A couple of gigs happening at Electrowerkz demonstrate that the noisy, beaty, psychedelic end of things is alive and in rude health in London. In such rude health, in fact, that I’m not even sure that they need me to provide this last-week/last-fortnight push, but I’ll just briefly go through the details anyway…
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Ripping the can open on the 25th January is Baba Yaga’s Hut’s Fun House show, an expansion of the launch of the third album by noise-band-cum-two-man-sound-system Gum Takes Tooth (keyboardist/vocalist Jussi Brightmore and percussionist Tom Fug). Preoccupied by the ravenous, toxic/intoxicated development frenzies which envelop contemporary cities (and not least the Aldgate neighbourhood where Jussi’s been working), ‘Arrow’ is a turnaround from GTT’s previous cosmic flights, dropping back to street level and to a more urgent, less indulgent headspace which they define as centring around “gentrification, uncertainty, self-empowerment” as well as meditations on the incitements to tribal violence and competition which become ever louder in the current environment.
More on all of that in this recent ‘Wire’ article; a sample of what’s to come is below.
Gum Takes Tooth, 2018
In support are growling, echoey sax-and-clang drone-rockers Sex Swing, whom I described last time around as “inhabit(ing) a post-Can, post-Suicide hinterland of hell, spring-echoed and tannoy-vocaled – a sinister quotidian landscape of blank anomie and oppression; a Los Alamos penal colony haunted by uranium ghosts, ancient Morse telegraphs, metal fatigue and the zombie husks of Albert Ayler and Ian Curtis.” (I must have been feeling a bit excitable.)
Also on hand are made-up-on-the-spot dirty-techno act Coldnose (acid house turned sharling acid factory), Factory Floor/Kaito/Carter Tutti Void person and cut-up industrial electronicist Nik Colk Void; plus the mysterious Michael (one of those unknown acts whom Baba Yaga regularly pluck out of the darkness which only they know about).
Over in the side room there’s a cluster of successive DJs from sympathetic bands and labels – Rocket Recordings’ own Chris Reeder, plus Rikard from Flowers Must Die, Valentina Magaletti from Tomaga, G&T (from Luminous Bodies / Melting Hand) and what may well be the whole of avant-techno rockers Teeth Of The Sea.
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On the 2nd February, noisejazzmetalprogfolkoustic promoters Chaos Theory (responsible for the Facemelter, Whispers & Hurricanes and Jazz Market) spend a day celebrating their nine-year-anniversary. Remarkable to think that they’ve been going that long without burnout – it must have something to do with the fact that main Chaosician Kumal Singh’s personal outlook seems to be as sunny as his bill choices are often gnarly, dark and/or earshredding. Loudness therapy, perhaps. At any rate, Chaos Theory has two rooms full of their favoured freaks; lit and otherwise illustrated by Emily Bailey, dotted with artwork by Sagui and also featuring a virtual reality installation by Nicola Plant.
Unsurprisingly, the fourteen-band lineup they’ve prepared feature a number of acts who’ve danced through previous ‘Misfit City’ posts. I’m already familiar with drums-and-noise “happenings” inciters Sly & The Family Drone (with their all-in approach to audience drumming participation), the triple-headed avant-garde women’s sketchpad V Ä L V Ē (with their scope running from reed-honking prog to post-punk glee singalongs to homemade instrumentation – see multiple posts passim), and convoluted Zappa-esque stunt-brass rockers The Display Team (who take the business of living up to their name pretty seriously, but don’t take much else very seriously). Among those I haven’t covered yet, I know that Medway post-rockers Upcdownc have been plying their grand noise since 2005: always looming on the sidelines. I also now know that although Cold In Berlin‘s name makes them sound as if they’re an earnest neoprog band trying to rip off John Le Carre, they’re actually grand-scale post-punkers adding hallucinatory body to their songs via textural guitar like a muezzin’s nightmare.
I’m less familiar with the knot of assorted metallics in the middle. Heavy Essex doomproggers Earthmass; cosmologically/geometrically-preoccupied Sheffield mathboys Body Hound (featuring former members of Rolo Tomassi and Antares); sludge-stoners Prisa Mata, female-fronted slowgrinder duo Bismuth; cross-country prog-metallers PSOTY. But for me, a little metal generally goes a long way, and I’m more interested in the other sounds spicing the mix. Enigmatic, theatrical electronic performer UKAEA (half of Gun Cleaner) seems to swing wildly between pelting techno dance sets on the one hand and ranting performance art (complete with masked violinists) on the other. Then there are the acts which have spilled in from acoustic-ish CT clubnight Whispers & Hurricanes – hammered-dulcimer-toting Fear Of The Forest frontwoman Kate Arnold and jazz harpist Tori Handley. Experimental mood cellist Jo Quail flits mysteriously between gigs in churches and disreputable art cellars like this one, has fairly recently put out a heavy-metal-influenced album called ‘Exsolve’ and will be working up a new project for the 9 Years show (although, given the involvement of various people from Wren, it will presumably be some kind of stately sludge-tone…)
Central to the occasion, though, is Gothic dream-pop siren Evi Vine, who’s using the occasion to launch her ‘Black/Light/White/Dark’ album (including contributions from various Cure men and Nephilim-ites, if you’re familiar with your hats’n’backcombing icons.)
A wall of Chaosnoise follows for those who wanted to keep up with the metal from earlier in the post…
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Dates:
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Fun House: Gum Takes Tooth + Sex Swing + Nik Void + Michael + Coldnose + various DJs Electrowerkz, 7 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Friday 25th January 2019, 9.00pm – information here and here
Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
9 Years Of Chaos Festival Electrowerkz, 7 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Saturday 2nd February 2019, 2.00pm– information here, here and here
With eight years of noisy, complicated, wallpushing music under the bonnet, London happening-makers Chaos Theory are celebrating with a two-pm-to-two-am alldayer at the start of February, featuring the pick of their past few years of concerts.
Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
‘8 Years of Chaos: Celebrating Eight Years of Music for Open Minds’ The Brewhouse @ London Fields Brewery, 369-370 Helmsley Place, South Hackney, London, E8 3SB, England
Saturday 3rd February 2018, 2.00pm – information here, here and here
As a foundation, expect plenty of of time-signature-skipping, dynamic shifts and steely guitar work from a mass of loud experimental-progressive rock bands, mostly sandwiched between eight-wheeled prog/garage roarers The Fierce & The Dead and cunning tales-of-the-unexpected heavy post-proggers Thumpermonkey. Predominantly (if not entirely) instrumental, these include revitalised Brighton math-metallers Poly-Math, jumpy slammers Flies Are Spies From Hell and the epic goth-toned Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster, plus grand grunge/prog/metal heavies Sümer.
The earlier part of the day will see classical fusion and more experimental, free-floating performers. Mystical avant-cello darling Jo Quail will be playing a set, as will electro-acoustic post-classicalist Lucy Claire. Oliver Barrett’s devotional-drone project Petrels will make an appearance in full band format, while the festival’s opening slot goes to Prometheus & The Satyrs: a new permutation of the work of Spyros Giasafakis and Evi Stergiou (who, as Daemonia Nymphe, have been reworking ancient Greek instruments and music into new part-improvised dark-blurred pieces like an Athenian Dead Can Dance).
As the day wears on, though, things will get hairier and the music gradually heavier and more ritualistic via slots from baleful screaming sludge-metallers Wren, Kentish metalcore men Harrowed, head-against-the-wah-pedal psychedelic noise-metallers Casual Nun and hot-rodding motorik chanters Taman Shud. Towards the end, the infamous Sly & The Family Drone squad will be simultaneously on and offstage. A free-play shufflezone of border-crashing electronics, feedback and occasional horns, they hand out their drums to the audience as part of a mutual meld of inspiration and noisemaking. Drones, blares, convulsions and fragments usually ensue.
The electronics-and-drums duo who are playing as the closing act used to rejoice in the pretty hideous provocateur name of Shitwife. Since then (and post-Pussygate) they’ve grown up a bit, have opted to represent heart and community over nose-tweaking and nihilistic offence, and have been blazing on since June last year as Big Lad. From the early days as an “astonishingly brutal drums/laptop/electronics juggernaut fusing rave, death metal, noise and post-hardcore”, they’re now sleekening into a sunnier, more ecstatic outfit: still slopping out welters of in-your-face noise, but now letting their rave ethics flush through in a setful of “high octane party bangers” and in their desire to become “the band that brings the biggest, rudest party to as many people as possible… we want you to be able to meet awesome new people at the shows and hopefully start sharing important ideas about how we can combat the fuckers that are causing real damage!” It should be an ideal Chaos Theory signoff: blitzing noise meets communal joy.
While there’s a powerful taste of CT’s Facemelter and Whispers & Hurricanes nights here (the metal and the woods) there’s not quite so much from their Jazz Market side to hand. Never mind: there’s only so many hours available – and there’ll be more of everything in the coming year. There’s also a plentiful supply of live-at-Chaos-Theory event clips below, (plus a few borrowings from elsewhere) to get you in the mood…
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).
Progpostdronedoomcrunchmathdustrial… the syllables pile up as densely as the riffs. In two of several gig nights they’re running in April, Chaos Theory look at heavy rock music from several very different perspectives via six different exemplar bands. Sounds range across lashing, flowering mathematical shapes; blunt, dragging post-hardcore rage; exuberant fence-jumping stunt-twists; ornate psychedelic temple mysteries layered in sitar, flute and chanting; and complex-but-direct racing angst.
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Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
Telepathy + ZAUM + Wren The Black Heart, 2-3 Greenland Place, Camden Town, London, NW1 0AP, England
Thursday 6th April 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
“Telepathy play post-metal with a unique edge that engages fans of heavy riffs and haunting atmosphere alike. From humble beginnings at early versions of The Facemelter many years ago, to performances with Oathbreaker, Rosetta, Year Of No Light, and festival performances at Incubate and DesertFest, the Colchester-based four-piece have carved out quite a following across Europe. Tonight, expect to hear brand new material from their new LP ‘Tempest’, produced by Jaime Gomez Arellano (Paradise Lost, Cathedral, Ulver).
“ZAUM are a monolithic doom, mantra-based psychedelic experience, featuring bass and drums merged with sitar and synth textures, layered with melodic vocals and Mongolian throat singing. The huge impression they’ve left on post-metal, drone, post-rock and doom fans from gigs including Incubate Festival have gained them attention from bands such as OM, Sleep and Ufomammut. This is the duo’s fourth European tour, celebrating the release of their latest album ‘Eidolon’.
“Wren are a powerhouse of raw, controlled fury. This London band flawlessly combine the aesthetics of post-metal pioneers, the bleakness and control of ambient doom and the unbridled rage of sludge metal. Over the years, they’ve tested the waters with a couple of shows at The Facemelter, a few short UK tours, and more recently have begun their climb through the ranks with the release of their latest EP ‘Host’ via Holy Roar Records, support slots with Minsk, Kowloon Walled City, Bossk, Rough Hands and Bad Guys, and a gig at the famed Incubate Festival in the Netherlands. If ever a band encompassed seething angst that’s moments away from bubbling over the surface, this is it.”
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Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
Alpha Male Tea Party + Valerian Swing + Asian Death Crustacean Birthdays, 33-35 Stoke Newington Road, Dalston, London, N16 8BJ, England
Friday 28th April 2017, 7.00pm – information here and here
“Fans of riffs and odd time signatures! Get ready for a hell of a big night!
“Hailed as both “tear-jerkingly beautiful” and “18-carat fun” by ‘Rock Sound‘, Alpha Male Tea Party‘s explosively upbeat guitar-driven rock has made them legends in the math rock scene. We’ve enjoyed them at ArcTanGent, Dunk!festival, StrangeForms Festival and Handmade Festival, and after a healthy dose of national and international tours, they continue to be a band that gets better and better. Their new album ‘Health’ is out this year.
“Described as “borderline insane, wildly syncopated, and above all- precise” by ‘Echoes And Dust‘, Valerian Swing are an eclectic and experimental math rock trio from Italy. With a couple of stupendously good albums, European and American tours and an SXSW appearance under their belts. They have an insatiable appetite for playing live, and can’t see any better reason than for the release of their upcoming album ‘Nights’.
“Formed in the Midlands in late 2013 from an unlikely fusion of various projects, the four-piece Asian Death Crustacean channels post-rock, extreme metal, jazz and ambient/electronic music into extended instrumental compositions. Having spent three years refining their sound and playing shows in the Midlands and London, culminating in headlining a UK tour in summer 2016, they’re now focused on recording their debut album. Very impressive live and we can’t wait for them to get themselves on record!”
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I’d got a couple of upcoming and nationalistically-inclined gigs to consider. The first of these, a Cornish music celebration, was an easygoing patriot’s-cream-tea of an afternoon, opting to put fun ahead of political confrontation. The second of the events – the Norwegian three-day London music festival By Norse – raises tougher questions almost from the start. Buying into the idea of “harder music’s position as Norway`s most important cultural export” isn’t a problem, as long as your idea of culture embraces extreme varieties of heavy metal. (For plenty of us, it does.) Outside of the Scandinavian peninsula, however, it’s a little more challenging to be asked to buy into the concept of old Nordic traditions of pure native paganism, standing firm against the corruption of an imported and state-imposed Christianity.
The two main artists behind By Norse – both of whom do buy into all of the above – are Ivar Bjørnson (of extreme metallers Enslaved) and Einar Selvik (of dark-folk project Wardruna, who blend their post-heavy-metal ethos with the use of ancient Scandinavian historical instruments – including deer-hide frame drums, tail-hair lyres, and goat and lur horns – as well as sourcing sound from trees, rocks, water and pitch torches). Most of Ivar and Einar’s shared beliefs and preoccupations have come together in ‘Skuggsjá’, the conceptual song-suite which they’ve written together and which they’re performing as part of By Norse this week with a united Wardruna/Enslaved ensemble. As they themselves describe it, the work is “commissioned to commemorate – and castigate – the 200th anniversary of Norway’s constitution, which took place last year, the suite is a furious journey into the dark reaches of Norwegian history. A counterweight to the enshrining of Christianity as the national religion and a harsh light on the atrocities committed in its name, its white-knuckle journey through innumerable musical moods is also a reminder of the rich pagan culture that was lost as a result…. ‘Skuggsjá’ translates into ‘mirror’ or ‘reflection’ in the Norse language, and the piece not only contextualizes harder music’s role in Norwegian democracy, but also joins threads from the country’s ancient musical history…”
There’ll be more on ‘Skuggsjá’ a little further down, but the following Einar-and-Ivar event at Camden’s Forge is the By Norse aspect which first drew my own attention and interest (and which, as I post this, is down to the last few tickets):
London By Norse/Metal Hammer present:
Einar Selvik workshop (‘The Thoughts and Tools Behind Wardruna’) + Ivar Bjørnson’s BardSpec The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Friday 18th March 2016, 6.00pm – more information
“At this Forge event, Einar Selvik will speak about his approach to Norse historical music and the extensive creative concept behind Wardruna’s ongoing ‘Runaljod’ trilogy as well as his approach and study of the runes and other Norse esoteric arts. He will demonstrate a selection of the oldest Nordic instruments, play fully acoustic Warduna music and there will be opportunities for questions from the audience.
“Ivar Bjørnson will also be performing as his immersive electro-ambient project The BardSpec, which features the set-up of Ivar, his computer, a few strings, plus a pedal or two (and sometimes a trapeze artist). The direction is dark, surprisingly rhythmic and hypnotic. Thematically, in both sound and concept, The BardSpec is about minimising – cutting away, subtracting and meditating upon the simplest essence of ‘things’; the single points, bones and salt particles, the basic elements and building blocks that make up the whole.”
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There’s some historical truth – not to mention dignity – in the neo-pagan position and in some of these neo-Viking rumblings. In times when more and more people are querying the long-standing cultural reflexes they live under – and becoming sceptical about the alleged benevolence of world-spanning systems – this is a local, specifically Norwegian example of pursuing a less industrialised identity. In Britain, music followers who’ve kept a long-term faith with the transformative cultural odyssey of Julian Cope (from beat pop to shamanism) are used to him rattling off tracts of anti-Christian Odinist rhetoric, exploring pagan ideas in song, and using them to raise questions about what British culture might be. In Norway, however, these matters are closer to their original home and bite a little deeper.
If you want to treat these ideas with proper respect, you need to unhook them from some of the more shadowy, ominous attitudes associated with Norwegian black metal during the 1990s, when (in spates of ferocious misanthropy and rejection of contemporary society) some of its adherents travelled from politically-motivated Christian church burnings to anti-outlander racism, death-cult derangements, hate-prejudice and even murders. Under certain conditions, this culture – with its core of masculine romanticism – can succumb to the erosive lapping of a vicious and half-disguised nihilism. This isn’t something unique to Norway or even to black metal culture. It’s something held in common with plenty of dissatisfied movements with cores of action-seeking males who overturn common laws in favour of a different, structured and self-empowering ethos regardless of a negative impact on others. Something which it also holds in common with belligerent nationalism.
As you’ve guessed by now, I’m sceptical… but I’m also inclined to give Einar and Ivar the benefit of the doubt. Despite their suggestions that unfavourable reviews or practical frustrations of their projects are the machinations of “Christian monks” (which might just be deadpan heavy-metal humour), their work seems to be rooted in an earnest, honourable and artistically committed place. Their dedication to their music (and their interest in how it evolves and how it draws on an interesting past, rather than continuously warming over a sterile present) is clear and evident, and they don’t appear to be motivated by smouldering surliness. Certainly there’s warrior rhetoric, and some battle lines declared; but all of it has been subsumed into music, engagement and open debate rather than hooded, ugly social violence. They might be interested in unravelling some aspects of the world as we know it, but constructively: not as a wanton teardown.
You could also, of course, argue that Einar and Ivar’s philosophical stances and their co-opting of history are mostly about building a brand: that the paganism and protest primarily constitute an art project and a commercial push. Approximately two-thirds of the music in the By Norse gigs features Ivar, and most of that is with Enslaved; suggesting in turn that perhaps (fanbase notwithstanding) this scene, its impetus and its artistic adherents are smaller in number than might be desired, especially when presenting a festival. Perhaps that’s true as well: but all art movements start relatively small, at which point enthusiasm and dedication matters, and integrity is measured by the consistency of the work.
With that in mind, I’m going to stop musing and just post details on the other By Norse concert dates – the ‘Skuggsjá’ performance and the three-night celebration of Enslaved’s career, from black metal beginnings to their current psych-eclectic form.
Enslaved 25 Night 1 – ‘…Of Frost And Fire’: Enslaved + Vulture Industries, The Dome, 2A Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park, London, N19 5QQ, England, Thursday 17th March 2016, 8.30pm – more information
Enslaved 25 Night 2 – ‘From The Runic Depths’: Enslaved + Helheim, The Underworld, 174 Camden High Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 0NE, England, Friday 18th March 2016, 8.30pm – more information
Enslaved 25 Night 3 – ‘Spinning Wheel Ritual’ show – Skuggsjá + Enslaved + Wardruna + Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal (art exhibition), The Coronet, 28 New Kent Road, Elephant & Castle, London, SE1 6TJ, England, Saturday 19th March 2016, 6.00pm – more information
Regarding each night of Enslaved music, Ivar Bjørnson says “’…Of Frost And Fire’ represents the quintessence of Enslaved roots. From the legendary ‘Hordanes Land’ with its soundtrack-esque musical long players, via the vast geomythological canvases painted on ‘Vikingligr Veldi’; the revolutionary ‘Frost’ that lifted us out of the strict underground; and finally the odd pair – ‘Eld’, which pointed forward to a progressive future, and ‘Blodhemn’, where we had a last blowout of black metal tempos and inspiration. For anyone curious about where such an eclectic band like Enslaved came from, this will be a first-hand guided tour through the primeval landscapes that shaped us.
“‘From The Runic Depths’ will explain the unlikely yet logical transition from then until now. From the nightmarish flirt with death and black on ‘Mardraum – Beyond The Within’; the spaced-out balancing act that is ‘Monumension’; the milestone and futuristic beacon ‘Below The Lights’; ‘Isa’, the second break for the band; and finally the refined prog-vs-extreme monument ‘Ruun’.
“‘Spinning Wheel Ritual’ is where the band wields together the dark roots with the psychedelic fabrics of the newer days – bringing to the surface the true potential of our songwriting and musical abilities. The focus is the same as it has always been – to bring to life our personal vision of whatever ‘good and meaningful music’ means to us, to create a vessel for atmosphere, deep association and simple enjoyment of music.”
Support on Night 1 comes from introspective Bergen progressive black metal band Vulture Industries, who describe their work as “dark, heavy rock vistas bent and twisted into living entities embodying the width and breadth of human emotion.” Support on the second date is by Helheim whose Viking black metal draws heavily on Norse mythology. On the third night, Wardruna will be performing a set of their own, making their second-ever appearance in the UK following an acclaimed Southbank Centre gig back in autumn 2013.
The last part of the third-night show will be a performance of ‘Skuggsjá’ featuring all members of both Enslaved and Wardruna, plus visuals by reknowned extreme metal artist Costin Chioreanu (who’s previously collaborated with At The Gates, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Arcturus among others). This will be only the third performance of the piece to date, following its September 2014 premiere at the Eidsivablot festival at Eidsvoll (where the constitution was originally written) and its subsequent performance at the Roadburn Festival earlier this year.
It will also be a release celebration for the release of the ‘Skuggsjá’ album on Season Of Mist Records, which came out the previous week (on 11th March).
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One more thing. As you’ve read, another aspect of that final show will be an exhibition of artwork by Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal, the former Gorgoroth/current God Seed frontman who’s also a Wardruna studio member. Historically, Gaahl has been one of the more controversial figures in Scandinavian extreme metal: when at home, he’s even transcended the public anonymity of the metal scene to become an occasional tabloid bogeyman. It’s certainly true that he’s come on an interesting, turbulent and confrontational journey.
For part of the picture, you’re advised to check out some of his more unpleasant mid-‘90s pronouncements on race (here and here) – you don’t have to be a Christian, or even particularly staid and self-righteous, to find this stuff alarming. Set against this is the much more easygoing way in which Gaahl revealed his own homosexuality a decade later. While it would be a little crass to suggest that Gaahl was Scandi-metal’s Malcolm X, there’s certainly a suggestion that, like Malcolm, he’s learning as he goes: making a journey from rage into something more sophisticated: staying true to his history and mistakes while not letting them constrict him, or peg him to blunt anger and inhumanity.
It seems to be that the truth of all of this – the conflux of paganism and nationalism, the engagement of anger and art – is likely to be a tricky knot to unwind, and one which I’ll leave there for now. Perhaps these gigs are worth attending for the thrilling roar alone, with the complexities to be worked out later, Go and discover, if you’re interested, but I’m sure that Einar and Ivar – and Gaahl too – would want you to go in with your eyes and ears fully open.
If you’re in or around Brighton this weekend with kids on your hands, and if you quite like the idea of them growing up to be lateral-thinking and freaky (I’d quite like that myself), here’s an all-ages event for you at a local community centre. No booze on offer, but you can bring your own.
Blurt date back to 1979, when restless self-styled “colonial brat” Ted Milton (by then in his mid-thirties) became disillusioned with his longstanding work as a professional puppeteer, which his restless and non-conformist spirit had been increasingly warping into audience-alienating Jarry-esque provocateur moves. Forming a Situationist rock trio presented a better opportunity for him to realize his aims for spontaneous expression, incorporating his neophyte Ornette Coleman-inspired sax playing, his improvised dancing and his spoken-word poetry (inspired by the Beats, the 1960s Liverpool scene and the Soviet school).
A strange mixture of sharp existentialist grit and whimsical Dada self-indulgence, Blurt have been out on a limb of their own ever since. Post-punk veterans who possess deeper roots in 1960s consciousness expansion and anti-authoritarianism, they joined the post-punk scene through chance, time and circumstance rather than affinity. Their music is a mixture of simple, jabbing musical figures and nail-tight drumming, with space for Ted to declaim or improvise freely on top. Now in his seventies, he’s still declaiming, dancing and blowing at the front of a lineup which currently features guitarist Steve Eagles and drummer Dave Aylward.
In support are a collection of kindred-spirit Brightonians offering a variety of music from the straight to the out. At the straighter end, The Sticks provide cheery, spindly country-garage, but beyond that things become a little more eccentric. Coming across like the Sylvanian Families as abducted by Captain Beefheart, The Glugg perform in animal masks and sound like a threshing querulous lo-fi blues disaster that can’t be bothered to get out of bed. Variously described as “a local industrial complex” and “a noise-punk charter team” their racketing guitar, china-pig organ and wino vocals stumble over saxophone, harmonica, biscuit-tin drums and broken-telegraph slide in a welter of fake spaghetti themes and disintegrating rhythms.
Completing the bill, husband-and-wife tape-and-voice duo Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance make an appearance in their intermittent Dada-sound-experimentalist Blood Stereo guise. They’re like a Krautrock take on Ligeti: eerie sonic backdrops merge with pastoral electronic squiggles (a touch of the Cluster-ine), panting/yammering vocal sounds and carefully-recorded disruptions of function (violins with cello strings, incomplete mechanisms).
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Back in London, there’s still a few tickets left for this one…
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Terminal Cheesecake + Taman Shud + Khünnt The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Saturday 20th February, 8.00pm – more information
Terminal Cheesecake were amongst the protagonists in the “arsequake” movement of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in which chaotic bass-heavy British and European bands, inspired by the acid-juddered noisework and unhinged stage shows of American hardcore acts like Butthole Surfers or Jesus Lizard, grabbed that noisy baton and vigorously rammed it upwards through sampling, dub, hip hop and homegrown psychedelia. Standing out even amongst the hedonism and loud-living of their contemporaries for an exceptionally druggy, “fools at the gates of excess and wisdom” image (and sometimes falling foul of venue chains who didn’t appreciate their orgiastic performances and following), the band originally ground to a halt in 1995 – a mixture of too many chemical indulgences, not enough appreciation.
Since 2013, they’ve been back in action, with original-run members Russell Smith, Gordon Watson and John Jobbagy joined by Head Of David’s bass player Dave Cochrane (and with original fried howler Gary Boniface replaced by a contemporary psychedelic voyager, Gnod’s Neil Francis). Having played their own part in influencing a host of younger bands and musicians on the current psychedelic noise movement, the band are reaping the fruit of their original work- new concert opportunities, collaboration options, the pride of an actual living legacy.
Terminal Cheesecake have taken a lot of stick for their silly name, both then and now, but to me it encapsulated many of the qualities of arsequake: often ludicrous and tongue-in-cheek, yet stubbornly committed to art even to the point of ruination. The fact that they nicked that name from a list of fictional bands, cooked up in a spoofing mood by neo-psychedelic outlier Nick Saloman, somehow fits in with their plunderphonic psych ethos.
Monickers aside, it’s the music that speaks. With one foot enmired in rockabilly and ’60s psych and the other in the east London 80s scene that also birthed Bark Psychosis, M.A.A.R.S and A.R. Kane (and with the whole band effectively face-down, staring into a chaos pool) Terminal Cheesecake were exemplars of arsequake’s instincts and wildness, and the sloppy, overwhelming guitar noise of their early years was ameliorated on later recordings (most notably 1990s ‘Angels In Pigtails’ with its multi-levelled production approach of layers, samples, psychedelic loops and unusual instrumentation). The current band favours a return to the guitar stewings, but whether they’ve been thundering down a primitive or a sophisticated route there’s little doubt as to TC’s integrity regarding making a constructive racket, blowing open envelopes, or creating an atmosphere of free and uninhibited options at the rougher end of psychedelia.
Support comes from necro-psych band Taman Shud, who trail their influences and comparisons like heavy cerements (Killing Joke, “Hawkwind meets the Birthday Party”). With that doomy screech of hoarse vocal delivering lyrics of ziggurats and arcane diabolism and their taste for distorted grandeur and crashing rock guitars, they sound like an appointment with murder down at the end of a winding street, under crumbling Turkish battlements and harsh Mediterranean stars.
Dragging open the gates for the evening are Newcastle supergroup (or infragroup) Khünnt, whose members also play in various interrelated Toon heavy bands, predominantly power trio Blown Out and concrete-psych quintet Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. If Taman Shud lean towards the grand, Khünnt deliberately aim low. Theirs is an agonised, droning, thickened-trickle of a noise, a browned-out early Swans slithering into an oppressive doom-metal crush, Steven Palmer’s chord-shredding ghoul howls entangled with guitar riffs like dying hands clutching at a sewage outfall. The umlaut is important, too. Don’t ignore the umlaut.
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The following night, there’s an evening of rumbling post-prog and post-metal:
O.R.k. are an intercontinental quartet of prog, post-prog and art-rock stars: two Italians, one Anglo-Australian, one American. Colin Edwin provides bass bedrock, Carmelo Pipitone adds an impressive assortment of guitar tones, Pat Mastelotto sets up his usual whirl of drums and electronic triggers, and Lorenzo Esposito “LEF” Fornasari sings and handles the odd drapes and strikes of keyboard and synthesizer. Their debut album, ‘Inflamed Rides’, has been attracting quite a bit of attention since its release last year.
They’ve certainly got the credentials, but to my ears O.R.k. remains a band searching for an identity of their own, still trying on various mix-and-match suits beneath which to flex their impressive collective muscle. There’s certainly a strong flavour of other projects which the various members have been involved with (including the clunk-and-cigarette art-rock croon of David Sylvian and Robert Fripp’s ‘The First Day’, which Pat toured around the world, prior to getting the drum slot in King Crimson, and the interim soundscapes of Colin’s work with Porcupine Tree and latterday Ex-Wise Heads) and LEF sings and emotes in a variety of familiar tones recalling Sylvian, Maynard James Keenan and Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, as well as Mike Patton (with whom he shares extreme flexibility and a sense of skewed drama). Having said that, O.R.k. are accomplished setters of mood and tone, transforming gracefully from folk-prog delicacy to death-metal rasp and ambient billows. Carmelo in particular is emerging as a superb and chameleonic rock polystylist (incorporating but transcending the punk-edged folk guitar webwork he shows with his main band Marta sui Tubi via electric drones, sheet-lightning riffage, and stress-damage lead lines).
All in all, the band are possibly closest to LEF’s work with Fourth World polyfusion project Berserk! a few years ago, but restrained by a thicker wall of progressive metal and possessing less of the jazz, lightness of touch or overall flexibility, as if it were being grappled around the knees by the arty sludge-rock of LEF’s other main recent project, Obake. There’s plenty of latent promise, especially since LEF’s a genuine musical polymath whose other collaborations span work with Bill Laswell, Nils Petter Molvaer, Italian post-hardcore heroes Ephel Duath and even singing in Nino Rota operas. If there’s a problem, it’s just that O.R.k. are still groping in the dark for the elusive, necessary spark to shock them into fully being themselves. Come along and perhaps you’ll get to see the moment when they catch it. Meanwhile, here’s a chop-and-change video of live snippets from Milan earlier in the month, plus a few more album tracks:
Assuming that my mixed reactions to O.R.k. haven’t put you off, I should add that the support bands are at least as much of a draw. Pat Mastelotto makes another appearance in the opening act, Komara – a heady and ferocious live-fusion trio which draw equally on the steely tendons of Crimson/Tool art rock, scintillating sheens of club electronica, and the balance of supple inventiveness fiery plasticity in Scandinavian nu-jazz acts such as Jaga Jazzist. Always one of the most inventive yet undervalued drummers of latterday prog, Pat is on particularly stirring form in this collaboration, which hooks him up with Italian electrophonic trumpeter Paolo Raineri (a collaborator with Stefano Battaglia, Junkfood and Blessed Beat, and with LEF in Berserk!) and Slovakian everything-guitarist David Kollar (an audacious polydisciplinary musician, playing his homemade instrument through an unusual array of pedals, effects and electronics). Described disarmingly by David as “punky, ambient, electronic and avant-garde stuff”, Komara is actually much less of a spass-jazz kickaround than that would suggest. Informed by David’s work in film and dance projects . Paolo’s love for rock and free improv, and Pat’s knack for surging heavy polyrhythms, it has a sense of dark flamboyant drama: filled with kaleidoscopic brass and guitar textures and burning electrical energy, it flows and seethes more along the lines of David Torn’s still-arresting ‘Cloud About Mercury’ or of Andy Diagram’s work with Spaceheads.
The three London bands that make up the rest of the bill are all headliner-worthy, too. I’ve written plenty already about the mordant, tricksy brilliance of Thumpermonkey, whose melodious heavy-progressive songs are packed with mood and texture changes, rich vocals, gruff punk-and-metal-sourced energy and sly, literate lyric puzzles. They’re a band whose work you can stomp and head-bang to, yet spend a happy age unpicking.
The Earls of Mars plough a similarly playful furrow, though in a skinnier and more oblique vein. A morbidly humourous alliance between Harry Armstrong (once of early Noughties prog-metal stoners End Of Level Boss, and ‘90s doom metallers Decomposed and Hangnail) and Dan Hardingham (from horrorscape project Onethirtyeight), plus stand-up bassist Si McCarthy and drummer Dave Newman, they offer curdled cabaret dramatics and Tom Waits-ian/Mike Patton-esque takes on heavy metal, weird fiction and burlesque. The jokes swim under the surface of the music, like lurking alligators.
Landskap are a more sober slow-welling affair altogether. If you’ve ever felt that Elbow are what happens when a band steeped in pastoral prog hits the mainstream, you might feel that Landskap is what might happen if it were coaxed back again. Although they cite late ‘60s and early ‘70s psychedelic rock as key influences, I’m more inclined to hear Isaac Hayes, Portishead or no-man in their sound. With that funk swing to the drumming, the bluesy smears, the clusters of electric piano and the solidity in the whole package, they sound more like a prog band who dream of being a soul or rhythm-and-blues band (as many of them did, back then, at the start). There’s also an authoritative, earthy ache in Jake Harding’s stern singing tones – a little of Jim Morrison, a little of Ian McCulloch – making him an earthbound anchor to the band’s flights. In an evening which has more than its fair share of cosmic jazz blurs, Gothic artifice and mischievous humour, Landskap are likely to add a little human depth and straightforwardness.
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Finally… something good ending too soon? Only a few posts ago I was urging you all towards my neighbourhood venue Forks & Corks, the deli venue at the foot of Archway Tower, and its developing series of jazz gigs: I even took my own advice and made it to to the Jonny Gee quartet show the other Friday, bringing along a group of friends to have their feelings soothed in the wake of a funeral. In a swirl of Parker, Ellington and Porter interpretations, plus the quartet’s own originals, the job was done, buoyed up by the warmth of a Forks & Corks full house drawn from around the community and friends, plus the feeling that something was being built up in this unprepossessing but lovingly inhabited, carefully decorated space.
Now I hear that the latest gig there is likely to be the last Forks & Corks jazz show for a while. Quiet and ominous rumours suggest that it will be the last jazz show there ever, and that the venue itself (which was always sitting on a questionable future in the heart of an Archway redevelopment that’s increasingly out of control) is going to quietly close. I’ve no idea what will crop up in its place: presumably it will be yet another coffee shop to go with the newly-announced Coffee Republic a few doors down and the eight or ten other coffee joints scattered around the junction. Part of the scenario for a regenerated Archway appears to be encouraging us Archway residents to circulate, grinning, from well-furnished caffeine pump to well-furnished caffeine pump, pretending we’re in a ceaseless round of ‘Friends’ re-runs.
Anyway, here’s the information for that last gig.
Jazz in Archway presents:
The Pike/Daniels Quartet Forks & Corks, 2 Archway Mall, Junction Road, Archway, London, N19 5PH, England
Saturday 20th February 2016, 8.00pm – more information
A quick scuffle around the search engines turned up a bit of information on the band. It’s co-led by London jazz-noir singer Kate Daniels. and composer/multi-instrumentalist Graham Pike (who can play chromatic harmonica, trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone and keyboards); guitarist Phil Danter leads the jazz-pop octet Straight On Red and generally seems to live the dream, while bass player Kevin Dunford’s been a London fusion mainstay for years and plays with The Incredibly Strange Film Band. There’s not much news on the quartet as a whole, but that shouldn’t count against them. London jazz is full of obscurities, word-of-mouth and ad-hoc teamups: this may well be the start of another one.
As for Forks & Corks, if anything replaces its original spirit and its jazz initiative, I’ll post up that news whenever I get to hear about it. Whatever the future for the venue itself, its manager’s passion for jazz is heartfelt, so I wouldn’t write him off yet… Meanwhile, if you’re passing the deli, drop in for a snack while you still can.
A busy week: I should just remind you that tickets might still be available for the second of this month’s two London Annette Peacock gigs at Cafe Oto (the one on Monday) and that the combined Vennart/Knifeworld/Cleft tour is sweeping across Britain during the week (leaving a lot of fans of math/psych/twitch-rock bobbing happily in its wake), but there’s more coming too.
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At the start of the week, Ismena Collective present a multi-media piece. More information below, at length (cobbled together from assorted press releases, bits of essays, etc…)
Ismena Collective presents ‘Anaïs Nin: The Lie Box’ (The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Monday 23rd November 2015, 7:30 pm) – £12.00 – information & tickets
Formed in 2008 by Mayda Narvey and Sara Cluderay, Ismena Collective is an eclectic group of musicians, singers, composers, writers and actors inspired by multi-disciplinary collaborations and the synthesis of music and words. Their unusual and innovative projects have explored subjects as diverse as the 19th century German Romantics and the 1942 New York arts commune to which Benjamin Britten and WH Auden belonged. Performing in venues across London and beyond, they have delighted audiences with their genre-defying presentations and their insightful approach to the manner in which literature can elucidate music and music can illuminate literature.
Collaborating with dramaturg and director Danielle Allen, Ismena has created a new and unusual theatrical collage of music and words exploring the world of diarist and novelist Anaïs Nin, whose complex, chaotic but compelling inner and outer lives involved many transgressions and secret affairs. Her father (a Cuban-Spanish composer and pianist) was her first love and it was his abandonment of the family and her subsequent complicated relationship with him that engendered both her passion for music and her passion for lies. In her journals, she documented her own fragmentation into Self and Other, and thinly disguised herself in her fiction as a spectrum of different characters. Married to two husbands at the same time, she negotiated her “bicoastal trapeze” between her West coast and East coast relationships by keeping track of her lies in a “Lie Box”.
Nin wrote constantly about lies, confessing “when I talk, I feel that I lie imperceptibly in order to cover myself. I put on costumes. I hate to expose myself truly… The truth is I only face human beings in fragments… I always find the mensonge vital necessary — the one lie which separates me from each person… I have a sense of all that I leave out – the lacunae, especially the dreams, the hallucinations. Also the lies are left out, a desperate necessity to embellish. So I do not write them down. The journal is therefore a lie.” In fact, she reworked and rewrote her diaries constantly until they became well-honed works of fiction.
In the words of her composer brother, Joaquin Nin-Culmell (from his introduction to her childhood diaries, ‘Linotte’): “Later she reinterpreted many events, many situations, many impressions. Linotte may seem to contradict these later interpretations, but I do not feel that this is so. After all, reality is many layered. We peel off one layer only to discover that the process must be repeated. It is evident from the very beginning that Anais’s heart went out to the intuitive, to the poetic, to the magic of subjectivity.”
It is fascinating to reflect upon this uneasy relationship between truth and fiction, between reality and lies. It is equally fascinating to ponder Nin’s relationship to music which seemed to embody for her both her sensuality and her creativity. In her own words, “jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. When he was five years old, my brother Joaquin, a spirited and restless child no one could tame, would spend hours absolutely still on the staircase of our home in Brussels, listening to the musicians rehearsing. That was the sign of his vocation. We both listened. I can still hear the lines of Bach which were most often repeated. Joaquin became a musician and in me music was channeled into writing.”
With score and presentation inspired by the soundworld of the surreal art films Nin performed in during the 1940s (and reprising some of the fascinating selections of Nin’s writing and her father and brother’s compositions that Ismena performed in May of this year) ‘The Lie Box’ explores Nin’s life, the musical influences that threaded through it, and the uneasy ground between truth and fiction. As Joaquin Nin-Culmell put it: “After all, reality is many layered. We peel off one layer only to discover that the process must be repeated. It is evident from the very beginning that Anaïs’ heart went out to the intuitive, to the poetic, to the magic of subjectivity.”
For ‘The Lie Box’, Ismena-founding cellist, composer and writer Mayda Narvey performs with actress Sally Mortemore, Danish soprano Lene Sahlholdt and pianist Horacio López Redondo. All four are also working in conjunction with music by electronic composer Daniel Thomas Freeman (whose evocative score to the British indie film ‘Catch Me Daddy’ was heard in cinemas across the country earlier this year).
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Over the next two days, there are two Baba Yaga’s Hut gigs in rapid succession. At time of posting, both of these look set to sell out soon, so move fast if you’re interested. The first of them, on the Tuesday, sees the London debut of two interesting American bands.
From Athens in Georgia, four-piece Maserati style themselves as being “sleek, sexy and sophisticated as the legendary Italian sports car” and meticulously tailor various musical loves together – English psychedelic artiness (Pink Floyd, Eno), its parallel German precision (Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel) and post-psych, post-punk arena-rock swagger (U2, ZZ Top). The cocky, stiffly-shaking result is not a million miles away from what post-rock pomp-boys Trans-Am might have produced if they’d been a little less clenched. Maserati’s Moroder-ified robo-psych seems to be aimed at inducing rock club crowds into unselfconscious flappy dancing: hitting an unexpected triggerpoint at which art-rock meets headbanging meets drone grooves, and where maths twitches the pelvis. You’d expect them to play to an audience of silent, ecstatic mannequins.
Support comes from bicoastal U.S duo Insect Ark. Finding their own space between doom metal crush, ritual experimental loops, wall-of-noise grandeur and the kind of spacious, springy and hypnotic percussion that brings to mind both Can and Steve Jansen, Dana Schechter (bass and lap steel guitar, synths) and Ashley Spungin (drums and electronics) create engrossing and ancient-sounding all-instrumental soundscapes filled with the baleful, the mournful, the grinding and the flat-out apocalyptically lovely.
On the Wednesday, it’s the turn of some London-based crews. Well, not entirely London-based…
The Comet Is Coming + Snapped Ankles + Flamingods (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ The Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, Shacklewell, London, E8 2EB, UK, Wednesday 25th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £7.00 – information – tickets
Formed in mid-2014, The Comet Is Coming are what happened when Betamax Killer and Danalogue The Conqueror (the duo behind synthpunktronica band Soccer96 joined forces with London reeds polymath Shabaka Hutchings. Like a punkier, power-trio take on Jaga Jazzist, Betamax and Danalogue generate a wall of stiff, arresting dayglo nu jazz grooves on drumkit and analogue synths, on which Shabaka – like a grand graffiti professor – bursts and tags figures from his battery of saxophones.
The results blur Soccer96’s omnivorous dance music tastes and conversational punky immediacy with Shabaka’s deep and broad engagement with jazz, African, free and classical forms; all tempered with a shared shamanic, psychedelic approach to jam and composition and with a dash of pulpy science fiction mysticism. These ideas spill all over their debut EP, released late last week; from the lead track Neon Baby (in which a Moroder/motorik pulse is set against freewheeling chiptune, phased tom passes and ballsy Afrobeat sax riffs) to the pop-up computerised jump jive of Do The Milky Way or the larger-form compositional tapestry of Star Exploding In Slow Motion.
More punktronica comes from “pagan funk, art wave dropouts” support band Snapped Ankles. Performing in huge and shaggy walking-hedge costumes (based on the legends of the Woodwose, or ancient European wild-man-of-the-woods), the trio thump out gnarly drum-filled collaboration grooves on customised instruments and describe themselves as an “agricultural Kraftwerk”.
Also on the bill are Flamingods, Britain-and-Bahrain-based worldbeat globalists who form their music from instinctive, unschooled plucking and hammering on assorted regional instruments collected from around the world. Both their intuitive adapt-and-make-do approach and their displaced, separated way of life (the seed of the project came from when group member Kamal Rasool was pushed out of Britain by visa restrictions, and group members variously live in, work in or trace roots to London, Dubai and Jamaica) echo the varied plights, both good and bad, of latterday migrants and world-trotters. For those interested in more of what this might cast up, Flamingods are also heading an evening of global exotica and cross-cultural DJing at their own event, Eastern Mystics, on the Friday, at Café 1001 in Brick Lane – details here.
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For the second week in a row, I get to welcome a new London music night. More News From Nowhere are launching a series of “experimental/noise/generally interesting left-field music” up in Walthamstow/ At their debut night, they’re promising “a double-headline masterclass in brass-and-electronics brilliance.”
Gyratory System + Hirvikolari + Fragments Of Space Hex + Luke Turner of The Quietus DJ set (More News From Nowhere@ The Victoria, 188 Hoe Street, Walthamstow, London, E17 4QH, UK, Wednesday 25th November 2015, 8.00pm) £4.40-£6.00 – information – tickets
Back in the earlier days of ‘Misfit City’ (late ‘90s, pre-blog) I covered a jazztronica band called Blowpipe, of which the core members were father-and-son horn team Robin and Andrew Blick and which mutated through various lineups, bouncing off various passing and evolving dance forms while threading their own impressive knowledge and multi-instrumental adaptability through them. Blowpipe may have petered out, but only in order to make a further mutation into Gyratory System(the Blicks plus James Weaver), who make a slightly different noise, steering away from subverting club beats in favour of making a “brass-inflected kosmiche racket” heavy on Andrew Blick’s multi-levelled synth programming but maintaining Blowpipe’s cunning way with a breezy hook.
Hirvikolari, a splinter group from psychedelic rock band Teeth Of The Sea, are effects-ridden trumpeter Sam Barton and
modular synth interferer Mike Bourne. While Teeth Of The Sea tend to play great stomping horror-slabs of musical architecture (a flying saucer spitting out rows and rows of heavily-armed tower blocks) Hirvikolari prefer to take the slow path and evolve themselves a great bolus of stewed electronic burble and resonating brass tracks. Ennio Morricone’s been cited as a comparison, as has the long tradition of counter-culture festival techno: both comparisons have some grounding.
Also playing are Fragments Of Space Hex, synth experimentalists given to hypnotic jams: behind the mocking and probably bogus Crosby Stills Nash & Young obsessions they’re Andrew Nixon (who usually plays as drone-kosmiche scenarist Deathcount In Silicone Valley) and Ciaran Mackle (of dub-techno project Ashplant). To keep things ticking along, half of the Hamburger Ladies (i.e, Luke Turner of ‘The Quietus’) will be playing a DJ set.
There’ll be another More News From Nowhere night in late December – hopefully the second of many. I’ll preview that in due course.
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Two gigs follow featuring ‘Misfit City’ favourites The Fierce & The Dead who should need no introduction to regular readers – for those of you fresh into these pages, you can familiarise yourself with their friendly, gnarled prog-punk-highlife-whatever hybrid via the clip above.
Crippled Black Phoenix + The Fierce & The Dead (Fire & Air @ The Dome, 2A Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park, London, N19 5QQ, UK, Thursday 26th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £15.00 – information – tickets
Following a tumultous couple of years in which they were hobbled by a bitter internal feud, Crippled Black Phoenix have regrouped, reshuffled and reasserted. Now they’re on tour again, in all of their usual looming, black-clouded, apprehensive glory. As ever, their mixture of sombre folk balladry, political resistance and seething post-rock volume is realised by an expanded octet of massed guitars and keyboards, with strings, saws and anything else which fits plugged in where necessary.
With The Fierce And The Dead in the middle of the gig sandwich, the third band on the bill is Masakichi, another of the musical brainchildren of guitarist/producer Reuben Gotto (of prog band Twin Zero and various business with Foals, Sack Trick, The Maccabees and others). Masakichi dwell on the careful cusp between the springy rhythms shared by bass player Hattie Williams (formerly of post-progressive rockers Telegraphs) and drummer Ben Calvert and the more Gothic, textural tendencies of Reuben and singer Hannah Cartwright (the latter of whom also holds down a gig with folktronicists Snow Ghosts). The result is a winning mixture of sinewy motions, carefully blurred riffs and atmospheres, and (for once) icicle-clear vocals that don’t hide in a lazy haze of recycled shoegazery. See for yourselves:
The Fierce & The Dead get to headline on Friday at another gig, way up the road in Nottingham. I’d not heard of former warehouse venue J.T. Soars, but it sounds as if we have another art-rock outpost in the Midlands, which is cause for celebration.
The Fierce & The Dead + Mannheim + Memory Of Elephants (bUTTONpUSHER & Mountains Of Records @ J.T. Soars, Aberdeen Street, Nottingham, NG3 2DG, UK, Friday 27th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £3.00-£4.00 – information – tickets on the door
Of the other two bands on the bill, Memory Of Elephants are an “eclectic noise” trio from Bristol whose grinding metallic base-sound is belied, stretched and exploded by the quickfire changes of time, pattern, mood and arrangement which they put it through: they’re a restless, conspiratorial mask-dance of a band. Mannheim are a heavy quartet from the Netherlands: saxophone, guitar, bass guitar and drums applied to a stern headcrushing math-and-post-rock structure. Up in the metal end of post-rock, they’re overpowering but somehow vulnerable – like a dogged, accelerating stilt-charge with a snarling dark-jazz edge.
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Three more varied London gigs on Friday:
Jimmy Cannon: The Best Of British Song (Songs From The Cellar @ Zelas Cafe, 216 Archway Road, London, N6 5AX, UK, Friday 27th November 2015, time) – no ticket price available yet – information – tickets on the door
In the first performance of a new show, Jimmy Cannon explores the repertoire of the ‘Great British Songbook’: the songs associated with British composers and singers from the golden age of songwriting. As he comments, “the much-loved American Songbook reflects Hollywood’s heyday, from the first ‘talkies’ in the 1920s right up to the demise of the legendary Hollywood orchestras in the late 1960s – but many of these great songs aren’t quite as American as you might think!” For this show, Jimmy will be accompanied by pianist Matthew Regan (from The John Wilson Orchestra).
Jimmy is a current British easy-listening star – a versatile singer and saxophonist who has performed with Tom Jones and in West End shows (The Commitments, The Rat Pack, Elvis The Ultimate Performance) and in the classic-swing/soul/pop band Jazz Cannons. However, he’s also a song historian, an arranger and an adapter, bringing his curiosity, knowledge and skills to bear on a wide variety of songs. Drawing on his Cornish roots, Jimmy also sings in the English Heritage band Burton Bradstock – a collaboration with pianist and arranger Dorian Ford which nurtures and revives a repertoire of English folk songs (predominantly mid-to-late 19th century work songs) in brand new settings performed by a band of British jazz luminaries including Iain Ballamy, Julian Ferraretto, Riaan Vosloo, Tim Giles and Pete Berryman.
Damn Vandals + Kloq + The Bay + The Many Few + Santonica (Bugbear @ The Dublin Castle, 94 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7AN, UK, Friday 27th November, 8.00pm) – £5.00-£7.00 – information – tickets
The endearing Many Few (reviewed at an early stage back here) are playing at a “nights-are-drawing-in, gearing-up-for-Christmas, never-mind-the-November-dismals-come-and-do-the-Exquisite-Shark gig”. I’ve got to admit that the charm of their own gently skewed, probably-less-shambling-than-it-was Anglo-pop would be the main draw for me as regards this particular show, but here’s the breakdown of the bill from Bugbear:
Damn Vandals – four ex-graffiti artists who fell foul of the law and had to re-decorate a youth club apart of their community service: whilst there, they discovered a drum-kit and some guitars. Musically it’s twangsome garage swamp blues rock n roll, Alabama 3 via The Bad Seeds with a Mark Lanegan aspect to the vocals: not what you would expect from a bunch of graffiti artists, but fab all the same. Kloq– rock meets hiphop but way better than most in this genre: a very American rappy vocal that echoes Run DMC and other old school exponents whilst the music is a soulful funky shunky soul rock groove metal with a genuine drrrty vibe..N*E*R*D at their heaviest meets AC/DC via Metallica and some timely squelchy ‘dub step’ bits. Neat. The Bay – a high-octane mix of White Stripes, Band of Skulls and the punkier side of Nirvana. The Many Few – ‘The Many Few are armchair surrealisms, bizarre and wonderful journeys that touch on the absurdities and question marks of small town life, from which you never quite return’…yes indeedy, add a little classic ’80s era Peelite je ne sais qoui referencing awkward squad art pop happenings like Yeah Yeah Noh and Young Marble Giants and plenty of biting wit. Santonica – rousing indie rock with an electro interface, great delivery and actual tunes! Sounds like Editors via The Killers, by way of Bastille.
Magic Brother call up the spirits of the ancient masters of music and brew them into something just a little bit different. Think of a modern day Traffic or prime Jefferson Airplane with a twist. A band influenced by the sixties playing music very much for the future. Manja & The Maytrons are a three-piece beat combo originating from London, Hastings and Dresden, and their latest EP “Unexpected Side Effects” has been spun by Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music.
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As usual, I’m ending up with another Daylight Music gig:
Daylight Music 208 – Soviet Sounds & Cold War Cabaret: The Real Tuesday Weld + Polina Proutskova & IZBA Voices + Spaceship Mark (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK, Saturday 81st November 2015, 12.00pm–2.00pm) – free (£3.50 donation suggested) – information
Say a hearty “Здравствуйте” (“Hello!”) to The Real Tuesday Weld this week whose pioneered style combines old jazz sounds and electronics in something they’ve called “Antique Beat” which has influenced the current movement of electro-swing producers. This Russian-themed Daylight Music event will feature a selection of songs by film composer Mikael Tariverdiev (who’s been described as “the Russian Nina Rota”) in addition to a set of their own cinematic swing sounds. (There’s a little more on the project here.) They will be joined by a supporting selection of Russian and Russian-inspired musicians.
Polina Proutskova has been performing and researching Russian village singing traditions for over 15 years. This year IZBA Voices – a vocal ensemble led by Polina – has been formed of participants and folklore enthusiasts from the IZBA Club (a Russian cultural organization in London) and will be bringing their sounds, spirit and repertoire to Daylight Music.
For a final and inverted Soviet-era touch, the concert’s “in between” sounds will feature work-in-progress by Spaceship Mark (former Minions member Mark S. Williamson, who also works as Microscope Wilson and Crock Oss).
This particular multimedia project, ‘A Hole In The Ground’ features field recordings of sounds taken from the derelict sites of a number of the 1563 Royal Observer Corps bunkers, built as part of the UK’s Cold War nuclear response plans. There’s more information on the project here, and a preview below.
Moscow-based pianist/composer/multi-instrumentalist Dmitry Evgrafov (whose music blends intimate piano parts with delicately evocative string arrangements) was also scheduled to play at the concert, but for reasons outside of his control is no longer able to make it to the UK. Hopefully we will be able to reschedule an appearance for him at Daylight during 2016. Meanwhile, here’s a taster.
Ripping the can open on the 25th January is Baba Yaga’s Hut’s Fun House show, an expansion of the launch of the third album by noise-band-cum-two-man-sound-system Gum Takes Tooth (keyboardist/vocalist Jussi Brightmore and percussionist Tom Fug). Preoccupied by the ravenous, toxic/intoxicated development frenzies which envelop contemporary cities (and not least the Aldgate neighbourhood where Jussi’s been working), ‘Arrow’ is a turnaround from GTT’s previous cosmic flights, dropping back to street level and to a more urgent, less indulgent headspace which they define as centring around “gentrification, uncertainty, self-empowerment” as well as meditations on the incitements to tribal violence and competition which become ever louder in the current environment.
Unsurprisingly, the fourteen-band lineup they’ve prepared feature a number of acts who’ve danced through previous ‘Misfit City’ posts. I’m already familiar with drums-and-noise “happenings” inciters Sly & The Family Drone (with their all-in approach to audience drumming participation), the triple-headed avant-garde women’s sketchpad V Ä L V Ē (with their scope running from reed-honking prog to post-punk glee singalongs to homemade instrumentation – see multiple posts passim), and convoluted Zappa-esque stunt-brass rockers The Display Team (who take the business of living up to their name pretty seriously, but don’t take much else very seriously). Among those I haven’t covered yet, I know that Medway post-rockers Upcdownc have been plying their grand noise since 2005: always looming on the sidelines. I also now know that although Cold In Berlin‘s name makes them sound as if they’re an earnest neoprog band trying to rip off John Le Carre, they’re actually grand-scale post-punkers adding hallucinatory body to their songs via textural guitar like a muezzin’s nightmare.
