If you’re in London on 14th June (and not already heading for the Lost Crowns show in Dalston), you might consider this free event.
Friends Serene presents:
H0nkies + TomZack + Aeddan + Stal Kingsley The Lock Tavern, 35 Chalk Farm Road, Camden Town, London, NW1 8AJ, England
Thursday 14th June 2018, 7.30pm – free entry – information here and here
As you might have noticed in previous posts, I’ve got an ambivalent relationship with Americana: but while H0nkies dabble in it (the official line is that their work is “Americana, bluesy, post-punk country cuts”) they don’t pay it much undue respect. They pick it up, drop it on the floor, and then drunkenly gum it back together with added noise and clatter and hooty keyboards.
Here’s ‘Pagans’, their half of a recent split single. It’s a punky-tonk, a little as if The Libertines, Tom Waits, Jim White and Madness had collaborated in a round of happy mutual arse-kicking. Their singer keeps peering out of the racket (and out from beneath his own looning bawl) as if to wink at us, as if we were in on the gag. I think I like him.
In the space of a year, Tottenham art-rock/post-punk quintet TomZack have travelled from the industrial dance feelers of their debut single Too Much To Love to the theatrical flair of their current incarnation, delivering peculiar badlands singalongs and rumblesongs on record. A band with at least one parallel life, they’re also working on a live soundtrack to the upcoming theatre version of ‘The Forbidden Zone’ (Oingo Boingo’s cult 1980 film showcasing the early work of Danny Elfman amid a riot of transgressive cartoonish imagery, as if John Waters had transformed ‘Alice In Wonderland’ into American burlesque). Expect the latter, plus the debut TomZack album, in the autumn.
Meanwhile, here’s current single Caroline (Still In Love With You): a mordantly downbeat piece of grinding melancholy (again with that Waitsian tone) unmoored to fly on a strange junk/space-opera background narrative of starship troopers, gender wars and time-travelling bereavements. Either they’re writing their own bit of long-form twisted steampunk, or they just like bamboozling people with their press releases.
Wrapping up the bill are a couple of solo songwriters. Aeddan Williams (or just “Aeddan”) fits firmly into that line of singing multi-instrumental play-and-record-everything craftsmen: the one which includes Roy Wood, Karl Wallinger and other blokes who’ve either shaped, or paid glorious expansive tribute to, British pop. His debut album has shades of The Move, World Party, Kinks, Small Faces and the usual jaunty suspects. The album and EP he’s popped out so far have been filled with songs of kooky chicks and small adventures, indie protest songs about racists, and (just under the bonnet) subtle little twists which reveal that craft doesn’t blind him to ironies and changes in perspective.
Stal Kingsley, on the other hand, is already well embedded into that skewed-perspective zone. A lo-fi pop aficionado with an ear for the grand gesture, he enjoys but can’t quite stay slouched in his tape rumble; and chooses instead to bring his eccentricities out into the light of the mainstream. Comparisons to Ariel Pink and Cleaners From Venus abound; his live gigs apparently stretch out into performance art (with “live drawing countdowns”, filmed ad breaks and the backing band on an old tape cassette); but I think that what he really wants is to bring his music into your sitting room, even if it’s not quite the right size to fit through the door, or keeps sliding off your sofa.
Despite their increasing whirl of gigs over the past year, it’s difficult to find performance video of V Ä L V Ē besides these gnomic little fragments: glimpses of feet and harps, pedals and synths, shuffles and patch wires. They’ve been rapidly evolving far beyond their beginnings as Chlöe Herington’s vehicle for musical jokes, chance theory and post-Zappa woodwind patchworks and her experiments with samples and homemade instruments. Now, they’re a live, surprisingly accessible avant-everything trio with Elen Evans and Emma Sullivan – reeds and microsynth, melodica, harpstrings and bass, RIO/Raincoats-style vocals that inhabit both the forthright and the naïve – and they’re getting pieces in ‘The Quietus’ about how they’re expanding on synaesthesia and spacework and the disjunction of time, and mining the weird yet archetypal templates of Chlöe’s recurring dreams.
While we’re waiting for more evidence to emerge, here are a couple of pieces which represent a couple of V Ä L V Ē’s varied polarities – the avant-rock all-in wrestle match of Rhythm Strip (based on an EEG reading from Chlöe’s mum) and the warming songwork of the more recent Lights – plus one of those distracted fly-on-the wall videos (this time, of Chlöe negotiating a keyboard, pretty much literally).
V Ä L V Ē’s next show (just over a week before Chlöe pops up again with the Lindsay Cooper Songbook) is this coming Sunday, supporting the Monkey Puzzle Trio – which unites perpetually/perversely-journeying art-rock and improv drummer Charles Hayward, Pinski Zoo bassist Nick Doyne-Ditmas and longstanding sound-and-place voice artist Viv Corringham. It’s a post-jazz music of deformed rounds, ranging chatter and a kind of reimagined dub focus, via Charles’ assured yet regularly broken-up and disrupted drum cycles, Viv’s cavernous range of vocal effects (stippled by loop pedal and flexible larynx, augmented by mini-disc abuse) and Nick’s bass, which seems to be travelling at two-thirds of the thinking speed of the voice and drums but always knows where to settle and lean on the moving beat.
V Ä L V Ē and Charles Hayward present:
Monkey Puzzle Trio + V Ä L V Ē Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Sunday 10th June 2018, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
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Charles Hayward shows up again just under a week later when he guests at Laura Cannell’s ‘Modern Ritual’ show at LSO St Lukes, performing a self-explanatory experimental piece called ‘30 Minute Snare Drum Roll’, an “improvisational piece that sees him develop a rudimental drum technique into something more complex, subtlety changing density, pressure and volume before our ears.” There are precedents for this kind of thing – people like Max Roach or Art Blakey keeping an audience enthralled by a quarter of an hour of carefully modulated hi-hat – but any excuse to see Charles thinking hard behind a drum kit is a good one.
In many respects, this is a revisitation of the ‘Memory Mapping’ show which Laura brought to Daylight Music in November 2016. More to the point, it also revives an event at Cafe Oto last March, with repeat appearances for Charles’ drum roll, for ‘Wire’/Resonance FM/Arc Light Editions mainstay Jennifer Lucy Allan and for Suffolk-based “edgelands” musician Andre “Hoofus” Bosman.
Hoofus’ experiments in FM overlaps, raw-formed percussion and drifting oscillators “(explore) the uncanny beauty of the intangible, the occult and the arcane seeping through into the post-industrial 21st century world of reason and corporate compliance” resulting in “music of eerie wonder, where oscillating melodic loops meld with distorted rhythms.” In contrast, Jennifer presents her combined talk and performance ‘Foulis’s Daughter: Social and Cultural History of the Foghorn in 30 Interrupted Acts’ accompanied by “the ghost of a long de-activated foghorn which is on a fifteen-second loop”: Jennifer’s history is narrated during the gaps between blasts, tracing “a rhythmic history of the foghorn at the edges of the Atlantic: along the fog-bound Labrador Coast; at a bend on the Firth of Clyde; on the tip of The Lizard and from the cliffs at the South Foreland in Kent.”
In keeping with this drift into New Weird Britain ambience, writer, filmmaker and ‘Quietus’ co-founder Luke Turner explores his own world of liminals with a talk on “urban forests, family, death and sexuality”. This is based around his forthcoming “spiritual memoir” ‘Out Of The Woods’ – a study of Luke’s own coming-to-terms with his bisexual identity and his past experiences with sexual abuse and a religious upbringing, alongside his investigations of “memory and experience in the context of landscape and the natural world”. It’s a journey framed by the trees and the history of Epping Forest, which for Luke seems to have become representative of an ur-forest which allows for the expression of “a wilder, truer, more spiritual self” (and brings those wood-woses, drones and leafery which have threaded through ‘The Quietus’ into fuller perspective). Laura, meanwhile, keeps up her own traditions of reinvention, refurbishment and recontextualising on double recorder and bow-threaded violin: generating eerie, often-violent sonic landscapes of folk melodies and sharp-minded post-classical noise, each calibrated to the particular place where it’s being performed.
The evening will be topped off by a large group collaboration involving all of the named performers plus additional guests.
Laura Cannell: ‘Modern Ritual’ LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England
Saturday 16th June 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
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More assorted improvisations and explorations come on the 22nd, when Ashley Paul and Tom James Scott team up as a duo at The Old Dentist in Homerton. Both have a fair amount in common, as multi-instrumentalists heading up small exploratory record labels (Ashley with Wagtail, Tom with Skire). Equally, there’s enough distinction between them to make for some interesting friendly frictions as Ashley’s American background, reeds leanings and free-form tastes interact with Tom’s Cumbrian background and the process that’s taken him from classical guitarist to experimental minimalist.
In support are improvising trio Glowering Figs, made up of venerable Ya Basta! free jazzers Ivor Kallin and Dave Fowler (on electric upright bass/vocals and drums, respectively), plus Ivor’s London Improvisers Orchestra comrade and ex-Astrakan member Jerry Wigens on guitar. Come for bilious, awkward avant-power-rock noodlings topped with Ivor’s authoritative stream-of-conscious rantings: here’s an example…
Opening the show is Ben Pritchard – not to be confused with the former Fall guitarist, he’s a London-based artist, songwriter, experimental musician and Ashley Paul bandmember who writes disintegrating-shack instrumentals for prepared acoustic guitar and percussion – strangely compelling pings, scrapes, rattles and string noise with an emotive visual quality as well as a knack for summoning in illusions. You can somehow hear impressions of ghost fiddles, a whittler’s workshop, or vocal chords tweaked by breeze gusts. When he wanders into song, it’s along the frail, fluttering-shirt lines of end-of-the-road Talk Talk, or the sparsest of Robert Wyatt: spontaneous-sounding experimental folk sketches with an undertone of parched, amnesiac blues.
Muckle Mouth presents
Ashley Paul & Tom James Scott + Glowering Figs + Ben Pritchard The Old Dentist, 33 Chatsworth Road, Homerton, London, E5 0LH, England
Friday 22nd June 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Right now I’m keeping an eye on a couple of very different south London dark-horse acts, seeing which sparks fly up and around them as they carve their spaces underground. Each is distinct – Great Dad play genderfluid experimental pop full of sampler collaging, flustered hummingbird guitars, voice-processing and Charlie Loane’s mixture of yawing, caught-in-the-flux perspective and fractured ecstatic/paranoid/semi-carnal song narratives; Black MIDI play a sometimes stony, sometimes yammery mashup of experimental rock positionings, post-hardcore slams, and neo-No Wave adjustments. Each has a peculiar ability to pull in listeners and attendees from their comfort zones. Each is keeping busy.
Great Dad play tomorrow night as part of a Bethnal Green college band gig, bringing their Goldsmith’s College inspirations to a show “spawned from the creative minds of UCL’s hottest young talents”. I know more about them than I do about any of the others – I can’t tell you much about Svetlana Smith apart from the fact that they’re a “neurotic synthpop duo” preoccupied with Russia and with pernicious beauty, and short of any clips or online sounds which I can use to illustrate that; Couples are theoretically easier to pin down, being a funky, fully-formed act allegedly aiming for a post-punk/grunge feeling but fronted by a classic blues-rock voice, actually ending up a little like Editors about to mutate into Stealer’s Wheel, if that makes any sense.
The following week, Great Dad play a much punkier free gig at the recently reopened Vinyl Deptford. Billmates Italia 90’s songs alternate between dank, irritable, menacing railway-arch noise or angry jet-propelled purpose; underpinned, in each case, by a glowering thrumming drone like an overhead bombing raid. They could have stepped straight out of 1979 and the winter of discontent – theirs is a classic butch-punk snarl of angry, disenfranchised boredom from the land of the have-nots, their lyrics minimal, their sound just a touch of Joy Division live loom. They’re just one constructive spat away from toppling into a broader politics; for now, though, they’re stuck on the edge, threshing out their frustration. Female-fronted firecrackers Socket don’t worry about anything like that, specialising in a hell-for-leather guitar pelt with capacious Lust for Life drumming and barely controlled chant-yelling.
Dates:
Quick Spin: Svetlana Smith + Great Dad + Couples – Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 42-46 Pollard Row, Bethnal Green, London, E2 6NB, England, Friday 25th May 2018, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Double Dare w/ Socket + Great Dad + Italia 90 – Vinyl Deptford, 4 Tanner’s Hill, Deptford, London, SE8 4PJ, England
Friday 1st June 2018, 8.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £3.00) – information here
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Celebrating a year of existence (during which they’ve played with all and sundry and an insouciant swagger, and effectively created their own no-rules scene), Black Midi play three shows in the first fortnight of June. The first is probably the highest profile one – a Village Underground show supporting fiercely-honed Canadian neo-post-punkers Preoccupations, currently touring their tersely-titled new album ‘New Material’. The second is another support slot, this time a Bad Vibrations gig in which they’re supporting Atlanta post-punkers Omni, another post-punk crew who play raised-eyebrow songs with taut riffs continually re-articulating their shape and moving onto new ones: arrangements like card-tricks executed within 4/4 time.
The third gig is Black Midi’s own combined formal first birthday party/single release party, down at the Windmill with a clutch of Windmill friends in attendance as they unveil their vinyl debut with the Bm Bm Bm” seven inch. Last time I covered Jerskin Fendrix, I tagged him as “a smart operator with a wise, knowing line in media-savvy one-man synth pop, who uses Autotune like a dance of the seven veils, and who knows how to make use of lo-fi bedsit trappings without being trapped by them”; and since he’s happily using the quote, I guess he’s not felt the need to change his ways. Similarly, I’ve recently described The Guest as a “Casio cave-techno specialist and parody-hipster narrator… like a meetup between adolescent versions of Jarvis Cocker and Julian Cope, Momus and Klark Kent in a school computer room, all up for smartarse bloopy experiments with primitive synth programs and hijacked games consoles.” while “haunted electronicist”GG Skips showed up at a DIY Space gig last month.
Entirely new to me are electro/art-punk collective Legpuppy, who create dance-friendly clean-limbed European electropop with a dark, sarcastic cutting edge, sifting through the narcissism of social media quirks and memes and processing them into chilly, sarcastic songs with titles like Selfie Stick Narcissistic Prick, or Running Through A Field Of Wheat. It could be spiteful, but there’s a moral core to it, with the band training their sights on the kind of solipsistic ineptness that unglues the world.
Dates:
Preoccupations + Black Midi – Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England, Tuesday 5th June 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Omni + Black Midi – The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England, Monday 11th June 2018, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Sonic Bm5: black midi + Jerskin Fendrix + GG Skips + Legpuppy – The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, England, Tuesday 12th June 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
I’m rushing this one into post, since I’ve only just heard about it. No apologies for the excessive cut-and-paste here, nor for the absence of much personal insight (although I will say that when a shortage of information meant that I had to dig deeper, I found more).
“While touring the world as guest multi-instrumentalist with Mogwai, Luke Sutherland (Long Fin Killie, Bows, Music A.M.) used the downtime to sketch a bunch of songs. Once he got home, he wrote a handful more and recorded them with the help of a few friends at his cottage on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. The result was an album’s worth of material with references ranging from My Bloody Valentine to Teebs, Lemmy-era Hawkwind to ABBA, Vaughan Williams to Boulez.
“Keen to translate the radiant chaos of the recordings into a live setting, Luke put together Rev Magnetic, featuring Audrey Bizouerne (Gift Horse), Sam Leighton (Live w/ Prides, St MARTiiNS) and Gregor Emond who played with Luke in a band called Hynd, way back before the birth of the internet. Combining elements of dream pop, shoegaze, R&B, and post rock, their first single, Like No Girl That Ever Was/Don’t Let Joy Destroy You is the sound of summer at full pelt.”
Imminent Scottish and English tour dates are below:
Neu! Reekie @ St Andrew’s Church, 410-412 Easter Road, Leith, Edinburgh, EH6 8HT, Scotland, Friday 25th May 2018, 7.15pm (with Salome Benidze + Helen Mort + Erin Friel + The Honey Farm) – information here and here
Stereo, 22-28 Renfield Lane, Glasgow, G2 6PH, Scotland, Sunday 27th May 2018, 7.30pm (supporting Superchunk) – information here and here
The Hug & Pint, 171 Great Western Road, Glasgow, G4 9AW, Scotland, Tuesday 29th May 2018, 7.30pm (with Nova Scotia The Truth + Caitlin Buchanan) – information here and here
The New Adelphi Club, 89 De Grey Street, Kingston-upon-Hull, East Yorkshire, HU5 2RU, England, Thursday 31st May 2018, 8.00pm (with Foolish Atoms + others t.b.c.) – information here, here and here
Conroy’s Basement, 51-53 Meadowside, Dundee, DD1 1EQ, Scotland, Friday 1st June 2018, 8.00pm (with Stonethrower + winterThieves) – information here
It’s probably accidental, but when you take a look at the finer details of the tour, it’s almost like an exploded reflection of Luke’s influences and sympathies; the cultural and artistic breadth he’s shown throughout a career voyaging through books and music. Indie rock and dance chemistry, hip hop and poetry; filtered and transformed Scottish folk; literacy and blasting noise. The balancing of multiple cultures in one evening, or just in one person.
Regarding the Glasgow shows… if you’ve been hitting on indie-punk playlists and festival lineups for the past twenty years, you’ll need little introduction to Superchunk. Headlining over Luke and co. at Stereo, they’re early ‘90s favourites who helped define a Carolina DIY punk sound. They were all over the inkies back in the day more or less during the same time that Luke first was; they founded Merge Records, and have kept their place in indie rock affections ever since. On the other hand, the two support acts at the Hug & Pint show are still thrumming – just – under the radar.
Originally from Aberdeen, Caitlin Buchanan is an emerging acoustic singer-songwriter working towards her first EP and taking Angel Olsen, Laura Marling and Kate Bush as influences. Perhaps Angel’s the most obvious one – the slowcore tempos, the collapsing drapes of melody – but Caitlin has little of Angel’s narcotic slur. She also isn’t as propulsive or as easy-to-follow as Laura, and (despite her own musical theatre background) isn’t as brilliantly hammy as Kate.
That’s not actually a string of negatives. Rather, it’s a suggestion that, even at this early stage, Caitlin’s already sloughed off her initial inspirations and found a voice of her own: a folded, cleverly elusive literary one which makes you sit up and take notice, full of double-take lyrical moments. Nestled in strong hammocks of folk guitar, and in gorgeous transplanted curves of Scottish melody, her songcraft is often a series of strange elisions and non-sequiturs somehow coalescing into stories, delivered in a velvety softness which makes it all the more jolting when she drops a perfectly-enunciated precision F-bomb into the crook of a tune – “I fucked up your favourite song, and this is why I don’t do imitations. / Betrayed by the idea of God, we are her most hated creations / Dressed for the office but underqualified, / express my gratitude between her slender thighs…”
I suspected that Nova Scotia The Truth might have picked her name as a ScotNat political assertion. It seems that I was half right. A “queen of sample-based electronic music”, active in the Scottish hip hop scene since her teenage years (and now stretching out as a producer-performer), Nova might well be representing a rising strand of modern Scotland, but not necessarily one which will cradle comfortably in the old-school saltire. Her preoccupations are with feminism and of people of colour: a pavement-and-club engagement with embedded and intersectional inequalities, mapped out in whip-crack sonic edits and shifts.
Nova’s recent ‘Al-Haqq’ EP is a determined but bewildering mash of pointers and unrest. Cyber-mimetic R&B, corbies and round-chamberings; blasts of rap and dancehall chat; industrial-grime sound collage; all mixed in with found speech from black culture and protest and faith (some of it tweaked and repurposed, but much of it left free to run). The follow-up, Zoom, is a half-hour of rapid sonic cross-cuts in a similar vein: it’s intended as a backing track for a live rap story of love and talk gone wrong, ultimately, broadening out to a wider exploration about power imbalances in relationships, silencings and language. As with a lot of underground hip hop, there’s plenty packed in there: I’m guessing that onstage, this flies.
The Dundee show could have been created as a vast-contrast tribute to Luke’s own willingness to be broad in listening. Rev Magnetic aside, it’s a truly strange, rather brave pairing of opposites. “East coast ecossemo” band Stonethrower bring “monolithic slabs of lead-heavy riffage, angular rage-filled spiky melodies and frantic jazz-core arrangements to blast our faces off”; while Edinburgh/Dundee duo winterThieves are a sacramental ambient act “pool(ing) their varied musical backgrounds to craft a sound that is in equal measures melancholic and euphoric, featuring vast ambient swells, lush guitar and piano melodies, and crashing drums,”, playing wordless slow-reveal post-rock hymnals to an empty sky. The angry hammer and the lonely quilt.
South of the border, the London show features Ilk, whose “colourful and dreamy songs unravel against a collision of psych pop influences and scruffy, found sound warmth… the band’s songs and sketches are somehow both grandiose and playful, upbeat and melancholic” plus the “psychedelic jazz-infused” songwriting of rising folk-rock favourite Jack Cheshire in solo mode.
Supporting at Hull, Chris Norrison – a.k.a. Foolish Atoms – is a solo performer who “dreams up droning acoustic swamps in his sleep… creating music so delusional and pain numbing, audiences peacefully drown in the sweet rustic guitar tones and his strained vocals.” Other acts will be added at Hull over the course of the next few days: let’s see what the city’s recent pop-cultural renaissance has produced…
However, it’s the Edinburgh show which looks like the pick of the crop. It’s a packed-to-the-gills mass of words, music and beats put together by “Scotland’s favourite avant-garde noisemakers” and high/low art boundary-smashers Neu! Reekie, as a partial benefit for the Save Leith Walk community crowdfunder.
As well as Rev Magnetic, on hand for performance are poets Salome Benidze and Helen Mort and a couple of Scottish hip hop acts. Onetime Deadlife Crew member Erin Friel (part of a wave of Scottish hip hoppers who stick, refreshingly, to their own accents and cadences) recently opened for rapper/activist Loki at his sell out King Tuts event for Poverty Safari. The Honey Farm – Scotland’s only all-female rap crew – are self-confessed East Lothian rap bumpkins who “simultaneously skewer and celebrate rap stereotypes with their unapologetic, take no shit attitude” and whose recent debut release L.A.D.S. is “a dragged-up pussy-grabs-back takedown of laddish, bullshit behaviour.”
It’s not quite the fierce textured outrospection of Nova, and perhaps the Farm sometimes let their drama school backgrounds show a little, but it’s all fine. Wit over pose; and plenty of rap’s supposed to be accessible, youthful and funny, including the bit of cross-cast fun with which the Farm kick off the roll of verbiage below…
I hate punk. No, scratch that. I hate what punk too often turns into – the institution of punk, the ossification of what ought to be immediate, the sense of discovery and an armful of bright options that stales and turns into an array of choking conservative forms; the way it all ages too quickly and turns into the faded favourite shirt you wear out of stubbornness.
It’s not supposed to be that way: it should always feel like a shot of energy into the moment, or a flare of wising up. I sometimes feel that it should only be a transient thing, but a transformative transient thing – a kind of liberating wind-tunnel which you hurtle through en route to finding who you are, so that you can be someone whom you’d never otherwise have had the imagination and purpose to become. Stretching out that moment, that process, somehow seems to stop the result. I get bored by most punk, energy or no energy. When it does get a grip on me, it’s when it drags me in to witness that firing of possibilities. I always wonder why, and how, it should last any longer.
Chinese punks Birdstriking have been together since 2009; some way off the sixteen active years of Fugazi, let alone the forty-two of UK Subs, but a span which, in terms of the early punk waves, would have practically rendered them elder statesmen. Despite this, they still sound as fresh as if they were in their first flush – a glorious, splintery, shimmery noise like an rotary engine made from flying gobbets of molten silver, topped with a stormtossed thrill of Sino-Anglo vocal. On their rare trips over here they’re the subject of documentaries, or are fêted in word-of-mouth samizdat as if they were princes from the East: their shows immediately garlanded as must-see events. It’s tempting, I guess, to treat them as something exotic – different from the Western malcontents we’re used to – and whenever you hear a thrilling echo of Chinese folk melody ringing through the smog of guitar bash or shaping a vocal line, it’s even more tempting to pursue that angle.
It’s also tempting to try to cast them as rebels against the suffocating monocultural paternalism of the latterday Chinese state, but that’s not easy to make stick. Having had their debut record banned due to a single, fairly unspecifically political song, Birdstriking have shrugged their shoulders, said a few things about anger being for people’s younger days, and are now opting for more innocent-sounding themes – sports enthusiasm, the thrill of personal energy, the mixed soothings and pain of family. You could, if you squinted, cast them as apologists for a kind of positive Chinese conformism. I’m guessing that that’s not true either. I suspect that a kind of subtlety is at work amongst the noise – discussions in the timbre of arguments, and in the implications of personal joy within a collective . They want to keep on doing what they do, to become something more. It’s not in the rhetoric, it’s in the sound.
Regardless, in each of the two London gigs they’re playing over the coming week, Birdstriking will be interfacing with a different Western counter-cultural mindset. At the Sebright show (where they’ll be at the bottom of the bill), the tone’s definitely leaning towards the psychedelic, the noise-surfy and the shaggy rebel-academic. Gnod-affiliated Dutch avant-garde music collective Radar Men From The Moon will be deconstructing psychedelia and acid house: part of the group curating the Eindhoven Psych Lab, they’re currently touring and touting ‘Subversive II’ (the last in a triple-run of themed albums). London psychedelic droners One Unique Signal (who also moonlight as the instrumental backing for The Telescopes) will also be joining in, continuing their sixteen-year voyage into noisy minimalist repetition with added layered impulses from space rock, post-rock and kosmische.
At the Windmill – where Birdstriking are headlining – expect a dip into the more stripped, loquacious end of post-punk smarts, since they’re being supported by The Wolfhounds. Post-punk veterans from the mid-’80s, currently thirteen years into a resurrection, the Wolfhounds are now grizzled smartarses in their early fifties. Smart enough to embrace their middle-agedness without succumbing to it (meaning that they’re in a place where they can sing about self-parody rather than just becoming one), they’re also armed with a lean, laser-guided wit and a deceptively sophisticated perspective. Although they’d hate the comparison, they’re proof positive of that old bastard P.J O’Rourke’s adage about age and guile beating youth, innocence and a bad haircut.
If The Wolfhounds are garage rock, theirs is an omnivorous man-cave of a garage. It’ll be rammed with books and time-tested music, and inside it they’ve honed a pitch-perfect blend of sarcasm and hidden sincerity, and a way of loading their snarling guitar chassis with bursts of soul, a capella political folk and digressions into the digital sound palette which frontman David Callahan mastered during his interim years with Moonshake. Though the songs on their current album ‘Untied Kingdom’ (one of 2016’s finest, sharpest records at the punkier end – perhaps a ‘Sandanista!’ without the sprawl) echo, and probably intentionally, Brecht, Blake and Shelley they’re never pompous or swotty. An equal template, at least in terms of directed smarts, are the wise, rowdy Mekons, whose own forty-one year career evolution is an example of how punk doesn’t have to tumble into the pickling jar; proof positive, as The Wolfhounds continue to prove, that those punky impulses don’t have to turn into flab and complacency.
One more thing – in case you thought the psychedelic-noise side of things had been left behind at the Sebright Arms, the interim DJ sets at the Windmill come from Sterling “Rosco” Rothwell, the onetime Spacemen 3 and Darkside drummer who’s sometimes resurfaced as himself (for 2004’s The Psychedelic Ubik) or as a guest performer with various acts from Sky Saxon to Geraint Watkins and Martin Belmont.
Dates:
Radar Men From The Moon + One Unique Signal + Birdstriking, The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England, Sunday 20th May 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Birdstriking + The Wolfhounds + DJ Rosco, The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, England, Tuesday 22nd May 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
As of yet, no-one’s really successfully categorised south London under-bubblers Black MIDI – something which I reckon they’re quite pleased about – but there seem to be an increasing number of people who get them, responding to the band’s perverse flinty reverberations with outright delight.
Here’s what I wrote about them last time our paths crossed:
“Teenage Croydonians Black MIDI (subtitled, variously, “the decibel boys” and “purveyors of the loudest dreamscapes”) managed to win over a pubful of Cardiacs cultists. Not the easiest thing to do and they didn’t do it with post-punk virtuosity or effusive psychedelic complexity but by dogged, determined presence. Artful and awkward (or gawk-ward), in some respects reminiscent of key post-hardcore bands such as Slint and Jesus Lizard (and in others a muted, utterly pared-back Huge Baby), they also sound as if they’ve got there without listening to the records. While a generation of shoegazer revivalists annoy me by clogging up my inbox with ersatz sonic cathedral cliches, Black MIDI arouse my interest by whittling sparse piles of breeze-blocks into mysterious cranky monuments… I found them elusive to follow, and follow-ups are no easier (their Soundcloud’s vanished down the back of the rehearsal room sofa; their Facebook page currently consists of one post).
“Still, they offhandedly own their space onstage: perhaps their secret ingredient might be impeccably fit drummer Morgan Simpson (who might look as if he’s timewarped in from the young Fishbone but seems absolutely at home where he is now) but when you’re dealing with a bandful of stubborn square pegs like this one, any or all of them could be…. Between holding the low notes down or strumming out wooly baritone chord-clouds, (the) bass player maintains ambiguous eye contact with the audience, like an onstage imposter letting us in on his stunt. One of the guitarists (blessed and cursed with the arched, cruel, elfin eyebrows of Thomas Sangster) looks perpetually affronted, but instead of screaming out tortured emo wails he enunciates rambling, precisely-formed, utterly incomprehensible digressions: like a fiercely introverted baby Peter Hammill, or an exiled punk senator addressing a horde of penguins…
“With a rumble spreading about their south London rumble, this feels like the start of something. Just as much as I find it hard to place where Black MIDI come from, I have no idea where they’re going; but they’re the kind of band which excites me via that blank-slate art-punk feeling that they could go anywhere.”
Having demonstrated both a preternatural confidence and a healthy genre-crossing “play-with-anyone” attitude ever since their emergence, Black Midi continue their London encroachments via two very different gigs in May. For the first (on the 10th), they’re playing at a Shacklewell show curated by South London artist and tastemaker Wu-Lu, a trans-Thames event aiming to “showcase some of the most exciting acts currently breaking through South of the river, all the way up in East London.”
Billmates for this one are a pair of hip hop talents. South London rapper Shaun Sky is the kind of affable jack who sounds as if he’d rather spend his time ambling round the top of a hilly park, greeting and free-associating, away from street corners. Semi-acoustic and spacious, his work’s balanced atop a London sundowner groove of sunwarmed beats, acoustic guitar and soul murmurs; his thoughts are a constant, light-touch note-to-self to pick up and get focussed.
On the flipside, Omelet (usually the beatmaster and orchestrator for the brooding, phantasmal Neverland Clan, the Catford-to-Hackney crew he also calls, with full irony, “the world’s gnarliest boyband”) steps out from his dayjob for a solo appearance. Taking something from the drunken-sounding, unbalanced, falling-asleep-on-the-spindle urban veil-dances he uses as Neverland backings (who generally sound as if Massive Attack had taken a couple of draws from their own future, straight from the post-split Tricky, and begun to disintegrate) he sharpens them up. Minus the MC murmurs of Daniel OG and Ryan Hawaii, they’re still narcotic and weird-eerie, but now more on pitch – disassociated minimal beatscapes made as much of space, echoing wafts and inconclusions as they are of hits and pindowns; uncomfortably sedated, with drift-in samples of dream-recountings and distant orgasms.
The second Black Midi outing of the month is at the second PL x Glows “Middle Of The Room” event at DIY Space for London. It’ll be a big sprawling evening of mixed media and art, in which they’ll be sandwiched between the adventures of two experimental pop duos – Farai and Jockstrap – on a bill completed by TØNE, who fires off slinky-robot salvos of latterday electro (veering between a kind of warm, distracted isolationism and scattered hints at the black experience).
Similarly oblique is what’s going on within Farai. Basil Harewood Jnr provides the sounds (deep-buzz, sawtoothed synthpop) while the superbly named/renamed Farai Bukowski-Bouquet provides the voice and the identity; the whole concept stitched together with lashings of Afropunk attitude and beady Berlin-art blankness. Farai herself yells small-voiced, cryptic/obvious nuggets into echoing dub-chamber space (“I am a warrior, but even lions cry too”, “Chasing the dragon, inhale exhale”, “I roll with the hell’s angels”) and always seems to be glancing off bigger statements, leaving pointers or shreds of clues rather than outright explanations or challenges; exchanging meaningful nods with Robert Johnson or Prince Far I while swiping past them on the autobahn. Perhaps there are more clues in the group’s videos – flat, pop-up art-gallery/fashion shoot reframing of introspections or street-market scenes, in which Basil and Farai seem to be part of a contracting and expanding collective of talkers, arguers, dancers and hustlers.
I can’t tell whether it’s all a deliberately difficult slit-view onto a bigger world, with them demanding that you make up all the running to gain understanding; whether it’s all codes and pre-initiations; even whether there’s substance behind those sketched references and implications, or whether its a handful of slogan-poses around an empty core. Sometimes it’s all frustratingly impenetrable – Farai makes fleeting eye-contact from under her lids, challenging you to speak or to question, without ever indicating that she’ll provide a reply – but she and her group are a compelling presence, a bewildering mix of shyness and stage-owning, resilience and passivity.
Jockstrap are easier to get. Despite the sweaty hardcore name, they’re another boy-girl duo: Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye, a couple of Guildhall grads who start out with ’60s MOR pop – orchestral, bossa, ye-ye – and then promptly put it through the weird wringer. What starts out straightforward ends up strange – pitchwarped; almost atonalised; drag-g-g-ing; like Portishead being dragged through a Nordic-narcotic slurry of slowed-down electronic jazz. Their pocketful of recorded songs come across like minor bossa classics being waylaid by experimental electronica, or by the teasing strand-by-strand rearrangements of contemporary classical. Full of drop-outs, cheap pocket blips and strange celebratory jump-shifts of tone, mood and pace, they’re prey to interfering sounds and rude, speaker-prodding mixes. Think of a more gleefully insane Elephant, a more mischievous Broadcast, the balefully intelligent murmur-whisper pop oddities of Anja Garbarek; or (going back a bit further) the mocking deconstructive treatment of old jazz standards on Django Bates’ Quiet Nights.
Live – with a two-man rhythm section and Georgia pulling triple duty on treated viola and stylophone – they’re deprived of the absolute mix control which makes their recorded songs so startling. On the other hand, they become a little more accessible – still subtly pranky with their interjections of weird sound processing and attention-deficit mood shifts (listen as a lounge-pop string part goes weirdly Chinese!), but with their disruptive futurism now fighting a rearguard action to their nostalgia. The other bonus is the added prominence given to Georgia’s breathy leaf-on-the-wind vocalising and her “now-I’m-slinky, now-I’m-friendly” performance persona: unveiling the subtleties and human touches within their songwriting from the offbeat thought processes to the shots of blunt, frustrated eroticism.
As with the previous Glows party, there’ll be DJ sets, a meetup for assorted zines and alternative promoters, and a steady stream of art curated by Felix Bayley-Higgins: “a pool of films, objects and images in continuous circulation, presented through a process of rotation.” No word yet on who’s contributing to this, but last month’s event had irreverent, ingenious and sometimes just plain beautiful sculptures and designs from a basketful of artists including Wilfrid Wood, Willa Hilditch and Harry Grundy.
Dates:
Wu-Lu Curates: Black Midi + Shaun Sky + Omelet, Birthdays, 33-35 Stoke Newington Road, Dalston, London, N16 8BJ, England, Thursday 10th May 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
PL x Glows present ‘Middle Of The Room’ featuring Farai, Black Midi, Jockstrap, TONE + more, DIY Space For London, 96-108 Ormside Street, South Bermondsey, London, SE15 1TF, England, Thursday 24th May 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
CLUB.THE.MAMMOTH. presents:
ILL + LibraLibra +The Ethical Debating Society + CLUB.THE.MAMMOTH DJs The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England
Friday 11th May 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
There’s an evening of feminist-slanted dance, rock’n’rave coming up in Bethnal Green next Friday, as delightfully gaudy post-punk Manchester shoutmonsters ILL (following up two previous self-released EPs) light the blue touchpaper under their debut album ‘We Are ILL’.
Admired by ‘The Quietus’ for their “kinetic force” and describing themselves as “a genre-evading band which believes in the power of disobedient noise… with a repertoire of precarious pop songs and frequent improvised departures”, the all-female, fiercely feminist four-piece “revel in the right to be weird, exploring the borders between the funny and the sinister, the personal and the political, the mundane and the surreal.”
Between making a racket at Quietus events, Supernormal and the Raw Power Festival, carrying out relatively standard support slots with the likes of British Sea Power, and splurging out improvised audio-visual work at assorted art galleries, they’re certainly making a mark of their own choosing. In true Situationist tradition, ILL conceive their debut album as much as event as record – “…a call to action, a disobedient protest in the face of passivity, wrestling with the personal and political issues of identity and gender, mental health, the disintegration of social services, capitalism and misogyny. Subversive, surrealistic, humorous and fighting fierce, ILL warmly invite you to join them in kicking some ass!”
In support are Brightonian four-piece LibraLibra, a live mash of “exotic melodies and frenetic, lyrical flows meet(ing) tribal beats and broken guitars” fronted by striking singer Beth Cannon, whose recent credits include work with post-rockers Nordic Giants and co-writing/singing the riveting dream-pop-soul track Bones for Simon Raymonde’s Lost Horizons project (which she delivered like a magnificent tri-point cross between Etta James, Kate Bush and Liz Fraser).
LibraLibra’s debut single Animali (out since mid-March) is a rip-roaring renegade slosh of sub-bass-oozing world-beat carnivalia. As vigorous as the height of a Brighton Pride parade – or a volcano-cresting sabre fight between Shirley Bassey and Eartha Kitt – it’s chockful of animal namechecks, wild-woman party-leading, and a cavalcade of ferocious summoning lyrics (“you sting, you pierce my skin like a razor,” “monsoon of blood-flood, she’s calling”, “save me from the bullshit boy”) suggesting a writhing in-the-moment package of shape-shifting, menstrual sorcery, and assorted seize-the-day don’t-give-a-fuckery.
Completing the set, matter-of-fact London riot pop trio The Ethical Debating Society bring street-level DIY art-punk to the evening. Having originated as “a pseudonym for Tegan Xmas, writing anti-love songs on her hooty piano” it blossomed into “a full band, now with Kris Martin on guitarrr/vocals and Eli playing pots and pans. If we’re trying to prove anything, it’s that music is for everyone to have fun with, not just a chosen few.” Expect no frills; but do expect noisy non-nonsense songs about ethics, choices and the travails of the leaned-on, hard-bitten end of the London community.
