Looking for events with singer-songwriting women in London? This coming Thursday, you can go big or go small.
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If you’re going for the bigger option, there’s Hazel Iris’ album launch in Smithfield, at St. Bartholomew-the-Great, no less. It’s an event that sprawls across the entire church: its varied acts located in different places within the building, like a cross between a miniature festival and a stations-of-the-cross procession. In one corner, two classical musicians – Katrina Sheppeard and Jayson Gillham (who between them have racked up appearances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, ENO, Melbourne Symphony and the Sydney Opera House) will provide a piano-and-soprano duet performance of Richard Strauss’s ‘Vier letzte Lieder’ – the composer’s last work, a four-song death-and-transfiguration sealing of his legacy, composed during the dusk of the Romantic era. Next, in another corner, Kate Arnold – usually to be found as frontwoman for dark classical-folk fusioneers Fear Of The Forest – will be playing solo and acoustic with hammer dulcimer, violin and voice, providing a set of songs reflecting her folk, medieval and Middle Eastern influences.
And so to the headliner, who’s recently been making a name for herself as a standout performer at the Blind Dog Studio evenings. Hazel Iris is a storyteller with an overwhelming musical streak; her tales drawn from her travels, her own musings and her borrowings from the great stewpot of mythology and folklore. California-born and London-based but world-honed, her songs blend indie-folk habits, vaudeville brassiness, operatic training, lieder romance and a dash of country.
Bringing her brand-new ‘Nine Sisters’ album to life at St Barts is a similarly broad-based nine-piece band. The rhythm section – drummer Fred Harper and double-bassist Twm Dylan – come from the London and Leeds jazz scenes, while Winter Quartet violinist Aurora Del Río Pérez and French horn player Jessica Cottis are both established in the classical world (the latter, notably, as a conductor – she’s returning to a childhood instrument for this performance). Harpist Tara Minton straddles both jazz and classical worlds. Rounding out the ensemble is cellist and screen music composer Matt Constantine, classical accordionist Aine McLoughlin (Hazel’s regular collaborator at previous Blind Dog gigs), and up-and-coming guitarist Myles Peters (who plays anything and anywhere he can).
Also integral to the show will be the puppets of Alicia Britt, artistic director for Wondering Hands Puppet Theatre. Her usual gig involves using puppetry of all kinds for the entertainment and nourishment of all ages, with an undercurrent of healing, conversation and a restoration of our human nature: work that ranges from carefully-thought-out fairy tales of bereavement and development for children to bawdily sexual puppet-cabaret for adults. Quite possibly all aspects will be making a showing in her support work for Hazel. I’ve no idea whether huge rod-guided creatures will be leaping through the church or whether the puppetry will be on a smaller, more human scale with creatures the size of lutes or horns, but it should add an extra level of story texture.
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Speaking of smaller, more human scales – if all of the above sounds too grand, then on the same London night another songwriter – Emma Lohan – is launching her own debut album up in the south end of Hackney. ‘Black Atlantic’ pulls together Emma’s own particular blend of Irish hometown influences (she’s a Galway woman), pop leanings and traveller’s scraps, drawn from her footloose global roamings. Impressions and stories, a kind of global coast-combing or, as I put it last time, “beautifully-constructed cloud-tossed songs imbued with the flicker of constant motion.” The album itself is a small, quiet-reveal treasure imbued with a bouncing, soft-chatting liveliness. There’s jigs and kalimba, there’s age and youth, there’s plenty of story to unspool.
She’s doing it all again the following night in Wales – in an unusual display of synchronicity, at a puppet theatre in Cardigan – in a puppet theatre. Elusive ska band Julian’s Reluctant SKAfterparty are in support: no more info on them, I’m afraid. (Update, 24th October – sadly the Cardigan show has had to be cancelled, but they’re promising to reschedule it soon…)
All dates:
Hazel Iris + Kate Arnold + Jayson Gilham & Katrina Sheppeard – St Bartholomew the Great, Cloth Fair, West Smithfield, Clerkenwell, London, EC1A 7JQ, England, Thursday 25th October 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Emma Lohan – NT’s Bar, 1 Westgate Street #207, London Fields, London, E8 3RL, England, Thursday 25th October 2018, 7.00pm – information here
Emma Lohan – Small World Theatre, Bath House Road, Cardigan, Ceredigion, SA43 1JY, Wales, Friday 26th October 2018, 8.00pm(with Julian’s Reluctant SKAfterparty) – information here and here
Daylight Music‘s autumn season of free family-friendly Saturday lunchtime gigs continues with organ music, singer-songwriters, brass, jazz strings and synthpop…
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The 6th October show features Caoilfhionn Rose, Tomorrow’s Warriors StringTing and Abimaro.
“Caoilfhionn Rose has an eclectic range of influences, including the Mummers, Polly Paulusma, Broadcast, Rachel Sermanni and Peter Broderick. She featured on The Durutti Column’s 2014 album ‘Chronicle LX:XL.’ She is currently recording her debut album with Matthew Halsall of Gondwana Records.
“Tomorrow’s Warriors StringTing is a flagship ensemble from Tomorrow’s Warriors, the celebrated hothouse for young jazz talent in the UK, led by violinist Rhiannon Dimond. Blazing a wide trail for women and strings in jazz, their musicians are core players in Tomorrow’s Warriors’ acclaimed Nu Civilisation Orchestra and are ones to watch as they begin to make an indelible mark on the London jazz scene.
“Abimaro is a singer and songwriter from London who is inspired by life, faith and stories. Having previously lent her vocals to bands such as Zero 7, Cinematic Orchestra and The Free, Abimaro released her debut solo EP in July 2017. Abimaro is also a Music Facilitator, regularly leading projects for organisations including The Roundhouse, Spitalfields Music and the Southbank Centre.”
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The 13th October show is another in the Union Chapel’s ‘Organ Reframed‘ series, in which a variety of musicians play, interact with or are accompanied by the Chapel’s resident Willis pipe organ. In Daylight Music’s case, a variety of singer-songwriters from different disciplines are involved. On this occasion, the performers are Terry Edwards (with Seamus Beaghen), Douglas Dare and Deerful.
“Jazz and rock multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards has performed and released records both as a solo artist and in collaboration with artists such as Madness, PJ Harvey, Spiritualised, Nick Cave and Tindersticks. For this special performance, he will be joined by composer Seamus Beaghen on Union Chapel’s Henry Willis organ. Seamus has played with Iggy Pop, Death in Vegas, Madness and Morrissey, to name but a few. The performance is going to be semi-improvised in four interlocking sections. A multi-genre musical offering, wind-based without electronics – the improvised giddy sound of pipes, trumpet and saxes (occasionally two at once!).
“Douglas Dare is a London-based singer-songwriter, originally from the coastal town of Bridport, South West England. His live sound combines acoustic instrumentation including piano and percussion with glitchy electronic elements. Inspired by the likes of Portishead, Elliott Smith and James Blake, Douglas combines a rich and haunting vocal with lyrics crafted from his own poems and short prose. For this performance he aims to play the organ as sensitively as he can, reworking some of his older material and introducing some new as he explores the organ’s sonorities in the chapel, singing tenderly with this powerful machine for the first time.
“Deerful is Emma Winston, a keyboard player, singer and producer based in London. She writes lush, sad, romantic electropop about feelings on synthesisers small enough to use on the bus. For this performance, Emma will combine the chapel’s Henry Willis organ with electronics.”
Daylight add “to get you in the mood for this show, we did an organ playlist from previous years and other related shows. It took a lot of organ-ising so we hope you’ll pull out the stops to make time to listen…ahem…”
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All gigs are at the usual place – Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England – with a suggested donation of five pounds (go on, it’s worth it…) Dates below:
Daylight Music 290: Caoilfhionn Rose + Tomorrow’s Warriors StringTing + Abimaro – Saturday 6th October 2018, 12:00pm – information
Daylight Music 291: ‘Organ Reframed’ – Terry Edwards (with Seamus Beaghen) + Douglas Dare + Deerful – Saturday 13th October 2018, 12:00pm – information
Details on November Daylight concerts to follow in due course…
Polydisciplinary pop-charmer Belle Ehresman – better known as Bellatrix – pops up at Elektrowerx at the start of October. She’s been on the up for a couple of years now: the former leader of The Boxettes and a onetime UK beatboxing champion (as well as someone who’s chalked up a parallel musical life as a jazz double bassist), she’s recently subsumed all of these skills into a freeform pop approach.
I caught her a couple of years ago at Rich Mix, just her on her own. Citing influences from Bjork, Ravel, Nina Simone and Sun Ra, to Mingus, Fleetwood Mac and The Pharcyde, she was nothing if not eclectic. For half an hour the venue was her sketchpad as she flung out work-in-progress – a set of unclenched, openhanded musicality in which she finger-painted in assured fashion on mini-synth, loop station and double bass; unfurling songs, meditations and mouth-driven beatscapes in jazz, experimental pop and the loosest of hip hop tones; floating dreamily a little way above the earth.
Since then, Belle’s put together a band, spat out a couple of quirky EPs and stormed the big streaming services, bypassing Bandcamp and Soundcloud to go straight with the Tidals, the Deezers and the Spotifys. For all the boho trappings and the whimsicality (her first EP was called ‘Real Stuffed Owls’), there’s clearly quite a bit of faith and funding behind her. While her former freeformery has settled into more accessible attention-gripping songcraft, I’m hoping that her wholesome world will mesh enough with the demands of that level of glaring attention sharky commercial demands: dropping into one of her sessions should feel like visiting an enchanted workshop, not like chasing a YouTuber.
In support is New York singer, songwriter and slam-poet Amy León. Once part of the Nuyorican Slam Team, she now rolls solo: a powerful, joyous, positive-political performer with her work rooted in specific experiences (blackness, womanhood, social inequality) and fusing them all into a compulsive stew of hip-hop spoken-word and sung R&B. Amy’s subject matter’s stirred by rage and outrage, the surviving of brutality and broad sweeps of oppression. Her ethic is to overcome it (in time-honoured civil-rights-movement manner), via a celebration of love, bursting through shame and tears with defiance.
She can sing like battered, determined grass, giving with the gale; she can speak soft; she can wail with rage. Her hard-hitting grit will anchor Belle’s dextrous free-floating thistledown. It would be fascinating to see what they came up with together.
Bellatrix + Amy Leon Electrowerkz, 7 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Tuesday 2nd October 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
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On the same night, Friends Serene are putting on a show of their own. Headlining is former Water Babies member and current Snapped Ankles-er Clémentine March – French-born, Brazil-schooled, London-cradled. Solo, she mixes the pressing, noisy dynamic of ‘90s indie rock with the airy, summery liberation of French and Latin pop melodies. Clanging, precisely-tooled guitar parts (like little iron chandeliers) mesh gently with her sleepy Gallic coo, which in turn rises to indie-siren clarions as she rambles across three languages at will. She’s a sleepy intermittent whirlwind, variously flicking up the debris and festival decorations in Mediterranean towns, and sometimes swirling them into intent little vortices as the mood takes her.
In support, Garden Party are the duo of singer Yujin Jo and instrumentalist George Edmondson. They bring along bedsit-glamour trip hop sounds in a Portishead/Moloko tradition, reaching towards a skinny R&B feel. It sounds thin as tissue paper or thrift-shop bedsheets at points, and Yujin’s voice is a tiny Eartha-kitten laze. Still, Garden Party revel in the worn, recovered texture of their soundworld and – on recent track Real Tapes – sometimes reach out for something a little more ambitious; rattling their collection of instruments, oddments and samples to reach out through the radio towards a bigger world.
Russian-inspired “neurotic synthpop duo”Svetlana Smith complete the bill: they’ve had a debut EP out since July, which you can find on Spotify if you like. As with Bellatrix, they seem to have vaulted a promotional stage: and since I object to streaming services which rip their clients off, I avoid Spotify like the plague and have stayed pretty ignorant as to what SS sound like. However, both ‘Bittersweet Symphonies‘ and ‘From the Streets‘ caught them just under a year ago: the latter highlighted “innocent but empowering love songs, preaching about love for yourself not another, all bought together in an elegant package taped together by sickly sweet and catchy melodies” while the former reported back on something “cynical and sexy, sweet but deadly… synth-pop with bitter lyrics of heartbreak and disdain.”
That’s the way of it, I suppose: a person can show completely different faces to different people on the same occasion, and one man’s light ear candy is another’s compelling poison. At least they agreed on the initial sweet taste; while I’m left wondering whether Svetlana Smith is deliberately Janus-faced, a kind of emotional double agent or just some kind of cannily blank song-canvas. You’ll have to find out for yourself.
This is a free event, but the usual “book-your-slot-first-and-turn-up-early” business applies.
Friends Serene presents:
Clémentine March + Garden Party + Svetlana Smith The Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, Shacklewell, London, E8 2EB, England
Tuesday 2nd October 2018, 7.30pm – free event – information here, here and here
Music tech initiative WITCiH (positive, feminist, genderfluid, multicultural) returns to its regular canalside home at the end of the month, for its first work as a full commissioning platform. ‘The State of Gender?’ is a full festival following several standalone WITCiH concerts over the past few years. While open to all genders, skin tones and persuasions, the three nights of the festival present, foreground and celebrate WITCiH’s central preoccupations – women, technology and creativity. In additional, they continue to promote WITCiH’s extended interest in teasing out and broadening (and, where necessary, seizing) opportunities generally only offered to the male, the straight and the white, and sharing them out across a wider community.
If this sounds like a revolution, it’s a charming and positive one. The people in and around WITCiH are unafraid to critique and push against orthodoxy, and are equally unafraid of their own strength and potential; but this is primarily a celebration rather than a catharsis. Enthusiastic about its geekery, revelling in dressing up and performance, it seems to call into being a place and time in which the worst of patriarchal glowering and rigidity has been dispelled or dissolved; where the culture wars have been won from dance and crafting studios, and from workshops and sheds where electronic components are used to reel in the future. A place and time in which people are just free to get on with open-ended, humanitarian tech-play.
As regards how to get there, there’s a good interview here, at ‘Wyldemag’, in which WITCiH co-founder (and living, walking, proactive “giant culture clash”) Bishi points out her cultural-creative ethos, and that of WITCiH. “People are deciding – especially women and people of colour – that the simple answer is that you have to invest. I mean, it’s great that there’s more awareness and blah blah blah, but it’s really simple, with the minority groups in society, it’s not just about building awareness; it’s the sustained investment that comes with that. And, of course, all the social media and stuff is helpful, but living in a city is so expensive, and politically, everything is so rough and uneven and uncertain, and there’s something powerful about a collective of people coming together physically.”
On this occasion, it’s eight women (or, to be more precise, seven women plus a non-binary person with a female name) coming together. In amongst the music, three of them are going to be providing lectures – physical-pop explorer Chagall, “movician” Di Mainstone and conceptual wildcard Gazelle Twin.
Amsterdam-born but London-based, Chagall is an electronic music singer-songwriter, producer, and performer inspired by a wide-ranging collective-culture range of influences including “nature, Greek poetry, Bjork, James Blake, Beethoven, Nina Simone, Erykah Badu, Joni Mitchell & Miriam Makeba.”. Her particular musical approach embraces gestural and reactive technology: she was an early adopter of a key gestural synth controller, the Mi.Mu Gloves, and her performances involve choreography and triggered interactive visuals.
Chagall’s interest in body-gestural sound sourcing is shared – and then some – by “movician”Di Mainstone: artist-in-residence for Queen Mary College at the University of London, and one of the “new generation visionaries” of the international digital arts scene (according to the ‘New York Times’). Working with researchers from QMC’s Centre for Digital Music and Media Arts & Technology, Di creates musical instruments as wearable technology for dancers: electronic extensions of the human body, triggered by movement. These include the Human Harp (which she uses to play suspension bridges), the spring-based Whimsichord, the squeeze’n’jig Hydrochordion, the limb-like “choreophonic prosthetic” Serendipitichord and – outside of music – the Scorpions (a set of kinetic garments with a life of their own). Di also coined the “movician” term – a name for a player of her devices, “a hybrid artist who explores and composes sound through movement.”
Earlier on, I suggested that WITCiH was predominantly utopian. The work of Gazelle Twin provides a hellish counterpoint indicating that there’s still plenty of struggles to go through, whether it’s from sinister social forces or our own unacknowledged darknesses.
Beneath her alarming/exciting dual skins of latex costumery and processed sound, Gazelle Twin is Elizabeth Bernholz – composer, producer, incantationeer, framework-overturner and time-traveller. Via loops, sampling and processing, her work jams and transforms acoustic and Early Music sources (recorder, harpsichord, female chorus) against found sounds and electronic “shades of ‘90s house and the once-thriving rural rave scene, albeit recalled as a watery, second-hand memory.” The results buck and bray, ripple and snarl; delivering disturbing, liberating dreamscapes and warning fables with a violently physical component. In her videos, we see hissing ferocious folk devils battling it out; or blank-masked hooded figures capering and proliferating, barking and twitching like dysfunctional maenads. Much of it comes across as mingled summoning, exorcism and terrible warning. There’s rather a lot of teeth, and an underlying exploration of specific modern sicknesses via primeval mythology (redressed in manmade synthetics).
Elizabeth’s lecture promises to unpack and reveal the complex vision of one of Britain’s most unsettling and unexpectedly timely artists: it will cover the creation of the latest Gazelle Twin audio-visual project ‘Pastoral‘, including the influences and ideas behind this year’s Hobby Horse single and video (the aforementioned devilfest). En route, it will branch out into related fields exploring “fascism and horror in the English landscape past and present, (Elizabeth’s) own creative process from writing to recording/production, and her identity as a working artist and mother.”
Other musicians will be performing newly commissioned audio-visual music pieces. Bishi herself is performing in the middle of the bill on all three nights. There’s no specific clues as to what she’s doing, but on past form expect a melange of some or all of the following:
interlocking pop forms (from classic English to Eurosynth to Hindi filmi songs).
a headlong, full-on involvement with the intersection of grand costume and high fashion.
sitars, ukeleles, extended voice and Ableton synth controllers.
traditional folk material from the Balkans to Bengal; classical ideas from Hindustani tradition to contemporary opera.
vocal inspirations from Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono.
fervent and earnest positive politics (including song cycles about immigration, and a long-standing loyalty to queer club culture).
and finally, Bishi’s own strong and self-willed musical identity, which never rules out a willingness to interact or integrate with anyone from Sean Lennon to the London Symphony Orchestra (and with anything from interactive wind-harps to Christina Rosetti poems and giant floating holograms of Tony Benn).
By day, Miri Kat works as a Novation Music engineer, designing and finessing electronic musical instruments. She’s also a combined audio-visual artist and music producer, interested in algorithmic music, webtech and generative visuals, with further interests in hacking, live coding and immersive multimedia in general. Mainly composed with Max/MSP Supercollider (and with found sounds live-coded from open ecosystems with open-source tools), her productions provide “hyperactive textures (and) ephemeral collages, in turns frenetic and and lyrical, in a unique brand of glitchy grindcore for a post-Internet age.”
Lia Mice‘s work covers multiple bases: live electronic artist, producer, DJ and instrument designer. Sometimes she’s to be found applying her live analog sampling skills across “high energy vinyl-hybrid” DJ sets of electro, Italo, tech noir, acid and “weird-pop”. At other times she applies them to live sets of original music alongside “self-hacked” instruments and Max/MSP, while her recordings can stir in eight-track tape mangling alongside influences from Laurie Anderson, BBC Radiophonics and electronica across forty years from German pioneers to American outliers. Live sets also feature both live voice sampling and Lia’s own custom-designed tactile-interface instruments – such as the Delia Derbyshire-inspired Reeltime sound manipulator (based on a broken reel-to-reel tape recorder) and the suspended tap’n’tilt/swing/spin ChandeLIA (designed to blend the organic bell-like sound of tapping on a metal chandelier with the sound of the electricity powering its lights).
A major WITCiH supporter, Lia also designs sonic sculptures, is a contributor to the Augmented Instruments Lab in the Centre for Digital Music and is “forever taking refuge in the mysteries of the sonic universe.” Her third solo album, ‘The Sampler As A Time Machine’, is a selection of “experimental dance x wave-y industrial x parallel-dimension pop tracks”. For the festival, she’ll be presenting a lecture based on the album and its studio experiments (themselves inspired by time travel writings by philosophers, physicists, neurologists and psychologists from Mark Fisher to Oliver Sacks to Stephen Hawking).
An explosively enthusiastic character (and WITCHiH regular), Vicky O’Neon performs in a dazzle of beats plus shocking day-glo costumery and makeup. Born Vicky Österberg in Finland, she was originally a class-topping, award-winning drummer and percussionist at the British Institute of Modern Music. She went on to work around the world as sessioneer and tour-band member for the likes of Pharell Williams, Johnny Marr, Hans Zimmer and assorted live-set DJs. Since summer 2017, she’s gone solo, buoyed up by the success and positivity of her parallel work in tech/instrumental teaching and in co-founding girl-promoting music initiatives Girls Rock London, Rock Donna and Racuma.
Vicky characterises herself as a “relentlessly optimistic Riot Grrrl multi-instrumentalist, with fluoro-glowing intentions to inspire the masses with harmony, laughter and love … on a mission from a higher plane of consciousness, devoted to the elevation of human vibration.” Her one-woman show involves her making a delightful proactive racket via drum pads, loopstations, acoustic percussion, body-worn percussion triggers and MicroKorg synth, plus her own “tongue-in-cheek lyrics and visuals”. As the founder of the Electric Vegetable Orchestra she also mixes tech with vegetable husbandry, carving new instruments from fruit, tubers and other root vegetables, then playing them through loops and effects to create “catchy tunes and singalongs with the audience.” However she chooses to entertain you at WITCiH, she’s certainly got plenty of options to choose from.
Vicky’s fellow BIMM graduate Rebekah Ubuntu is a multimedia performance artist, musician and culture scholar experimenting with “ideas of futurism, rebellion, and paradoxes” filtered through queer, non-binary, black and feminist perspectives. Their work spans synthwave, glitch music, techno and various forms of Afro-futurism (including reference to black poets and writers such as Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler, black rock and punk statement, and Afro-orientated pop/house/trap/beat forms) as well as electronic soundscapes and vocal manipulations.
As with most of the other participants, Rebecca’s got a strong allegiance to (and grounding in) club culture, and they’ve recently played sets at black pride, queer and general futurist events from Berlin to Norwich and Birmingham’s FLUID festival. Outside of clubwork, previous work has included last year’s ‘trans.mission.Q’ sonic installation project for Tate Britain (in which Rebecca posed as an extra-terrestrial DJ encouraging gallery visitors to “add your voice(s) to the live soundscape as we broadcast our earthly messages to the remotest regions of outer space”. They also recently guest-edited new music webzine ‘The Sampler’, interviewing five queer, trans & non-binary sound-and-music artists about the intersection of their identities with their music.
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Full dates:
WITCiH presents ‘The State of Gender?’, evening 1: Chagall (lecture) + Bishi + Miri Kat – Wednesday 26th September 2018
WITCiH presents ‘The State of Gender?’, evening 2: Di Mainstone (lecture) + Bishi + Lia Mice + Vicky O’Neon – Thursday 27th September 2018
WITCiH presents ‘The State of Gender?’, evening 3: Gazelle Twin (lecture) + Bishi + Rebekah Ubuntu – Friday 28th September 2018
All events are at The Barge House, 46a De Beauvoir Crescent, De Beauvoir Town, London, N1 5RY, England at 7.00pm. Further information is here, here and here.
Note that on the evening of the 27th – the day before her appearance at the festival – Gazelle Twin will also be making a live in-store appearance at Rough Trade East off Brick Lane, performing tracks from ‘Pastoral’.
Here’s the second batch of September gigs in Nest Collective‘s Campfire Club shows in the open air in London parks, gardens, playgrounds…
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The 15th September gig features Jim Causley and Saskia Maxwell.
“Since the release of his debut album in 2005, Jim Causley’s unique voice and persona have helped him become one of the most well-loved and respected figures of today’s contemporary roots and folk scene. He’s won numerous accolades (including no less than six nominations for a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award and the title of “finest singer of his generation” from ‘Mojo’), presented his own folk music show on BBC Radio Devon. in 2015 he worked with BBC TV historian Dr Sam Willis to create the music for his show ‘Highwaymen, Outlaws and Villains’; In 2017 Jim composed the entire soundtrack for Cornish filmmaker Jane Darke’s BBC4 biographical film about his relative, the poet Charles Causley.
“A prolific collaborator, Jim is hugely admired for his work with iconic groups The Devil’s Interval and Mawkin:Causley as well as playing, touring and recording alongside Waterson:Carthy, John McCusker, Eddie Reader, Graham Coxson, Shirley Collins, Michael Morpurgo, Show of Hands, Kate Rusby, David Rotheray (of Beautiful South fame) and many more.
“Saskia Maxwell is a singer-songwriter, guitarist and flautist who hails from Cornwall. Born into a musical family (and inspired by bands like Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins), she has always been surrounded by music and was classically trained on guitar, flute and piano from an early age. She has gigged extensively, performing over six hundred shows and festivals in the UK alone and supporting the likes of Ralph McTell, Rae Morris, JP Cooper, Nick Harper and Rachel Sermanni.
“Whilst her first three EPs encompassed soulful jazz styles and exuberant folk songs, her more recent performances display a new-found purpose and grace and are suggestive of a move towards a more otherworldly and ethereal folk style. Her new songs are explorative of many moods and perspectives that share a common purpose of being spiritually provocative and invigorating/ A full debut album, ‘Entertaining Possibilities’ is coming soon.”
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The 21st September gig features The Hut People and Danny Peddler & Rosie Butler-Hall.
“This is a show like nothing you’ve ever seen before – expect feel-good dancing tunes, audience participation, step dancing, Quebecois foot-percussion (whilst playing the accordion!) and humour aplenty. Taking the audience on a musical journey around the world, English instrumental duo The Hut People (Sam Pirt and Gary Hammond) have firmly established themselves as one of the best loved, entertaining and best-loved acts on the UK folk scene today.
“Mixing global rhythms with folk tunes from Quebec to Spain, Scandinavia to Sussex and everywhere in between, this is a quirky celebration of our rich musical heritage – and it works so well!
“Danny Pedler & Rosie Butler-Hall are two young and dynamic musicians who formed as a duo in late 2011. Danny (from Essex) plays hurdy-gurdy and accordion, and Rosie (from Wiltshire) plays five-string fiddle and sings. They play mostly English and French songs and tunes and enjoy a close relationship with the audience at our live gigs. Their music is characterised by flowing melodies, intricate harmonies and strong rhythms while keeping the flavour of the traditional style.”
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The last September gig, on the 28th, features Kit Hawes & Aaron Catlow and Jake Morley.
“Kit Hawes & Aaron Catlow are a Bristol-based duo playing acoustic, folk and roots music. They’ve worked with many artists including Seth Lakeman, Afro Celt Sound system, Yola Carter, Mad Dog Mcrea, Sheelanagig and Roni Size (to name a few) but what unites them is a passion for folk music. They draw on their many influences to created unique arrangements of traditional song and tunes, as well as their own compositions.
“Kit and Aaron’s debut album ‘The Fox’ explores the relationship between fiddle, guitar and voice, using the fertile ground of the traditional music of the British Isles as its starting point. The product of decades of musical experience, it combines self penned tunes and folk tales, all intricately arranged and heartfelt. The live show is a musical journey through Europe and beyond; combining dazzling playing with a fine sense of musicality and showmanship.
“Having played over four hundred gigs in the past few years, it’s hardly surprising that Jake Morley has been invited to share the stage with many leading lights of modern English songwriting such as Ed Sheeran, Ben Howard and Lucy Rose. Seriously captivating live, his groundbreaking and unusual lap-tapping guitar techniques are just an accompaniment to his true passion for words and ideas and their power to connect.
“His most recent album, ‘The Manual’ – produced and mixed by Calum Malcolm (The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout) – was released in summer 2016 to stunning reviews: his sound now developed and matured whilst maintaining its unique directness and his capacity for strong hooks and big tunes, with the addition of stunning string arrangements by Kate St John (Dream Academy, Van Morrison) bringing a deeper dimension to the sound.”
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Full dates:
Campfire Club: Jim Causley + Saskia Maxwell – Phytology, Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, Middleton Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9RR, England, Saturday 15th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Campfire Club: The Hut People + Danny Peddler & Rosie Butler-Hall – Lumpy Hill Adventure Playground, 15 Market Road, Lower Holloway, London, N7 9PL, England, Friday 21st September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Campfire Club: Kit Hawes & Aaron Catlow + Jake Morley – Oasis Nature Garden, Larkhall Lane, Stockwell, London, SW4 6RJ, England, Friday 28th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
This month, Rupert Gillett and Jennifer El Gammal relaunch their new collaboration as One Voice, One Cello And A Mad Belgian onto the live stage with a brace of London gigs, following their debut gig in Stoke Newington back in August.
Rupert is the cellist: a sharp-dressed, cheerful and irreverent diversifier who uses the instrument to explore jazz, rock, folk, pop and various other genres… anything as long as it isn’t classical. Projects he’s involved with have included Dai & The Ramblers and the London Klezmer Quartet and his own Many Celli orchestra. As part of all this, he’s an established improviser and occasional radio/television performer: in addition, he’s an offbeat singer-songwriter whose subject matter spans “aliens, robots, space invaders, murderous bogeymen, mathematics, life after death, fairy godfathers, war, peace, love, death, taxation and other serious issues of the day”. Notably for a contemporary solo performer, Rupert eschews loops and effects. When you hear him live, it’s just him, the necessary techniques and a dose of imagination.
Jennifer (the titular Mad Belgian) is many things – her website lists “writer, comedian, sociologist, tour guide and magician”, and she’s a former theatre performer – but as a musician and master improviser she specialises in soprano saxophone and melodeon as well as singing, playing with modern jazz trio Uživati, folk band Virevoltes and solo under the Mad Belgian monicker. She defines the dreamier, more eccentric end of the Fripp-defined “small, mobile, intelligent unit”, travelling with her instruments on a fold-up bicycle to creates “strange and wonderful musical sculptures” and “jazzy and melodic excursions”.
This is what they get up to, separately and together.
Dates here, all of them free or pay-what-you-like:
Babel ART House, 86 Stoke Newington High Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 7PA, England, Friday 14th September 2018, 8.00pm – free entry – information here
Spit and Sawdust, 21 Bartholomew Street, Newington, London, SE1 4AL England, Wednesday 19th September 2018, 8.00pm – pay-what-you-like event – information here
The Spice of Life, 6 Moor Street, Soho, London, WC1 5NA, England, Sunday 23rd September 2018, 8.00pm(part of the ‘Secret Rapture’ gig with Daniel Paul Baxter, Henry Grace and Nick Ereaut) – pay-what-you-like event – information here
Luna Lounge, 7 Church Lane, Leytonstone, London, E11 1HG, England, Friday 28th September 2018, 8.00pm(with The Islas and The Blue Spiders) – pay-what-you-like event – information here
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Also this month – vocal music showcase label La La La Records are starting up the Pindrop Sessions, a series of acoustic/unplugged music shows at the Brixton Pound Cafe. First up in the series is a duo gig by a pair of longstanding collaborators – a tale of two Alices.
An inspiring blend of folk-culture conduit, benevolent diva, teacher, scholar and benefactress, singer and violinist Alice Zawadzki is a tireless musician and a warm, charismatic, enthralling performer. Almost ceaselessly active (which explains why she shows up in here so often), she moves purposefully between jazz songs, Jewish music (among other things, she’s a member of stunning Sephardic fusion ensemble Sefiroth), her own themed concerts, Joni Mitchell interpretations, film scores, string/vocals classical solo spots and much more (including a host of social programmes including teenaged-refugee support scheme Play For Progress). She also manages to be a young British national treasure with a firm international perspective; and never seems to look tired, either. How she packs it all into one life, I’ll never know.
Alice Purton, meanwhile, has been making her name as a leading young contemporary music cellist. An active member of diverse-minded ensemble Distractfold, the Plus Minus Ensemble, the Chagall Piano Quartet and Trio Artem, she’s involved in the regular performance and commissioning of new work while dipping deep into existing repertoire. Amongst other collaborations, she and Alice Z have previously worked together on the latter’s ‘Songs About The Moon’ concert and in the Cello Songs trio (which also features fellow cellist/Team Zawadzki member Shirley Smart).
There’s not too much of Alice P on the web at the moment, but here’s her playing in two trios – one performing Charlie Sdraulig’s voice/cello/shakuhachi piece ‘close’ back in 2012 and the second one also featuring Alice Z and guitarist Alex Roth, performing Alex’s trio piece ‘After’ in London last year.
Together, the two Alices will “weave together the intimate sonorities of cello and violin to create an unusual bed for their rich voices, in a program of soulful songs ranging from European folk to jazz to re-imagined pop.” This is likely to be a well-attended gig and the Pound Cafe’s a cosy space, so make sure you book a space by email before coming down.
La La La Records present:
Pindrop Sessions – Alice Zawadzki & Alice Purton The Brixton Pound, 77 Atlantic Road, Brixton, London, SW9 8PU, England
Friday 21st September 2018, 7.30pm – information here(email to reserve your place)
Like progressive rock before it, post-rock ended up disappointingly short of genuinely inspiring exponents. The blueprint was all very well: retaining rock’s technology and what remained of its countercultural drive while dissolving its rigid methods, its predictable narratives and textures and its conservative exclusions In practise, few could reach (or be bothered to reach) the heights of the movement’s most inspired figures and their new paths: such as Tortoise’s integration of jazz, dub and electronica; Slint’s taut, grinding refusals; Godspeed’s sprawling/brooding scapes of punk-cinema-versus-conservatoire-grandeur; Talk Talk’s mendicant, increasingly hermetic passage from synth-pop to a dissolution of blues, prog and folk into distressed noise and silence; Moonshake’s abrasive post-everything groove and careening samples; Disco Inferno’s angst-ridden music concrete and social challenge. Most post-rockers, then and now, have stuck with a glowering reduction, a boiling-out of rock posturing leaving a glum muted residue of passive riffs and patterns… actually, more of an opt-out than a boil-out; in which say, the impact of Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit Of Eden’ is much-cited but rarely remembered in terms of how it can inform and colour the music, much less for the intimations it can throw up.
Though they’re not overturners – at least, not in the tradition of the bands I’ve cited above – third-generation London post-rockers Rumour Cubes are a welcome exception to the procession of drab refuseniks that make up the bulk of the post-rock movement. It’s probably partly because they’re proud and self-confessed “counter-revolution(aries)”, founded from the start around violin, guitar and electronics and obtaining their rock instrumentation later rather than using and rebelling against it from the start. Their origins, too, stick in post-rock’s teeth. Violinist Hannah Morgan lied about her knowledge of the genre in order to bluff her way into the starting lineup, while guitarist/main composer Adam Stark and drummer Omar Rahwangi were already impatient with its dour restrictions. In an interview with Chaos Theory, Adam’s stated that “as a band we are painfully aware of how boring post-rock can be… what we are trying to do is take what we find amazing about those bands that have influenced us and that are part of our community, and do something new with it.”
What Rumour Cubes have done is in as much in the in the lines of good prog rock as good post-rock – opening the gates to a variety of ingredients and described as a “luminous re-imagining of very many constituent parts” by ‘Louder than War’. As with underrated Aussie unit Apricot Rail, the toned-down interweave of guitars and the Krautrock groove bass often aim for a slow-building pastoral ecstasy while the band seeks a sweet spot that’s more country and roots than graphs and laboratory. The dancing interplay, in particular, between Hannah and viola player Terry Murphy ducks lemony-minimal string textures in favour of something that’s more country hoedown or folk fiddle. Rumour Cubes often hit their own delightful merge-point between the rustic and the highly technological, performing on bowed banjo and (the ubiquitous) post-rock glockenspiel in addition to the guitars, strings, keyboards and percussion, adding brass and harps where they can, and regularly bringing in instruments like the gestural technology of mi.mu gloves, new uses for joystick controllers, software-synchronised video displays and a battery of custom effects pedals to create new textures. Their gigs are, in consequence, joyous and open-ended experiences: collaborations, on and offstage with poets and filmmakers result in
Following two years of silence, and four without new music, Rumour Cubes return to live work via a gig at the Underdog Gallery near London Bridge, in order to premiere a batch of new music (including upcoming single ¡No Pasarán!, which will be out in a few week’s time). Meanwhile, here are some previous bits of Cubery to whet the appetite.
A couple of other acts are joining the show – firstly, amplified French acoustic violinist Agathe Max, who fled classical music around twenty years ago in favour of improvised sonic textural music and electrically-enhanced string-drones. Currently playing with Kuro and Mésange, she’s appearing alone on this occasion in order to offer a set of solo violin works. Secondly, Dream Logic: the recent solo project from Adam Fulford (previously known as the guitarist for Bristolian post-rockers This Is My Normal State) It’s pealing, cool-busting stuff which sees Adam all but drowning his own plagent piano lines, guitars and basses in eager tides of yearning orchestral strings and feverish noise clutter, bringing him comparisons to Nils Frahm and to A Winged Victory for the Sullen. This is Dream Logic’s third show (following previous support slots for Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment’s rulebreaking alter-ego the Night Shift and for rebranded ambient post duo VLMV (previously ALMA) and live arrangements usually involve a string quartet: let’s hope he comes up with the goods on this occasion, too.
Echoes And Dust presents:
Rumour Cubes + Agathe Max + Dream Logic The Underdog Gallery, Arch 6, Crucifix Lane, Southwark, London, SE1 3JW, England
Friday 14th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
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A little later in the month, jumpy and unpredictable Norwegian art-rockers Major Parkinson are dipping into England as part of an autumn European tour presenting their new ‘Blackbox’ album (and which also includes Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands). A jaggedly muscular alternative pop proposition, Major Parkinson’s music recalls a host of eclectic forebears such as The Monochrome Set and Faith No More: most notably, they’ve become a hit with the sometimes partisan (and often hard-to-impress) Cardiacs fanbase, who appreciate unrestrained complex melodicism and truckloads of energy, and have been up and yelping about this band for a while now.
I can’t really top this for an intro…
“Major Parkinson write tunes. But with influences from across the rock and classical genres (from The Beatles to Cardiacs) and a warped vision of the musical world, their tunes are like no other. You may hear a snippet of an East European folk song, a nursery rhyme, a stage musical, even a rock anthem, all played out on a range of instruments that a symphony orchestra couldn’t muster – synths, strings, old typewriters, brass and reputedly a decommissioned jet fighter engine. The musical scores behind their songs are both monumental and breathtaking – explosive synth and guitar sections that pound at your heart and then instantly make it melt with beautiful choral harmonies, and then drawn in you will dance and sing along as if centre-stage in a West End show.
“With songs too that cover subjects as diverse as Pavlovian hounds to ducks in the pond, the sheer scale and absurdity of the Norwegian band’s extraordinary musical world can only be truly appreciated by seeing their seven-piece stage performances live.”
All of the upcoming shows appear to be solo flights for the Major, other than London, Berlin and St Gallen. No news yet on the Berlin guest, but in London support comes (bizarrely, but delightfully) from Sterbus, the quirky Anglophile Italian art-popper similarly beloved of Cardiacs fans and who’s sitting on what promises to be one of 2018’s sunniest and most enjoyable rock albums: he’ll be playing with a band including longterm woodwind-and-vocal sidekick Dominique D’Avanzo, Pocket Gods’ keyboard wizard Noel Storey and Cardiacs drummer Bob Leith. In St Gallen, the gig’s being opened by bouzouki-toting Dutch psych-exotica rockers Komodo, whose music also draws on raga, hip hop, desert blues, rumba and ’60s harmony pop and surf rock.
Full dates:
The Hare & Hounds, 106 High Street, Kings Heath, Birmingham, B14 7JZ, England, Wednesday 26th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Exchange, 72-73 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EJ, England, Thursday 27th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
The Water Rats, 328 Grays Inn Road, Kings Cross, London, WC1X 8BZ, England, Friday 28th September 2018 7.30pm(with Sterbus) – information here and here
Soup Kitchen, 31-33 Spear Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M1 1DF, England, Saturday 29th September 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Hafenklang, Große Elbstrasse 84, 22767 Hamburg, Germany, Monday 1st October 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
Cassiopeia, Revaler Str. 99, 10245 Berlin, Germany, Tuesday 2nd October 2018, 7.30pm(with support t.b.c) – information here, here and here
Backstage München, Reitknechtstr. 6, 80639 München, Germany, Wednesday 3rd October 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Grabenhalle, Unterer Graben 17, 9000 St.Gallen, Switzerland, Thursday 4th October 2018, 7.30pm(with Komodo) – information here, here and here
Orange Peel, Kaiserstraße 39, 60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Friday 5th October 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
