginary Friends presents:
SOIF Soiree: Lords & Ladies of Misrule Soiree – Society Of Imaginary Friends + Lady Lovely Lute + Millie George + Her/Jeff Townsin + The Kosmic Troubadour + Math Jones + Cian Binchy/Blert Ademi + Debra Watson + more t.b.c. Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Friday 6th April 2018, 7.30pm – free event – information here
From the Society:
“He rolls into town drunk as a skunk, trembling chihuahua on his shoulder and rattlesnakes for scarves. He winks at the sun and collapses in paroxysms of laughter as the gullible gather round to buy his dubious wares: he is the ‘Medicine Man’ curled up under the stars and the Appellation moon. He is our April Fool, the Duke of Disorder, the paradise quack of chaos; and we will be dancing the hallucinogenic hoedown with him at our Medicinal April Fool Soiree.”
Shouldn’t that be “Appalachian moon”, or have I misread my grimoire? At any rate, Society of Imaginary Friends are back, armed with “their most mischievous songs” and with Society accordionist Alfie Thomas presiding over the usual free fest of fine vegan food and diverse, odd-bedfellow acts. This month’s special guest and (I think) Soiree newcomer is fol-de-rollerblading lutenist and Thamesside busker Lady Lovely Lute aka Stephanie Feeney who will “whisper mediaeval somethings in your ear; she will lull you into a false sense of sweetness and drop some belladonna in your tea” while playing her own versions of Early Music classics.
The April Soiree also features some familiar faces – some on their own (poets Millie George, Math Jones and Debra Watson , twinkly hippyglam glo-pop soloist The Kosmic Troubadour) and some in duo arrangements: autism posterboy performer Cian Binchy with pianist Blert Ademi; Rosa Mota/Crown Estate songwriter maverick Julie D. Riley (a.k.a Her) with drummer Jeff Townsin (Madam, Sophia and Submarine).
Also on tap (possibly literally) is a “very special guest dancer” and a special guest DJ from the Society’s little black book.
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“Flaming, queer and transsexual wannabe metal punx”Twinken Park have an EP launch at South Bermondsey playzone DIY Space for London: I don’t cover events at this place often enough, so here goes…
Twinken Park + Ghum + Stef Fi at DSFL DIY Space for London, 96-108 Ormside Street, South Bermondsey, London, SE15 1TF, England
Saturday 7th April 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
“Twinken Park have a new EP of twinky transgenderqueer heavy metal rage coming out on For The Sake of Tapes! To celebrate the release of ‘Flowers’, we’re holding a launch gig at DSFL.”
In support, female four-piece Ghum (who hover in a defiant, hungry, soursweet dreampsych zone somewhere between Nirvana and Lush) and Stef Fi, the experimental pop solo project from “black feminist sistah punk band”Big Joanie‘s singer and guitarist Stephanie Phillips (featuring “love songs about trying hard and mostly failing” in styles ranging between acoustic punk, bedsit soul and lo-fi folk loops).
In keeping with the inclusive ethos of both venue and bands, this is an all-age gig, with “no-one turned away due to lack of funds” – although in order to attend you’ll need to take out the two quid DSFL membership arrangement by the preceding Thursday at the latest.
It’s not exactly surprising that Kavus Torabi has finally gone solo. There’s too much hopeful, demanding inventiveness in him ever to submit entirely to the dynamics of a group, despite the fact that he’s currently got at least three on the go, most of them with him at the helm – the brassy lysergically-illuminated avant-pop of Knifeworld; the ritual instrumentalism of Guapo, and the cantering countercultural circus of Gong (transferred onto his lanky shoulders, history and all, following the 2015 death of Daevid Allen).
What’s more surprising is the direction he’s chosen for the first records under his own name (the new ‘Solar Divination’ EP and a full upcoming album for later in the year). A darker, more agrarian take on his psychedelic homeground, this time it’s drumless, bassless, hornless – rinsed clear of the capering squirrel energy he’s shown for twenty-odd years, in order to reveal muted, angsty bones. Mostly based around slow, smoky-lunged harmonium stretches and sparse flotsam drags of guitar chording, this is a more foreboding turn of song, haunted by deaths, loss and disintegrations. It’s never mopey or lachrymose, thank goodness (even in Knifeworld or The Monsoon Bassoon, Kavus knew how to undercut joyous tootling with passing shadows without souring the milk) but these new songs are overcast with sombre vulnerability: the gravel-grain in Kavus’ voice welling up from deeper, ghostlier territories than before.
Despite being a couple of decades younger than Kavus, Cosmo Sheldrake has been out on his own for a bit longer. It’s been four-and-a-half years since Cosmo put out anything as part of super-eclectic mongrel troupe Gentle Mystics, but during that time he’s been gently dabbing the release schedules with occasional singles, videos and EPs of his own. Earlier work brought some of the Mystics weird and charming vibe along with it: a homemade-toy, party-in-the-fairy-forest feeling, Cosmo lilting skewed nursery-rhyme verses over softly bouncing weaves of melody. In the videos, he came across as a generous digital troubadour on a set of meandering visitations, playing his lashed-up keyboards-and-tech assemblages for performances in model villages, truck beds, pigsties and fishing boats.
Byronic-looking but Branestawm-minded, Cosmo’s a shed-pop tinkerer and a baffling multi-instrumentalist with a mixed mystical/academic background. Part kid’s entertainer and part hippy-boffin, he has a shamanical nose for the margin between nonsense and connection. More recent efforts (trailing the imminent release of his debut album ‘The Much Much How How and I’) have seen chewier, pacier and poppier songs. The videos, meanwhile, have become an ingenious riot of increasingly theatrical, fantastical and sometimes macabre fabling in which foil monsters swim in canvas seas and giant fluffy headlice run amok. There’s a communal, childlike warmth to what he does: not perhaps a guileless wonder, but a sense of celebration, where fables and singalongs and misadventures become part of the accepted, useful junk with which we build our nests.
Kavus’ upcoming tour is a brief series of simmering April dots around England and Wales; Cosmo’s is a more leisurely, lengthy two-month loop, garlanding the British Isles and western Europe. They’re not sharing any shows, or even any venues. The only time they overlap in any respect is on the 25th of April, when they’re playing different but simultaneous one-man shows a stone’s throw apart in Bristol. It would be nice to think of them looking up midset on that one evening, peering across that city-central loop of the Avon, and nodding to each other. Not necessarily natural comrades but, in their way, parallel leywalkers. Each with a bit of Barrett in the back pocket, each with a peculiar charm of innocence, each with fingertips in the otherworldly and the mythic. The uncontainables…
Kavus’ tour also happens to be a chance to catch an intriguing spread of fellow musicians, reflecting the wide body of musical ideas and affinities he touches upon. While in Margate (squeezed into a former Victorian coach house transformed into the Japanese/Alpine cheese dream of a minature theatre), he lines up with two left-field folk acts: the organ-draped, ridge-walking green-chapel psychedelia of Arch Garrison and the mysterious brand-new “wonk-folk” of Bovril (featuring Tuung’s Mike Lindsay). In Birmingham, the bill sharer is Scaramanga Six songwriter Paul Morricone, providing gutsy acoustic songs of fear and brutality with lashing of dark Yorkshire humour. Paul and Kavus also reunite in York for the Tim Smith fundraiser Evening of Fadeless Splendour, alongside the off-kilter art rock of Redbus Noface and the sarcastic-bastard English songcraft of Stephen Gilchrist (a.k.a. Stephen Evens).
On his Manchester date, Kavus will be supported by Peaks (Ben Forrester, formerly of shouty slacker-punk duo Bad Grammar and Manc math-rock supertrio Gug, now performing “loop-driven emo pop”). In London, it’ll be V Ä L V E – once an avant-garde solo project (full of belches and found sounds, situational scoring and sound-art jokes) for Kavus’ Knifeworld bandmate Chloe Herington, now an increasingly ubiquitous three-woman live trio (evolved and evolving into a warm-hearted feminist/Fluxus/Rock In Opposition massing of harps, bassoon, punk bass and singalong bunker-folk). In Leeds, Kavus plays the quiet support act in a free gig for tintinnabulating Sheffield post-metallers May The Night Bless You With Heavenly Dreams (whose echoing tremstrumental pinings add a little magical shimmy to the usual doleful post-rock astronomy) and Bristolian experimental rockers Madilan (whose songs recall both the angst-shredded psychedelic night-journeys of Oceansize and also, in their spindly electronics and Autotuned vocal musing, post-Oceansize rocktronicists British Theatre).
In contrast, most of Cosmo’s dates are solo – possibly because once he’s unshipped his assorted instruments and gizmos (from euphoniums and banjos to loop pedals and pennywhistles), there’s not much room for anyone else in the dressing room. Nonetheless, support for eight of the European April dates comes from Liverpool-based Norwegian girl trio I See Rivers, who wed their outstanding and eerily resonant Scandinavian vocal harmonies, sunny dispositions and scanty guitar to their own balloon-light, touching folk-pop songs and to heart-thawing covers of Daughter (Medicine), George Ezra (Budapest), and Whitney Houston (‘80s wedding fave I Wanna Dance With Somebody).
For the London album launch for ‘The Much Much How How and I’, Cosmo and I See Rivers are joined by Bunty – “multi-dimensional beat merchant and vocal juggler” Kassia Zermon. Also to be found fronting jazz/junk/folk trio Le Juki, co-fronting dub act Resonators, and co-running Brightonian experimental label Beatabet, Kassia’s run Bunty for years as a loopstation-based “one woman electro-orchestra” bolstered by her multi-instrumentalism and vivid imagination. Parallels with Cosmo are clear (the looping and beatboxing, a life blossoming with social art initiatives and therapeutic work beyond the entertainments) and she guests on one of the ‘Much Much’ tracks (very much an equal passing through, with a cheeky hug and a bit of upstaging), but her own vision is distinct. Giddier, jazzier, less directly English in its whimsy, with input from her Moroccan heritage and from her taste for Andy Kaufman; a slightly more cosmic playbox; imaginary languages; an undiluted Brightonian fabulosity.
Kassia’s last Bunty album, ‘Multimos’, was a pocket-sized multimedia event spanning apps, interactive AV, dream machines, audience choirs and gaming cues. Time and occasion will probably only allow a smidgin of that, this time around, but it’ll be a window onto her explosively colourful world.
The Mother’s Ruin, 7-9 St. Nicholas Street, Bristol, BS1 1UE, England, Wednesday 25th April 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
West Street Live, 128 West Street, Sheffield, S1 4ES, England, Thursday 26th April 2018, 7.00pm (supporting Madilan + May The Night Bless You With Heavenly Dreams) – information
An Evening Of Fadeless Splendour @ The Fulford Arms, 121 Fulford Road, York, Yorkshire, YO10 4EX, England, Friday 27th April 2018, 7.00pm (with Redbus Noface + Paul Morricone + Stephen Gilchrist) – information here and here
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England, Sunday 29th April 2018, 7.00pm (with V Ä L V E) – information here and here
Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England, Thursday 5th April 2018, 7.30pm (album launch, with Bunty + I See Rivers) – information here and here
Soup Kitchen, 31-33 Spear Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M1 1DF, England, Friday 6th April 2018, 7.00pm (+ tbc) – information here and here
Headrow House, 19 The Headrow, LS1 6PU Leeds, Saturday 7th April 2018, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Fluc + Fluc Wanne, Praterstern 5, 1020 Vienna, Austria, Austria, Monday 9th April 2018, 8.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Feierwerk, Hansastr. 39-41, 81373 Munich, Germany, Tuesday 10th April 2018, 7.30pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Artheater, Ehrenfeldgürtel 127, 50823 Cologne, Germany, Wednesday 11th April 2018, 8.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information
Molotow, Nobistor 14, 22767 Hamburg, Germany, Thursday 12th April 2018, 7.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Lido, Cuvrystrasse 7, 10997 Berlin, Germany, Friday 13th April 2018, 8.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Paradiso, Weteringschans 6-8, 1017SG Amsterdam, Netherlands, Tuesday 17th April 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Exchange, 72-73 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EJ, England, Wednesday 25th April 2018, 7.30pm (+ tbc) – information here and here
Ancienne Belgique, Anspachlaan 110, 1000 Brussels, Belgium, Friday 27th April 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
Ninkasi Gerland Kafé, 267 Rue Marcel Mérieux, 69007 Lyon, France, Wednesday 2nd May 2018, 8.30pm – information here
Point Éphémère, 200 Quai de Valmy, 75010 Paris, France, Thursday 3rd May 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
Woodburner presents:
Gabriela Eva + Yasmyn Hendrix Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Tuesday 20th March 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
On video, Gabriela Eva is a colourful explosion of appropriated and deftly spun images. In many respects she’s a tourist, but the kind who pulls off her acquisitive magpie business to perfection – a keen eye for the fabric she can repurpose, the hairstyle she can adapt, the body-paint or tattoo that can be repositioned. A globetrotter and a photographer’s darling even before she dropped her debut EP last month, she’s a natural at the subtly chameleonic star act; the dance of other people’s veils illuminated, assimilated and penetrated by her own charisma.
I’m hoping that this translates well to the stage once Gabriela’s tucked under the stairs at Servant Jazz Quarters – belatedly launching that selfsame EP, trapped behind her guitar without access to the self-edit suite, the quick-change boudoir screen and the magical boxes for makeup and jewels. That’s when it’ll either all fall apart or show its core roots. She doesn’t lack courage: previously part of Colchester duo Passive Passengers, she’s busked alone, braved the stage at Ronnie Scott’s and she’s certainly thrown her meme-anchors down (while “future organic” could mean bloody anything from cottage-industry world-changers to rich hippies with busy self-aggrandising Snapchat accounts, “driven, dyslexic, dreadlocked” is as good a packed’n’loaded personal tag as I’ve heard recently).
As for the music, there’s skipping rhythmic and harmonic footwork from jazz, some rhythmic echoes from hip hop, some party looseness from the breezier end of soul and R&B. You can trace your fingers through Gabriela’s songs and tease out strands from clear forebears – Erykah Badu, Astrid Gilberto, Van Morrison, Minnie Riperton (for her part, she claims Nina Simone, Little Dragon, Alanis Morrisette and Incubus) – yet her prime musical descent (probably through accidental parallels) seems to be Eva Abraham, the acoustic London jazzfolksoul luminary who, despite having boiled up cauldron after cauldron of superb transfigured rootsiness for twenty years now, seems doomed to remain a perpetual (though beloved) secret.
Setting aside the quick visual fix of a memorable video, though, that’s not a bad place to be, musically. Close your eyes and you’re still left with Gabriela’s rolling carpet of songcraft: just picking three, there’s her conversational, hip-hop storytelling cover of Estelle and Kanye’s American Boy, the airborne soul-jazz of Sailing Over The City and the twinkling Rise Up (heading that first EP – a light-touch groove salute to advance-and-reclaim, flickering through a clutch of delicate psychedelic changes and nodding to the short-lived but renewable hopes of the Arab spring).
In support is Yazmyn Hendrix, whom I last saw four-and-a-half years ago providing guest-vocal accompaniment to What?! (a long-dispersed jazz-rock trio). Nowaday’s she’s still most visible for further collaborations (with Euro-soul act Retrospective For Love and with jazz-rapper Mrisi) plus a smattering of Soundcloud cover versions (including Laura Mvula’s Green Gardens, John Legend’s All Of Me, Adele’s Chasing Pavements and Massive Attack’s Teardrop). By herself – armed with a microphone, a loop station, and assorted live percussion and beatboxing – she creates layered a capella choirs and vocal ensembles out of herself: either simple classic sounding pop songs, the cover versions mentioned above, or assorted vocalese experiments.
So far there’s not much direct evidence of the harnessed synaesthesia which Yazmyn claims shapes her music-making (and which means that she “associates each song, each word and each instrument with colours and textures”). Let’s assume that the full breakthrough in that direction is still working its way through development and caution, and that one day she’ll be giving us her own ear-boggling parallel to ‘Medúlla’ or ‘Starsailor’ or Todd Rundgren’s ‘A Capella’. Given her tunes-over-weirdness tastes, I’m guessing that we can rule out a head-to-head with Mike Patton in more tangled territory. For now, she stands as a capable one-woman Manhattan Transfer (or a sleepier, slowed-paced Grace McLean) for contemporary pop songs; and that’ll do in the short run.
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Decave Discovers presents:
Cavey + Moon Panda The Waiting Room, 175 Stoke Newington High Street, Stoek Newington, London, N16 0LH, England
Monday 26th March 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Young post-blues singer-guitarist Luke Cave – a.k.a. Cavey – is already known as half of stoner-fuzz rock duo Rad Frü. He’s already engaging in some solo wing-stretching, parking the Zep-happy Rad in favour of collaborating with Blaenavon bassist/producer Frank Wright, laying down songs with junior Wrecking Crews full of heavy-duty young session dudes. Not far out of his teens, it’s as if he’s trying to echo Robert Plant’s career development, while simultaneously crushing it down from fifty years to a mere decade.
Perhaps that’s a bit glib of me, as well as overstating the classic rock thing. Similarly, I’m not sure if he’s the same Luke Cave as the one who sprang (literally) from Nick Cave’s loins back in 1991, but even if he is, there’s not much trace of Cave the Elder here. Cavey himself cites Jim O’Rourke, T-Bone Walker, Hamilton Leithauser and Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen as influences; and in his light-touch songs I can also hear a dash of Gomez. Here’s a live performance of his recent Living Room Parade single, plus the studio take of its predecessor Day And Night.
Born in Boston but currently London-based (and sporting members coming in from Denmark, Sweden and Scotland), dream pop band Moon Panda will inevitably always ring Californian, not least because of the sheer sun-kissed San Diegan beauty of frontwoman Maddy Myers. A blonde, delicately-freckled photographer’s dream on honeyslide vocals and soft dots of bass guitar, she probably finds this kind of objectivifying attention a damn nuisance. For one thing, it distracts from the thoughtful, intricate details of the songs she writes: just as there was always more to Stevie Nicks than posturing and chiffon, there’s more to Maddy than blank-canvas prettiness or swoony lashes.
Let’s be honest – most dream pop bands think it’s enough to deliver blank blocks of navel-gazing noise and dirty snowplough billows: retrodden, remasticated sub-Lushness. Moon Panda don’t. Their songs are constantly, carefully changing beasts: encapsulated within their yearning melodies and taffy-stretched hooks, they have finely honed choral a capella parts, strange and revelatory key changes, sudden pauses and unorthodox shifts of time and dynamic. As with Gustav Moltke’s carefully-placed, only-there-when-you-need-them tidal smooshes of guitar, Maddy’s keen awareness of structure – of spectral drama, of just how softly and subtly you can make a jump-cut work – has a tendency to shatter the mood from within with a hard-hook shift in rhythm and intensity.
The lyrics too, eschew the cough-syrup blankness and drunken, dissolved sensual dazes of the genre; in effect, avoiding its copouts. Instead, Moon Panda are dream pop on the verge of waking up, or of piecing together the dreamwork. Shades of vulnerability, disquiet and suspicion run through these words: I’m still processing them, in the way that one works over the puzzling gristle of a dream, but I’m suspecting that these are songs for the gaslit, the fearful, the unwittingly immured: that they’re the etchings of the beginnings of an escape kit. Their videos, too, have an awareness to them – the disassociative motion, fall and sleep-roll of severed doll parts, ever-so-slightly reminiscent of Todd Haynes’ ‘Superstar’ and its Barbie-puppet retelling of the Karen Carpenter story; the road trip photography with its trapped, continuous-loop feel; Maddy’s own blank-faced ballet moves in which limbs stretch or a back twitches into restless determination.
It’s a shame that ‘Twin Peaks’ appears to be over and done now, and that Moon Panda are a year or two behind its production curve. In some respects they’d have made an ideal Roadhouse band. On the other hand, perhaps I’ve missed the point. Perhaps they wouldn’t have fitted the bill: not quite suited to the seamless and ominous cool, nor enigmatic enough for us to project our hungers, our apprehensions and confusions onto. From here, Moon Panda seem more like a measured curious hand rippling the waters or testing the surface of the mirror, fingertips uncovering and assessing what would otherwise been smoothed away. A band and a songwriter to keep a woken eye on, I think.
Echo Trails + Djanan Turan The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 3BL, England
Saturday 10th March 2018, 7.30pm – information
This month, the roiling, thrilling, mostly-acoustic post-folk band Echo Trails resurface for a Clerkenwell gig in the vaults of the Betsey Trotwood. If you missed them a month ago (at the Magic Garden), here’s what I said about them back then:
“Selling Echo Trails as being some kind of hopeful mashup of “epic groove and post-rock” is a massive undersell. Just because they’ve got a little Godspeed string thunder in them on occasion (and know a thing or two about old-school jazz’n’R&B propulsion) doesn’t mean that they’re one of those bands that milk the juice out of other genres and feed it into papery approximations.
“A well-honed acoustic band is like a set of unhindered precision muscles, able to flex rhythms on the fly and dance in unexpected curves, and this is just such a band. Fronted by Dimitra Tzanakaki (a ballsy, smouldering Greek blend of Beth Gibbons, Tori Amos and Bette Midler) they’re a supple alliance of guitar, voluble double bass, viola and drumkit, the song undercarriage slipping easily from Mediterranean folk to psychobilly to a salsa set-to or to shedbashing Led Zeppelin thrills. Since their arrival in 2014 they’ve phased out keyboard and phased in pedalwork, enriching texture even as the instrumentation shrank: hence the post-rock tag, but there’s Schönberg, Piaf, Korn, Temper Trap, bebop and Hidden Orchestra tucked into their bag of influences along with Godspeed.”
In support is Turkish singer turned Egg collaborator and London bandleader Djanan Turan, who specializes in light, chatty near-acoustic party pop with a timeless perpetually-youthful feel. Into the pot – along with her own warm and garrulous vocal – go Turkish beats, cabaret pop, mellow synth riffs, raga, woody spiralling clarinet lines and slithering Romani/Med-jazz guitar (the latter courtesy of Funkshy’s Fatih Ebrem).
Djanan’s also known for organising one of London’s female artist platforms (the Anatolian/Middle-Eastern-flavoured Hura Nights). In keeping with this, her own songs always sound and feel as if she’s invited you back into her kitchen to keep you abreast of developments and to talk a friendly blue streak about whatever’s crossing her mind – world peace, personal disagreements and reconciliations, the position of women, youth recalled and put into deeper perspective. Despite the hints at New Age positivity (I suspect that that kitchen has a couple of crystals hanging in the window), underneath that loquacious flow is an accomplished songwriter with her dancing feet firmly in touch with the ground. There may be gush involved, but it’s never flippant.
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A few days earlier, Echo Trails are making another London appearance at New River Studios as part of a film evening. As well as closing the show with a full set of their own songs, they’re one of four artists/bands performing live soundtracks to existing silent films. More below…
Colliding Lines present:
‘Colliding LDN: Reanimation’ New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Thursday 8th March 2018, 8.30pm – information here and here
Live cross-disciplinary art promoters Colliding Lines begin “a new, bi-monthly night of live art, sound and vision, presenting experimental collaborations and post-label projects from select performers. ‘Reanimation’ (is) a live re-scoring of mostly Soviet-era cartoons and surrealist animations by four different artists).”
The programme features two shorts by veteran Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky (1968’s anti-bureaucratic musical fable ‘The Glass Harmonica‘ and 1972’s ‘The Butterfly‘), as well as alternative 1968 tellings of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (‘Rusalochka‘ by Ivan Aksenchuk) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (the National Institute of Mental Health’s polemical ‘Curious Alice‘, which took a somewhat counter-productive slap at the early ‘70s drug culture by making it look even more fascinating to children).
In addition to Echo Trails, live soundtracking will be performed by extended-voice improviser and soundshaper Ingrid Plum (who blends and savages her own glorious clear vocals with sound processing and field recordings, and stirs in influences from neo-classical and from Scottish and Nordic folk music) and by two different sets of electro-acoustic music-making brothers. In-demand collaborators for film, dance and installation work, Kyriakides (Reuben and Jacob, to their mother) build “expansive, enveloping soundworlds” from live instruments, field recordings and found objects across a wide spectrum of musical and stylistic options. Electro-acoustic fraternal drone duo Polbrone are an alternate workframe for Andrea and Simone Salvatici of Glasgow avant-folk minimalists Clorinde, who in this project loop and gradually destroy their own sonic textures (and on this occasion will be aided by improvising cellist Derek Yau).
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A little later on, inspired East Anglian “marginal musician” label Antigen are running a concert over in Ipswich…
Antigen Records present:
MacGillivray + Sealionwoman + Polly Preacher The Smokehouse, South Street Studios, 6 South Street, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP1 3NU, England
Friday 16th March 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
When she’s out and about playing music, writing or committing performance art, Kirsten Norrie goes by her ancestral Scottish name MacGillivray, pulling her matrilineal Highland heritage over her head like a mask. With many wannabe artists, this kind of method ends up as no more than an affectation: people short on colour, scraping at the bottom of the pot of history in a vain attempt to garner the last scraps of savour. With Kirsten, it’s different: if it’s a mask, it’s the kind that renders everyday matters and habits transparent, allowing her to express deeper and stranger ideas and fancies fervently. What emerges is startling. MacGillivray it is, then.
Discovering her is a little like being startled by a slow-motion jack-in-the-box: she’s already got eight albums behind her, a couple of soundtracks and poetry collections, and a collaborator roster which bags a list of left-field folk musicians of all strands and odd definitions, including The Fall (yes, folk, really), The Pogues’ Jem Finer, Dead Rat Orchestra, Trembling Bells and Current 93. Her performance art involves powerful weird rituals – furiously smoking cigars in Sigmund Freud’s garden; conflating mediaeval stocks and death metal; eating chandelier glass in an abandoned shopping centre; carrying a dead sheep on a pilgrimage.
As a musician (both recorder and performer), she’s similarly unnerving: experimenting with loudness and quietness via folk drones, piano, savagely distorted electric autoharp and vocal wails, but refusing to hide behind them. Slender, still and intense, she rules a stage, dragging up distressed ghosts and the aftermath of harsh laws and bare beliefs. On this occasion, she’ll be performing tracks from her forthcoming mini-album, ‘Watermarked in Flame’.
Like Kirsten, Colchester’s Ashleagh Claire Hurren immerses herself in a performance persona, although Polly Preacher‘s “wonky folk troubadour” act is a good deal more comfortable than MacGillivray’s harsher hauntology. That said, the original tag makes her sound a lot kookier than she is. You don’t get cute acoustic numbers about spice racks, paintings and milky heartbreaks. Instead you get a crepuscular, witty electric folk with a homemade feel and a few echoes of lo-fi indie rock. There are a few shades of Kristen Hersh, perhaps even a little Lupen Crook, but for the most part a Polly Preacher song follows its own pattern: cryptic feints into storytelling where the supernatural rubs shoulders with grit, and in which haunted cutlery drawers and fairy tales cross imperceptibly over into stories of how to navigate a female life… or at least how to begin the journey and begin mapping the hazards.
Sealionwoman slightly buck this gig’s tonal trend of “folk meets New Weird Britain”, being much more of a dark-dusk monochromed blues-and-jazz basement affair, albeit filtered through loops, noise and the canny restrictions of being an unorthodox duo. The bare bones and wizard’s brew of Tye McGivern’s effects-laden double bass steps in and out of the shadows with subtle changes of raiment, sometimes clean-limbed and sometimes masked; Kitty Whitelaw ‘s vocals stretch from distracted torch singer to ghostly and mischievous jazz acrobat, running deft arabesques around the shape of the song.
Bar occasional gig notifications, I’ve not encountered Sealionwoman much since getting very absorbed in a live performance of theirs in a Hackney shopwindow back in 2013. My negligence, not theirs. Go back and have a look at that review: I’ve just done so myself, and it captures the compelling sinewy distractions of their live presence, the transformative implications of their name and their thousand-shades-of-black-white-and-grey better than anything I could come up with right now.
The Audacious Art Experiment presents:
Blood Sport + LOGS + Eşya + Isis Moray + Two Left Foot DJs + more t.b.c. The Leadmill, 6 Leadmill Road, Sheffield, Yorkshire, S1 4SE, England
Saturday 9th December 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
Next week, Sheffield says goodbye to homegrown “aggrobeat” band Blood Sport, who’ve been pumping out their open-ended blend of Fela Kuti afrobeat, dance rock and noise pop for seven years and have decided it’s time to stop. They’ll be missed for their music, which revived and rearranged various dots of New York loft music, classic post-punk exploration and latterday cellar noise. They’ll probably be missed even more for their communality, which saw them collaborating both onstage and in-set with a variety of international musical partners and guests both at small gigs and at the Hybrid Vigour shows (in which they crossed swords, palms or barriers in cahoots with the likes of Egyptian electro-chaabi champion Islam Chipsy, poly-composer/performer Mica Levi, Tokyo experimental rock trio Nisennenmondai and ex-Hype Williams vocalist Inga Copeland).
In keeping with their persistent ethos of collaboration, celebration and sharing, Blood Sport’s final show features a clutch of interesting friends and artists whom they’re shining a generous light onto. A couple of Sheffield acts will be playing sets and unveiling music – psytronic voice-trumental looper and bass’n’drumbox witch Isis Moray, and Sheffield electronic noise “supercluster” LOGS (born out of “a mutual love for fuzzy jams and spacey synth tones” and featuring Ben Hunter – a.k.a. Audacious Art Experiment bleep-and-squeak house technoist Saif Mode – plus assorted members and ex-members of Drenge, Wet Nuns and Seize The Chair).
The show will also feature a performance from Savages bass player-turned-experimental synthpopper Ayşe Hassan. She’ll be debuting a new performance identity called Eşya, with which/whom she claims is going to play out “the duality of conflicting traits, ideas and views that can exist within one being and how one deals with such conflict – the absurdity of being.” Hmm. A part-pixellated half-minute preview is on show below. On spec, Eşya seems to owe something to the brain-wandering club-pop/femme-pop of Ayşe’s existing Kite Base project, but moving deeper into onomatopoeia, sensuality and (given the pixellation) perhaps a little transgression too… We’ll see.
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Another musician whom we hopefully won’t be losing anytime soon is Dan Wild-Beesley, until recently of Manchester “turbo-prog” duo Cleft (known for “condensing fourteen-minute prog songs into three minutes and having a lot of fun doing it”) and more recently of perky post-hardcore/noisepop trio Gug. A couple of years ago, he had the horrible luck of being diagnosed with not just one, but two brain tumours, meaning that he needed to raise fifty thousand pounds for overseas treatment unavailable on the NHS.
While his JustGiving campaign was successful (gratifyingly, it seems that you can still build up a lot of love and fellow feeling from six years of ping-ponging around tiny British venues banging out stripped-down rock weirdness), there’s still more money to be raised for the essentials of drastically shifting to a cancer-crushing lifestyle. There’s still plenty people can do to help – picking up Cleft or Gug music, keeping that JustGiving campaign ticking along, or coming to the series of fundraising shows. I missed the opportunity to post about the one back in October, but here’s a little info about the one in December.
Mentholman Promotions/MADE present:
Dan Wild-Beesley (Cleft) Fundraiser: Porshyne + AWOOGA + Gilmore Trail + Pfaff West Street Live, 128-130 West Street, Sheffield, S1 4ES, Yorkshire, England
Thursday 14th December 2017, 7.30pm – information
“What better way to raise funds than to put on an event with four incredible acts?” What indeed? Expect a friendly, contradictory, noisy/soft post-everything rockquake (complete with raffle and donation buckets). The two Sheffield bands – thoughtful prog-grungers AWOOGA (fresh from their London gig the previous week at the Black Heart) and delicately limpid post-rock instrumental quartet Gilmore Trail (the latter noted for their twinkling cover of the ‘Twin Peaks’ theme) – will be joined by a couple of out-of-towners: three-piece Mancunian math-rockers Pfaff and “heavy atmospheric” rock quintet Porshyne from Brighton. All necessary evidence below…
Three interesting shows, all on the same evening in London – I remember when ‘Organ‘ used to do multi-gig hurtles on nights like these, and document the whole adventure. A tradition which could do with being revived, if funds and shoe-leather hold out.
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White Heat presents:
Sleep Party People The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Monday 27th November 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
If, for the last seven years, your idea of fun has been an ‘80s synthpop act refracted through a rippling slowcore/dream pop prism (while dressed like nursery versions of Frank the rabbit man from ‘Donnie Darko’), then you probably already know about Danish one-man music factory Brian Batz and his Sleep Party People project: a budding cult act just about anywhere outside the USA. If you don’t know them, then here’s Brian and co. performing SPP’s 2010 breakthrough online hit I’m Not Human At All (singing a captivatingly blank song of emotional detachment in full ludicrous/mysterious bunnygarb, like the Residents might have done if they’d taken their cues from Beatrix Potter and Dick Luna rather than Moondog and Harry Partch).
Though their music was initially inspired by a battered old piano, Boards Of Canada, Erik Satie and David Lynch, Sleep Party People have subsequently been dogged by lazy comparisions to the calving-iceberg noise cascades of Mogwai and Sigur Rós. A real shame, since it hustles them into the cliched cloisters of that already overpopulated cathedral-of-sound; and it’s unfair to a band who’ve never really opted to slump enigmatically in the middle of a haze of effects pedals. This year’s new album, ‘Lingering’, shows a dramatic evolution and broadening of Sleep Party People’s perspective; Brian losing his fey leveret mewl and adopting a sweet psychedelic coo as he steps up to meet (on the one hand) the fantastically inventive pop likes of Everything Everything or Dutch Uncles, and (on the other) the dreamy rattle and moonshine musings of Pram.
There’s also something of the loping grooves of Can in SPP’s current workings, but in truth there’s a far bigger tranche of sunny wine-blurred ‘60s Europop, dressed up in new trappings of clinking, shattering piano loops and ghostly keyboards, windup bass and bell-clock tinkles. Lyrical preoccupations (blossoming from early mumbles to open-hearted singing) stay half-in and half-out of dreamscapes and betray a transmogrificational fascination with different modes of life, Bryan imagining oceans covered in flesh or himself as a thinking, feeling tree. On ‘Salix And His Soil’, the band beam and pulse like a feyer Everything Everything; on ‘The Sun Will Open Its Core’, they’re a full-on love up between New Order and The Flaming Lips. It’s captivating stuff. See and hear for yourselves as they drop by London via their current European tour.
(Update, 22nd November 2017 – it seems that there’ll be a support act: Marco Pini’s narcotically ambient downtempo electronica project GLOWS…)
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And Now What? presents
Torycore
Sackler Space @ The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, Chalk Farm, London, NW1 8EH, England
Monday 27th November 2017, 8.00pm – information here and here
Political artscreamers Torycore (or #Torycore) define themselves simply, succinctly and savagely – “bullshit Tory rhetoric + brutal avantgarde metal = #TORYCORE”. They’re made up of two theatre-makers – Lucy Ellinson (Third Angel, Deaf and Hearing Ensemble, the RSC) on bellowing vocals and Chris Thorpe (Unlimited Theatre) on scourging guitar – and one full-time musician, Steve Lawson (better known as a cuddly looping bass guitarist with ambient jazzitude and a knack for equally loopy stand-up patter, but here unleashing the roiling social indignation and sharp musical wit behind the cute moves and the granny specs… as well as indulging his love for Cannibal Corpse).
Making no bones about their loathing of Tory ethics and economics (although Steve has described the performance outcome, to his own surprise, as “weirdly non-partisan”), their performance is “part gig, part metal-recital, part exorcism… combin(ing) sludge and doom metal with the Budget speech 2015; a pounding subverbal deathgrowl with text samples from the blue suits at Tory HQ, George Osborne and the architects of austerity… a verbatim record of a government ripping society’s guts out… a fiercely political convergence of death metal and theatre, vocalising a response to Conservative Party policies through music, speeches, PowerPoint and rage. It’s a guttural, expressive experience made up of Tory doctrine, political contexts and the impact of austerity over the past seven years.”
You can find out more about Torycore’s own political, theatrical and musical ethics at Chris’ interview in ‘The Guardian’ a couple of years ago – in which he states that theatre is “a national laboratory for thinking about how we think and how we are and what we are” and that “at its most basic, making theatre is just a way of meeting people… part of an ongoing conversation that can take place anywhere.” – or in this 2014 interview for the Mayfest homepage, in which Lucy and Steve discuss the more complex concerns behind the blunt hammerblow of the music: notably Lucy’s fascination with government perversion of language, reinforced by Steve’s point that “they’ve colonised the language that ought to be used to tear down the structure that protects them. So everything from ‘fairness’ to ‘democracy’ has been corrupted. Hence the need for a project like this, that throws those words back, stripped of all the pomp and bullshit that parliamentary process wraps around this rarified implementation of fascism-lite.” Lucy, meanwhile, fleshes out her mirror-method condemnation: “I’d like them to be sent to their run-for-profit detention centres. To be “visited by Atos”. To spend time with the families of those people who have killed themselves rather than fall further into fear and poverty. “We’re all in this together” right?”
The #Torycore event is part of the Roundhouse’s And Now What? season of shows between enquiry and protest which also includes contributions from, among others, Wax Lyrical and The Guilty Feminist.
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On a considerably lighter note…
Diego Brown & The Good Fairy present:
Clerkenwell ARTSlab: Diego Brown & The Good Fairy + Hannah Lovell + Maya Levy + Streatham Common (Station) + Alys Torrance + Parenthesis
Upstairs @ The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Rd, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 3BL, England
Monday 27th November 2017, 8:15pm – information
The evenings which evolved into the raffish, absurdist Clerkenwell ARTSlab events were originally run by beloved performance poet/proto-antifolker John Hegley. Although they’re now run by “twisted folk” band Diego Brown & The Good Fairy, much of Hegley’s sense of fun has stuck to them: they’re ongoing salons of “mind-bending song, stories and weird stuff… comedy and cha-cha from the kings and queens of all that”.
As usual, Diego and co. headline with their spooky, surreal, pointed London chansonnerie (puppets and automata optional), but also rolling up are three other songwriters. Parenthesis is a “prince of smooth-talking, forward-thinking, backward-walking electronic pop”. New Yorker-turned-Londoner Maya Levy, when not acting or otherwise making theatre, turns to the piano to write darkly funny folk/classical/theatre crossover songs either for herself or her band The Kitchen Quartet, (covering “medieval werewolves to Pocahontas to crazy teachers”). Hannah Lovell delivers soft-spoken, almost conversational portraits of domestic life and then hangs them askew – the solicitous hatred of one’s partner, the mental breakdowns over cooking the perfect Italian meal.
On the more overtly theatrical side, storytelling clown Alys Torrance will deliver her story of “the amazing feats performed by Stanley Gibbons’s’s’s Amazing Stamp Collection (bring binoculars/reading specs).” Somewhere in the middle is the Julian Fox/Bob Karper collaboration Streatham Common (Station): fifteen minutes of offbeat theatre songwriters Julian Fox and Bob Karper, “accordions and beats, deadpan and dance, songs and maybe film.” (The latter are still too much of a elusive fringe phenomenon to have much web presence, but I’ve included a Julian song below: a Kraftwerkian one about designing airports).
Ghost Car + Secret Tongues + Strange Lipsticks The Montague Arms, 289 Queens Road, Peckham, London, SE15 2PA, England
Saturday 11th March 2017, 7.00pm – information here
What’s on the invite:
“Ghost Car are inviting you to the launch party celebrating their debut single ‘Stuck In The Mud’ (released on New York label Greenway Records), on Saturday 11th of March at The Montague Arms, with support from Secret Tongues and Strange Lipsticks.”
What you get:
From Ghost Car – careening, shifting, minor-key garage rock with sweet’n’sour organ punches plus flavours of bolshy girl-group and of honey-and-yoghurt Gallic pop (despite the fact that, although the members hail from a wonderful pre-Brexit splatter of Spanish, Irish and British roots, none of them are French). The video for ‘Stuck In The Mud’ is a little low-budget hymn to female tensions – office-girl restlessness, transposed rage at impenetrable masculine spaces. It’s a collage of impeccable makeup methods, fusty corridors, and slammed or locked doors, with a nod to the way in which the women’s toilets can double as a sanctuary, a place to compose yourself, even a rallying zone.
From Secret Tongues, you get relatively conventionally dreampop indie. Permeated with a lazy but lipsmacking eroticism, it switches between languorous, scenic verses and upbeat, jouncy choruses. Recent single ‘Glass Beach’ is typical of their work – a song of arousal, of “pheromones playing with our hormones” (and it comes with a sloppy-sensual video full of orality and come-hither eyes).
For my money, the most persuasive reason to pitch up for the gig is for show opener Strange Lipsticks, a.k.a. singer-songwriter Mary Fritz. Over the times during which she’s shuttled between London and Boston, her music’s evolved from lo-fi tick/echo/strum songcraft (orchestrated with tremolo, warble and skate) to a shifting, half-moored folk sound interpolated with background noises and a wan tone of solitary council-estate psychedelia. Mary’s weary folk-chant of a voice (a little reminiscent of the unsettling intonation of Scottish post-folker Pinkie Maclure) remains the key note: breeding her songs’ atmospheres of ill-health and of a disturbed, distracted intelligence feeling its way around, angling for clarity.
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Hanging Valleys + Swan Levitt The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Tuesday 21 March 2017, 7.00pm – information here and here
What’s on the other invite:
“Hanging Valleys is an alternative band founded by Thom Byles in 2016, in which he’s joined by Mike Phillips (guitar, vocals) and Alexis Meridol (beats, synthesizer). Their music is centred around soaring falsetto vocals accompanied by ethereal atmospheric phrasing on electric and acoustic guitars, which combine to create a rich shifting soundscape. An unusual percussive playing style on the acoustic is blended with percussion and self-produced samples to create pulsing rhythms with captivating crescendos. The band’s debut EP will be released on 10th March 2017.
“Swan Levitt is an English singer-songwriter from the Isle of Wight, UK. Blending together acoustic folk with refreshingly modern themes, his emotionally charged voice lets you in on a personal level, taking intricate melodies and crafting them into a fully cinematic experience. Uniquely adept at songwriting, Swan Levitt carries the listener on a character building journey. Using his personal struggles and his passion for science to create music that is acoustic at heart, yet interwoven with subtle electronic atmospheres. Levitt is currently recording his debut album at Studio Humbug on the Isle of Wight with accomplished production duo, Boe Weaver and Organ Records.”
What you get:
Beyond the initial hype (and the little cloud of thumbs-ups from various people at BBC Radio 6), you get two acts coalescing from their initial post-folk vagueness. For the past year or so, as they built themselves up from being Thom’s solo project into being an actual band, Hanging Valleys have been dotting Bandcamp and Soundcloud with individual tracks. On the positive side, they’ve got an exquisite, downy, murmuring sound which – if anything – their press releases undersell. On the other, they’ve sometimes used it to be over-evasive, apparently more interested in capturing the perfect curve of a shadow-croon or the glint of a guitar-string harmonic over anything requiring a commitment of story or setpiece. Their most recent track, ‘T.B.D’, seems to indicate that they’re finally hitting the right balance.
As for Swan Levitt, he initially came to general attention last year thanks to two softly pained, quietly dramatic post-Damien Rice-ish singles – ‘Alive’ and ‘Singularity’ – which sounded gorgeous but also on the lazy side of sparse: as with the early Hanging Gardens stuff, songs which seemed to prioritise furnishing over content. His third single, ‘You Were Human’, is a big step forwards; a mourning, brush-drummed lament with an offbeat, unsettling perspective, casting an eye on the destructive vortex of male desire and sentimentality while weaving together ideas of artificial intelligence and human feeling cribbed from ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Ex Machina’ (and blurring the lines between lovesong and murder-ballad). He’s a lot more interesting now that he’s come out as a questioning geek instead of just being a beautiful attic voice.
A little convocation of bands associated with Philadelphia’s Ramp Local label are playing at the Glove, an out-of-the-way Brooklyn performance theater and art shrine. (Apparently the Glove’s been set up by the same people responsible for the Grove performance space, and seems to be so in-the-moment that it’s impossible to find a formal address for it – you’ll either have to private-message their Facebook page, ask the right kind of friend, or get off at the MTA stop by Flushing Avenue and Broadway and take the chance that you’ll spot it.)
Ramp Local presents:
Lily & Horn Horse + Macula Dog + Gavin Reilly Smoke Machine + The Cradle The Glove, (somewhere in) Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York City, NY 11221, USA
Wednesday 8th March 2017, 8.00pm – information
The gig’s a launch event for the debut album by Lily & Horn Horse, more on which below:
”Lily Konigsberg is a member of the experimental punk band Palberta, hailed by ‘Pitchfork’ for their “mercurial gestures, barking acidity, and off-the-cuff creativity” as well as for their taste for swapping or abandoning instruments midflow. Fellow multi-instrumentalist Matt Norman performs as Horn Horse. Together they formed a group called Lily & Horn Horse, who will release a collaborative cassette album – ‘Lily On Horn Horse’ – on March 3rd 2017 (on the heels of Palberta’s most recent album ‘Bye Bye Berta’), by way of Philly’s Ramp Local Records.
“With ‘Lily On Horn Horse’, Lily and Matt deliver a twenty-eight-track collaboration that synthesizes the eclectic musical talents of both multi-instrumentalists. Originally presented as a CD, the compilation was sold and packaged in origami during an August 2016 tour of the north-east USA. The album is more a snapshot of a creative time and place than concept-album. As Lily and Matt say “The release of Matt’s ‘Horn Horse‘ album featured Lily on most songs, most of which are included in y’own tape. Around the same time Lily was developing a mega set of karaoke music and instructed Matt to blow down some car horn charts which were eventually replaced by baritone horn parts and inserted into the recordings gently sleeping inside thine tape.”
“The record ends up a coherent pastiche of diverse tracks full of free jazz-inspired brass freak-outs, ethereal piano ballads, and synth arrangements skewed toward electronic composition. Lily’s siren-like voice calls from a perfume-cloud of disco-inspired grooves while Horn Horse’s vocals hit robotic and angular production. Tracks like Today and She Doesn’t Have A Good Brain bring to mind an Arthur Russell-like elevation of pop-music experimentation. In short, the record is a curated-tour through the frontiers of Lilly and Horn Horse’s creative landscape.”
The gig also offers three other acts. There’s discombobulated glitch-funk played with “inebriated, mule-like precision” from Macula Dog. There’s Big Neck Police‘s Paco Cathcart, performing with Palberta’s Ani Ivry-Block and The Gradients‘ Sammy Weissberg as The Cradle – woozy tenement indie-folk songs, a little like an accordion-and-double-bass equipped Mazzy Star at war with drum machines and bad aircon. Finally, there’s the goofy multi-media work of Gavin Riley Smoke Machine.
For me the most satisfying of the support acts is Gavin, who creates his own live-music take on a Choose Your Own Adventure paperback. He does this by gumming together a spitball of nerdy white-boy hip hop, blow-by-blow audience interaction and goofy pulp fiction/afternoon TV storytelling (a schoolkid caught up in a whirl of mutants, drug gangs, sinister teachers, the FBI and parents with mysterious pasts), topped off with some endearing homemade animation. In theory, it should fall flat on its face: instead, it can turn an audience of jaded hipsters back into eager, happy children.
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Back in London, Chaos Theory’s airier spin-off Whispers & Hurricanes is back in business with a few old friends:
Chaos Theory presents:
Whispers & Hurricanes: Hacke & De Picciotto, Jo Quail Strongroom Bar, 120-124 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3SQ, England
Thursday 9th March 2017, 7.30pm – information
“The first Whispers & Hurricanes of the year sees the return of two legendary multimedia performers (whose entire life together is an ongoing work of art), as well as a prolific contemporary cellist and loop artist.
“German-American artist couple Danielle de Picciotto and Alexander Hacke are internationally known – she as the co-founder of the Love Parade, he a founding member of the band Einstürzende Neubauten – and both of them together members of Crime & The City Solution. Since 2010 they have been leading a nomadic life, touring the world with music and theatre projects, never staying still for too long. After two breathtaking shows for us at Cafe Oto and at Hackney Attic, this unconventional and versatile duo return to the UK with new additions to their show.
“Tonight they will perform music from their recently released and widely acclaimed album ‘Perseverantia’ – made up of instrumental sounds, a few spoken words by Danielle, throat singing by Alexander, purrs and squeaks of the hurdy-gurdy and autoharp, melancholic melodies of the violin, and bass and guitar hums.
“We will also have a first chance to hear new pieces that they are working on for their next album, comprised of recordings made in a huge cathedral in Austria, mixed with Mexican found sounds and desert drones. It will be intense.
“Jo Quail is a visionary cellist who never ceases to push boundaries and her own limitations, with equally dramatic and contemplative compositions as well as with her use of loops and effects. Over the last seven years, her career has seen her release three full albums, a live DVD, several collaborative works, and many international tours, most recently with post-rock giants Caspian.
“Her music has captured the hearts of rock, classical, experimental, metal, post-rock, gothic and folk fans alike, and she is known for creating a unique experience with each performance.”
“Man with drumkit and nerve available. Works well on his own, but can work with anyone from virtuoso level to raw newbie. Will also travel, though being in the right place is essential.”
Charles Hayward – drummer, songwriter, improviser; patron saint of South London spontaneity. Creator, humble communitarian and sharer. Kit-and-tapes driver for avant-rockers This Heat and Camberwell Now! during the ‘70s and ‘80s; more recently, the curator-enabler of experimental multi-media events such as Accidents & Emergencies. Internationally reknowned but publically anonymous go-to bloke for musical support and thrilling upset. A musician who goes out and does.
Here are four separate upcoming instances of Charles Hayward in the act of doing: all taking place this month or next month. As good a hook as any to hang a ‘Misfit City’ post off.
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London EFG Jazz Festival presents:
Hallkvist/Taylor/Goller/Hayward + Charlie Stacey IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 12th November 2016, 8.00pm – information here and here
“The Swedish musician Samuel Hällkvist was given the ‘Jazz in Sweden’ award in 2010. It caused some controversy at the time because Samuel is a guitarist who doesn’t fit comfortably into the template of Scandinavian jazz. Nordic brooding is not his style at all. Instead Samuel brings unsurpassed wizardry to the use of effects pedals, which he deploys with great discretion and aplomb. He has toured extensively in Scandinavia, other parts of Europe and Japan, as well as touring the UK in 2012, where he performed with Yazz Ahmed, Denys Baptiste and Gary Crosby.
“Samuel is joined on this occasion by a carefully selected cast, featuring Ruth Goller (the bass guitarist of Acoustic Ladyland), the wonderful Charles Hayward on drums (This Heat etc.) and free improviser Noel Taylor on bass clarinet. The ensemble is a combustible blend of elements which promises high-energy rhythmic patterns awash with thunderous beats of drum and bass, and surmounted with the languorous, rich tones of bass clarinet.
“Charlie Stacey first popped into the jazz scene when he was featured on UK television as a child prodigy. In 2012, still a teenager, he reached the semi-finals of the Montreux Jazz Piano Competition. Since then he has performed at festivals around the world. Stacey’s tastes range from Keith Jarrett to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler – stir these ingredients together into a swirl of mood and pianistic virtuosity: that’s the unique sound of Charlie Stacey.”
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The Xposed Club presents:
Charles Hayward + Phosphene The Xposed Club @ Francis Close Hall, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, GL50 4AZ, England
Friday 18th November 2016, 8.00pm – information here and here
“Charles Hayward‘s ‘(begin anywhere)’ is a new project centred around songs performed at the piano, a sequence of betrayal, paranoia, subterfuge, opening out into resistance, hope and humanity, interweaved with sound events, drums, spoken word, performance. Stark, minimal arrangements; an unexpected departure.
“Phosphene is the name Glasgow-based artist John Cavanagh has worked under for his solo music-making since 2000. In that time, there have been three full-length Phosphene albums, featuring collaborations with Lol Coxhill, Bridget St. John, Raymond McDonald, John McKeown (1990s/Yummy Fur), Isobel Campbell, Bill Wells and others. John is also a a member of the duo Electroscope, along with Gayle Brogan (Pefkin) and the more recently formed Sonically Depicting, with Ceylan Hay & friends. He is also known as a radio presenter & contributor, voice-over artist, author of a book on the Pink Floyd album ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’, producer of records/occasional record label operator and organiser of music nights at Glasgow’s Sharmanka Kinetic Gallery.”
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Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 240: Laura Cannell presents “Memory Mapping”: Charles Hayward + Mythos Of Violins + Hoofus + Jennifer Lucy Allan Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 26th November 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information
“The Arctic Circle At Ten celebrations continue courtesy of experimental fiddle and recorder player Laura Cannell, bringing together musicians whose work is both spontaneous and deeply inspired by their surroundings. Using real and imagined memory, ideas are mapped internally and externally and turned into atmospheric, moving and unexpected performances.
“Charles Hayward gives a solo performance of his piano piece (begin anywhere)…” – see the Xposed Club bit for more on that. Also note that Charles and Laura play together in the Oscilanz trio (with Ralph Cumbers of Bass Clef/Some Truths), creating new music by exploding, recombining and reinterpreting the music of twelfth-century composer and polymath Hildegard Von Bingen, in a web of drums, trombone, violin, recorders, singing and electronics. (There’s a clip of them below, for context.)
“Mythos Of Violins is the experimental violin work of Laura Cannell and Angharad Davies, creating new works inspired by location and memory and “puzzling over the unsconcious or conscious effect of place on the creative development of an artist.” ‘The Scotsman’ reviewed their performance at Glasgow University Chapel earlier in April this year as “hypnotic… they made judicious use of the venue as they circled the pew-bound audience, unfurling a tapestry of intense scratches and squeals – as if the cloisters had been infested by an attack of rabid rats – fused with discordant prettiness and yearning hints of Celtic folk.” Laura and Angharad will be performing a special piece inspired by the Union Chapel. Laura will also be performing a solo set of her own.
Jennifer Lucy Allan – former online editor of ‘The Wire’ (and still running their Resonance FM radio show), as well as being the co-runner of experimental record label Arc Light Editions – will be weaving rural and industrial soundscapes through this very special event (possibly including evidence of her ongoing research project on fog horns).” Also to have played was Hoofus, a.k.a. Andre Bosman, an electronic musician based in coastal Suffolk. Focused on live performance, emergence and improvisation, Hoofus uses drifting oscillators, overlapping frequency modulation, ragged percussion and a sense of tactile interaction between performer and machines to create music of wayward eerie wonder. Drawing on ideas of edgelands and peripheries and the intersecting of wilderness with urban/industrial spaces, Hoofus explores 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. Unfortunately he won’t be performing them here this time around – maybe next time?
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The Jimmy Cake present:
Charles Hayward + The Jimmy Cake + Percolator Bello Bar, Portobello Harbour, Saint Kevin’s, Dublin 6, Ireland
Saturday 10th December 2016, 8.00pm – information
For this December show, Charles heads up an evening of “loud instrumental space-prog-post-apocalypse rock”. There’s no word on what he’s specifically doing, but I’m guessing it’s a return to the furious drums, the disruptive tapes and the man-in-the-moment vocals of his main improvisation style.
Event organisers The Jimmy Cake are sixteen-year instrumental veterans of Irish instrumental rock. Over five albums under the leadership of keyboard-playing main-brain Paul G. Smyth they’ve employed banjos, clarinets, strings and brass – mixing Chicagoan post-rock, European space rock and Canterbury prog with the happysad fiddle-and-whistle uplift of Irish music sessions – or lurked behind gonging walls of noise and synth. Fast friends with Charles already (he guested at their previous annual show, prompting his invite back for this one), they’ve also backed Damo Suzuki – a set of influences and associations which should make their intentions, impulses and credibility clear.
When they’re clicked into “simple” mode, Waterfordian trio Percolator bounce and sing-song like an appealing, easily-approved indie-pop mix of The Stooges, Television, and Pavement influences, with additional craic courtesy of the chatty vocal rapport between drummer Eleanor and fuzz-sliding, odd-angles guitarist Ian. When they pull out the remaining stops on their organism and get more complicated, they transform into something much more remarkable – one of the few bands who can appropriate that lazy “sounds like My Bloody Valentine” tag – or have it foisted on them – and not disgrace it. The wilder tracks on their last EP, ‘Little Demon’ are whirlwinds of biplane-crash guitar drones, road-hammering motorik drums and bass surges. They sound like so much more than a rock trio – virtual unknowns already able to capture the wheeling cosmic dizziness of a full-on King Crimson soundscape or the pre-apocalyptic glower of a Gnod blur-mood as well as the microtonal shear of Kevin Shields.
Whether or not you caught any or all of the art and fringe music at Bristol’s splendid-sounding Wakizashi festival last month, you’ve got an imminent chance to catch up with more from two of the acts that played there. On Friday, Iyabe hold a launch concert for their debut EP, accompanied by three other Bristolian bands who skim from layered jazz experimentation to sarcastic surf bounce. On Saturday, Christelle Atenstaedt (who performed a solo Wakizashi set of looped avant-folk and brambly dream pop noise under the name of Twin) launches her Lone Wolves experimental music evening.
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Iyabe present:
Iyabe + Run Logan Run + LICE + Sugar Horse + DJs DJs Dan Johnson & Annie Gardiner Cube Microplex, 4 Princess Row, Bristol, BS2 8DJ, England
Friday 4th November, 8.00pm – information
Fronted by the voice and words of Sophie-Louise Dawes, (her murmured messages always hovering on the verge of being delivered, always withdrawn after the first few dotted clues), “minimally loud” art-pop five-piece Iyabe explore “found sound and unconventional songwriting techniques” as well as taking notes from R&B, neo-soul, punk and noise. Last time around, I described them as “skeletal… soft pings, drum clicks, bass shadows… a pencil-sketch ghost of Seefeel’s dub-rock dreaminess.” I could add that what emerges from their various influences is a kind of oblique and embryonic post-rock Portishead – their soft touches and minimal fragments played loud, tied together in a web of song with enough space for the various ingredients to make themselves known and to run loose alongside each other.
The debut Iyabe EP, ‘Biology. Biography. Culture.’ (assembled from “four years of collecting, collage and collapse”) is finally ready for release, and the band are celebrating with a launch show accompanied by visual and performance artists, and by other Bristolian bandfriends.
I’ve no information on the visual and performance turns (perhaps they’re as mysterious and flitting as Sophie-Louise’s lyrics), but I do have some on the other bands. Second from the top slot, Run Logan Run are the gnarly jazz-punk sax-and-drums duo of Andrew Neil Hayes and Dan Johnson. Mingling physical techniques (circular breathing) and technology (rackfuls of electronic effects), they navigate by the brassy light of Colin Stetson (to whom they’ve played support), Pharoah Sanders, Can, Sons of Kemet and Lightning Bolt; and are amassing acclaim not only for their instrumental skills but for the strong, coherent compositions which they use as improvisation launchpads.
The other two bands take self-deprecation to deafening levels. “Awful-sounding post-punk band”LICE love The Country Teasers, The Birthday Party and The Fall, lay claim to “that feeling you get when you accidentally tread on a snail in the dark”, and apparently boast a membership of one piece of drumming eye candy, one indeterminate shouter and flailer, and two makers of horrible noises. Soundcloud evidence actually reveals a tight, nimble art-garage outfit happily switching between drum machine atmospherics, scuffed-up Ventures surf zip and sheets of noise, with Alistair’s beady-eyed chant on top (in some ways, he’s not too far off being a Bristolian Charlie Finke).
Evening openers Sugar Horse bill themselves as “decidedly average” and claim that their entire three-man membership is made up of Steve Harris from Iron Maiden. On the evidence of their lone Bandcamp track, they’re guitar-frost shoegazers with a touch of lonely overwrought drama (think Cure or Oceansize), digressing into monstrous sludge once the singing is over.
Once all of the singing’s over, DJs Dan Johnson and Annie Gardiner will pick up the slack until the small hours; after which you can get ready for…
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Christelle Atenstaedt presents:
Lone Wolves: Silver Waves + theskyisthinaspaperhere + Louise Brady The Old England, 43 Bath Buildings, Montpelier, Bristol, BS6 5PT, England
Saturday 5th November 2016, 8.30pm – free entry – information
Although Christabelle doesn’t seem to be playing at her own brand-new event (either as Twin, or as any other possible persona) the stubborn, inquisitive stamp of her work is all over it. She intends Lone Wolves to be “a night for those who carve a solitary path through the musical wilderness, those who are doing it for themselves and don’t need nobody else. (You get the idea.) I’m aiming to make it a regular thing, and it will be great to put many of you on as I realized I know a lot of people of who are the musical equivalent of loners: also, so many solo people I admire and hope to lure to Bristol.” There’s a promise of visuals, projections and “smoke and mirrors” – it could be a classic séance, and even if they are a good few days behind schedule the dark-ambient tone of this first edition has a definite Halloween hint to it.
As Silver Waves, Dylan Mallett creates turbulent electronic chop’n’change music in which the upfront, feet-first noise menace is offset by dizzying theatrical panache. Tagged by ‘The Quietus ‘ as “industrial music to soundtrack Satan’s own space travels”, a typical track will leap and convulse through jackhammer factory drumming, radio whine, and sweeps of drum & bass (plus diced-in subbass drops) via scything foil-tearing noise, haunted-house bangings and creepy organ. At its most unhinged peaks, Silver Waves sounds like several simultaneous aircraft accidents hitting a chopped-and-screwed beat factory dead on. Even the quieter moments feature random hauntings of tortured sound, with distorted, wrecked and out-of-control noises barging through – a wrenched bell foundry; a careering Friday night train with the brakes off; the sudden scream of a driver skidding off a black-iced road.
An expert in mobile app programming and generative music, sound designer Marcus Dyer helped hone an early Silver Waves EP and played similar roles on both ‘The Spectacular Nowhere’ (Manyfingers chambertronic Moondog tribute in 2015) and Third Eye Foundation’s Matt Elliott’s forays into experiment folk music. As theskyisthinaspaperhere, he steps out into music of his own, creating a meticulous but grandly gestural music founded on live-coded generative and procedural composition techniques, post-rock and ambient electronica.
On debut album ‘Falling to an Ocean’s Floor (Gasping Evermore’, the outcome is music balanced gracefully between nature documentary and Bristolian club culture. Grand folding orchestral passages offer suffocating, morbidly romantic Góreckian deathscapes in sinking bathyspheres, while other tracks take glum, glinting post-Labradford/Morricone guitar melodies and dizzy them up with great swoons of reverberant arrangement (synth vapours and space plummets, sometimes the brisk, no-nonsense rattle of a club drum line or a woody jazz bass slide).
Over a year or so of Soundcloud activity, semi-ambient soundscaper Louise Brady has evolved from dark field drones, hushed Cluster lambency and warm, humming folk ghostings towards more complicated work into which she injects covert, surreptitious nightmare humour. M456 89led Lit V.BASS is a swirling, intermittent bottle-storm; a crowded sinister ambience full of horror movie spook-music tropes and whiffling white noise. On the other hand, tracks like The Beautiful Sounds Of The Microbrute! or Korg Noise see Louise openly, geekily enthused by the sounds that specific bits of her gear collection can make. (Since the former sounds like meditation music invaded by sardonic, sinister Black Lodge spirits, don’t expect this approach to get too cute).
There may still be tickets left for the “glut of experimental and cross-genre artists” descending on Bristol this weekend for the two-day, twenty-band Wakizashi music festival.
The shared brainchild of two Bristolian gig engines – PROBO Titans (who incubate and deliver bi-monthly rock, pop and experimental gigs) and Harry “Iceman” Furniss (restless jazz cornetter and leading fringeman within the Avon jazz underground), Wakizashi offers an exciting, intimate and intelligent spill of psychedelia, noise, post-punk, math rock, jazz strains, electronica and much more.
PROBO Titans & Harry Iceman Furniss present:
Wakizashi Festival:
– Get The Blessing + Hysterical Injury + Twin + Iyabe + Iceman Furniss Quartet + Human Bones + Charivari + Luui + Saltings (Saturday)
– Knifeworld + Edward Penfold + Evil Usses + Milon + Halftone + Drone Soul + Rafael Dornelles Trio + Uther Modes + Perverts (Sunday) The Old Malt House, Little Ann Street, Bristol, BS2 9EB, England
Saturday 22nd & Sunday 23rd October 2016 – starts 1.00pm, Saturday – information here and here
Harry Furniss makes the most of his own involvement by appearing with his Iceman Furniss Quartet. His flowing cornet leads punk-art jazz moves over dogged springy bass rhythms and shuddering No Wave electric-curtain guitar (care of Danny Le Guilcher from Dynamite Pussy Club, whose other career as a printmaker seems to have literally rubbed off on his playing).
Further jazz directions are provided by Saturday’s headliners Get The Blessing (founded sixteen years ago over a mutual appreciation of Ornette Coleman,) provide rumbling, doomy trip-hop-tinged jazz-rock. They boast a rhythm section of art-rock/trip-hop/drum & bass go-to-men Clive Deamer and Jim Barr (who between them have kept the pulse going for Portishead, Radiohead, Hawkwind, Peter Gabriel and Roni Size) plus saxophonist Jake McMurchie (of Michelson Morley) and trumpeter Pete Judge (Eyebrow and Three Cane Whale), with another Portisheader, Adrian Utley, sometimes guesting on guitar. Their music brings along some of the flash and flair of jazz pioneers, but also the sense of being trapped in a small room with a lumbering, powerful inscrutable beast – with an equal chance of being either impressed or squashed.
Post-punk bass/drums/voice duo Hysterical Injury have a toe in the improv scene and a touch of folk. Their recent press tagging as some kind of “better version of Savages” belies the hovering thoughtfulness and the gentle dignity in their music beyond the softly roiling industrial bass textures. Singing bassist Annie Gardiner has a way with the writing and delivery of a surreal, conceptually suggestive lyric which baffles and entrances.
There’s something similarly compelling about the voice of Sophie Dawes, who sings for Iyabe further down the bill. As it was with missing-in-action Delicate AWOL singer Caroline Ross, Annie and Sophie’s voices and words are clear, weightless and elusive – keeping you listening while you try to figure out the messages and hidden narratives floating past in slow streams of isolated moment and fleeting detail.
Regarding Iyabe – considering that they’re a five-piece, they sound remarkably skeletal. Soft pings, drum clicks, bass shadows. At their most expansive, they’re a pencil-sketch ghost of Seefeel’s dub-rock dreaminess: other tracks are a hypnotic rain-drip of slowly growing consciousness. Recent moves towards alliances with remixers, further fleshing out the band’s sound, may point the way forward: but, as with Hysterical Injury, there’s already plenty in place.
Two more of Saturday’s bands provide further dispatches from rock’s dissolving, dreamier side. The mystery brainchild of Christelle Atenstaedt, Twin’s drawn-out one-woman Gothpop offers a wealth of detail in its hypnotic overlaid folk drones and its reverberant, tangled-roots guitar chug, which seems to reference both Cranes and Sandy Denny. With electric cello adding occasional extra texture to a droning, crashing armoury of blood-stained guitar fuzz, Bath-based post-rockers Charivari have a sombre lysergic depth; plus a repertoire of zurna-like Mediterranean melodies to add to their gloaming-murmurs, their evenstar twinkles and their post-Mogwai cascades of noise.
Begun as a solo project by Andrew Cooke (inspired by ancient ghost stories and the concept of the English eerie), Saltings has evolved into a three-piece drone collective. Andrew (plus string players Liz Muir and Caitlin Callahan) gradually unveil an occult soundtrack full of marine and maritime references, maybe as much inspired by Andrew’s origins in the port of Dublin as by the current trio’s Bristol harbouring. Sampler-moulded sounds (noise-grates, hull-knocks, whistles, water-throbs and motors) are enfolded with double bass and cello parts – whispered, minimal elegies for the undetermined; or baleful shadings; or queasy, discombobulated, John Adams-styled loops both shaken and slurred.
The sole hip hop representative on the bill, Luui, rolls out complex, constantly unfolding raps over seductively silky, time-flexed instrumental samples: slurred, narcotic Rhodes piano doodles, bits of glowing solo jazz guitar smeared into something blunted and sinister. Arced out in short, enveloping doses – most of his tracks are over and done in a couple of minutes – it’s both intimate and claustrophobic: a growing autumnal darkness, a slowly moiling confusion.
As Luui harmonises with himself (in subtle dischords), his flow folds over and over onto itself like piling lava, journeying from memories of childhood cheeriness into an increasing broody adult disaffection, shot with regrets, spiked with quick vicious jabs of obscenities and flashes of temper. As with the best, most unsettling confessional rap, you get a crooked window onto Luui’s unresolved world, see him wrestle with his conscience and his instincts and, though you see a little too much of him for comfort, for a while you’re matching breath with him too.
Initially known for upbeat Lou Reed drawls larded with guitar fuzz, Human Bones now seem to be moving towards a languorous cardboard-box take on Americana. Multi-instrumental looper Steve Strong, meanwhile, has set himself up as a one-man trip hop/math rock band, in which much of the emphasis seeming to be on the drum rhythm. See below for his Godspeedian live take on a grim, violent found story of road anarchy, in which his hopeful, orderly and dreamy guitar introduction gives way (under the growing brutality of the tale on tape) to the controlled heat of a drum beat through which he seems to be trying to slough off the increasing horror.
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It’s an odd festival indeed in which Knifeworld (Sunday’s headliners) are virtually the straightest act on the bill. That this is the case says plenty about Wakizashi, but it also says something about where Knifeworld are at the moment. Currently cruising on self-created, sunny psychedelic uplands, the London octet are enjoying a period of relative bliss and (for now) a more familial creative approach, as Kavus Torabi starts to share more of the writing with the crew of expert instrumental heads who make up his band. But if Knifeworld are the closest that the festival comes to pop, it’s still a zestfully spiked pop – brazen and crenellated, filled with monkey panache, their tunes still running exuberantly out of the ears with loopy spirals of melody and unexpected double-backs. If Henry Cow had woken up one morning and decided to steal a march on The Flaming Lips, they couldn’t have done much better than this.
More lysergic hints string through the day via the sleepy, lo-fi acidic pop of Edward Penfold, whose songs and instrumentals halo the everyday with a softly vibrating warmth. Sometimes they hint at a might-have-been Syd Barrett; one who ducked the madness and fled away to a healing West Coast hideaway, sending missives back to Cambridge in a rested, sprawling hand; faint blue ink on pale blue paper. On the other side of the coin are The Evil Usses – a deconstructive, fiercely humorous No Wave jazz-rock quartet, who share some of Knifeworld’s brassy exuberance but take it over the escarpment and down into a stomping, seven-league-booted Beefheart country.
As with Saturday, two fringe full-jazz groups will be taking the stage. Led by saxophonist Dino Christodoulou, Milon are a mostly acoustic quartet, edging into something more speaker-warping via Neil Smith’s electric guitar and Pasquale Votino’s judiciously over-amplified double bass: Eager Legs sounds like Charles Mingus being pursued down a stuck groove by a bounding ball of Sharrock/McLaughlin electric guitar grit, with Dino keeping one hand on the wheel by some riffling, ruffling Coltrane-ish sax lines. While the Rafael Dornelles Trio might have Brazilian roots, don’t expect samba or even Tropicália: electric guitar, bass and drums are aiming for somewhere far more heatedly lyrical and direct. Tunes like Slave’s Escape and Indigenous Mass grab you straight from the title and power off in muscular, quick-sprung directions, with a fierce and formidable vigour (plus a buccaneering hint of the knife).
Saltings’ double bass player Caitlin Callahan returns as one-quarter of part-improvising, part-compositional, female quartet Halftone, alongside two similarly-inclined Bristolians (violinist Yvonna Magda, flautist Tina Hitchens) and a London ally (cellist Hannah Marshall). Formed earlier this year, the foursome play an unsettling, absently beautiful post-classical music evoking wind in the trees, unresolved conversations and difficulties around corners.
Drone Soul boast about their “sheer bleak nihilism” and stake a claim to the abrasive post-punk heritage of The Pop Group. At least part of that’s true – the post-punk bit, anyway – but I’d bat away the nihilistic posturings. This music might be on the dark and cavernous side, but it’s illuminated with a vivid energy which belies the band’s collective grizzliness. If they’re bringing you news of falling buildings or collapsing people, they’re doing it with an exuberant dark snarl. Think of Iggy Pop in-yer-face, think Suicide’s assault-by-sine-wave; and also give a little credit to a lost Bristol band, Lupine Howl, whose gonzo millenial motorik finds a fresh echo here.
Rhodri Karim – the Welsh-Arabian heart of Uther Modes – used to be a mournful pop scientist, making his name with sepulchural computer-pop songs which bobbed gently at the juncture of philosophy, physics and bedsit soul. More recently he’s swapped this for a new kind of songcraft, strapping up a bass guitar and pulling in other musicians. Now he reels out shifting part-sombre part-jazzy mutters, winding slate-grey but sensual vocals around echoing guitar curlicues; like a fresh breed of post-rock which refuses to stagnate and instead flexes its muscles and goes haring around the park.
While he can sometimes be found paddling around in the warm, shallow pools of downtempo electronica, Traces will shake the drips off his feet once he’s warmed up enough. His studio recordings are fine, but it’s his live improvisations that show him at full strength. They’re heart-warmingly intimate and cheery stretches of pick-you-up synthery – like an enthusiastic half-drunken 2am conversation between Max Tundra and Guy Sigsworth, following which they track down Jean-Michel Jarre, drag him away from his pyramids and lasers and force him back into a kitchen full of analogue keyboards. From tabletop synth noodles to Pong blip and cheekily squirting techno, a cunning wonkiness prevails without diminishing the music’s straightforward ambition. Traces sometimes labels it “devotional”, and I’m not entirely sure that he’s joking.
Finally, there’s the fall-apart electronic gagpunk of Perverts, with their squalling songs about angry muppets and guilty onanists; their one-finger clickstab of synth drums; their beady-eyed sampler-shreddings of lachrymose film music. I guess that they’re there to remind musicians and punters alike not to take it all too seriously. It’s just that they’re staring me out a little too intently. On record, at least, Perverts deliver their spoofs and squibs with a crazed and chilly eye: a brattier Residents with a crappier laptop; a young digital Punch waiting to knock everything down.
I was only intending this post and the last one to be brief… I was going to quickly cover the upcoming Kiran Leonard tour and a couple of avant-prog dates in Yorkshire and London, but looking deeper into the latter meant that a whole lot of other dates and bands came springing out at me, as if I’d hit a tripwire.
Such are the ways of digging around for live previews for ‘Misfit City’ without a map or all of the details… I often come back with information on artists and venues I’ve never heard of before. (It’s exhilarating, and an education in itself, but it plays hell with my schedule.)
Anyway…
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Following their last UK visit (in October last year), Sax Ruins return for another go. The most active current version of the Ruins project (an ever-altering minimal-maximal mash-up of jazz, prog and avant-rock ideas centred, for three decades, around Japanese drummer and vocalist Tatsuya Yoshida) Sax Ruins features Tatsuya alongside Ryorchestra saxophone improviser Ryoko Ono in a spilling, furious, brassy power duo augmented by a battery of effects pedals, covering all bases from skronk to Rock In Opposition and big-band jazz across written and improvised material of baffling complexity.
The London show also features a set by what’s billed as “Ruins” – this is most probably a “Ruins-alone” drums-and-tapes set by Tatsuya rather than a spontaneous revival of the band’s original bass-and-drums lineup (unless a secret call’s gone out for ambitious London bass guitarists to step up and cover).
Exchange, 72-73 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EJ, England, Wednesday 17th August 2016, 7.30pm (with Barberos + Big Naturals & Anthroprophh) – information
Delius Arts & Cultural Centre, 29 Great Horton Road, Bradford, BD7 1AA, England, Thursday 18th August 2016, 7.00pm (with Barberos + a.P.A.t.T. + That Fucking Tank) – information here and here
The Car Park Space, 45-51 Duke Street, Liverpool, L1 5AP, England, Friday 19th August 2016, time t.b.c. (with Barberos) – information
Doune The Rabbit Hole Festival, Cardross Estate, Port of Menteith, Doune, FK8 3JY , Scotland, Saturday 20th August 2016 (with Barberos)
Islington Mill Arts Centre, James Street, Salford, M3 5HW, England, Sunday 21st August 2016, 5.00pm (with Barberos + a.P.A.t.T. + Massicot) – information
Along the tour, Sax Ruins are embracing and encouraging a set of post-Ruins bands. Support on all dates comes from Barberos – drumtronic electro-noise experimentalists from Liverpool. Live (and they’re very much a live concern), they resemble a trio convocation of nuclear power station workers and fetish gimps. A pair of kit drummers, swathed in or vacformed into latex bodysuits and full-head masks, batter away in parallel like wrestling brain hemispheres. A single begoggled head-nodding keyboard player exploits a baffling range of electronic organ sounds. Any or all of them can suddenly burst into cloth-muffled shouting. The sound varies from full-clog percussive noise-traps (the kind that’ll have you wondering whether the band’s deliberately using the wrong definition of “jam”), through to passing plateaux of psychedelic reflection and still points of droning, delicate hush.
In Bristol, both bands are joined by Big Naturals & Anthroprophh – a two-plus-one alliance featuring the noise-rock duo team of bass/electronic warper Gareth Turner and motorik-attack drummer Jesse Webb (Big Naturals) and rogue psychedelic sludge player Paul Allen from longstanding Bristolian psych-stoners The Heads. While it’s ostensibly Paul who travels under the Anthroprophh solo moniker, it’s increasingly unclear where the boundary lies between Anthroprophh and the partner duo, or whether there’s a boundary at all. Best to treat all three as a collective entity delivering a frowning fuzzed wall of experimental psychedelia: a ritual of heavy bricking.
Chipping in at Bradford and Salford (though, oddly enough, not at the Car Park show) are a.P.A.t.T., the deft and enigmatic gang of Liverpudlians who deliver a rolling multi-media extravaganza best described as “serious pranking”, and who skip around multiple musical styles in a boiling froth of play. Via their loose collective membership, they have family connections with a host of other Liverpool bands (including Barberos) but no-one ever seems to have sat down and laid out who’s who behind the pseudonyms and lab coats, the puffs of suspect facial hair and the occasional maskwork. Perhaps refraining to pin them down and pull them apart counts as a mark of respect.
Similarly, it’s difficult to summarise or bottle a.P.A.t.T. via anything that’s definitely representative, although tagging them as a Scouse spin on the methodology of The Residents is perhaps as good as anything. However, if you take a quick delve into the plinketting synth-pop minimalism and jazz operatics of Give My Regards To Bold St (with its playful am-dram video of everyday banality set against urban terrorism), their atmosphere/installation piece Seachimes or the Devo-esque Yes… That’s Positive (the last of which displays the punchy musicianship behind the art-school stunts) you might get an idea of how they work.
Also playing at the Bradford show are deafeningly loud drumkit-and-baritone-guitar duo That Fucking Tank, whose abrasive DIY noise rock has quaked venues from Yorkshire to China for nearly a decade and a half now. As with plenty of contemporary bass-end-plus-drums rock twosomes, you can track down a bit of Ruinous DNA in their work (alongside that of Nomeansno and Lightning Bolt), though they seem to be as much inspired by the nodding insouciant momentum of electronic dance as they do by any Rock In Opposition or post-hardcore ideas.
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At the Salford show, the Sax Ruins tour collides with (and briefly joins forces with) a different one by Genevan art-punks Massicot. Named after an electric paper cutter, the latter are a loose and twitchy four-woman array of scratch and propulsion. They pump out charming sophisti-primitive rhythmic instrumentals in which slice-happy guitar and lunging sproings of toy bass are decorated by squeaky violin and barky vocals, all of it bouncing atop a mattress of intricate drumming which apparently prides itself on a blend of “Krautrock and tropicalia”. All of the members draw on shared backgrounds of fine-art schooling and years of instinctive, untutored pre-Massicot bandwork (which, in drummer Colline Grosjean, has resulted in the creation of at least one accidental virtuoso).
Massicot’s music relies on maintaining and capturing the open-minded approach of the original improvisations which generate it, avoiding polish or emblandening; as a result, it keeps its instinctive, childlike sense of motion and immediacy. This kind of restless work – fizzing in a fug of assertive, iconoclastic female spontaneity – always gets the Slits and Raincoats names chucked at it, as well as that of No Wave: Massicot, however, pull off the trick or the triumph of making it sound like a fresh oblique discovery. For the curious, their first two albums – plus a demo – are available for free/pay-what-you-like at their Bandcamp site.
Here are the Massicot dates:
Wharf Chambers, 23-25 Wharf Street, Leeds, LS2 7EQ, England, Thursday 18th August 2016, 2.00pm (with Guttersnipe + t.b.c.)- information
Islington Mill Arts Centre, James Street, Salford, M3 5HW, England, Sunday 21st August 2016, 5.00pm (with Sax Ruins + Barberos + a.P.A.t.T.) – information
Rammel Club @ The Chameleon Arts Cafe, Newcastle Chambers, 17A Angel Row, City Centre, Nottingham NG1 6HL, England, Monday 22nd August 2016, 8.00pm (with Rattle + Negative Midas Touch) – information
Exchange, 72-73 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EJ, England, Tuesday 23rd August 2016, 7.30pm – information
Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England, Wednesday 24th August 2016, 8.00pm (with Housewives) – information
The Cavern, 83-84 Queen Street, Exeter, EX4 3RP, England, Saturday 26th August 2016, 8.00pm (with Housewives) – information
The Blue Moon, 2 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, CB1 2LF, England, Sunday 27th August 2016, 7.00pm (with Housewives + The Furious Sleep) – information
As with Sax Ruins, Massicot will be trailed and complemented by fellow travellers of one kind or another up and down the land. At London, Brighton, Exeter and Cambridge, the support comes from powerful, broody London four-piece Housewives. Noise-rock favourites since their formation in 2013, playing dissonant tectonic music with a future-chaos tinge on home-made guitars, the band mingle their rumbling No-Wave/no certainties approach and surging, forbidding dynamics with an adaptive and pragmatic artistic practicality, making drawbacks and serendipity a strong part of the process.
For instance, when their 2015 recording sessions at a remote country farm in France ran into trouble, Housewives salvaged them with a site-specific ingenuity entirely in tune with their musical ethos. With interference from the farm’s electric fence preventing proper recording of electric guitars and basses, the band postponed those particular tasks for another time and place and switched instead to working with the farm’s fabric rather than against it – making spontaneous field recordings; generating feedback models of the farm architecture by looping its ambient sounds; interacting with agricultural machinery by layering found items for percussion or playing reverberant drumkit parts from inside silage tanks. (The end results, with the guitars added from later and elsewhere, can be heard on their 2015 album ‘Work’. All this and a hint of Samuel Beckett, too.)
At Cambridge, there’ll be extra support from windstripped local post-punk ranters The Furious Sleep and at Brighton from Soft Walls, the psychedelic echo-pop/“Krauty bedroom noise” solo project by Cold Pumas/Faux Discx man Dan Reeves (which played at this year’s Lewes Psychedelic Festival).
In Leeds, Massicot will be joined by two bands. The only one that’s actually confirmed right now are mysterious local noiseniks Guttersnipe, who seem to have blown up (in all senses) this year. Consisting of cuddly, pseudonymously-frenzied couple Xyloxopa Violaxia and Bdallophytum Oxylepis, they’re a desperate lash-together of fragmenting volcanic drums, edge-of-unbearable guitar, flaying-knife electronics and blind, screeching, ranting vocals. In interviews, they talk up a cheery storm about black-metal fandom and deconstructive anti-technique. In action, they sound like a violent and querulous nervous breakdown, being bounced to pieces down an endless set of spiral staircases.
At Nottingham, two gigmates have been confirmed. Rattle are a warm, post-punkified union of double drum-set and conversational, exploring anti-pop vocal from Kogumaza‘s Katharine Eira Brown and Fists‘ Theresa Wrigley, whose air of distracted discovery belies their strategic percussive planning. (Read more details on both that and the Rattle mindset here.) Also on board is the writhing, sibilant, whispering one-woman power-electronics concern Negative Midas Touch, completing a lineup which renders the Notts gig an all-female experimentation zone.
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Iyabe present:
Misfit City 