As some of you may have guessed already, I’m treating this blog – including the long stretches during which I’m only posting up about live dates – as an ongoing education. Plenty of the musicians I’m covering I’ve only learned about shortly before covering them; in other cases, in pursuing their tour dates around Britain or elsewhere in the world, I’m learning about places, projects and initiatives which I might otherwise have been ignorant about.
I’ve posted plenty about Laura Cannell since the start of the year. Her slightly psychedelic yet deeply-rooted improvisations on early, mediaeval and imagined tunes and ideas (played on standard or overbowed fiddle or on double recorder) span and spark across several of my musical interests. As she makes her way across Britain this year in a meandering voyage from high-profile festival to half-hidden venue to multi-genre bill, I’m following along behind (at least with the gig news). Here’s where she is this week:
Playing in support is the Colchester experimental musician and sound artist Phil Mill, whose work “focuses on the use of field recordings and digital DIY softwares made for processing sound. He has recently been recording in a variety of locations in Europe, often associated with or identifiable as a territory or boundary between places and their sonic signatures. Phil’s music is often improvised, and he is currently developing software that reflects on this process – enabling the process of composition to reflect on the nature of the sound environment and the unpredictability of the soundscape.”
Below are videos of Laura in concert and one of ‘The Drifters’, a film soundtrack by Phil using only sounds from sea/environmental field recordings, which was commissioned for Colchester’s Lightbulb Festival in 2015.
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In London, there’s another gig by one of the finest, most rubbery (and recently augmented) instrumental bands out there at the moment, playing hand-in-hand with some special guests in one of the city’s snuggest venues…
Prescott + Charles Hayward “begin anywhere” + Kavus Torabi (DJ) Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Tuesday 2nd March 2016, 8.00pm – more information
“It’s the North London debut of a new-look, four-piece Prescott, featuring Keith Moliné (Pere Ubu, Two Pale Boys) alongside Kev Hopper (Stump), Rhodri Marsden (Scritti Politti) and Frank Byng (Snorkel, Crackle, many others). A mesmerising collection of new tunes featuring soaring melodies, nagging riffs and explosive sounds. Also, the legendary Charles Hayward (of This Heat and many other endeavours, including the recently resurgent This Is Not This Heat) will be at the piano with his (begin anywhere) project: “A solo song cycle sequence of betrayal, paranoia, subterfuge, as well as sound events, spoken word and percussion pieces, stark, minimal arrangements; an unexpected departure.” And binding the whole thing together from the safety of the DJ booth will be Kavus Torabi (Knifeworld, Gong, Cardiacs).”
I’ll just add this quote of my own here, from the last time Prescott played London:
“ a percolating musical alliance… According to The Harrison’s blurb, the band deliver “a curious mix of the melodic and discordant with syncopated funky, skewed beats and lopsided, sometimes jabbing riffs that emerge from a complex web of musical interactions and expand or contract like sections of a stuck record.”< The band themselves talk about "jabbing heteroclite riffs, circular rhythmic patterns, vibrating harmonic clashes, irregular note intervals, all contrasted with pockets of beautiful melody" and their trick of "microriffing" – repeating the same tiny melodic segment for “as long as they can hold their nerve” (out of a sense of persistence, a zest for irritancy or a desire to pay homage to loop culture) . I’ll add that while these descriptions make Prescott sound like a set of ticks on a battered art-music bingo card, they’re actually one of the most entertaining and even danceable bands I’ve seen in recent years; pumping out a surprisingly melodious batch of hiccups, peculiar grooves and inventive colours, and sometimes seeming to plug into a monstrous late-Miles Davis synth-fusion groove (entirely by mistake).”
There, that should do it – but here’s some video of the new-look Prescott quartet…
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Lastly for now, something mixing classical drama, classical music and folk work…
Shakespeare400 presents:
Barbican Shakespeare Weekender – Play On…
‘A Hum About Mine Ears’: Clara Sanabras/Chorus Of Dissent/Vox Holloway/Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Harvey Brough
Barbican Hall @ Barbican Arts Centre, Silk Street, City of London, London, EC2Y 8DS, England
Sunday 6th March 2016, 6.00pm – more information here and here
“Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ is set in new surroundings in this performance of vocalist and composer Clara Sanabras’s new album ‘A Hum About Mine Ears’. More than a simple soundtrack to the play, ‘A Hum About Mine Ears’ takes some of the ideas and themes in ‘The Tempest’ – loss and retrieval, exile and reunion – and relates them to Sanabras’s own experiences as an emigrant.
While some songs lift direct passages from the play, surrounding these in Britten Sinfonia’s soaring strings and the swirling vocals of choirs Chorus of Dissent and Vox Holloway, conducted by Harvey Brough, others place the characters in more modern settings – Sanabras’s powerful soprano solos casting Ariel as a festival-crazed free-loving spirit, or Miranda as a free and independent woman, emancipated from Prospero. Drawing on elements of everything from blues and jazz to European folk, see one of Shakespeare’s most famous works unravelled in a performance as deep, mysterious and expansive as ‘The Tempest’ itself.
This concert takes place as a part of Shakespeare400 – a year of celebrations in 2016 to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.”
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). 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 humorous 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 and 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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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.
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.
Here’s some news on a brief three-date set of Italian shows by William D. Drake. Approximate blurb translation follows:
“Cristiano Roversi (in collaboration with Arci Tom, Pietro Rubini & Guido Bellachioma ) is happy and proud to announce the William D. Drake Italian 2016 Minitour. One of the most exciting acts on the contemporary London underground music scene, the amazing virtuoso songwriter, keyboardist and piano artist (reknowned for having been both keyboard player and co-composer in Cardiacs) presents songs from his latest studio album ‘Revere Reach’ plus a selection of old numbers. William will share the stage with Mr.James Larcombe (keyboards, backing vocals & hurdy-gurdy, from Stars In Battledress) and Mrs. Nicola Baigent (clarinet, from North Sea Radio Orchestra).”
Dates:
Arci Tom, Piazza Tom Benetollo, 1, 46010 Mantova MN, Italy, Friday 19th February 2016 – more information here
Metricubi, Campiello delle Erbe 2003 San Polo 30125 Venezia, Saturday 20th February 2016 – more information here
Italian musician and songwriter Sterbus (whose ‘Smash The Sun Alight‘ mini-album features in one of ‘Misfit City’s most-read reviews) will be playing a support slot at the Rome date. Promising a mixture of originals plus “some familiar surprises”, he’s fielding a semi-unplugged trio of himself on voice and guitar, regular sidekick Dominique D’Avanzo on vocals, clarinet and harmonica and Noel Storey (of St Albans lo-fi indie pop band The Pocket Gods) on piano and synth.
Three video clips (two Drakes, plus a Sterbus) are below. The first is a full-band Drake recording – live in the studio – of To My Piano, capturing the folk, Early English and chapel-songbook aspects of his baroque pop songwriting to full effect (as well as some of the warmth of his live shows). The second is a recording of him playing his solo piano study The Moth Surrenders To The Flame, a deeper immersion in his classical side.
The third is Sterbus’ recent cover of the Cardiacs song Gina Lollabridgida, which eases away the original’s frenetic New Wave rush in favour of a summery acoustic coo while keeping all of its intricacies intact. Sterbus unveiled this version of the song at a London fundraiser for Tim Smith last autumn, while the video itself is a mash-up of some of the finest visual moments from Gina herself on film… so that’s three or four layers of tribute right there. Enjoy.
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The perpetual vigour and drive of theatrical, multi-disciplinary songwriter Louis Barabbas has seen him dubbed “the hairy Bez of blues harp”, put him to work with Dr. Dog and John Otway, and made him busy with mentoring developing artists, running a record label, and fronting radio shows plus at least three simultaneous bands. He’s currently engaged in a long and winding British tour over the next few months, spattering through spring and into a few bigger summer dates.
For now, here are the dates for Louis’ February shows, all of which take place in Scotland and the north of England and all of which are solo (although some subsequent dates will see Louis playing with his Bedlam Six and Ceaseless Horror Band projects).
Dates:
The Doghouse Cellar Jazz Bar, Kay Brow Yard, Kay Brow, Ramsbottom, BL0 9AY, England, Friday 19th February 2016 – free event
Stacoustic @ The Star Inn, 2 Back Hope Street, Salford, M7 2FR, England, Saturday 20th February 2016 – more information
The Ferret, 55 Fylde Road, Preston, PR1 2XQ, England, Tuesday 23rd February 2016
Siempre Bicycle Café, 162 Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, G11 6XE, Scotland, Thursday 25th February 2016
St Andrews Sessions @ St Andrews Church, Church Street, Innerleithen, EH44 6JA, Scotland, Friday 26th February, 2016, 8.00pm – more information
Heaton Perk, 103-105 Heaton Park Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE6 5NR, England, Monday 29th February 2016
Since most of these are café gigs, check at the venues for more information on times, prices etc or check via Louis’ homepage. The tour will continue into March and April, with further summer gigs to come. I’ll post information about those shows closer to the time. Meanwhile, here’s the man himself, in action…
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There’s a wealth of shows on Saturday 20th February, but for now I’ll just mention the acoustic one which comes with 1930s arrangements and voice-dancing…
Daylight Music presents:
Daylight Music 216: Alex Mendham & His Orchestra, Ben See + Rory McVicar + Gemma Champ Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 20th February 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event (suggested donation £5.00) – more information
“Alex Mendham & His Orchestra are a truly authentic Golden Age 1920s and 1930s British dance band formed in 2010. These young musicians have been stunning audiences all across Europe, as they perform with boundless passion and energy, with impeccable attention to period detail not only in their music and vocals, but in everything from their original instruments to their hair and attire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufAYwgz_Iyg
Ben See is a singer and composer from London. He specialises in vocal music, and more specifically contemporary a cappella. Ben’s musical influences range from the scores of Benjamin Britten to the ever-eccentric Björk, with a small detour via the beautiful song-writing of Brian Wilson and the vocal wizard Bobby McFerrin.
Rory McVicar is a musician and songwriter who has been releasing music under his own name since 2005. His first demo found its way into Radio One’s Festive Fifty after heavy rotation on the Huw Stephens and Rob da Bank shows. Since then, he’s released two long players and a clutch of singles, splits and EPs on various indie labels.
This week Gemma Champ will return to provide the matinee music in-between on the piano.”
Continuing with the flow of London gigs on Saturday 13th, before glancing further afield:
Daylight Music 215: Paperface + Jim Ghedi & Toby Hay + Dearbhla Minogue Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 13th February 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event (suggested donation £5.00) – more information
Direct from the Daylight Music press mill:
“Paperface has just released (from his lighthouse studio) his critically acclaimed debut album ‘Out Of Time’, inspired no doubt, by the choppy waters of the Thames lying in one direction, and the urban sprawl that lies in the other. He is probably up there hard at work on his next creation right now (weather permitting, of course).
We also welcome instrumental guitar duo Jim Ghedi and Toby Hay. Sheffield-based Jim’s influences range from African music, jazz and Eastern European folklore. Toby is from near Rhayader in mid-Wales: he is influenced by Indian Ragas, African Kora music and ancient Welsh harp music.
Dearbhla Minogue is a singer and guitarist in both The Drink and The Wharves. She will be playing electric guitar and doing some band songs as well as songs written to be played solo – and a couple of folk covers.
The brilliant The Leaf Library will be our in-between performer this week creating some weird and wonderful soundscapes – the icing on our Daylight Music sonic cake!”
(There’ll be more about Jim Ghedi and Toby Hay in the next post – this is a busy month for them…)
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Looking for further news on shows by Laura Cannell (mediaevalist improviser on fiddles and double recorder, previously covered here), I came across this:
“From Now On returns for the third year to fill Chapter with adventurous, fresh and boundary pushing music. Over three days you will be able to delve into a multi-genred soundscape of analogue dance, ancient re-imaginings, improvisation, silky balladry and lo-fi punk. We have sourced significant international visitors and some of the most intriguing performers working in Wales and the UK today.
As part of the celebrations, Chapter Cinema will be screening a compelling programme of music film and we are proud to present our first artist in residence. Acts include US experimental pop luminary Julia Holter; surreal electronic trio Stealing Sheep; paradoxical medieval/improv fiddler Laura Cannell; Bas Jan, a new krautpop trio from Serafina Steer; ambient explorer Mark Lyken and minimalist synth duo Happy Meals. Meilyr Jones will be presenting new work informed by his recent exploits in film and theatre that will be made in residence in the week leading up to the festival. Anna Homler & Stephen Warwick present a dance- and film-led performance of ‘Breadwoman’, a version of Tim Parkinson’s anti-opera ‘Time With People’; and Sweet Baboo invites you to join his ‘Synthfonia Cymru’, a collaborative synth performance.
We also have an alternative Valentine’s Day orgy of bands and short films curated by Club Foot Foot. In the cinema H. Hawkline soundtracks ‘Gwaed Ar Y Ser’ and experimental Welsh music films from CAM Sinema.”
(Other acts confirmed include Apostille, Sleeper Society, Club Foot Foot, L’Ocelle Mare, and Laura J Martin.)
Laura plays From Now On during Saturday 13th February. On the following day she’ll be crossing the Severn to play this event:
Onomato Collective present:
‘The Lost City Of Dunwich’ (featuring Laura Cannell, Rhodri Davies, Milo Newman and Matt Davies) Café Kino, 108 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3RU, England
Sunday 14th February 2016, 8.00pm – more information
“Onomato are delighted to bring together four artists to sonically explore the mystery and intrigue that surrounds the submerged town of Dunwich on the coastal region of Suffolk, East Anglia.
“Matt Davies and Milo Newman will construct an 8-channel sound installation of their on-going work ‘By the mark, the deep‘. Utilising their field recordings from the waters of Dunwich’s ruins they will create a sonic framework for Laura Cannell with her evocative over-bowed fiddle and recorder, and un-traditional harpist Rhodri Davies to respond to.
Hailing from the region, Laura Cannell’s music draws on ‘folkish mysteries and the stark landscapes of East Anglia’s coasts’ and the event will begin with a conversation about a shared fascination with Dunwich’s esoteric submerged town.”
I’ve grumbled before about the encroachments and exclusions which lurk in the ongoing gentrification of London, but there are positive sides too. In Archway, amongst the brush-ups and the shouldering aside of community resources for what looks like the usual drive towards more and more luxury flats (see here for some of the fallout from that) there are sundry encouraging pop-ups and lower-key investments.
One such is the move of the Forks and Corks cafe from the edge of Parliament Hill to a new location, livening barren and wind-sucked plaza outside Archway station. Ensconsed in a former betting shop, twenty seconds walk from the tube station, they cook up deli food and serve craft beers, ciders and wines in an atmosphere of comfy sofas, child-friendliness and an encouraging make-do and mend spirit. Part of the latter includes a battered old piano, which in turn is leading to music evenings…
Jazz in Archway presents:
The Jonny Gee Quartet Forks & Corks, 2 Archway Mall, Junction Road, Archway, London, N19 5PH, England
Friday 12th February 2016, 8.00pm – free event – more information
The Quartet are Jonny Gee (leader and double bass), Mick Foster (saxophone), Dan Hewson (piano) and Andrea Trillo (drums). From the photo, you can tell that they don’t take themselves too seriously, but don’t expect the same to apply to the music. Although you can expect a breezy, funky and accessible take on acoustic jazz, it’s going to be played by some serious musicians – most of them bandleaders in their own right – who don’t see why joy and sunniness can’t flood their playing. Between them they draw on years of experience with jazz, classical and dance forms (having collectively clocked up work with Stan Sulzmann, Ravi Shankar, Mike Garrick, Jacqui Dankworth, Zoë Rahman, The Sixteen, Pete King, the London Jazz Orchestra, Dave O’Higgins, Jon Toussaint, Jerry Dammers and Antonio Forcione). Not a bad collective draw for a scruffy, warmed-up concrete box in the middle of Archway…
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Still in London, on the 13th there’s the usual wash of Saturday gigs – acoustica, contemporary prog, electro-psych and power electronics, and lo-fi pop. Let’s make a start on that.
Bad Elephant Music have been one of the most industrious of British cottage labels this past year, putting out a steady and careful stream of latterday prog, post-prog, folk rock and sophisticated AOR albums. This home gig should live up to the label’s familial reputation…
“With their powerful and hypnotic songwriting, The Gift are supreme purveyors of the storytelling art and the perfect band to headline this event. The band will be staging a performance of their classic first album, ‘Awake And Dreaming’. 2016 sees the 10th anniversary of this long-deleted album, and to celebrate its birthday BEM will be reissuing it in a deluxe version, with brand new design. It is available for sale bundled with pre-ordered tickets for the evening, and also at the show. It won’t be on general release until later in the year, so this is a unique opportunity to get your copy and hear the album before it’s in the wild.
Twice Bitten will be making a rare live appearance, following BEM’s release of their first ever CD, ‘Late Cut’, in 2015. Formed in 1982, this legendary ‘heavy wood’ duo performed with most of the second-wave progressive rock bands of the Eighties, and will be well-known to anyone who frequented the Marquee back in the day. In keeping with their idiom, this appearance represents the launch event for ‘Late Cut’ – only six months after its release!
Tom Slatter‘s music is a listening experience like no other, with epic songs and deliciously dark storylines. Tom has eccentricity, inventiveness and mad genius at the core of everything he does – musician who is continually re-inventing himself. Tom is currently working on his fifth full-length album, a followup to ‘Fit The Fourth’, released by BEM in 2015. Tom certainly knows the meaning of ‘left field’ when it comes to the ideas and execution of his steampunk prog.
jh‘s uniquely British songwriting is a testament to his love of the album as an art form and his to his integrity as a musician. His eclectic yet cohesive music is full of melodies that will glue themselves inside your head. ‘Morning Sun’, an anthology of jh’s first three albums, has been a favourite for many visitors to the BEM store, and 2016 will see the release his first new collection of material since 2013′s ‘So Much Promise’.”
LATE UPDATE:
Unfortunately Rog Patterson – one half of Twice Bitten – has suffered a slipped disc in his neck, and is unable to even hold a guitar, let alone play one. Twice Bitten have, therefore, had to withdraw from An Evening of Bad Elephant Music. However… all is not lost! At the eleventh hour We Are Kin have stepped into the fray with a special acoustic performance of songs from their album ‘Pandora’.
Having just finished a British tour in support of their fourth album, ‘Highly Deadly Black Tarantula’, Teeth of the Sea (returning to one of their London home-venues) have shown up in ‘Misfit City’ before. Their driving part-electronic instrumentals – packed with wailing guitars, rasping analogue synths and effected kaleidoscopic trumpet – owe equal debts to counterculture techno and to the aggressive end of psychedelic rock. ‘The Guardian’ has described their sound as “a more malevolent Morricone… widescreen and atmospheric throughout, but with a sense of dread running through its veins.” That’s close enough to nail it, though I’d also salute the four-to-the-floor beats, the cavernous space echo, and the dark pop shimmer that seals their overall appeal. Lurking epic dread notwithstanding, a Teeth of the Sea gig is also a grand black-winged dance party – a huge Gothic laugh.
In support are Ramleh, whose lengthy and intermittent history dates back to the early ‘80s when they were launched as a solo power electronics project by founder and constant member Gary Mundy. As Gary and collaborator Philip Best developed, their sound generators, tunnelling shock-noise and lacings of screamed and hateful imagery gradually gave way to more flexible live instrumentation and more cryptically-inclined song-texts. Gary would become one of the key members of another crew of brutal noise-rock improvisers, Skullflower, whose explorations and personnel both contributed to Ramleh’s second and more psychedelic incarnation, which lasted through to the late ‘90s.
Since reuniting for a second time in 2009 (this time without Philip Best, now concentrating on the transcendently confrontational noise of his Consumer Electronics project), Ramleh have honed their sound to what you’ll hear on their newest album ‘Circular Time’ – dark guitar peals, blipping synth tones, pillared bass and supple, controlled-demolition drum-and-percussion flexings which can skulk in a kind of dubby minimalism or engage in furious death-spiral embraces of crowded noise. The Ramleh you see at this concert could be the rock trio version (Gary, Antony diFranco, Martyn Watts) or the drumless duo version of Gary and Anthony (I’m guessing that it’ll be the former…)
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There’s just time to quickly mention this one too…
The Centrals + Picturebox The Urban Bar, 176 Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel, London, E1 1BJ, England
Saturday 13th February 2016, 8.00pm – more information
“The Centrals return to The Urban Bar in Whitechapel. Expect a fast-paced set full of catchy scrappy numbers that rarely break the 3min barrier. No messin’. Alongside them will be Picturebox, with their unique brand of lo-fi pop music from the cathedral city of Canterbury.”
More assorted crossovers and team-ups via Daylight Music…
Daylight Music 214: Arcadio + Michael Price & Peter Gregson + Dakota Suite & Quentin Sirjacq Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 6th February 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event – more information
“Arcadio brings together London’s finest improvisers and percussionists to create a nomadic exploration of rhythm and movement. Led by composer Andrew Hall (also known as trumpeter for the vLookup Trio and Mak Murtic’s Balkan folk-futurist ensemble Mimika), Arcadio also features double bass player J.J. Stillwell, soundmangler Phil Maguire, woodwinder Rob Milne, multi-instrumentalist Ben Zucker, vLookup drummer Tom Atherton and several Mimika members (saxophonists Mak Murtic, Seb Silas and John Macnaughton; percussionist Paul Love). The band defines itself as the point where “electro-salsa meets free improvisation.” This will be their debut gig.
Michael Price is one of the UK’s most sought after composers and arrangers. His work for film and television includes ‘Sherlock’ and ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ (both of which he co-scores with David Arnold), ‘Unforgotten’, ‘Hot Fuzz’, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’, ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘Quantum of Solace’. Michael’s first film experience was as musical assistant, co-producer and arranger to the late Michael Kamen, with whom he collaborated for five years, working on a number of exciting projects including ‘X-Men’, ‘Band of Brothers’, ”The Iron Giant’, and ‘Metallica – S&M’. Having begun his career as a pianist and composer for contemporary dance, he has now established the Michael Price Trio and Ensemble to perform his own work in diverse venues across the world. His critically acclaimed debut album ‘Entanglement’ (on Erased Tapes Records, released in April 2015) was described as “gorgeous” by Rolling Stone.
On this occasion, Michael will be performing with New Music cellist and composer Peter Gregson, who has recently premiered works by composers including Daníel Bjarnason, Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Steve Reich.
Now approaching its twentieth anniversary, Dakota Suite is not so much a band, more the brainchild of Chris Hooson. While holding down a full-time job as a social worker in Leeds, Chris produces affecting sadcore music under the Dakota Suite monicker, usually working in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist David Buxton, but sometimes with Italian ambient composer Emanuele Errante and American composer-cellist David Darling.
Since 2009, another regular Dakota Suite collaborator has been Parisian composer and pianist Quentin Sirjacq – improviser, New Music performer and composer of music for film, theater and radio. A musician who has performed as part of rock groups, big bands, symphony orchestras and avant-garde ensembles, Quentin has also worked Fred Frith, whose music he has performed (alongside that of James Tenney and Frederic Rzewski and José Maceda) as part of his continuing explorations of the avant-garde and its relationship with older traditions. Quentin’s other recent collaborations have included work with Akira Kosemura and Shin Kikuchi, leading to releases on the Japanese label Schole Records.
Current collective Dakota Suite/Sirjacq plans include an upcoming studio record featuring the Hooson/Buxton/Sirjacq trio and the release of a live album featuring the Hooson/Sirjacq duo, some of which may be touched on at this gig.”
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There are two more upcoming jazz’n’improv gigs from the LUME organisation:
LUME presents:
Njanas + Far Reaching Dreams Trio The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8AZ, England
Sunday 7th February 2016, 7.30pm< – more information here and here
Njanas is a brand new project consisting of four female musician/composers – Laura Cole (piano), Filomena Campus (vocals), Tori Handsley (harp) and Ruth Goller (bass) – who are all band leaders in their own right. The ensemble, which celebrates women’s art and music, started more than a year ago.
Njanas state “we often feel under-represented as women in the worlds of jazz and art, and in this project all compositions are inspired by a female artist (such as Frida Kahlo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Gertrude Stein, Franca Rame and many more) or written by a female composer. The name Njanas is an encounter between the gigantic sculptures called ‘Nanas’, created by painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, and ‘Janas’, ancient legendary female figures and fairies/witches that relate to the myth of the Sardinian Goddess-Mother.”
Following the critically-acclaimed success of his ambitious nine-part jazz suite ‘Far Reaching Dreams Of Mortal Souls’, multi-instrumentalist and composer Percy Pursglove now debuts the music as re-interpreted by his fascinating new Far Reaching Dreams Trio, featuring himself on trumpet, Paul Clarvis on drums and Ivo Neame on piano and accordion.
Percy composed the original suite during 2013 and 2014, working with the support of a Jazzlines Fellowship. The multi-lingual piece (including sung texts referring to Anne Frank, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Malala Yousafzai, Charles Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Benjamin Franklin and Joan of Arc) was originally arranged for a nine-piece ensemble, conductor and eight-piece choir for its October 2014 premiere. Percy describes ‘Far Reaching Dreams Of Mortal Souls’ as “a project that has been in the back of my mind for a few years now. I had some wonderful experiences singing in choirs at an early age and the sound of and purity of massed voices has always drawn my ear. I wanted to find a way to access that broad spectrum of possible textures that Gabriel Faure had introduced me to all those years ago, but within a chamber ensemble setting that has the scope to offer another layer of unforeseen spontaneity.”
En Bas Quartet are string-section improvisers. In order of rising pitch, they are Seth Bennett (double bass and group leader), Alice Eldridge (cello), Benedict Taylor (viola) and Aby Vulliamy (viola).
Seth comments “I’d long been interested in contemporary chamber music, and wanted to investigate that aesthetic in an improvised context. A ‘low’ quartet also allows me to join in – the bass part in a quartet is usually taken by the cello – and write music for a chamber ensemble, with all the interaction and rhythmic subtlety they use. I find the parallel between a small jazz ensemble and a string quartet very interesting; both groups will stretch time, allow the music to breathe and pause, and find a way to play as a single unit. I chose three of the best string improvisers in the country to form the rest of the ensemble, and was lucky enough that they all agreed to take part in the project.”
Here’s what they do:
According to LUME, at this gig the Quartet “will be playing Seth’s quartet for improvising low strings, based on the Northumberland folk song tune Sair Fyeld Hinny, and exploring various settings and provocations for group and solo improvisation. Inspired by the quartets of Shostakovich, Beethoven and Bartok, as well as more contemporary jazz ensembles like Arcado String Trio, the Masada string trio and contemporary British free improvisation, En Bas Quartet weave their disparate influences into a compelling whole.”
Here’s another adjustment to the gig schedule, since Daylight Music have just announced their first 2016 season with a day’s notice and I’ve just heard about something else down in Brighton. Quickly, then…
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Daylight Music 211 – Strange Boy, Partikel + The Duke St Workshop with Laurence R. Harvey + Ed Dowie Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 16th January 2016, 12.00pm – free entry – more information
“Strangeness abounds at Daylight Music this week, with a splendidly unsettling start to the season. The Duke St Workshop are an electronic duo from Wigan making imaginary soundtracks, primarily to cold cases from the late 1960’s to the present time. Their new album, ‘Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft’ is a spoken-word collaboration with established horror actor and performance artist Laurence R. Harvey (of ‘Human Centipede’ fame).
Partikel are regarded as one of the most forward looking groups on the European jazz scene. Three London-based musicians, led by saxophonist Duncan Eagles, combine their various favourite musical elements to create a very particular sound of their own.
Rounding off the wondrous weirdness is Strange Boy, melding the beautiful songwriting of Kieran Brunt with the intricate soundscapes of Matt Huxley. Expect delicate melodic lines and crisp electronic textures wrapped up in soaring string arrangements.
Ed Dowie will also join us to pay tribute to David Jones on the 200 year old Henry Willis Organ.”
Daylight Music are justifiably proud of their cosy-meets-challenging gig rosters, and this upcoming season looks as if it will be no exception. From Daylight pilot Ben Eshmade – “the new season… includes music which ranges from electro-salsa to J-pop (and) brings you shows bound with even more ideas, surprises and themes, like our time travel special and a celebration of all things Cornish. The Hangover Lounge are returning, after their hugely successful shows in the past, and they’ll be taking over Daylight Music at the end of January for a special gig, including an album launch from The Wave Pictures. Another first this season will be a live set generated on an ipad app, thanks to the artist Ok Bertie!”
As usual, I’ll pass on previews of these gigs as they pop up, but if you want to read the schedule as it stands now, it’s here.
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Brighton’s Crayola Lectern are playing the Lewes Psychedelic Festival in March, and from following up on that for the previous post I also found out about this:
The Bleeding Hearts Club Winter Escape (presented by Bleeding Hearts Recordings)
Coachwerks, 19 Hollingdean Terrace, Brighton, BN1 7HB, England
Saturday 23rd January 2016, 3.00pm – more information
From Bleeding Hearts Recordings – “as we’re often sick of the winter by mid-January we decided to organise an indoors escape from the wintry grimness. This will be our third Saturday show at the Coachwerks but our first all-dayer. The show will be packed with music, poetry and performance art. Hopefully we’ll have time to organise food. Of course there is already a dangerously good bar run by Bartlebys Brewery in the venue. Entry incentive: £3.50 before 5.00pm (the acts on early will be amazing), £5 after 5.00pm (still a bonkers bargain). Get in touch if you’d like to help us out on the day.”
Although the Coachwerks Facebook page suggests that the venue’s permanently closed, I’ve been reliably informed that it’s open (Brighton anarchy). Confirmed to play at the Winter Escape are the aforemention Crayola Lectern and The Creaking Chair (both of whom specialise in a kind of kosmische-Anglica, complete with wit, smiles, drift and the occasional tearstreak); “sadcore/badcore/fadcore/dadcore” solo act Porridge Radio & The Cosmic Sadness; Xelis de Toro of electronic words/music/movement improvisers laboratoro); and The Trail Of Thomas Love (Shropshire-born songwriter and photographer Nathan Tromans, formerly of Mustard and John The Revelator, playing “slowgospelfolkrockcountrycore… reflective and intimate songs… small fragments of stories and ordinary myths of loneliness, misadventure, hope and redemption, of the journey and the coming home”). There are also various other acts whom I can’t find web pages for right now – singer-songwriter Daniel Searle, Hope In The Valley, TAiL, Dave Suit, Sophie Brown, Lisa Jayne, Ben Graham and Palmer’s Made of Sound.
Regarding those that I could track down, the usual tasters are below:
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More gig news next time, including those delayed previews for Of Arrowe Hill and Earl Zinger with the Emanative & Collocutor Duo; plus the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at Daylight Music…
The first of a few pointers towards upcoming festivals and tours happening this year. The first of these are both in Sussex during the spring and summer.
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Lewes Psychedelic Festival 2016 (presented by Innerstrings & Melting Vinyl)
All Saints Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes, BN7 2LE, England
Saturday 19 March 2016, 6.00pm – more information
(All-ages event, but under-16s must be accompanied by an adult)
Here’s what they have to say:
“Initially conceived by former Lewes resident Richard Norris (The Grid, Beyond the Wizards Sleeve, Circle Sky) over a pint of Harveys, Lewes Psychedelic Festival was an immediate success, selling out it’s first event way back in 2009. For the first two years, the event was held at All Saints Centre, a beautiful Norman church in the heart of Lewes. In 2012, the event moved to Zu Studios, which again was hugely successful. With mind bending visuals from Innerstrings since the festival’s inception, the event has seen performances from such great bands as The Soundcarriers, The Yellow Moon Band, Voice of The Seven Thunders, Black Market Karma, Himmel – Music For Massed Fuzz Organs, Crayola Lectern, Diagonal, kontakte, Notorious HiFi Killers and The Time & Space Machine. This year, Lewes Psychedelic Festival returns to the intimate 200 capacity All Saints Centre. On word of mouth alone, it’s already virtually sold out, but a few tickets remain available from physical outlets in the south coast area (The Vinyl Frontier, Music’s Not Dead, Pebbles and Wow And Flutter. These will go fast, so buy now.
The Cult Of Dom Keller will headline this year’s festival. The Nottingham four-piece are a groovy bunch of sonic alchemists, who create whacked-out soundscapes and songs that appear to have been born from another universe: their fuzz-laden psych pop is infectious and consuming and are destined to blow you away. The south London group Virginia Wing are a perfect blend of psychedelic majesty, speaking to everyday anxiety and isolation as well as seeking to evoke an inner world of pastoral fortification. They draw influence from the radiophonic sounds of Broadcast, the kosmische wonder of Cluster and the rhythmic propulsion of This Heat whilst never directly emulating any particular style. We are more than excited to have them join this stellar line-up!
Brighton-based (with a Lewes connection) Soft Walls is the solitude, singular and unique vision of Cold Pumas member and Faux Discx overseer Dan Reeves, who incorporates a broad palette of sonic textures from psychedelic pop to found sounds and ’60s echo. We also needed some youths on the line-up and new Brighton up-and-comers Wax Machine fit the bill. They are pure psychedelic rockers with a love for the ’60s, alongside a contemporary and experimental approach to the hazy, lo-fi sounds of psychedelia.
We are really pleased to have booked Novella after seeing them play an amazing set (with fan Bobby Gillespie in attendance) in London back in May. London-based (but originally from these shores), the band create their own intensively psych-ethereal harmonies and melodic garage sound. Finally, ZOFFF are a south-coast-based psychedelic krautrock band, assembled from various members of the rather brilliant Cardiacs, Levitation, Sons of Noel and Adrian, Clowwns and Crayola Lectern. It was Crayola Lectern’s mind-blowing performance of ‘Trip In D’ at the last Lewes Psych Fest that inspired them to form this collective. Intense and unpredictable, ZOFFF’s performances are the stuff of future legend.”
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While the Psychedelic Festival may well have sold out by the time you read this, the next one probably hasn’t: and if you’re female, you might even still have a chance to pitch for a performance slot. Read on…
Her Festival 2016 (presented by Samurai Nights)
various venues, Worthing, England
Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th June 2016
As befits a town in the Brighton orbit, Worthing has its share of a questioning and revolutionary undercurrent, with challenging countercultural/counter-status-quo ideas being constantly tossed around against that backdrop of Georgian-to-Edwardian seaside gentilities and bland housing developments. Albeit, sometimes this is off in the sidestreets and on the quiet, but it’s promising to hear news that someone there is planning an all-female music festival (with boys and men still welcome, but only in the audience this time). Details have been sketchy for a while (and it’s unclear whether there are going to be any stylistic tendencies or restrictions – they’ve mentioned band and dance stages and an “urban” component, but not suggested that anyone’s likely to be locked out due to not fitting the sound of the show). Here’s what the organisers have said so far:
“Samurai Nights presents Her Festival – a brand new festival that aims to lead in showcasing women in music. Held in Worthing, West Sussex, UK, the three day festival will showcase female DJs/bands/urban artists in three fantastic venues including Worthing Pavilion (the Dance Stage) and Worthing Assembly Hall (the Band Stage). Acts will be a mixture of grass roots, emerging and very established headline acts. We will also hold a VIP music industry convention that will hold discussions, workshops and Q&A sessions that will cover topics such as pregnancy in the music industry, radio, entertainment law and booking agencies to name a few. Day/weekend /VIP-industry tickets will be available”
So far the only confirmed act is beatboxer/ambient pop singer Grace Savage (a 2015 beatbox team champion and onetime member of BURD), with more to follow. The organisers are still teasing the audience by asking them to name people whom they’d like to see on the bill. I’d say that any women reading this (whether performers or just attendees) who are in with a chance of getting anywhere near Worthing in the summertime, should take them up on it. They said “grassroots”, so give them grassroots. Any building information and developments can be found here and here as it arrives. I’ll do an update later.
There are a series of concerts coming up featuring East Anglian musician Laura Cannell. Playing a variety of instruments (predominantly straight or overbowed fiddle and double recorders, but also percussion and “other rarified wind instruments”, Laura fuses early and mediaeval music with a mixed ancient-and-modern approach to improvisation and to transcendent musical ceremony, taking fragments or inspirations from earlier sounds and melodies as the basis for exploration, illustration and linkages.
Laura will be playing up and down the country over the next few months at a variety of different events and locations, Each one has different musicians on the bill – Brooklyn-based Dutch lutenist and composer Josef van Wissem, who’s bringing the baroque lute out towards the worlds of experimental rock, folk and film; Liverpudlian tape-loop composer In Atoms whose “blissful and evocative” soundscapes and tones mix heath music and throbbing clubby sub-bass with the industrial and reveal him straddling Anglo-pastoralism and the European electronic grandeur of the Schultzes and Jarres; and two Yorkshire singers, Stephanie Hladowski (whose work stretches from reggae to traditional folk) and Magpahi (a.k.a. Todmorden based multi-instrumentalist Alison Cooper, who assembles a collage of folk song, fairy tale, Elizabethan poetry and dreamworld sonics from a variety of instruments and is inspired by “sepia stories, stray animals and recurring dreams of migration”).
Here’s the gig list, and something from each of Laura’s gigmates (including something quite rare from Magpani via the Was Is Das clubnight and promotions):
Laura has further gigs coming up later in the year, which I’ll also be posting about in due course.
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Born in Nagoya, (but now based in Bristol with his wife and collaborator, alt.folk singer Rachael Dadd) Ichi is paying London another visit with his truckload of invented instruments and mind-snagging riffs, digging a dayglo-lined tunnel between the avant-garde and a children’s playroom.
Ichi (The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, London, WC1H 8JF, UK, Saturday 23rd January 2016, 8.00pm) – £11.00 – information – tickets
From the Harrison’s blurb:
Ichi takes the notion of a one-man band to new limits, combining his quirky handmade instrument inventions (stilt-bass, kalilaphone, balloon-pipes, hatbox-pedal-drum, tapumpet, percussion-shoes & hat-trick-hat) with steel-drum, ping-pong balls, toys & everyday objects all in the space of one short set. Somehow there’s an ancient, ritualistic feel to his performances – he’s like the misplaced leader of a tribe. To see Ichi live is to witness something so playful and unusual you know that you’re experiencing something entirely new. It`s fun, it`s danceable, it`s exciting…. Also a practicing and exhibiting artist and film-maker, Ichi is usually seen with a cine camera in his hand, or his hands rooting through Bristol skips for materials for his musical and sculptural inventions, or his hands in the earth making human sized interactive earth xylophones as he did at Bristol`s Forage Festival.
And where words fail, there’s always the video to Ichi’s recent single Go Gagambo, “a song about mistaken identity (gagambo is an insect unfortunate enough to be mistaken as a big mosquito, resulting in probable death by angry clapping hands)”.
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I’d been hoping to bring you news of London acoustic steampunk-prog hero Tom Slatter playing Britain’s first actual steampunk bar (the recently opened Yellow Book, which is squirreled away in the Lanes of Brighton and claims to have been founded by time-travelling Victorians). Sadly not. Message just in – “This gig has been postponed. Don’t go there expecting to see me on the 23rd! Do go there if you want to see the venue, which is lovely. I will be playing at the Yellow Book in the near future. Watch this space.”
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More gig news next time, including shows by Of Arrowe Hill and Earl Zinger with the Emanative & Collocutor Duo; plus an appearance by Sealionwoman.
Born in Oldham, currently Saddleworth-based, but occupying a wayward and exciting multi-instrumental/multi-genre orbit (which takes in, among many others, Todd Rundgren, spangled electronica, Dirty Projectors, Van Morrison and Nancy Chodorow) teenage wunderkind turned twenty-year-old psych-pop pioneer Kiran Leonard embarks on a quick British tour this coming week. For a sampling of what’s on offer, have a listen to Kiran’s most recent single, which examines the panicked, unwilling misogyny of pubescent boys and uses it as a launchpad for sixteen minutes of charging, spontaneous-sounding twist-and-turn musical quest. Spattered with snippets of radio, cut’n’paste ADHD changes and lo-fi turnarounds, it sounds like Lou Reed and Jim O’Rourke grappling over the steering wheel of a gawky teenage Yes.
For the tour, Kiran’s four-piece band features three other flexible Manchester music luminaries. Guitarist Dan Bridgewood Hill also plays as dbh and with NASDAQ, Irma Vep Band and Seatoller), bass player Dave Rowe is from Plank and Andrew Cheetham drums with acts including Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, Easter, Butcher The Bar, the Birchall/Cheetham Duo and experimental rock duo Yerba Mansa. Support across the dates comes, variously, from Yerba Mansa, introverted Manchester singer-songwriter Tom Settle, Marc Rooney (taking a solo break from his usual band, Glaswegian “past post-modern bug-eyed beatniks”Pronto Mama), Edinburgh rock juveniles Redolent and inventive Sussex girl duo Let’s Eat Grandma.
The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, Hackney, London, E8 3AS, England, Monday 11th January 2016, 7.30pm – £8.50 – information – tickets
The Prince Albert, 48 Trafalgar Street, Brighton, BN1 4ED, England, Tuesday 12th January 2016, 7.30pm (with Let’s Eat Grandma)- £8.80 – information – tickets
The Eagle Inn, 18 Collier Street, Salford, M3 7DW, England, Wednesday 13th January 2016, (with Tom Settle & Friends + Yerba Mansa) – information – tickets
This gig info was added to the top of this post at the last minute, and these gigs are selling out fast, so move quickly.
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The past week’s death of Pierre Boulez cast an overwhelming shadow over the classical and avant-garde worlds. Under that pall, it’s easy to forget that breed of composers that the post-war work of Boulez and his acolytes sometimes eclipsed – working at a humbler altitude, often inclined to traditional tonalism and craftsmanship and generally writing for the vast and undersung body of working musicians and small regional music groups, their work’s left out of the big conversations. It may break fewer boundaries, or no boundaries at all, but (to my mind, at least) it doesn’t necessarily have a lesser value. Not only does it often demonstrate an empathy for the musician over the concept, it demonstrates music’s quality of constant giving, showing that the older schemes which a younger and more intemperate Boulez once dismissed as being played out are anything but: revealing an ever-renewing, ever-fertile grain to be worked with and against even in well-mined territories.
To my ears, the work of Julian Dawes fits into this category. Five decades of his composing has produced chamber and keyboard music, theatre compositions, youth pieces, assorted works on Jewish themes (including Kaddish songs, Exodus cantatas and Holocaust pieces) plus an acclaimed mandolin concerto. All of it displays a lambent, empathetic feel for subject, performer and musician; and this coming Wednesday sees some of it compiled for a dedicated concert in London.
A Concert of Commemorative Music by Julian Dawes (The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England, Wednesday 13th January 2016, 7.30pm) – £9.00 to £12.00 – information & tickets
This is an evening of music which Julian has written to celebrate people and events. The night is also in memory of Emma Daly, and the proceeds of the concert will go to the Rosewood Chemo Ward at the Darenth Valley Hospital.
Programme:
Love Life and Lyric (for soprano and piano)
Reflection on Psalm 43 (for piano) – first concert performance
Homage (for string quartet)
Wedding Song (Louisa) (for soprano, violin & piano) – world premiere
Piano Sonata – world premiere
Bagatelle for a Wedding (for string quartet)
Songs from ‘The Song of Solomon’ (for mezzo soprano, tenor & piano)
String Quartet (slow movement)
Sonata for Violin and Piano
Soundclips of Julian Dawes’ music on the web are few and far between, but I’ve managed to dredge up these two videos – one of Cantor Jason Green performing one of Julian’s vocal pieces, and a low-key one of Julian talking about his work (on behalf of the publishing service Tutti). You can also listen to soundclips of some of his work at the page for Omnibus Classics’ release of his ‘Chamber Music’ CD.
Julian’s most recently completed project is ‘Pesach Cantata’ with a libretto by Roderick Young telling the story of Passover. This will be premiered at the New London Synagogue in April 2016: I’ll post about that closer to the time.
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Lastly, there are a couple of New York gigs (this week and towards the end of the month) by a ‘Misfit City’ favourite of recent years, Brooklyn-based groove-pop band Legs, who mix irresistible New Wave dance grooves with twitchy emotional neurosis and a verbose, occasional waspish Steely Dan-esque approach to songcraft under the double-keyboard licks.
Legs + SKP (Hypnocraft @ The Manhattan Inn, 632 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, New York 11222, USA, Monday 11th January 2016, 8.30pm) – free event (suggested $5.00-$10.00- information
This pay-what-you-like gig is a Legs headliner, at which they’re supported by SKP – a.k.a. Sarah Kyle, frontwoman of Brooklyn psychedelic pop band Lip Talk. Sarah is also a member of recent Interpol tourmates Cosmicide, which features most of Lip Talk plus ex-Secret Machines leader Brandon Curtis.
Blank Paper + Tropic Of Pisces + Legs (Rough Trade NYC, 64 N 9th Street, Brooklyn, New York, NY 11249, USA, Friday 22nd January 2016, 8.00pm) – information here and here – tickets
This latter one’s a bottom-of-the-bill show for Legs. Swings and roundabouts, but they can play on both. At least they get to perform at Rough Trade (should be a natural audience booster) and they also get to act as warm-up and gig primer for two other stylish and eminently compatible Brooklyn acts. Keytar-wielding Blank Paper mix up classic hip hop rhythms, distant glimmering-city synthpop tones and vocals with just the right degree of hauteur for detached explorations of love and obsession sheathed in immaculate tunes. Tropic of Pisces is the new project from Mon Khmer/Oberhofer sideman Mathew Scheiner – his geeky white-boy solo funk seems to be inspired equally by glam, hip hop and South African township jive, though he himself describes it as “a warm, magical place that you must be special enough to have found.” Judge for yourselves below via the videos, with their ninja noir and tinfoil chic.
Back to the centre of London for some no-nonsense math rock, post-hardcore and brainwork with knuckles… and what could be more festive and seasonal than a band called Shitwife?
TINJR Xmas Party with Axes, Shitwife, Vasa & Wot Gorilla (This is Not Revolution Rock/Jebs Presents @ The Borderline, Orange Yard, off Manette Street, London, W1D 4JB, England, Saturday 19th December 2015, 7.00pm) – £8.50-£9.60 – information – tickets
“Absolutely buzzing for this show. Not only will this be the Xmas party for This Is Not Revolution Rock / Jebs Presents, it marks Del’s 30th birthday and 200th show as a promoter. So we’re really pushing the boat out and there might be some free mince pies. Please spread the word and let’s pack the venue out from start to finish for this, the last show we’re putting on in 2015!”
(They’re so carried away by the occasion that they didn’t really introduce the bands… or assumed that everyone reading would know them. I’m in a hurry, so here’s the one-line version.
Axes – brash and playful mathrockers with a Foo Fighter pop vigour. Shitwife – astonishingly brutal drums/laptop/electronics juggernaut fusing rave, death metal, noise and post-hardcore. Side project of musicians in bands with equally tasteful names. Vasa – noisy synesthesic post-rock package. Wot Gorilla? – how to noodle away at prog-inspired math rock and not alienate people.
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Here’s Knifeworld’s frontman (and eccentric broadcaster, in every sense) heading over to Deptford to dig up something old for the end of the year…
Dear Boss: Kavus Torabi and others (The Bird’s Nest, 32 Church Street, Deptford, London, SE8 4RZ, England, Sunday 20th December 2015, 4.00pm) – free entry – information
It’s Chri-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-istma-a-a-a-as! Join us as we are joined by avant-psych-rock multi-instrumentalist and all round Interesting Alternative guy Kavus Torabi (Knifeworld/Guapo)…(Mr. Steve Davis sadly can’t join us, as he’s gone skiing). And… come early to witness one of England’s strangest and most resilient midwinter traditions – ‘The Christmas Champions’ (a.k.a ‘The Mummers Play’). Our team of Jolly Boys and Guisers will offer up some seasonal shambols – preparing to entertain you with a short performance featuring William the Great, St George, Bull Slasher, The Doctor and old Beelzebub himself – with original music from James Larcombe (Stars in Battledress/North Sea Radio Orchestra). We’ll be doing it around 7-ish, I expect.
Boss. Wassail!
Beyond all of the throaty bombast I think that most of what’s beyond the mummery is DJ sets, although anyone who’s tuned in to Kavus on the Interesting Alternative Show will know that he can slap together some of the most extraordinarily eclectic sets you could ever hope to hear, featuring plenty of names you’d never heard, while telling cheerful lies about other cult artists who don’t actually exist. Fun to catch, in other words.
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On the subject of DJ sets, here’s one last one…
Café Oto NYE Party with Hieroglyphic Being 6-hour DJ set) (Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, UK, 31st December 2015, 10.00pm) – £20.00-£30.00 – information – tickets
We’re ecstatic to be welcoming in the New Year with Jamal Moss (a.k.a. Hieroglyphic Being), who will be flying in especially to Café Oto for a bumper 6 hour DJ set.
Jamal is one of the most unhinged and adventurous artists working in electronic music today; born in Chicago and raised in the heyday of the city’s house music scene, he has gone on to blur the lines between various forms of dance music, free jazz and industrial music, releasing countless singles and LPs, and even recently collaborating with the likes of Marshall Allen and Daniel Carter. His infamously unpredictable DJ sets have gardened considerable praise over the years, so we’re delighted to have him here for this very special occasion.
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And that’s it – although there’ll be a ramble through 2015 sometime between now and the end of January, and I may sneakily shuffle a few previously-incompleted posts back into the dates when I intended to publish them.
Back in London, Momentum Arts are setting themselves going with a Christmas gig tomorrow. They’ve got roots in, and are closely associated with, the Jeremy Corbyn movement, so the politically averse/committed should expect speeches and some familiar political faces to be included in the package along with the music. You can find out exactly who’s speaking, and in some cases what about) by following the information link). Personally, I share quite a few of their sympathies; but here’s what they have to say:
Momentum Arts Xmas Fundraiser with The Marzec Group + Mariela of Venus on the Radio + Maz O’Connor + Keith Burstein + others (Momentum Arts @ POW/The Prince of Wales, 467-469 Brixton Road, Brixton, London, SW9 8HH, England, Friday 18th December 2015, 7.00pm) – £6.00-£7.00 – information – tickets
Momentum Arts is an open network where creative people from all walks of life and lovers of the arts can unite through a shared passion for contemporary progressive, socially democratic politics. We are very proud of this and always aim (as far as possible) to create organising spaces which are safe for all. For this reason we’ll be operating on a zero tolerance policy for homophobia, racism, classism, transphobia and misogyny. We’re excited to present the first Momentum Arts event upstairs at the Prince Of Wales in Brixton! Get down to hear our excellent speakers, some inspiring music or just have a bit of a dance.
Performing:
The Marzec Group‘s appreciation for the club culture and electronic music genres brings back a reality to jazz; a grit long forgotten. Channelling these influences through a fresh and sophisticated combination of jazz, soul, blues and electronic music, their intense and improvisatory grooves are tailor made for the dancefloor.
Mariela is a girl of many hats; a musician and published author influenced by the likes of Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone, Jack White, Sergio Moroder and many others. With longtime collaborator Anthony she formed Venus on the Radio, a band which after recording in Abbey Road studios, was featured in BBC Introducing.
Maz O’Connor is a gifted singer of traditional and self-penned songs. Influenced by the folk songwriters of the 1960s; Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Neil Young along with her literary leanings make for a varied and intriguing body of work.
Keith Burstein is a composer whose work includes controversial operas which have provoked much comment and indignation from the right-wing press for daring to question the political establishment. Most notable among these is ‘Manifest Destiny’ (co-written with Dic Edwards) which portrays would-be suicide bombers who renounce violence and trigger a peace movement across the world. Keith will be performing two songs on piano, with a guest singer.
DJs Dr Punkenstein and Calvin De Kline will also be playing sets.
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In Deptford, something a little more straightforwardly musical:
Firstivus (The Bird’s Nest, 32 Church Street, Deptford, London, SE8 4RZ, England, Friday 18th December to Sunday 20th December 2015, 5.00pm onwards) – free – information & tickets
Two Deptford gig-scene lynchpins, Sinema City and Tom Moody –join forces for this year’s Firstivus – “a fun-filled weekend that will likely proved to be just a little too rhythmically-challenging for the whole family.”
Friday 18th opens, appropriately, with First (about whom no-one seems to know anything), followed by a pair of noisy drum-and-guitar duos (Charles Hayward‘s Bass Drum project with his son Riley Hayward, then the more secretive No One You Know). The music continues with garage-grungers Black Plastic Cardiacs/Bungle/Zappa-inspired progressive punk tanglers The Display Team, Gong-esque jazz-rock collisionists Psychoyogi, and finally by Ted Milton’s veteran schizo-disco art-punks Blurt (who are informed by poetry and puppeteering as much as by rock and roll).
Saturday 19th sports another diverse roster – stoner rockers The Cortège, the ”post-punk/alt-pop/awkward friendliness” of Dead Arm, The All New Greatest Hits Band (in which event organiser Tom Moody fronts the rhythm section of The Display Team), an acoustic Japanese interlude with shamisen player Hibiki Ichikawa and Champagne Dub, a new teaming of established friends: polydiscipline drummer Max Hallett (of A Scandal In Bohemia/Super Best Friends’ Club) and bassist Ruth Goller (Acoustic Ladyland, Oriole, Bug Prentice, many others), who’ve previously worked together in the encym trio. The evening rounds off with Afrobeat-ing Leeds post-punk trio Azores and headliners Boss Terror (who bring “drone, punk, spaced-and-motorway funk” as well as “Cockney tropical surf”).
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To be honest, I’ve got little idea of what’s going to happen with this next one, especially since it’s at The Others – but all of the clues point to a fusion of music, theatre and audience, and what time of year is better for that?
The Christmas Cabareilidh (Troupe @ The Others, 6-8 Manor Road, Stoke Newington, London, N16 5SA, UK, Saturday 19th December 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00 – information & tickets
A brand new night out that fuses the fabulous fun of cabaret with the gaiety of a good old fashioned ceilidh. Fresh from the success of our last sell-out event, Troupe presents another Christmas Cabareilidh that promises to be even more delightful than the evening’s portmanteau. You’re invited to sit under the glowing haze of fairy lights, as our hilarious cabaret performers fill you with festive cheer. Dance with giddy abandon to the live folk music of our Cabareildih band and fill your stomachs and hearts with mulled wine, minced pies and cheery Christmas carols. Join us at The Others for an evening of irreverent yuletide song and dance- because nothing says Christmas quite like a Cabareilidh!
Rush, rush. Last gigs before I give it a rest for the year. Here’s the expected random peppering, that lack of a consistent aesthetic, and all the other things you either love me for or despair over. They’re still mostly London shows, but for this first post of three, Glasgow and Colchester are getting a look in.
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The Prog before Xmas: Abel Ganz + Tiger Moth Tales + We Are Kin (Saramago @ Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street, G2 3JD Glasgow, Scotland, Friday 18th December 2015, 7.30pm) – £13.00 – information here and here – tickets
I probably can’t get away with calling Abel Ganz“veteran neo-proggers”. Although they’ve had no shortage of line-up changes and lengthy hiatuses since forming in Glasgow back in 1980, in recent years they’ve become an almost entirely new band, with the last founder members finally stepping down a year or two ago in favour of new musicians. Not so unusual, perhaps; but oddly, Abel Ganz has thrived in these new circumstances: in 2015, they’ve enjoyed their most successful band year in three-and-a-half decades, and are in the mood to celebrate.
“We really wanted to end what has been a fantastic year for us with a special show in our own home town – and to help us celebrate we have invited along not one, but two of our very favourite bands to join us. Amazingly, they have both agreed! First of all, we are absolutely overjoyed to welcome along the man who is behind the brilliant Tiger Moth Tales: Peter Jones! Anyone who has not heard Pete’s albums ‘Cocoon’ and ‘Story Tellers’ is really missing out! The reaction to these astonishing works has been nothing less than ecstatic with many reviewers – quite rightly – hailing the man’s arrival on the prog scene as a major talent!
Secondly, we have been watching with great interest the growing roster of fantastic artists that have been gradually collected by perhaps the most important and influential independent prog record label around at the moment: Bad Elephant Music. Amongst their many stand-out releases in 2015, there is one in particular that we keep coming back to: ‘Pandora’, by young Manchester band We Are Kin. Rave reviews describe this fresh band’s atmospheric approach as music that “transcends genre and sound to become something timeless, original and new”. So – there you have it. We are really, really excited about this! Three bands on one Xmas party night. We are so pleased that Tiger Moth Tales and We Are Kin will join us on this special occasion, and we are very proud to be bringing them both to Scotland for their first shows north of the border.”
Over in Colchester, one of the town’s leading alternative venues (and one of its more eccentric promoters) has something for you.
A Harry Merry Christmas with John Callaghan + Sealionwoman + Tropic of Xhao (Mother Popcorn @ The Waiting Room, The Old Bus Station, off Queen Street, Colchester, Essex CO1 2PQ, Saturday 19th December 2015, 7.00pm) – pay-what-you-like – information
Harry Merry returns to Colchester for the final Mother Popcorn gig of 2015. Last time he was here was a few years back (when what is now Tribal was still Molly Malones). If you were there then you know what went down. If you weren’t, don’t miss this opportunity to see a Rotterdam legend do his thing in Colchester! Harry has toured extensively with his good friend Ariel Pink (who covered his song ‘Stevie Storm’) and has shared the stage with R. Stevie Moore, Quintron & Miss Pussycat and Colchester Arts Centre regular (via the Faroe Islands) Goodiepal. Here’s what ‘The Weirdest Band In The World’ blog has to say about Harry:
“Harry Merry is a living underground legend from the Dutch harbor city of Rotterdam. Dressed up in a sailor’s tunic and styled with an iconic haircut, he is out there to flabbergast with his unique brand of entertainment. His favourite keyboard is subjected to his own wild arrangements, full of odd chord changes and a tone scale of its own. Add Harry Merry’s unique, heavily accented voice and your ears will witness a match made in weirdo heaven.”
In support is John Callaghan (“an unusual songwriter / performer of thoughtful and spiky electronica from Birmingham… king and fool of the Eccentronica Microscene”), who played for Ma Popcorn back in May and made such an impression on Colchester that he was invited back for the Free Festival in August.
Tropic of Xhao, that weird psychedelic drum ‘n’ bass lot from Essex’s only tropical island St. Xhao (and featuring Captain Mother Popcorn) will be playing as well. We invite you to come and do weird dances with us.
Really happy to say Sealionwoman have just been confirmed to complete the line-up and open the show! This will be their first Mother Popcorn but the third time I’ve seen them, and I already want to book them for more next year. Double bass and vocal, both at the top of their game in terms of musicianship, just an incredible force to watch and hear. They list their band influences as “gin, jazz and noise” which sums them up better than anything I could write.
As usual pay what you can afford. All the money goes to the bands so please give generously if you can.
(Just to add a little to the blurb on Sealionwoman: if you want to read my own live review of them from a few years ago – also featuring Liam Singer, Foxout! and a moonlighting Laura Moody – it’s here. And to add to the blurb on John Callaghan: while I’ve yet to make it to one of his shows, I know his music, we’ve conversed, and he’s one of the wisest men I’ve met but cunningly disguised as one of the silliest.)
On Saturday this week, there’s what looks like a particularly engaging Daylight Music afternoon, with the return of a familiar face…
Daylight Music 210 – The Pictish Trail + artists from the Lost Map label: Seamus Fogarty + Tuff Love + Kid Canaveral (Union Chapel, Saturday 12th November 2015, 12.00pm) – free (suggested donation £5.00) – information
Wrapping up this season of Daylight Music are Lost Map; a loose-knit DIY label/collective from the Hebrides founded by alt-folk troubadour, Johnny Lynch, a.k.a. The Pictish Trail. For this special Christmas show, Johnny will be ice-skating back to the mainland, bringing a selection box of pals from his Lost Map roster, for a cosy festive afternoon of stripped back acoustic merriment, frost-bitten Casio hymns, and mulled-tea fuelled carols.
While The Pictish Trail often comes across on record as an eerie digifolk creation (like a Scottish oil-town-and-fishing-port David Lynch, with that surreal supernatural undertow suffused by Gaelic angst rather than Americana), anyone who’s caught one of the live acoustic shows will know that Johnny has an altogether more joyous side as unplugged strummer. Many of his tales may be based on shyness, grief and confusion, but I’ve seen few people who take such unalloyed pleasure in warming up and including an audience the way he does. For a reminder of this, have a read of my review of his last Daylight Music appearance back in January… and see below.
Mayo-born but London-based, Seamus Fogarty plays and sings his own soulful version of contemporary Irish folk, dabbled with electronic found sound. His output’s been described as “songs about mountains that steal T-shirts, women who look like dinosaurs and various other unfortunate incidents” and as “summoning all manner of odd noises and audio ghosts”. Taken from his current album ‘God Damn You Mountain’, here’s Rita Jack’s Lament, which showcases all of his various tendencies to the maximum.
Glaswegian fuzzy-pop duoTuff Love represent Lost Map’s more-out-and-out indie rock side, although their cottage-industry approach (recording and producing everything at home themselves rather than chasing studios and jaded professional engineers) reflects the label’s d-i-y philosophy. Julie Eisenstein and Suse Bear (augmented for concerts by Phantom Band drummer Iain Stewart deliver “dazzling, sun-streaked guitar pop songs with mesmerising lyrics, heart-wrenching vocals and dreamy melodies like the sound of pure summer.” Over a scant few years of existence, they’ve already supported Paulo Nutini and Ride and played several overflowing handfuls of rock festivals.
‘Resort’ – a not-quite-debut album pulling together the three EPs that Tuff Love have put out so far – is out in January, but meanwhile here’s what will either be a reminder of their existing delights or an introduction to their world: somewhat shoegaze-y but with mischievous glimpses up through the eyelashes.
Edinburgh four-piece Kid Canaveral (whom Lost Map described as “ADHD pop splendour”) met at university in St Andrews and have been playing together ever since. Imaginative alternative pop, they manage to recall the early-‘80s cleverness of Postcard Records pop or the ramshackle poignancy of Belle & Sebastian without actually sounding much like either. It’s more a matter of spirit, a discreet but inclusive sophistication which reaches out, brushes your arm and invites you along. Two albums in, with a third in preparation, they’re a delightful discovery whenever you happen to encounter them. Their clever videos are a treat, too – here are a couple of tastes below, the first of which had my four-year-old son continually tapping the replay button.
(For anyone who wants a more substantial dose of Kid Canaveral, note that they’re playing a full set at the Shacklewell Arms on the evening of the same day.)
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On the Saturday evening, you’ve got your pick of twisty London art-rock and revived mid-Western proto-punk…
Thumpermonkey + Mayors Of Miyazaki + Lolita Laytex (Something’s Gonna Happen @ The Albany, Douglas Way, Deptford, London, SE8 4AG, England, Saturday 12th December 2015, 7.30pm) – £3.00-£5.00 – information – tickets on the door
Welcome back everybody: and once again we have two superb outfits centre stage, Thumpermonkey (heavy progressive music) and Mayors of Miyazaki (DIY three-piece based in south London, guaranteed to spit and sweat on us at close quarters). The lovely Lolita Laytex will be joining us to add the flavour of burlesque. Yes, people of the universe, with all those ingredients in store, you know the score: £3.00 concessions and a fiver on the door. Bring ya skin!
I’ve said quite a bit about Thumpermonkey over the course of the year. Grand, clever and atmospheric, they also have enough sly, self-aware wit and humour to undercut all of the previous. They’re also tricky to pigeonhole – a band who create intricate catastrophe epics (part Radiohead, part Van der Graff Generator) but also trill the occasional Mastodon cover in the style of early Kate Bush; a prog band with a singer who sounds like an old-time theatrical knight, but also a noise band who happen to wrap their wildness into tightly-composed structures; geeky popcorn information omnivores drawing from Alejandro Jodorowsky to H. P. Lovecraft to William Gibson, but salting it with Noam Chomsky and science magazines before whipping it up into artful tornados of song. This little sample here is both characteristic and unique within what Thumpermonkey do, which in itself probably tells you all you need to know.
I don’t think Mayors of Miyazaki have been in here before, but they should have been. In their way, their music’s as grand and complex as that of Thumpermonkey and even more enthused by its options. It’s punk with all the chains blown off, joyriding math-rock, de-Ritalined bratprog. A typical song sounds like both chase sequence and protracted explosion: spiky, switch-and-swap assemblages of guitar parts doubling back through alleys and charging halfway up walls, over which sibling team Gareth and Claire Thomas declaim a punky boy-girl barkathon, a speaky-drawl of sparking thoughts. Fugazi and The Fall both might be in there, though you could also pull Bis and long-lost ‘90s psych tanglers The Monsoon Bassoon out of the root cluster.
I don’t know much about Lolita Laytex except that she’s a fetish model as well as an alternative burlesque performer and fetish model. Not much information about a third-stream digression into music: so perhaps you should expect something sensual and mobile, which squeaks a little when it flexes. (UPDATE, 10th December – Well, that’s that laboured gag wasted. Lolita’s off the bill, replaced by Deptford punk-poppers The Kill Raimi’s. Some video evidence below…
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Rocket from the Tombs + Luminous Bodies (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ The Brewhouse, @ London Fields Brewery, 369-370 Helmsley Place, South Hackney, London, E8 3SB, England, Saturday 12th December 2015, 8.00pm) – £19.25 – information – tickets
Rocket from the Tombs (Brudenell Social Club, 17 Brudenell Road, Leeds, LS6 1HA, England, Sunday 13th December 2015, 8.00pm) – £17.60 – information – tickets
In their initial lifetime Rocket from the Tombs never got past a series of scorching mid-‘70s gigs in their Cleveland hometown, plus a handful of demos and radio sessions; yet they have long been counted as proto-punk ancestors, kicking up a frumious Velvets-and-Stooges racket long before every other garage band was doing it.
These days, onstage rock rage is quotidian; when Rocket from the Tombs brought it to the gig, it was a revelation. Following a headstrong and punchy split, they even spawned several other key bands. Main ranter David Thomas, doomed-and-driven guitarist Peter Laughner and soundman-turned-bass-player Tim Wright would create the first lineup of Pere Ubu. Second guitarist Cheetah Chrome and drummer Johnny Blitz hooked up with Stiv Bators and others to form the hardcore punk pioneers Dead Boys. The rest was bootlegs and rumbling mythology. Rocket from the Tombs became one of the ur-bands; a surviving impression holding its ghostly mark but pushing onwards, providing inspiration above and beyond its initial ideals.
By the accounts of the ex-members, being in the band was a short, brutal and vivid experience; but it seems that there may also have been an unspoken, slow-burning sense of unfinished business. Twenty-eight years later, in their grizzled early fifties, and with plenty of other experience clocked up, most of the surviving band members (minus the retired Blitz and the long-dead Laughner) reunited for piss-and-vinegar-fuelled gigs, a long-delayed debut album and an actual afterlife. Although Laughner’s initial replacement (ex-Television guitar star Richard Lloyd), left in 2011 and a tour-burned Cheetah Chrome is now opting to sit out the live gigs, Rocket from the Tombs are still going – very much the garage end of Cleveland’s infamous avant-garage, making the most of this ornery self-driven second shot while bleeding in lessons learned from Pere Ubu and elsewhere.
The band have never played in Britain before, something which is being remedied with these two gigs in Leeds and London. In an interview with ‘The Guardian’ earlier this year, a currently chair-bound David Thomas growled “I’m approaching the end of my life, I’ve got my foot to the floor and I’m going to be going full speed ahead when I hit the wall.” It’s probably worth your while coming to one of these shows to check out his main accelerant.
There’ll be no support band at the Leeds gig, but in London things will be warmed up by Luminous Bodies, a “knuckle-dragging rock & roll” supergroup stealing members from Part Chimp, Terminal Cheesecake, Ikara Colt and others. See below.
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More coming shortly with the remaining December gigs and the seasonal parties… keep warm…
Increasingly, Sunday night in these listings seems to be the night for jazz – or near-jazz. Something accessible’s going on in Crouch End, just down the road from ‘Misfit City’; something spikier’s in preparation at the Vortex over in Dalston; and a thousand miles away in Warsaw, an old favourite’s taking a new step.
In order of proximity, then..
The Chris Laurence Quartet with guest Henry Lowther (Sunday Night Jazz @ The Supper Room, Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre, The Broadway, Crouch End, London, N8 9JJ, UK, Sunday 6th December 2015, 8.00pm) – £11.00 – information – tickets
For several decades, Chris Laurence has skilfully straddled the worlds of British jazz, British classical and British popular music without compromising his artistry in any of them. He’s played double bass on tracks by Elton John, Sting or David Gilmour and spent many years as principal double bassist with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the London Bach Orchestra; but the prime outlet for his melodic, propulsive playing has always been jazz, whether he’s been working in controlled explosions with free-jazz drummer Tony Oxley or in more measured compositional jazz space with Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor or John Surman.
His own Chris Laurence Quartet has been active since the mid-2000s, with the other three members being vibraphonist Frank Ricotti (a longtime Laurence collaborator and bandleader in his own right, as well as being a British percussion-session legend) and past/present Loose Tubes players John Parricelli (guitar) and Martin France (drums). Their lone album to date – 2007’s ‘New View’ – includes Laurencian takes on compositions by Wheeler, Surman, Taylor, Stan Sulzmann, Joni Mitchell and Andy Laverne. As well as featuring guest appearances from Norma Winstone, it also showcases the interplay of Chris’ vigorous bass playing and the subtle implicatory musicianship of his cohorts.
For this particular concert, Henry Lowther (whose five-decades-plus career of playing has seen him grace work by Mike Westerbrook, Gil Evans, Talk Talk, John Dankworth and many others including various jazz orchestras) will be guesting on trumpet. The Quartet is playing as part of a brief Three Sundays of Inspirational Music season at Hornsey Town Hall, which concludes on the 6th and features various jazz, baroque and classical performances.
Deemer + Survival Skills (LUME @ The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8AZ, UK, Sunday 6th December 2015, 7.30pm) – £11.00 – information – tickets
The next concert’s billed as “a special evening of improvised music with electronics” and hangs onto whatever jazziness it has by its fingertips alone: but if you’re interested in creative spontaneous music, don’t let that put you off in the slightest.
Deemer is the brain-child of Merijn Royaards and Dee Byrne. Deemer started life in 2006 as a weekly improvisation/electronics session in a warehouse in Hackney Wick. The project has since evolved into an installation/performance based electro-acoustic two-piece orchestra, whose aural narratives are created within fluid frameworks that map a trajectory in time, but leave the sonic textures and compositions entirely free and undetermined. Deemer employ, among other things, alto saxophone, analogue electronics, tape, transducer microphones/speakers to instantly compose, activate space, and blur the boundaries between free jazz and sound installation. They are releasing their debut album ‘Interference Patterns’ on Monday 7th December on the new LUME record label, Luminous.
Survival Skills is the solo project of Chris Sharkey (trioVD, Acoustic Ladyland, Shiver). It has no fixed instrumentation but the music is often comprised of various processed layers created in real time by hardware including synths, sequencers, cassette recordings, vocals and guitar – the results have been described as “a lo-fi vision of mangled techno, where beats cluster and stumble in their fight for dominance; a highly intriguing piece of noise art…” (‘Data Transmission‘).
Noise of Wings (Staromiejski Dom Kultury, Rynek Starego Miasta 2, 00-272 Warsaw, Poland, Sunday 6th December 2015, 7.00pm) – 20 zł – information – tickets on the door, one hour before concert
Saxophonist Ray Dickaty has travelled a long way in twenty-odd years – both geographically (Liverpool and London, via assorted world tours, to Warsaw) and musically (British avant/alt-rock with Spiritualized, Moonshake and Gallon Drunk, then the brutal jazzpunk of Solar Fire Trio, and his current work as an improviser). Now embedded deep in experimental jazz (plus a host of projects around the Warszawa Improvisers Orchestra) he’s stepping out as a frontline composer. For Noise Of Wings, Ray twins his tenor sax with that of Maciej Rodakowski, adding avant-garde double bass player Wojtek Traczyk and polygenre drummer Hubert Zemler to form a quartet playing “inside and outside” Ray’s own written pieces.
Though the project’s influences and ingredients come from Terry Riley, Ornette Coleman, “mediaeval darkness”, drone culture and Albert Ayler free-forming, Ray claims that the final results“are not free jazz blowout music; this is a carefully considered sonic palette… It may be considered dark ambient jazz, with a hint of contemporary classical: melodic and yet full of interesting twists and turns… The saxes are pushed to their limits sonically and all the time the volume is kept down.” The project is still too young for me to be able to provide any sonic evidence, but this December gig at Warsaw’s Staromiejski Dom Kultury is being pitched as “a very special concert in a very special sounding room” and will be recorded live for rapid release.
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Bringing up that last Warsaw gig reminds me that I’ve been trying to look further afield than London for news on interesting concerts, in attempts to escape the complacent gravity of the capital and my own complacence as a born-and-bred Londoner. The results can be rewarding, and although I don’t want to spend all my time as a gig-advertising service, there’s definitely some satisfaction involved in supporting people’s efforts to foster and promote interesting music away from the biggest cities and media hubs. The flipside, though, is an occasional feeling that I’ve started doing this too late.
Take this Was Ist Das? concert, for instance – the latest effort by an enthusiastic promoter and instigator of rare noise in West Yorkshire, but also the final effort. The story might not have quite such a sad ending – this thing’s coming to an end not due to disillusionment but because of the promoter emigrating – but it’s still a shame to see a gig series wink out of existence in a place where it will be missed. All the more reason to catch this particular concert before the end…
Skullflower + Tor Invocation Band (Was Ist Das? @ Inkfolk @ Machpelah Mill, Station Road, Hebden Bridge, HX7 8AU, UK, Sunday 6th December 2015, 8.00pm) – price t.b.c – information – tickets on the door
The final Was Ist Das? gig before I emigrate to America and there’s only one way to go out….with a bang.
Formed in 1987, Skullflower emerged from the Broken Flag noise scene but with a sound far more guitar-driven than most of their peers. Their intense sonic assaults have been influential on such bands as Bardo Pond and Godflesh. Band leader Matthew Bower has worked with many of the leading lights of the UK underground such as Vibracathedral Orchestra, Richard Youngs, Ramleh and Colin Potter.
Tor Invocation Band is a nebulous, international unit of seasoned improvisers. As given to the light as to the dark, their exploration of space, sound, noise and sacred spaces. The exact line-up is yet to be completely confirmed but if it is what I hear it is… Well, don’t turn up late. It seems like the perfect way to end it all, with our ears ringing!
Further information – this gig’s part of the Inkfolk December gathering, sprawling from 3rd 6th December. I think that the Tor Invocation Band may have something to do with the group of improvising musicians associated with Tor Press (who run various psychedelic.drone.folk.metal.noise Tor Bookings events in Todmorden Unitarian Church a few miles from Hebden Bridge, but I can’t be sure. Meanwhile, Skullflower have the following comment on the whole affair – “On the Sixth of December we will descend on Hebden Bridge to evoke the Dakshini Force and build altars of Set/Guedhe in the Werewolf Universe with that shadow stuff that their bible calls ‘the Darkness of Aegypt’. Driving over the moors to the Calder Valley, I have seen, the world cloaked in mist below me, and only a few plateaus, like islands, left, as if the world were drowned, cleansed.” With the minimum of tweaking, that’s the band’s Christmas card written too.
Glib jokes apart, publicizing this last gig has made me feel both sad and inspired. I’m increasingly feeling that this kind of concert (not in terms of genre, but in terms of hope and pluck – small and hopeful endeavours) is what I should be plugging more. So – best of luck to the mysterious Was Is Das person as he sets up again in America, and an open and obvious invitation to everyone else: if any of you are reading this and trying to run small, committed gigs of interesting music somewhere, please get in touch.
There were too many gigs this week to fit into the last post – go back there for details on assorted chamber music, folk, sample pop and the Anawan gigs in New York (one of which spills over into the weekend). For my usual erratic pick of what’s on over this coming weekend, keep reading.
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Daylight Music 209 – James McVinnie, Mara Carlyle, Liam Byrne + HART (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK,12.00pm) – free (suggested donation £5.00) – information
World famous organist James McVinnie makes the perfect partner for the Union Chapel’s 200-year-old Henry Willis organ. In the spirit of Christmas, James has invited his closest musical chums to share the stage with him: Mara Carlyle, Liam Byrne and HART. Together, they’ll be presenting some of their own music and doing arrangements of hidden gems and forgotten carols.
Organist James McVinnie was Assistant Organist at Westminster Abbey between 2008 and 2011 (playing for both regular and special services as well as directing the Abbey’s world-famous choir) and has held similar positions at St Paul’s and St Albans Cathedral. He appears on numerous recordings of vocal and choral music and, as a continuo player, he has appeared at most European early music festivals. In parallel to this, he is internationally renowned both as a soloist and a collaborator in new music whose boundless approach to music has lead him to collaborations with some of the world’s leading composers and performers. David Lang (winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in music), Martin Creed (winner of the 2001 Turner Prize), Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), Pee Wee Ellis, Max de Wardener, Mara Carlyle and Bryce Dessner (The National) have all written works for him. He is a member of Bedroom Community, the Icelandic record label and close-knit collective comprising like-minded, yet diverse musicians from different corners of the globe. ‘Cycles’, his debut release of music written for him by Nico Muhly was released on this label in 2013 to widespread critical acclaim. 2016 will see releases of music for organ by J S Bach and Philip Glass.
Originally from Shropshire and now living in London, Mara Carlyle is a singer-songwriter, an arranger and electronic orchestrator, and a player of both ukelele and musical saw. The child of musical parents (with whom she played in assorted folk projects from childhood) and the product of classical training, she’s also the possessor of an eclectic taste as much enthused by A-Ha and Amerie as by Henry Purcell.Initially known as a guest singer on a succession of Plaid albums between 1997 and 2001, she released her first solo album in 2004. Mara’s own work blends her operatic voice with classical structures, torch jazz and electronic flourishes. In addition to her own original material, she specialises in interpretations and adaptations from the classical, baroque, Romantic and modern-classical canon including works by Handel, Purcell (Dido’s Lament), Robert Schumann (whose Ich Grolle Nicht was the basis of her single I Blame You Not), Walford Davies and Jacques Offenbach. Since 2014 she’s been part of the presenting team on Late Junction. Mara is currently in the process of recording her third album.
Liam Byrne divides his time between playing very old and very new music on the viol. With the firm belief that baroque music can be vibrant and expressive on its own terms, Liam’s solo work regularly explores lesser known corners of the 16th and 17th century repertoire. For several years he was a member of Fretwork, and has also toured and recorded with the Dunedin Consort, The Sixteen, Le Concert d’Astrée, i Fagiolini, Concerto Caledonia, and the viol consorts Phantasm and Concordia, among many others. Liam’s interpretative curiosity has also led him to work increasingly with living composers, and he has had new solo works written for him by Edmund Finnis, Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigurðsson and others. Beyond the realm of classical music, he has worked with a wide variety of artists including Nils Frahm, Matthew Herbert, Martin Parker and The Hidden Cameras. He has played a significant musical role in the creation of several large-scale operatic works: Damon Albarn’s ‘Dr Dee’, Shara Worden’s ‘You Us We All’ , and Valgeir Sigurðsson’s ‘Wide Slumber’ . In 2015 he will undertake a new project with Belgian ensemble Baroque Orchestration X and Icelandic musician Mugison. Liam plays a 7-string bass viol by John Pringle, a 6-string bass by Marc Soubeyran, and a treble viol by Dietrich Kessler, which is graciously on loan from Marc Soubeyran.
Described as possessing “one of the most noteworthy male voices of the last twenty years,” (‘For Folk’s Sake‘), singer/songwriter Daniel Pattison trades under the project name of HART. Featuring elements of dream-pop, folk, avant-garde psychedelic rock, electronica and contemporary classical songcraft, his debut EP ‘Songs Of The Summer’ (featuring string arrangements from Nico Muhly) was released in October this year).
Playing in-between on this weeks festive edition will be singer songwriter Harry Strange, a singer-songwriter from London currently working on his first EP.
If all of that sounds too genteel, the same evening brings this triple-legend concert of experimental and industrial music heroes (also in a church). Putting this one on is a real point of pride for the organisers, who describe it as “a dream line up for us as we are all very heavily influenced by each of these artists. It will be an amazing show and the last one of 2015 from us.” I’ve just seen that tickets for the concert are selling out even as I post this – so move fast.
Roadmaking equipment onstage, self-invented instruments, performers who refuse to conform even to standard roles of getting onstage and playing…if any or all of this sounds familiar (or even the kind of thing that’s mentioned in ‘Misfit City’ every other week) it’s because Faust set the blueprints at the start of the 1970s, or at least brought them into the world of popular music. An inspiration for innumerable questioning music-makers for over forty years, the band (or, more accurately, the collective event which calls itself Faust) have maintained the same sense of spontaneity, constructive pranking, rude assertion and open-ended possibilities throughout an erratic and frequently interrupted existence.
Initially assembled and pitched (by record producer/journalist-philosopher Uwe Nettelbeck) as a counter-cultural boy band for the lucrative but conservative German record market in 1970 – as if they were a Hamburg take on The Monkees – Faust showed their true avant-garde colours immediately and deliberately. Only a rock band in the very loosest sense of the word (perhaps only their electric instrumentation, amplification, time of emergence and love of rough immediacy really plugs them into the genre), their music has combined free improvisation, garage-band jamming, a pre-punk inspiration-over-technique aesthetic and a distinctly Dada perspective. Stories about perverse, inspired experimentation and behaviour in the face of an increasingly bewildered and irritated music industry have passed into legend: rebellions which seem, for once, to have been essential and genuinely inseparable from the band’s music creation (even from their very existence). Today’s Faust may be mining a tradition rather than breaking new ground, but even as the original members pass through their sixties and into their seventies they retain their commitment to the methodology they unearthed.
To be honest with you, I’ve got only the faintest idea about which of the parallel current incarnations of Faust (each featuring various different original members) is playing in London this coming week, although the evidence is pointing towards a grouping of Zappi W. Diermaier/Jean Herve Péron/Maxime Manac’h/Uwe Bastiansen). The members themselves seem particularly unconcerned: Péron has never much concerned himself with rules and (in an eminently readable interview with ‘The Quietus’) founding organist/noise-marshaller Hans Joachim Irmler from the other main faction has confessed “our idea was that all six original members could be Faust but there should never be two Fausts at the same time. It was an agreement but the version of Faust based around Diermaier, Péron and [Amaury] Cambuzat broke the rules, in a way. It took a little while for me to get used to it but now I think… ‘Why not?!'” If they don’t mind, maybe we shouldn’t either. Increasingly, Faust is of more an idea than a band, per se – or perhaps it’s best to call them a travelling opportunity, an open mind; a self-contained performance space.
For three decades and over fifty releases, sonic collage project and “purveyor of sinister whim to the wretched” Nurse With Wound (predominantly the work of Steven Stapleton) has been drawing directly on nearly every musical genre imaginable, mixing them up via tape loops, samples and whichever methods work to illustrate Stapleton’s curiosity and sense of humour, itself influenced by surrealism, Dada and absurdism (which explains why John Cage, filched easy-listening and snatches of kosmiche could be rubbing shoulders on any given NWW track). The project’s music is also informed by Stapleton’s keen visual and fine-art sensibilities, reflecting his other work as painter and sculptor.
Originally the key figure in transgressive 1980s power electronics band Whitehouse, William Bennett has been exploring “Afro-noise” under the Cut Hands moniker since 2008. The project is heavily inspired by William’s fascination with Haitian vaudou, deploying Central African percussion in radical new ways and generating an intense sound unrivalled in its physical and emotional intensity. In a recent interview with ‘Self Titled‘, William has commented “with Cut Hands, one of the original intents was to try and achieve the same kinds of emotional transformation through polyrhythmic percussion where once words were used… I confess there is a bit of a crazy, beardy New Age composer trying desperately to break free.”
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If you’re in Winchester that night, rather than in London, and you fancy a bit of budget-imaginarium fun, I can point you towards this…
Tom Slatter (Heart Of Saturday Night @ The Art Café, 2 De Lunn Buildings, Jewry Street, Winchester, Hampshire, SO23 8SA, UK, Saturday 5th December 2015, 7.30pm) – free (donations encouraged) – information
This is Tom’s last gig of the year (although he’s got a few lined up for both London and Brighton in early 2016) and it’s free entry, though a hat might be passed around at some point for donations – possibly the topper which Tom is famous for wearing while he delivers his Victoriana prog songs.
I might as well requote my quick description of Tom from a few months ago, since he’s cheerfully seized on at least part of it for himself – “Tom describes his work as “the sort of music you’d get if Genesis started writing songs with Nick Cave after watching too much ‘Doctor Who'”, while one of his occasional collaborators, Jordan Brown of airy London prog-poppers The Rube Goldberg Machine, calls him “a sci-fi storyteller with a penchant for odd time signatures and soundscapes.” Both descriptions ring true but fail to pinpoint the cheerfully pulpy weird-fiction exuberance of Tom’s work as a one-man band. He’s a man not just happily out of his time, but making a virtue of it – a latter-day Victorian street-theatre barker with a guitar promising tales of mystery, imagination, ‘orrible murders and bloody great waving tentacles.”
For a second opinion, try this from ‘The Progressive Aspect‘ – “Tom is an engaging singer with a resonant voice and an unorthodox songwriter whose songs push the boundaries of what can be expected from the solo acoustic guitar troubadour, straying into the darkest of corners. There is a strange mind at work here but one that makes for a compelling and fascinating listen.”
Recorded and live tasters below…
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Meanwhile, over in Brighton, there’s something for the psychedelic crew:
The Real Music Club is delighted to present an intimate night of highly eclectic music.
Within Inspiral Trio, three current members of Gong explore their harmonious musical synergy. Dave Sturt (bass guitarist and composer) has worked with Gong, Bill Nelson, Steve Hillage, Jade Warrior and Cipher. His solo album ‘Dreams & Absurdities’ will be released on Esoteric Antenna on October 30th. Ian East (sax/woodwinds player and composer) has worked in multiple genres, from Gong to Balkanatics. Ian is currently producing a solo album to be released in 2016. Kavus Torabi (guitarist, singer and composer) has worked with Cardiacs, Gong, Knifeworld, Guapo and Mediavel Baebes – much of his work can be found on his own label, Believers Roast. Solo sets from each man (with Kavus promising some acoustic renditions of tunes from the forthcoming Knifeworld album in his one) will be followed by an improvised set from all three players together. Come and enjoy a tasteful melange of solo and triadic creations from these unique musicians.
The Fibroid Nebulae was formed by Damned/Sumerian Kyngs keyboardist Monty Oxymoron after opening the Real Music Club’s ‘Drones4Daevid’ gig in February 2015. The band consists of Monty (keyboards and vocals), Francesca Burrow (vocals, sax, clarinet and keyboards), Dave Berk (of Jonny Moped) on drums and vocals, Andy Power (Sumerian Kyngs) on bass and the Real Music Club’s own Gregg McKella (Paradise 9/Glissando Guitar Orchestra/Peyote Guru/Gregg & Kev) on synthy bits, vocals, guitar and glissando guitar. The Fibroid Nebulae play offbeat tracks and fuse their own styles and quirks with some lo-fi groove psychedelia, ambient sounds and Krautrock – taking in Soft Machine, Gong, Neu! and Pink Floyd along the way!
A few months ago, I briefly covered folk/classical/pop fusion night Whispers & Hurricanes (the latest arm of the Chaos Theory Promotions mini-empire) and they’re back this week.
Raf & O + ArHai + Lucy Claire + guests (Whispers & Hurricanes @ The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green London, E2 9AG, UK, Friday November 20th 2015, 7:30pm) – £6.00 – information – tickets
After a wonderful launch in September, our newest night is back with inspired musicians who fuse traditional sounds with groundbreaking techniques in an evening of mesmeric triphop, folktronica, avant pop and contemporary classical electronics. Fans of Portishead, Bowie, Lamb, Bjork and Eric Satie will enjoy.
Raf & O are a duo from south-east London who are garnering widespread acclaim in the UK and Europe, creating a buzz via exciting performances of their uniquely detailed avant-pop and its vortex of live electronics, acoustic instruments and fragile, magnetic, strange lullabies. After supporting artists such as Faust and Little Annie Bandez, they were special guests in Richard Strange’s production for William S. Burroughs’ centenary at Queen Elizabeth Hall, and recently composed for the theatre play ‘That Woman’s Voice’ (a tribute to Jean Cocteau). Raf and O’s second album ‘Time Machine’ was named as one of ‘FACT Magazine’s Top 10 albums of 2014, with their “avant-bizarre” interpretation of David Bowie’s Lady Grinning Soul pricking the ear of Bowie’s pianist, Mike Garson (who praised their minimalist approach) and leading to appearances at two Memory Of A Free Festival concerts (re-stagings of the legendary Beckenham Free Festival organised by David Bowie and The Beckenham Arts Lab back in 1969). Tonight we’ll hear them perform music from their first two albums, as well as unheard music from their upcoming third album.
ArHai is an electronic Balkan folk duo, consisting of Serbian-born composer and singer Jovana Backovic and British multi-instrumentalist Adrian Lever. Their music is a fusion of electronic music and folk with medieval influences from both the Gaelic and Balkan traditions. Underlined with breathtaking visuals, Arhai breathes new life into the sounds of the Bulgarian 8-string tambura lute and hammered dulcimer (played by Adrian), blending them with Jovana’s ethereal vocals and electronic production. Their previous album ‘Eastern Roads’ is a must have. Tonight’s show celebrates the launch of their new website and the upcoming release of their single.
We also welcome back the brilliant composer Lucy Claire, who launched her beautiful ‘Collaborations’ EP with us last year. A soundscape artist and a contemporary classical composer with influences from the likes of Satie, Peter Broderick and Björk, Lucy composes music with a very organic heart to it and in a style so unique and diverse that it has resulted in her performing to classical, electronic, acoustic and post-rock audiences, as well as live performances on BBC London’s breakfast show and BBC6 Music. Her sound initially seems soft and ambient, but reveals a defiant spirit and gentle force breaking its way through. This evening we will see her perform new collaborative works with some special guests, some of whom you may know already.
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It’s always nice to hail a new music night, especially one that’s only a short stroll from your own front door. In the Archway cutting, just up the road from the current Misfit City HQ, Songs from the Cellar have begun to fill a café basement with sound: next week it’s an investigation of antique popular songs, but this week it’s guitar instrumentals…
Guitar Journey Duet (Songs from fhe Cellar @ Zelas Cafe, 216 Archway Road, London, N6 5AX, UK, Friday 20th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00 – information – tickets on the door
Guitar Journey Duet is a team-up between two leading London cross-disciplinary guitarists – British player Jonny Phillips (a member of Oriole and F-ire Collective) and Sardinian-born Giorgio Serci (whose twenty years of recordings, collaborations and performance has included work with Antonio Forcione, Eduardo Niebla, Denys Baptiste and Shirley Bassey).
Between them Jonny and Giorgio cover jazz, classical, flamenco, samba, art rock, British folk and African jazz. They might be off to play Verdi at the Albert Hall barely a week after this concert, but what they get up to in this small Highgate basement might well be something completely different. The only clue as to what they’re playing is that they’re favouring Spanish guitars tonight, as they are in the video below.
The last gig I’m listing for the week is another Daylight Music effort, bridging the acoustic and the electronic, the pastoral and the urban.
Daylight Music 207 – 20 Years Of Lo Recordings: Grasscut + Astronauts + Lilith Ai (Union Chapel, Saturday 21st November 2015, 12.00pm–2.00pm) – free (£3.50 donation suggested) – information
Renowned for quality esoteric music, Shoreditch’s Lo Recordings has released music by Thurston Moore, Four Tet, Aphex Twin and others. Now the label is celebrating its 20th birthday with a special showcase at Daylight Music featuring label artists Grasscut, Astronauts and Lilith Ai.
Many accolades have been heaped on Grasscut, the teaming of Andrew Phillips (voice, keyboards, guitar) and Marcus O’Dair (keyboards, double bass) in a wide-thinking Brighton-based duo which encompasses electronica, classical minimalism and multi-media, and which draws inspiration from landscapes and history. Andrew, who writes and produces all Grasscut music, is also known for his soundtrack work for HBO, BBC Films and Channel 4: he has been nominated for an Emmy and shortlisted for an Ivor Novello. Marcus (who manages the band in addition to his instrumental contributions) also occupies himself with journalism for the Guardian and Financial, lecturing in Popular Music at Middlesex University and work as a broadcaster in particular on Stuart Maconie’s ‘Freakzone’: he is also the author of ‘Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography Of Robert Wyatt’. At this concert Grasscut will be playing music from their new album (and first for Lo Recordings), ‘Everyone Was A Bird’.
Astronauts is the solo project from Dan Carney (formerly of Dark Captain). Described by Sputnik Music as “often bleak and highly contemplative indie-folk”, according to Facebook, the project is mainly in the business of creating “ham-fisted bleep-folk neoliberal takedowns”. As with Grasscut, Dan’s interests and influences extend beyond making music: he is a qualified developmental psychologist with an interest in short-term memory development and in Williams and Down’s syndromes.
Lilith Ai is a new signing to Lo Recordings. A member of the Fight Like a Girl collective, she performs poignant tales of modern city living. Drawing from blues, folk and acoustic R’n’B, and dusted by subtle electronic shades and beats, Lilith’s songs show urban life through a clear lens which does not hesitate to reveal her own dark life experience.
I’ve not got quite as many gigs to cover this time, but bear in mind that The End Festival is still happily raging in Crouch End this week (if it were a standalone concert, The End’s Feast of St Cecilia weird-folk afternoon would be taking pride of place here), as is the London Jazz Festival. As I’m also a little more squeezed for time than usual this week, there’ll be less personal reflection and much more press-release in the coverage of the gigs in this post. Sorry about that. I’ll opinionate a little more next time.
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First up, a Baba Yaga mid-week gig: the debut British show for Josefin Öhrn, who’s rapidly becoming a darling of the urban psychedelic crowd. With her band The Liberation, she creates a beautifully spacious, light touch sound: some Krautrock motorik, enough rock’n’roll minimalism to slip smoothly into the sweet spot between hypnotic and monotonous, a strident skullbone rattle-and-drone where it’s needed, and a repertoire of subtle sonic finessing (shimmer, backwards reverb, rises, rainbow tone curves, all of the ingredients precisely and skilfully placed). To cap it, there’s Josefin’s voice – as perfectly-judged as the rest of the instrumentation and as cool as a drink of iced milk on a parched day, floating in the ever-present thought-space between the band’s chassis and roof.
In an era in which “psychedelia” can often mean merely a grab-bag of influences from which wah-wah pedals and two-note riffs are dispensed as signifiers and signposts into a realm of easy accessibility as opposed to gateways to another dimension, it can be a rarity to come across a band who are genuinely fixated on creating alternate realities for the listener. Yet this is exactly how Stockholm’s Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation view their incandescent art, and it’s this sensibility that’s led to the kaleidoscopic splendour of their debut full-length for Rocket Recordings, ‘Horse Dance’. “It’s a continuum that flows beyond here and now, and psychedelic music seems to be a really powerful way to unveil those deeper oceans of being that are our true home,” reflects Josefin, who forms half the core of the band with Fredrik Joelson. The last twelve months have seem a dramatic rise to prominence for The Liberation (who take their band name from the Tibetan Book Of The Dead) with their EP ‘Diamond Waves’ leading to shows in their homeland with Goat and Les Big Byrd, a nomination for a Swedish Grammy as best newcomer, and rapturously received appearances at festivals like Roskilde.
These adventures have set the stage for a spectacular movement into the unknown from their earlier work. ‘Horse Dance’ is a razor-sharp collection of ditties that marry dreamlike radiance with hypnotic rhythmic drive, set alight by a prismatic experimental glow. It inhabits a realm in which a propulsive ’60s-tinged pop song like ‘Sunny Afternoon’ can be elevated skyward with krautrock-tinged repetition, dub echo and analogue curlicues alike, and one in which a Broadcast-style mantra like You Have Arrived can tap into a psychic lineage that stretches all the way from The United States Of America to Portishead’s ‘Third’. Yet whilst ghosts of the like of Laika, Cat’s Eyes and The Creatures may lurk in the darker recesses of these songs, this is a band paying no homage to bygone glories.
The Liberation cite a myriad influences in both their philosophical stance and their aesthetic, from 12th century iconoclasts like Milarepa to 20th century sonic voyagers like Catherine Ribeiro, and from Kandinsky’s abstract expressions of synaesthesia to the avant-jazz of Moondog. Yet at all times their transcendental extrapolations are married to icy and enticing melodic flourishes, making for a revitalising clash between the chic and the transcendental, and a sound as biting as it is beatific. “I definitely think that the human need for altered states – to see oneself from a bigger perspective – is a deep fundamental need,” Josefin elaborates. “We’ve been deprived of access to our full nature by a restrictive system where altered states may be the ultimate taboo.” With ‘Horse Dance’, Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation step into a world where all such restrictions and taboos are null and void, and this journey is already proving quite the spectacle to behold.
Dunes
Support comes from all-female rock trio The Wharves (whose resonant clear-voiced indie sound, with a stack of folk-pop harmony and a sheen of blurred fluidity, sometimes sounds like a raindrop on the verge of collapsing) and from Mr. Silla (the solo project from former múm member Sigurlaug Gísladóttir, who’s joined live by guitarist Tyler Ludwick of Princess Music). There will also be DJ-ing from Daun of Swedish space-rockers Flowers Must Die.
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To be honest, I’m expecting half of the committed freaks in town to be at this next gig; and to have bought their tickets months ago…
The Magic Band (Under the Bridge, Stamford Bridge, Fulham Road, Fulham, London, SW6 1HS, UK, Friday 20th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £20.70 – information here and here – tickets
After a sold out Under The Bridge gig in 2013, The Magic Band are back! Sharing the vision of celebrating the music of the late Don Van Vliet – aka Captain Beefheart – the band re-visits the classic Beefheart tunes with renewed fervour.Fans of the Captain won’t, wouldn’t and couldn’t miss this! Avant-garde blues at its finest and most rambunctious!
Speaking for myself, the enjoyment of Beefheart’s particular, perverse genius is always marred by the appalling stories of how he maltreated his colleagues. In many respects the man’s life was in tune with mischievous American folk-hero mythology. Those stories of microphone-busting vocals and of teaching his musicians all of their skills from scratch fit happily into the grand tradition of the American liar, the itinerant teller of tall tales and outright whoppers. Still, as the years have gone by, and as the other stories have bled through (about Beefheart’s take-the-money-and-lie attitude, his theft of credit for all of his players’ skills and work, and especially the brutally entitled sadism and psychological warfare meted out to his musical serfs as the band wrung out the tunes) the shine and mystique has well and truly worn off the man. What’s left, as ever, is the music: that tangle of bloodshot rolling blare and skew-whiff insight, the stubborn blues limp and the wrong-angle harmony attacks, the unorthodox barbed hooks that have kept generations of musicians and listeners transfixed.
With the Captain himself dead and gone for five years, reduced to a baleful honk of memory in a speaker, it’s been down to those who played alongside him in the various Magic Bands – and who, in the long run, finally survived him – to regularly blow on the embers and revive the noise. Since the Magic Band’s first reformation in 2006, some of the original members have, for various reasons passed out of the lineup again (first Robert Williams and Gary Lucas; most recently, Denny Walley) but the group still features singer and multi-instrumentalist John “Drumbo” French and bass player Mark “Rockette Morton” Boston. For this gig they’re joined by their current roster of sympatico recruits: guitarist Eric Klerks, drummer Andrew Niven and the newest recruit, Walley’s replacement Max Kutner (a multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Mike Keneally and Oingo Boingo and with Zappa tributeers Grandmothers of Invention, as well as his own projects such as Evil Genius and The Royal US).
By all accounts, in spite of time and circumstance whittling away at the roster of original players, the band retains their magic (judge for yourselves from the clip below). For me what clinches it is that at least some of the right guys are finally being paid, both in cash on the nail and in the credit they’ve damn well earned.
(All right – I did find time and room for some opinionating…)
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On Friday (and on the following Monday), Annette Peacock – a great undersung pioneer of various strains of songwriting, jazz experiments and electronics, as well as being an anticipator of many of the intriguing trends in female-led art music of today – is playing a couple of shows at Café Oto.
“We’re very excited to host the first OTO appearance – and first show in London for quite some time – from visionary composer and songwriter, Annette Peacock. Always ahead of her time, Peacock has influenced a huge array or genres whilst never letting herself be pinned down by one, resulting in a music that is as captivating as it is unique. This should be very special indeed.” – Café Oto press release
“Annette Peacock’s wondrous, immersive trailblaze across recorded music’s rich history has marveled the likes of David Bowie, Brian Eno and one-time collaborator Salvador Dalí. Peacock once jokingly told The Quietus she has been fighting her way back to reality ever since taking LSD at Timothy Leary’s Millbrook estate in the early 1960s. Her plunge into otherworldly sonic wellsprings made her one of the first artists to synthesize her own vocals, pioneering the realms of minimalism, free jazz, rap, classical music and psychedelic funk along the way. After Robert Moog gifted Peacock one of his elusive prototype-synthesizers, she started implementing the makeshift device into her already individualistic, free-form lingo of songwriting and composing. To hear music skip so radically across exotic new touchstones, who needs reality, right?” – ‘Le Guess Who’
“Annette Peacock is a stone cold original – an innovator, an outlier, authentically sui generis.” – John Doran, ‘The Quietus’
“Nothing prepares you for the howl of her searingly high notes spiralling up out of spooky organ chords and soul-brass riffs.” – John Fordham, ‘The Guardian’
“A pioneer of rap, live electronic music and synth-pop, Annette Peacock’s achievements are monumental.” – ‘Scarufi’
When I was growing up in north London, Crouch End was the “next village over”. It was the place where I went to primary school and first heard song by Neil Young, Steve Winwood and The Kinks (strummed out and sung in assemblies alongside battling hymns from the civil rights movement) and where I began sharpening my hunger for musical knowledge on the rich ranks of vinyl LPs in Hornsey Library. Over the years, I’ve continued to associate the neighbourhood with music – other people’s memories of old art-rock and punk gigs at the Hornsey College of Art; the star traffic through the Church Studio at the bottom of Crouch Hill (owned in turn by Eurythmics and Paul Epsworth), where you might find Erasure or Sisters of Mercy catching a mid-session coffee in the local café; and the Gareth Malone wet-dream of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, a local choir with a national reputation.
That said, Crouch End’s day-to-day music scene has always struck me as lacking. There have been exceptions to the rule – the steady reservoir of blues and roots playing at the Kalamazoo Club; the string of house concerts that Jenni Roditi ran at her loft between 2002 and 2009; more recently, a flowering of rootsy events at the Earl Haig Hall. But generally speaking, Crouch End has always seemed to me to export or traffick in music rather than play it, becoming an increasingly upmarket and bijou neighbourhood where shoppers vastly outnumber giggers; easily eclipsed by the musicality of other London neighbourhoods like Camden Town, Dalston, Shoreditch, even Tooting.
Well, more fool me. It turns out that I’ve regularly been overlooking and missing The End – an annual, musically expansive Crouch End festival that turns all of my gloomy observations about the neighbourhood’s gig shortcomings to dust – at least, for two weeks. As my penance, here’s the first half of an overview of everyone playing at this year’s festival, which starts tomorrow (all ticket details are to be found via the info links or at the festival website).
The festival kicks off with a concert navigating the blurry margins of folk and lo-fi alternative rock, with headliners good enough to warrant a post all of their own. The crepuscular but lovely Lowpineshave been racking up an unending stream of plaudits for their Anglo-Americana atmospherics, which recall old phonographs playing whispered, heartspilling songs in dusty basements, laced with judicious drums, intricate campfire fingerpicking and stargazing whistles of feedback like psychedelic pedal steel lines. Support comes from Oliver Girdler’s one-man lo-fi project Forced Random (which drifts ghostlike from instrument to instrument and from one slow soft-edged song to another) and from Reykjavík folk-rock trio Ylja (initially based around female harmonies and lap-style slide guitar but expanding into a broader palette that encompasses and recalls not just Fairport Convention, early Clannad and Pentangle but also the glowing starfield details of Sigur Rós and 1972 Pink Floyd).
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The Fierce & The Dead + a.P.A.t.T + Markers (Downstairs @ The Kings Head,2 Crouch End Hill, Crouch End, London, N8 8AA, UK, Friday 13th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £8.80 – information
The first of several events at The Kings Head hosts assorted sprigs from the thornier of British art-rock. Headlining are prog-punk quartetThe Fierce & The Dead (no strangers to this blog) who bring the rumbling immediacy of their quick-flaring complicated avant-garage instrumentals to the valley for the evening. In support, hazmat-suited Liverpudlian performance art troupe a.P.A.t.T, play “progressive pop that owes as much to Kurt Schwitters and the Chapman Brothers as it does to ABBA and Zappa”, drawing on a shifting tag-team of ‘Pool talent and bring strong flavours of the absurd, the deceptive and the cunning to whatever they do.
Opening the evening, Markers reunites two old friends from the omnivorous ferment of the 1990s London math rock scene – Jodie Cox (Ursa, Narrows, Exes, Rohame and Earth) and Jason Carty (Geiger Counter, Foe, Art Of Burning Water) as two electric guitarists without a singer, a rhythm section, any other instruments or much in the way of signal processing. Expect carefully poised, bare-branching instrumentals somewhere between Slintian maths, precise Fripp and Summers interplay, and the minimum-lines/maximum-impact approach of a Japanese ink painting or minimalist film.
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Kate Jackson & The Wrong Moves + Oh800 + YLJA (The Crypt Studio,145a Crouch Hill, Crouch End, London, N8 9QH, UK, Friday 13th November 2015, 9.30pm) – £8.50 – information
Kate Jackson (the former Long Blondes singer (and sometime British Electric Foundation/Heaven 17 collaborator) brings her current band The Wrong Moves to The End. She’ll be playing music from the upcoming “mysterious” album she’s been writing and recording with Bernard Butler over the past six years (though from what I’ve heard of it it’s more assured than mysterious – a muscular, classic pop rock mix with Kate’s big vocals and Bernard’s bright, sometimes startling guitar work).
Also on the bill are Oh800, a currently secretive new supergroup featuring Eoin “Oh Ruin” O’Ruainigh plus members of The Duke Spirit and F.U.R.S. The project is still enough under wraps not to have any tracks available to share, so you’ll just have to guess what they sound like, though it’s possible that the old Oh Ruin ingredients of blues, campfire tunes, Irish folk and fingerpicking will get a look-in. In addition, Ylja will be playing their second support slot of the festival, following the previous day’s appearance with Longpines.
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Joseph & Maia + Charlotte Carpenter + Annalie Wilson + Storme (Rileys The Ice Cream Café, 32 The Broadway, Crouch End, London, N8 9SU, UK, Friday 13th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £5.50 – information
An intimate gig of classic pop styles in one of Crouch End’s favourite drop-in cafes. New Zealand duo Joseph & Maia headline, playing songs from their debut album ‘Sorrento’ (a record which shows both their indebtedness to American songbook player-writers both old and new – Buckingham and Nicks, Ryan Adams, Paul Simon, Patsy Cline, Noah Gundersen – and their absolute assurance in working the same seams). Armed with a deeper and more ambiguous folk-blues approach, Northamptonshire-born Charlotte Carpenter sings songs of doubt and connection, softly, but with great emotional power held in check (like a surge pushing at a levee).
Rounding out the bill, acoustic festival favourite and all-round performer Annalie Wilson brings straight-ahead conversational, coffee-house songs on piano and guitar: while concert opener Storme (a Swedish singer-songwriter who’s come over to London to develop her songs, reversing the usual trend) is bold and dramatic enough to be a headliner, since her heavy-weather synth-pop aims for the same stadium-friendly altitudes as Florence + The Machine, Chvrches or even the more crowdpleasing moments of Björk .
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Becky Arundel + Nora Grefstad + Kloak (Kiss The Sky,18-20 Park Road, Crouch End, London, N8 8TD, UK, Saturday 14th November 2015, 3.00pm) – free
The first of the Saturday gigs is a celebration of young female songwriters. Becky Arundel writes and delivers muscled, determined folk-rock in the Melissa Etheridge vein, moving from unplugged strum to bursting electric explosions. Norwegian singer Nora Grefstad , who generally trades as Noraslittleworld, slides her path midway between Elkie Brooks and Beth Gibbons (offering slightly wonky, jazzy trip-hopped pop or full-diva piano balladry – in each case with a hint of smeared-lipstick, morning-after feeling). While there seem to be plenty of people contributing toKloak, in essence they’re two sassy-wise white girls – Georgia Meek and Gabrielle Mallett – putting together R&B-tinged electropop with a strong flavour of Eartha Kitt (those bent notes and divan stretches; that conversational yawp in the voice).
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Cortes + Bea Munro + Orfan (ThisIsWIRED @ Rileys The Ice Cream Café, 32 The Broadway, Crouch End, London, N8 9SU, UK, Saturday 14th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £7.70 – information
Showcase night ThisIsWIRED (which, since its initiation in Shoreditch seven years ago has incubated the early budding careers of musicians including Ellie Goulding, Raleigh Ritchie and Michael Kiwanuka) rolls up to a Crouch End ice cream parlour for a north London jaunt. Tonight’s players include crisp power-poppers Cortes and belting 22-year-old ‘60s-rock-siren revivalist Bea Munro; but for my money the likely star in the pack is gig opener Orfan, who uses his multi-instrumental skills to hone captivating yearning songs which touch bases with such odd-bedfellow influences as Nico, Prince and Boo Hewerdine.
In keeping with The End’s origins, peripatetic roots night Before The Gold Rush curate an outright folk & Americana evening. A truly enchanting set looks likely from Farrago, the psychedelic folk vehicle for the lucid, highly literate work of London songwriter Ian Bennett – vivid short stories couched in rich, longing arrangements and with colourful, falling poetic imagery. There’ll be a third appearance by Ylja, perhaps opening up to their lusher dream-folk tendencies. With flavours of honky-tonk and Grand Ol’ Opry, rising festival favourite Frida Wallin brings us the End’s most straightforward country music set to date. (She’s actually Swedish. Don’t let on or anything…)
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The Battles of Winter + Metro Verlaine + MOSES (The Crypt Studio,145a Crouch Hill, Crouch End, London, N8 9QH, UK, Saturday 14th November 2015, 7.30pm) – £5.50 – information
While Before The Gold Rush keeps the Americana and folk covered for the evening, the people at the Crypt hold down the indie and punk rock side of things. The Battles Of Winter embrace a driving post-punk indie sound compared to Echo & The Bunnymen, Interpol and The Doors. French “pop sauvage” trio Metro Verlaine are noisy electric romanticists inspired by the rush of Patti Smith/Richard Hell punk and the latterday spark of The Kills, as well as drawing on the original poète maudit fury of their namesake. The evening is opened by guttural punky rock’n’roll noise from M O S E S, who draw a London parallel to Wolf Mother and The Subways.
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The Wave Pictures + The Oreilles + Victor Lovlorne + Beverly + Pony & Trap + Nadine Khouri + Kindling + Annie Rew Shaw + Ryder Havdale + Kloak + Aphty Khea + Hudson Scott + Esther Joy Lane + others tbc (Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre, The Broadway, N8 9JJ, London, UK, Saturday 14th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £16.50 – information
The big one. For this concert, at least thirteen performers will be taking up temporary residence in the battered but still beautiful Art Deco rooms of the former Town Hall, running quick-changeover mini-sets in the Supper Room, Committee Room and Council Chambers. Like a spontaneous party, the actual participants and their playing order seem to be in constant flux – as I quickly put this post together, the following seems to be the current setup.
Two bands are down from Yorkshire – The Wave Pictures (rattling Byrds-and-Motown garage-indie from Wymeswold) and teenaged Halifax trio The Orielles (a surf pop band from a landlocked town, teetering on the balance of their love of Riot Grrrl and the la-la-la). From America, buzz-pop Brooklyneers Beverly can’t quite make up their minds over whether to stick with Slowdive or Lush or to hit the accelerator pedal towards Surfin’ USA; pellmell Massachusetts indie-punks Kindling provide some rocket-powered shoegaze pop of their own. From Canada via Berlin, Ryder Havdale of The Mohawk Lodge might or might not come good on his promise to salt the lonesome indie-country rock of his main band with some Berlin-inspired electronics.
Several performers bring in captivating moods and stories. The blend of murmur, smouldering torch and cool eyed-vision in the work of Lebanese-British songcrafter Nadine Khouri has drawn comparisons with Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Mazzy Star. Athenian-in-London singer Aphty Khea (a.k.a. MantRah) deals in self-produced slow-drag abstract soul and hip hop ideas; Texan gospel choir escapee and human love-wreck Victor Lovlorne in unsettling lo-fi basement ballads in a Will Oldham, Sparklehorse, Beefheart or Redbone vein. Piano singer Annie Rew Shaw mingles Christine McVie melodicism and wit with an eerie ghost-haunted songwriting style.
Of the rest, Kloak make a repeat appearance (this time unplugged) following their slot at Kiss The Sky earlier in the afternoon; Pony & Trap mix crisp girl-about-town rhythm-box funk with buzzy post-punk guitar hooks); and Oxford electropop diva Esther Joy Lane puts in an appearance, as does the elusive and underplugged Hudson Scott (at the moment, just a name on a wobbling list…)
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Emma Pollock + Ylja (Earl Haig Hall, 18 Elder Avenue, Crouch End, London, N8 9TH, UK, Sunday 15th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.50 – information
The last gig of the week features Scottish alternative rock heroine and onetime Delgados songwriter Emma Pollock, now three records into a solo career as well as being branched out into poly-genre supergroups (The Burns Unit) and socially-minded collective projects (The Fruit Tree Foundation), with her varied collaborations stretching well beyond her bright indie-pop beginnings to involve folk music, theatre work and string quartets. If you’re good, she might play you some songs from her upcoming album ‘In Search Of Harperfield’. Ylja, who by now are starting to look like the End’s house band, will play their fourth and final support slot of the festival at this gig.
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That’s all for this week, but I’ll try to put together a rundown of next week’s End gigs over the weekend…
Emerging out of a cloud of voodoo-scented bombast (in the centre of which you’ll find former Do Me Bad /Chrome Hoof singer Chantal Brown) Afro-psych/doom metal band Vôdûn bring a welcome taste of old-school Black Rock Coalition determination back to the party along with their artfulness. A churning bass-less power trio – multi-racial, two-thirds women, and taking on the names of loa spirits – they set wall-of-noise guitar against galloping drums and full-throated soul-power vocal melisma.
The band make much of West African spirit power, possession and cosmology: but from what initially seems like a stew of schtick brewed from heavy metal and voodoo swagger, various Afrocentric and feminist images bubble up (not least in the assertive vigour of the female players, and in the way they remind us of the passionate feminine component in the rituals and worldview of the original vodun culture). The current Vôdûn single Mino’s Army is a tribute to the fearsome all-female musket regiment which (by the nineteenth century) made up a third of the Dahomeyan army, played a leading role in the nation’s military policy, and honed female ferocity into a powerful fighting force which dismayed and won the admiration of male opponents (including the French, whom the Mino repeatedly mashed in early stages of the colonial wars). The blood-and-fire video pays tribute to this, and to the acres of severed heads which the victorious Mino left behind them, though perhaps not to the fact that the Mino came to strive against slavery in their own nation as well as the slavery fostered by the Europeans.
Inevitably, Vôdûn are going to be inspiring questions and challenges about the African traditions they’re playing with, and perhaps a deeper approach to storytelling doesn’t currently fit the spontaneous and immediate nature of the band as it stands. But in spite of this, and behind the surface theatrics, the signs are promising. One to watch…
Dub Trio + Thumpermonkey (Nightshift/Rock-A-Rolla @ The Underworld, 174 Camden High Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 0NE, Sunday 15th November 2015) – price – information – tickets
On the following Sunday, Dub Trio return to London, bringing their live dub/rock skills and their interdependent mutually-looping interactions back to the stage of the Underworld. Here’s a long clip of a full, relatively recent show to get you in the mood.
In support are London’s Thumpermonkey(another bunch of ‘Misfit City’ regulars) whose intricately-constructed heavy post-progressive sound is in some ways the antithesis of Dub Trio’s semi-spontaneous instrumental tightrope act. I’d argue that that was the joy of a well-arranged rock gig – in this case, the contrast between two equally deft, clever and complementary bands keeps one’s brain fizzing away happily, and you leave the gig feeling smarter and more alive than you did when you arrived. Certainly Thumpermonkey’s crammed and ingenious musical constructions, topped off with Michael Woodman’s theatrical songlines and multi-layered lyrics, remain one of the current underrated treasures of British rock.
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If ‘ve got a moment over the next few days, I’ll post up something on the London Jazz Festival and on The End – failing that, more November gig news to follow.
On the 12th November, Baba Yaga’s Hut are presenting a double event in London: simultaneous gigs in the east and the south, each blending rock and electronica in different ways and at different intensities.
Tropic of Cancer + Shift Work + Telefon Tel Aviv (DJ) (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, London, SE17 1LB, UK, Thursday 12th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £10.00 – information – tickets
Gauzy, morbid-romantic LA dream pop project Tropic of Cancer (comprising murmurer and instrumentalist Camella Lobo plus collaborators) return to London for another set of blurred lyrics and slow-burner Gothic psychedelic-tinged tunes. Expect lapping echoes, grey-draped music and a numbed atmosphere with concealed drama: self-confessed romantic and “hyperbolic dramatist” Camella admits that the driving concept behind most of her songs is “a love so supernatural it lasts beyond death, but also a love that is sometimes not strong enough to conquer human weakness in the living.”
The live Tropic of Cancer band now includes Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv (and also Sons of Magdalene, Puscifer and the Nine Inch Nails tour band) who’ll apparently be playing a DJ set under his TTA moniker. Further support comes from London dance-electronica minimalists Shift Work.
Teeth of the Sea + Anonymous Bash (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ The Brewhouse, London Fields Brewery, 369-370 Helmsley Place, South Hackney, London, E8 3SB, UK, Thursday 12th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £9.00 – information – tickets
At this gig, the increasingly acclaimed Teeth of the Sea launch their fourth album – the subtly-titled ‘Highly Deadly Black Tarantula’.
The London band’s assured and stormy concoction of spacey psychedelic guitar rock dramatics, heavily-processed Fourth World trumpet, counter-culture festival techno, electronica and drone music – plus their assured-to-arrogant stage presence and mastery of performance – has been winning them a wide range of fans from across the board. The clips below should give you an idea of what to expect both on record and onstage.
Support comes from Anonymous Bash, featuring veteran experimental drummer Charles Hayward (of This Heat, Camberwell Now, Massacre and the myriad collaborations of Accidents + Emergencies). Based on the music springing from last year’s four-week Hayward residency at Salford’s Islington Mill (during which Charles collaborated with over twenty musicians from the Manchester regions), the project features a taut, dubby experimental sound centred around the sonic marriage of his own percussion, melodica and vocals with shifting, abrasive rock aspects brought in by his collaborators. The Salford-based Gnod ensemble (a mixture of kosmiche and cult-spoofery) played a substantial role in the Anonymous Bash album, and join Charles in the ongoing live line-up.
As the opening concert of the South East Asian Festival 2015, there’s a performance at the Forge by My Tricksy Spirit, a new musical project which fuses the shimmering sounds of gendér wayang – Balinese gamelan instruments – with dub, electronic, ambient, trip-hop, and psychedelic rock. The Forge’s writeup is below (tweaked a little by me).
My Tricksy Spirit (The Forge , 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Monday 26th October 2015, ) – £10.00
Performed on the bronze-and-bamboo “gendér” metallophones which gives the music its name – and featuring intricate, interlocking melodies played with mallets and damped with the wrists – gendér wayang is a subset of Balinese gamelan music. Involving between two and four players (a small number for a gamelan ensemble) it is used in the island’s Hindu rituals including life-cycle ceremonies, temple festivals, purification rituals and cremations (as well as in the sacred wayang kulit shadow-puppet dramas, based on ancient Indian epics).
The My Tricksy Spirit project was started by Nick Gray, who teaches south-east Asian music at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London, and who runs the gendér group that forms the basis of the band. Using Ableton Live, several synths and effects, guitar, bass and drums, the music is played through a mixing desk – much like dub – to create an intense psychedelic journey through sound.
Tonight’s band features Nick Gray (violin and vocal), Paula Friar and Rachel Wilcox (gendérs) and four other musicians: Tomoya Forster of Pumarosa (bass guitar, effects, mixing desk), Julian Vickary of General Skank (synthesizer and effects), Charlie Cawood of Knifeworld (bass guitar, sitar, guitar) and Rob Shipster of Buttress Root Drumming (electronics, drums), who also produced My Tricksy Spirit’s upcoming album.
Support comes from electronica/world-house act Wax Wings and from another of Nick Gray’s SOAS gendér wayang ensembles, Segara Madu (who mostly play repertoire pieces from the Balinese village of Sukawati, as taught by the late I Wayan Loceng). More information and gig tickets are here, with the Facebook event page here.
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Arguably, there’s not been enough pop or R&B in here recently. Let’s set that straight.
Kill J + Loveless + Maasai (Ja Ja Ja @ The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, UK, Thursday 29th October 2015,) – £5.00/£7.00
Straight from the publicity:
Founded in 2009, Ja Ja Ja is the definitive Nordic website and club night celebrating the very best new music emerging from Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Denmark. Each month at London’s The Lexington, Ja Ja Ja hand-picks the finest emerging talent from the Nordic countries, making sure that only the best music is filtered through to your ears.
KIll J (a.k.a. Julie Aagaard) has been turning heads the past two years with her signature blend of dark experimental pop. A devastating one-two-punch with debut singles Phoenix and Bullet set the blogosphere buzzing, also catching the keen eye of ‘The Guardian’, ‘Indie ‘, ‘Stereogum’, ‘Pigeons and Planes’ and landing airplay on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 6music. Deliciously diverse, the sugary sweet Cold Stone revealed a more innocent and naive side of KIll J, whilst Propaganda burst forth as “a bombastic, fangs-bared snarl at sexism” (‘Stereogum’). There’s more to come too, with an EP promised this fall.
Prominent identities in their own right, Eirik Tillerli and Filip Kollsete teamed up late 2013 to form Norwegian beat crooners Loveless. Following back-to-back remixes, debut single How To Love You was instantly added to national radio. Clocking in excess of 500K streams last year, their music has picked up attention from blogs, magazines and DJs all over the world; also landing them on some of the biggest festivals in Norway, not to mention their own club night in Oslo, Klubb Loveless (where guests include Artful/Artful Dodger and NVOY). New single They Don’t Know was recently hailed Record of the Week on BBC Radio 1xtra, serving the first taste of upcoming project ‘Relationships’.
Maasai is a Stockholm-based duo consisting of Dominique Teymouri and Zackarias Ekelund. Together they create soulful sound landscapes with a cinematic touch and lyrical depths. The pair broke on to the scene with debut single Memories, pulling inspiration from varied and abstract constructs – places, people, surroundings and everywhere in between. Follow-up tracks The Healer and Forgive Me have since held a captive audience; also hinting to the fearless, fragile and all-the-while dreamy atmosphere inhabited by MAASAI’s upcoming debut album – set for release later this year.
Resident DJs Project Fresh Socks are along for the ride in October; having also spun up a storm at Ja Ja Ja’s first club night of the season last week at The Lexington with CHINAH (Denmark), The Fjords (Norway) and Axel Flovent (Iceland).
Up to date information for this particular Ja Ja Ja night is here and tickets are here.
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Flapping-in-the-wind time… here’s what looks like a very interesting gig, but the colourful cloud of information around it keeps changing shape. Here we go..
Subterfuge presents Samhain Special/Labiatory New Year’s Eve Party with Rude Mechanicals + NiMBUL + Bad Suburban Nightmare + We Are A Communist + Jane Ruby + Milky Sugar (Subterfuge @ The Others, 6-8 Manor Road, Stoke Newington, London, N16 5SA, UK, Friday 30th October 2015, 7.00pm) – £3.00 to £6.00 and upwards
Run by arch, arty but heartful prank-rockers anarchistwood (whose own ingredients span post-punk cantatas, skeletal lo-fi garage pop, silly voices and quickfire sampler collages), this is the last Subterfuge club night of the year (hence the split between a Halloween/Samhain night and a New Year’s Eve shindig) and promises a fabulous musical sprawl – a right old grab-bag of this and that, in the best way. anarchistwood themselves are playing, though at the moment it’s unclear whether or not they’re teaming up with dysfunctional Chatham polymath and Stuckist art brute Sexton Ming (as the anti-supergroup called Nimbul), or playing as themselves. I guess that whichever way it goes you could expect a roughly equal mix of distracted behaviour, political protest, self-absorbed memory jigsaws and détournements with echoes of Beefheart, Crass, The Raincoats and the high point of a Pride parade. But that’s all it is – a guess.
Compared to Earth and Neil Young at their most dogged and noisy, Dan Hrekow – a.k.a Bad Suburban Nightmare – plays “impossibly slow and melancholic” grunge-drone instrumentals on a minimal setup of distorted guitar and pedals. In violent contrast, Rude Mechanicals play party music for paranoid schizophrenics, fronted by the peroxide-beehive rantings of Miss Roberts (who looks like a doubled-back-drag-queen version of Patsy Stone, and speak-sings like a collision between Dagmar Krause and Holly Penfield), Their songs are rattling hallucinatory-jam sandwiches about sinister neighbours, stand-up arguments and alien mice on the Tube, mixing jazz, punk and cabaret together in equal measures and played with both needle-sharp precision and full glamour oomph.
Of the rest, We Are A Communist provide “trashy guitar-laden sci-fi surf music, with stylophones to boot – a must for Man or Astroman? fans”; onetime Naked Ruby frontwoman (and current Deptford Beach Babes member) Jane Ruby turns up to sing her solo mixture of torch, garage rock’n’roll, flamenco and blues songs with twists of Spanish & Arabic flavours; and Milky Sugar performs “punk go go”… but that’s where I run out of information.
I’ve no actual idea about the order in which everyone’s going on, as the various info and flyers seem to contradict each other: either that or the whole event is morphing too fast for me to keep up with it. Presumably they’re working to some functional anarchist or I Ching method to establish it, or you just turn up and see what happens. Perhaps that’s what they’re doing. Either/and/or DJ Sugarlump SS, DJ KG Lumphead and MC Sadogasm provide some extra noises, punkvertery & Kodek provide visuals, and they’ve got a proactive but generous door price policy – three quid if you’re unwaged, four quid if you’re a student with an NUS card, and six quid if you’re neither but have shown enough commitment to arrive before 9pm. After that, they charge more. More information is here; keep track of developments as best you can on Facebook here; and there’s the usual array of tasters below.
Pausing only to remind you that the last week of October includes two of the Pierre Bensusan acoustic gigs at the Half Moon in Putney (which I mentioned in the previous post), here come the last of my selected London gigs for the month, and the first for the start of November. As ever, it’s just a small sampling of what’s on in town, but it’s what’s caught my attention.
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Bitchin’ Bajas + Tomaga + Demian Castellanos (Baba Yaga’s Hut & Hands in the Dark @ Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, UK, Monday 26th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £9.00
I’ve heard Chicago trio Bitchin’ Bajas described as “psychedelic easy listening” – presumably by someone who insists on being shouted at in conversation. Despite that swaggering faux-dumb name (the one that makes them sound as if they play manic Tejano to be drowned out by fist-fighting oil workers) they’re more ‘Bitches Brew’ than cathouse. They spin out protracted rhapsodic instrumentals drawing on a variety of introspective, mindful influences and parallels, looking back to the hallowed bucolic trance of Harmonia and Cluster, the ecstatic modular pulses of Terry Riley, the breezy but depthless Pacific cool of West Coast jazz, and perhaps the dissolving pastoralism of Talk Talk. Though they’re multi-instrumentalists, they wear their skills lightly, working wind instruments and mallet percussion into their mists of keyboard and workhorse organ and their landscape of lively rolling, rilling glissandi and drone chords. Sometimes overlapping into ambient electronica, they’re never quite dilute enough to fit into it: even at their most vaporous and transparent, they’re the smoke that never quite fades, the tang that holds your attention. As the clip below shows, they’re perhaps a little too diffuse to work at an open air festival: embraced by the Oto space, they should do just fine.
Synth/sounds looper Tom Relleen and drummer Valentina Magaletti keep in step – just about – as Tomaga, an impressionistic improvising duo drawing on drone music, free jazz and modular synth work hanging off the edge of rock. Simple oscillating melodies percolate loosely over a syncopated jazz lope with hanging coffee-can taps and rattles and shortwave radio whines; sometimes a synth organ hangs by itself, burbling, while the percussion sways and alarms like an approaching freight train. It’s music of preoccupation, with brief flashes of bright sunlight through the pressing focus.
Best known as the figure behind London psychedelic/kosmische projects The Orichalc Phase and The Oscillation, Cornish-born loop guitarist Demian Castellanos steps out under his own name for his most personal work so far. Like Fred Frith or G.P. Hall, Demian’s had a history of playing guitar with implements – paper, cutlery or whatever else came to hand – and feeding the sounds through volume swells and sundry pedals: like Hall, he’s also possessed of a nature-inspired, painterly view of music. For this current work, he’s going back to his formative years of woodshedding as a cottage-bound teenager at the isolated southernmost tip of the British coast; creating rich, portentous and melodious sound layers drawing on early-‘90s shoegaze, on raga and drone, and on echoing, guttering British, Indian, American and German psychedelic influences.
More gig info is here, and tickets are available here.
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On the first day of November, there’s a double bill of Japanese heaviness at Corsica Studios.
Zeni Geva (or Zeni Gaiva, depending on how you translate the phonetics – conceptually, it translates as “money violence”) have been around since 1987. Led by guitarist/singer/noise-chopper KK Null, and currently backed up solely by drummer Tatsuya Yoshida to make a quake-strength power duo, they have initial links to legendary noise-Dadaists The Boredoms (and even the venue-destroying pre-Boredoms chaos act Hanatarash, which featured Mitsuru Tabata, until relatively recently Zeni Geva’s second guitarist). You’d expect them to have an abrasive side, and you’d be right. Their default musical setting is one of boiling, barking aggression, with tight and furious knots of threshing machine guitar; their records have savage, sadistic titles like ‘Total Castration’ and ‘Desire For Agony’; their progressive hardcore approach takes assorted forms hostage (aside from the obvious, there’s math and noise rock, psychedelia and death metal in the tangle) and makes them jump like puppets.
And yet, in spite of this, there’s a world of difference between Zeni Geva and your average long-lived heavy-thunderfuck band. It’s mostly in the way they use calm – little, perfectly-formed lacunae of space in between the blurs and blows, bringing their bursts of frenzy into focus (Steve Albini is both fan and sometime collaborator, and you can see why). It’s a terrible cliché to compare Japanese musicians to martial artists, but in this case there’s some substance to it. The brutality is sheer craft rather than an end in itself, every movement seems considered and purely executed; and live, in between each flurry of songblows and each ugly song name, they seem enormously humble, friendly and pleased to be there.
Acid Mothers Temple have taken twenty years to set themselves up as a revered psychedelic institution, but it seems as if they’ve been doing it for much longer, such is leader Makoto Kawabata’s talent for back-engineering himself into the culture. Part of this is down to the way he and his cohorts have mastered the ingredients, including the tearing metallic squalls, mellow blues tracery and starry smears of Hendrixian guitar, the whispering lapping Gong synths, the Pink Floyd mantra riffs and Zappa-esque air sculpture solos, and the zoned-out post-James Brown grooves (with the addition of Japanese chanting and noise-squalls). Much of the rest of it is to do with AMT’s open, overlapping community approach. Their musical impetus has utilised multiple faces and names, from their own simpler reconfigurations (the heavier trippier playing of Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno, the Sabbath-y sludge of Acid Mothers Temple & Space Paranoid) to the friendly absorption or co-opting of contemporaries (Acid Mothers Temple SWR, with Ruins, and Acid Mothers Afrirampo) and of heroes from the original psychedelic generation (the team-up with Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth as Acid Mothers Gong, and with Mani Neumeier as Acid Mothers Guru Guru). If old heroes are unavailable or disinclined to pool resources, AMT have simply shrugged and continued anyway (such as when they took up hurdy-gurdys and acid folk and briefly became Acid Mothers Temple & the Incredible Strange Band).
If this makes Kawabata and co sound like slick chancers (and even if AMT album titles like ‘Starless and Bible Black Sabbath’ do suggest both avid, nerdy fandom and piss-taking on a Julian Cope level), I’m selling them short. Acid Mothers Temple might be a brand as much as an ethos, but that hasn‘t stopped their project and record-releasing ethics being continually dedicated to possibilities and continuance,rather than simply banking a following (or colonizing someone else’s). Their communal origins may have been two decades behind those of their inspiration but were hardly any less sincere; and their exploration of less obvious musical areas en route (including opera, Terry Riley minimalism, Nepalese folk and southern European Occitan culture) have led them into interesting places and opened further doors to anyone following them.
First and foremost, anyone who’s seen AMT play will vouch to their talent of both mastering their sources and creating music which lives, thrills and involves in the moment. This week’s London concert features the more space-rock inclined Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. lineup – probably the easiest entry point to an increasingly rewarding musical world. See below for a full-length concert clip of the band in action.
More gig info is here, and tickets are available here.
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Also on the Sunday, it’s time for the monthly LUME gig: more jazz in Dalston…
Tom Taylor/Rob Luft and Cath Roberts/Seth Bennett/Andrew Lisle (LUME @ The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8JH, UK, Sunday 1st November 2015, 7.30pm) – £10.00
For our November Vortex gig, we welcome a duo and a trio to the stage, for a night of improvised music.
Tonight sees the first meeting of a new improvising trio featuring LUME’s co-director Cath Roberts (baritone saxophone), Seth Bennett (double bass) and Andrew Lisle (drums). Andrew is known for being one of the drummers in heavyweight Leeds anarcho-sextet Shatner’s Bassoon, and as a prolific improviser working with a multitude of musicians on the free scene (Colin Webster, Alex Ward, Daniel Thompson, Tom Wheatley and more). Seth leads his own ensembles Nut Club and En Bas Quartet, as well as being involved in many other projects across musical styles including Fragments Trio, Metamorphic and The Horse Loom. He and Cath play together as a duo, as well as in Word of Moth and Cath’s quintet Sloth Racket. In addition to this and her LUME work, Cath also leads Quadraceratops (a septet) and has a duo with guitarist Anton Hunter, Ripsaw Catfish.
The new duo featuring Tom Taylor and Rob Luft is a recent collaboration borne out of a mutual love of improvised music. The music draws attention to the many common features of the two instruments, and mixes high-intensity improvisation with more tender and reflective textures.
A former award-winning classical piano graduate at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Tom is now a rising British jazz star, having transferred to London in 2009 to pursue a Masters in jazz piano at Trinity College of Music (studying with Simon Purcell, Liam Noble and Nick Weldon). Since then he’s played the main jazz festivals in Manchester and London and Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway. He’s a member of the Jack Davies Big Band and of Southbound (both of whom have recorded for V&V Records) and also plays in the collaborative electro-acoustic trio duck-rabbit with saxophonist Joe Wright and double bass player James Opstad. Rob began his career as a jazz guitarist in Sevenoaks, where he took lessons from Mike Outram and turned professional at 15. He has been a mainstay of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra for many years, having been its guitarist since 2010 and having played in the associated NYJO Nonet. He currently co-leads the band Organism and plays with various groups on the London jazz circuit; including positions with Nigel Hitchcock, Gareth Lockrane and the Callum Au Big Band.
During the middle of next week, there’s a set of new or rare contemporary classical pieces being performed in Camden Town.
Picking Up The Pieces: Darragh Morgan & Mary Dullea (The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Wednesday 14th October 2015, 7.30pm) – £10.00/£12.00
Here’s what the Forge has to say about it:
Described by BBC Music Magazine as ‘agile, incisive and impassioned’ violinist Darragh Morgan and pianist Mary Dullea are renowned soloists of new music as well as members of The Fidelio Trio, one of the UK’s leading chamber ensembles. ‘Picking up the Pieces’ explores new and recent repertoire, much of it written for this duo, by a diverse selection of composers. Among the program items, Richard Causton’s ‘Seven States of Rain’ (dedicated to Mary and Darragh) won the first ever British Composers’ Award; while Gerald Barry’s ‘Midday’ receives its world premiere alongside other London premieres from Camden Reeves and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly.
Here’s the original premiere recording of Darragh and Mary playing ‘Seven States of Rain’.
Tickets and up-to-date information are here. This concert is being recorded by BBC Radio for future transmission on Hear & Now.
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On the Saturday following, there’s a triple bill of Bills at Daylight Music. Now that’s cute, even for them. Here are the words, direct from the top…
Daylight Music 203: William D. Drake + Bill Pritchard + Bill Botting (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 17th October 2015, 12.00pm-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £5.00
For his fifth solo excursion, former Cardiacs keysmith William D Drake takes us on a serpentine path through the inner regions of ‘Revere Reach’, a part-imagined landscape composed of memory and fantasy. At once heart-felt, hearty and absurd, its heady reveries blend ancient-seeming modal folk melody with an obliquely-slanted rock thrust.
Bill Pritchard is a beloved cult British-born singer/songwriter. You may remember. You may not. He started writing songs for various bands at school but it wasn’t until he spent time in Bordeaux as part of a college degree that his style flourished. He did a weekly show with two friends on the radio station La Vie au Grand Hertz (part of the burgeoning ‘radio libre’ movement) and was introduced to a lot of French artists from Antoine to Taxi Girl. In 2014 Bill released – Trip to the Coast (Tapeste Records). He’s recently resurfaced with a cracking new album, the songs of which are classic Bill Pritchard. Guitar pop, hooky chorus’, melodic ballads and personal everyday lyrics about love, loss, and Stoke-On-Trent.
Our final Bill is Bill Botting – best known as the bass player from Allo Darlin with the encouraging face, or as one half of indie electro wierdos Moustache of Insanity. Bill returned to playing his own music sometime in 2014. What started as a solo act has now grown into a complete band featuring members of Owl and Mouse, Allo Darlin and The Wave Pictures. A 7-inch single out later in the year on the wiaiwya label has a country slant but an indie heart.
Up-to-date info on this particular Daylight Music afternoon is here.
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Laura Moody’s captivating cello-and-voice songcraft (which edges along the boundary lines of avant-garde classical, art pop and heart-on-sleeve folk music, while demonstrating a daunting mastery of both vocal and instrument) has been a favourite of mine for a while. On this particular week, she’s performing as part of the Match&Fuse Festival in London on 17th October, which I’d have made more of a noise about had I cottoned on to it earlier. She’ll be following up her London show with a date on 20th October at Leeds College of Music: unfortunately, this concert (which also features a talk) is only for LCM students/staff, but if you happen to be attending the college, grab the chance to go along.
There’ll be more on Laura shortly, as she’s embarking on a brief British tour next month which dovetails quite neatly with some other brief tours I’d like to tie together in a post. Watch this space.
Meanwhile, I might as well provide a quick rundown of the Match&Fuse events. This will be a short and scrappy cut’n’paste’n’link, since I’m honouring my own last-minute pickup (and, to be honest, because I exhausted myself listing out all the details of the Manchester Jazz Festival events earlier in the year).
By the sound of it, though, the festival deserves more attention than I’m providing. Even just on spec, it’s a delightful bursting suitcase of British and European music; much of which consists of various forms of jazz and improvisation, but which also takes in electronica, math rock, accordion-driven Tyrolean folk-rap, vocalese, glam punk, the aforementioned Ms. Moody and what appears to be a huge scratch ensemble closing the events each night. It’s spread over three days including a wild triple event on the Saturday. Tickets are starting to sell out; so if you want to attend, be quick.
Committed to the composers and bands who propel, compel and challenge, Match&Fuse turns it on and ignites the 4th London festival in October. Dissolving barriers between genres and countries, it’s a rare chance to hear a spectrum of sounds from underground European and UK artists. On Saturday 17th October our popular wristband event will give you access to three Dalston venues and about thirteen artists and bands. Strike a match…
The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London, N16 8AZ, UK, Thursday 15th October 2015, 7.30pm – £9.90
Midnight – The Eirik Tofte Match&Fuse Orchestra (Europe)
00.30am – Soccer 96 (UK) party – stripped-down, amped-up analogue synth vs. live drum assault
Full details of Match&Fuse London 2015 are here and here, with tickets (including wristbands) available here. There’s also a playlist available – see below.
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More October gig previews coming up shortly, plus some more for November…
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Tropic of Cancer + Shift Work + Telefon Tel Aviv (DJ) (
Misfit City 