Next week in London, a window on some nascent opera work…
Second Movement present:
Rough For Opera #16: A Scratch Night For New Opera
Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, London NW8 8EH
Monday 9th October 2017, 7.30pm – information
“…’Rough For Opera is a performance platform for composers to share new work and opera in progress. Each event is a snapshot and celebration of contemporary opera making, with most work being brought from page to stage for the very first time. With an informal and intimate atmosphere and a Q&A following each performance, Rough For Opera is a great way for audiences to engage directly with opera makers and for composers to get invaluable feedback about their work at an early stage in its development.”
This month’s edition features the following short opera performances (between ten minutes and half and hour apiece):
Over the course of October (and at the beginning of December), a labour-of-love musical staging of the life of classical and folk singing legend Kathleen Ferrier is touring some of the more out-of-the-way venues in England. From the sound of it, it’s a pretty portable show, so if you’re interested in booking it for your own venue, drop the production company a line.
“This new one-woman play with music tells the story of the great English contralto, whose voice and recordings are treasured to this day. Kathleen Ferrier was one of Britain’s phenomenal women of the twentieth Century. ‘Whattalife!‘ tells her story from her debut as a singer in 1940, her meteoric rise and her tragic death in 1953. ‘Whattalife!’ is the first staged dramatisation of Ferrier’s life, evoking the spirit of the war and post war years. Just like Kathleen during her short but full life, the show has a great sense of fun and talks straight from the heart.
“Professional actress and contralto Lucy Stevens has researched and created a unique and totally engaging performance. The play is written in Kathleen’s own words taken from her letters and diaries. Sung music with piano accompaniment from her repertoire is woven through the text.”
There’s a ‘Guardian’ article on the piece here, in which Lucy reveals how the piece was put together and throws light on the life, moods and artistry of a strong-minded and talented woman who went her own way during a time when such things weren’t so readily accepted.
Cooper Hall, Selwood Manor, Frome, Somerset, BA11 3NL, England, Thursday 26th October 2017, 7.30pm – information
Anthony Minghella Theatre @ Quay Arts, Sea Street, Newport Harbour, Isle of Wight, PO30 5BD, England, Friday 27th October 2017, 7.30pm – information
Dorchester Arts, Corn Exchange, High East Street, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1HF, England, Sunday 3rd December 2017, 2.30pm – information
And purely to indulge myself, here’s Jocelyn Pook‘s mid-’90s setting of a Ferrier loop as part of her minimalist song-cycle ‘Deluge’: best known as the theme for a mobile phone advert (and, as the video image shows, as fodder for numerous new-age compilations), it’s a little classic of minimalist fusion.
A quick note about what looks as if it’ll be an enchanting concert-for-voices in one of north London’s most atmospheric venues. This is also the first show presented by London folk/acapella label LaLaLa Records, who got in touch recently claiming to have been following and picking up on new music via this blog (it’s always encouraging to hear that that’s happening). I’m happy to give them their own opportunity to be found in turn…
LaLaLa Records presents:
Åkervinda + The Ballina Whalers The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street (corner of Clissold Park opposite St Mary’s New Church), Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England
Tuesday 13th June 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
“An evening of new vocal music curated by LaLaLa. Both Åkervinda and The Ballina Whalers will take your breath away with their contemporary interpretations of traditional folk songs.
“Jazz singers at heart, Linda Bergström, Agnes Åhlund, Lise Kroner and Iris Bergcrantz (the four singers of Swedish/Danish vocal quartet Åkervinda) give new life to ancient Scandinavian folk music and stories of women throughout the ages, through improvisation and their own original arrangements: beautiful, vivid and engaging. The group’s name is inspired by a Swedish wildflower whose roots spread far and wide like rivers under the ground. Like the flower, gracefully entwining melodies, rock solid groove, and ever-intriguing harmonies take root in your mind. Like the flower, they will be impossible to remove. Iris, Lise, Linda and Agnes share a deep love of folk music. They released their debut album ‘Kära Mor’ (Dear Mother) in 2014 and have been touring in Sweden, Denmark, the USA and Canada ever since.
“The Ballina Whalers (Pete Truin, Jamie Doe and Sam Brookes) are three musical barnacles clinging to the creaking hull of a vocal tradition stretching back hundreds of years. Using just their voices they explore ballads, shanties and seafaring songs in hearty three-part harmony. They’ve become one of the most sort after shanty bands around, playing folk clubs, harbour sides, beaches, boat sheds and festivals up and down the country. Between December 2012 and April 2015, they released a series of three EPs (‘Lowlands’, ‘Haul The Bowline’ and ‘Pull Down Below’ the last of which was recorded in the rolling belly of the bright red Lightship95). Having already charmed the Nest Collective, Mark Radcliffe and Late Junction, they’ve taken a couple of years away from live performance, but reunited in November 2016 to continue their adventures.”
Former members of cult ’90s psychedelic folk band The Wise Wound always tend to have gone on to do something interesting. Their musing percussionist/flautist/interjector Brian Madigan’s been no exception, but for this show (for this year’s Bath Fringe Festival) he’s excelled himself…
Brian Madigan: ‘Think of a Song’ (+ Paul Bradley) The Old Theatre Royal, 12 Old Orchard Street, Bath, Somerset, BA1 1JU, England
Wednesday 31st May 2017, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
“When we go to a show or concert, what are our expectations? To what extent do we, the audience, create the performance? How does the space affect us? How do other audience members impact on our experience? ‘Think Of A Song‘ sets out to explore these and other questions in a unique, collective, experimental-theatre experience.
“Singer-songwriter Brian Madigan is famed for his lengthy, spoken intros. Indeed, during a previous Fringe Festival performance, he got the biggest cheer of the night when he introduced his last song but ran out of time to perform it. So what if he were to remove the songs altogether – only thinking them “out loud” as the audience were invited to imagine them? Would that be deeply uncomfortable? Transcendental? A brief moment of sanity amid the cacophony of everyday madness? Or an evening wasted?
“There is, of course, only one way to find out. If you only go to one high-risk, experimental, participatory, silent-music performance this Fringe, make it ‘Think Of A Song’. One thing is for certain: you won’t forget it in a hurry… A unique journey – not only into the mind of a performer but also into the audience’s own. Inspired by the works of John Cage and Marina Abramovic, this is powerful, immersive and unforgettable experimental performance at its experimentalist!”
If you’re planning to attend, note that ‘Think Of A Song’ is also going to be recorded by filmmaker Martin Tomkins. Brian: “The show comprises two performances: one with and one without audience. The first will take place in advance of the public show on May 31st, in the empty space, before it is set up for the Fringe. This will be filmed and recorded, the audio then presented to audience members after the live show on a complementary CD. The film will capture and blend the two parts. In the first , I will be thinking the intros and singing the songs out loud in the empty space. In the second, I will be speaking the intros, then thinking the songs “out loud” in front of an audience (including you, hopefully…) As well as providing a document of this unique event, the filming will serve to underline the role of audience as participants. In essence, you are the show.”
Support comes from “the incomparable Paul Bradley – right-strung left-handed guitarist, bandleader, composer, triple-octave singer, improviser, sessioneer, collaborator, children’s musician and multi-instrumental livelooper-cum-raconteur. If you have never encountered Paul before, you are in for a real treat. It would be no exaggeration to say that he alone is worth the ticket price.”
One of the month’s more interesting London opera events…
Oedipa & Lucia Lucas present:
‘Binary Optional’ Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, Euston, London, NW1 2PY, England
Thurday 25th & Friday 26th May 2017, 9.00pm – information
From the press release, spliced with a little more research:
“Oedipa collaborates with the extraordinary female baritone Lucia Lucas (Wuppertaler Bühnen, Deutsche Oper, Chicago Opera Theatre) on an evening of song in transition: from masc to femme, classical to queer and oppression to freedom.
“A freelance opera singer based in Germany (who has previously held full-time contracts with the Badisches Staatstheater, Kalsruhe, Theater und Orchester Heidelberg and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin), Lucia Lucas is a strong dramatic baritone specializing in Verdi roles, and has sung roles including Ford in ‘Falstaff’, Iago in ‘Otello’, Escamillo in ‘Carmen’, Le Grand-Prêtre in ‘Samson et Dalilah’, Jochanaan in ‘Salome’, Alberich in ‘Das Rheingold’, Thoas in ‘Iphigenie en Tauride’, Figaro in ‘Le nozze di Figaro’, Leporello and Giovanni in ‘Don Giovanni’, Mephistopheles in ‘Faust’, Don Pizzaro in ‘Fidelio’ and Nick Shadow in ‘The Rake’s Progress’.
“Beyond this, Lucia is one of the small but growing number of transgender woman performing significant operatic roles (a list of singers which includes Breanna Sinclairé and Emily De Salvo, whose own unusual range covers baritone to soprano). As Lucia commented in an interview in ‘Slipped Disc’ a couple of years ago, “I am performing all of the same things. Still singing angry old men on stage, but fringe projects have also started appearing as possibilities”. ‘Binary Optional’ is one such project – singing Bizet, Britten, Wagner, Purcell and Adams, flirting with Sarah Vaughan and ‘Rocky Horror’, Lucia draws on her experience singing classical repertoire across the world to tell her incredible story and celebrate the fluidity and plurality of gender in opera.
“Oedipa is the alter ego of writer/director Finn Beames (who’s dedicated himself to working “against the male perspective”) and a diverse range of varying collaborators. As Oedipa, groups of artists create and produce live performances in theatre, opera and related forms, often with an emphasis on music.
“Based in London and working internationally, Finn won the 2015 Genesis Future Directors Award at the Young Vic for his production of Man: 3 Plays by Tennessee Williams in the Clare theatre. He also holds the 2015 Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship, granted by the British Council for research into the eponymous Brazilian architect and the creation of a piece of theatre. For his own company, bodycorps, he recently directed a sold-out run of a new opera about depression, funded by The Wellcome Trust and ACE. Finn has commissioned further new work for bodycorps, including a musical based on The Sorrows of Young Werther. In 2014 Finn wrote, directed and designed a new music theatre work for the London Sinfonietta with composer Gavin Higgins, which they are currently expanding into a triptych. Finn is a director/librettist on the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme at Aldeburgh Music, and a member of the Young Vic Directors Network and Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in New York.”
Three upcoming jazz gigs this month – shimmering vibes-and-voice-led songwork; large-scale and purposeful big-band abstractions like a collapsing city; cartoon-coloured Weather Report-ish synth and drum grooves…
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MAP Studio Café presents:
Ella Hohnen-Ford Quartet MAP Studio Café, 46 Grafton Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3DU, England
Saturday 8th April 2017, 7.30pm – information
“The unusual line up of bass, drums, voice and vibraphone adds to the unique sound created by the Ella Hohnen-Ford Quartet, a vibrant jazz/cross-genre quartet of passionate young players, currently studying at the Royal Academy of Music and Guildhall. With influences ranging from the jazz greats (such as Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Horn), to modern composers (including Kenny Wheeler and Marius Neset) and singer-songwriters such as Nora Jones and James Taylor, the group have a truly individual and confident sound. A debut performance not to missed, featuring arrangements of songs we love and compositions written by and for this specific line up.
“The band features Ella Hohnen-Ford (currently the only singer studying at the Royal Academy of Music’s jazz course), vibraphonist/composer Jonny Mansfield, drummer Boz Martin-Jones and bassist Will Sach (who currently holds the world record for playing the highest altitude bass line, at 40,000 feet). Ella and Boz also play in Johnny’s hotly-tipped Elftet band.”
I couldn’t find anything by the whole band, let alone any sneak previews of their original tunes, but here’s what sounds like Jonny and Ella at work on an old standard:
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MAP Studio Café presents:
The Delegation MAP Studio Café, 46 Grafton Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3DU, England
Saturday 22nd April 2017, 7.30pm – information
“Gabriel Zucker’s indie jazz orchestra The Delegation was founded in 2013, and has already broken new ground in New York’s dynamic music scene. Combining an array of disparate influences into a unique and emotionally immediate sound, The Delegation has performed throughout the Northeast and Canada, and Zucker’s compositions for the group have received awards from ASCAP and the American Composers Forum JFund grant. The group’s singular musical philosophy has been profiled at length by the Ottawa Citizen, Jazz Gallery, and the American Composers Forum.
“Last autumn, The Delegation brought its unique concept to life with the release of ‘Evergreen (Canceled World)’, Zucker’s maximalist 12-movement composition that serves as the band’s sprawlingly ambitious debut record. In ‘World Music Report’, Raul da Gama wrote “in Zucker’s almost confrontational writing I find the vision of one who is hugely expressive. Here is a young man with a profound sense of tone and colour and how it can be wrought from diverse instrumentation to be affectingly “cantorial”, expressive and hugely symphonic too.”
“‘Evergreen’ also received 4.5 stars in ‘Downbeat’ and 4 stars in ‘All About Jazz’. With protean production by Zucker and pop producer Chris Connors, the nearly-two-hour record features everything from angular rhythmic grooves to Radiohead-inspired soundscapes to jarring electronics-infused chamber music to enigmatic lullabies, and is one of the year’s only contemporary releases on the prestigious ESP-Disk label.
“Support comes from Introspection, a new seven-piece contemporary modal jazz and jazz-rock ensemble, soon to release their eponymous debut EP. The group plays the original compositions and arrangements of its bandleader and guitarist Julian Woods, which explore colourful modal harmony, open improvisation, dense textures, contemporary through-composition, and rock-like timbres.”
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IKLECTIK Art Lab presents:
TEXTURE IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Friday 28th April 2017, 8:00 pm – information
“TEXTURE is an original drums/keyboards duo project of drummer, percussionist and composer Adam Teixeira, featuring Chris Pruden on analogue keyboards and synthesizers. Based in South London and Berlin, the two musicians began playing together in Toronto, Canada in 2012 and have since performed across North America and Europe collaborating with a variety of international musicians.
“Adam has recently released this music on his debut album (also called ‘TEXTURE’), which features hypnotic and infectious drumset grooves, kalimba melodies, atmospheric synth landscapes; exploring a unique blend of folkloric rhythmic traditions stemming from African, Caribbean and Indian classical roots with modern jazz and electronic influences, and providing the perfect setting for the musicians to launch into energetic improvisations.”
Progpostdronedoomcrunchmathdustrial… the syllables pile up as densely as the riffs. In two of several gig nights they’re running in April, Chaos Theory look at heavy rock music from several very different perspectives via six different exemplar bands. Sounds range across lashing, flowering mathematical shapes; blunt, dragging post-hardcore rage; exuberant fence-jumping stunt-twists; ornate psychedelic temple mysteries layered in sitar, flute and chanting; and complex-but-direct racing angst.
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Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
Telepathy + ZAUM + Wren The Black Heart, 2-3 Greenland Place, Camden Town, London, NW1 0AP, England
Thursday 6th April 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
“Telepathy play post-metal with a unique edge that engages fans of heavy riffs and haunting atmosphere alike. From humble beginnings at early versions of The Facemelter many years ago, to performances with Oathbreaker, Rosetta, Year Of No Light, and festival performances at Incubate and DesertFest, the Colchester-based four-piece have carved out quite a following across Europe. Tonight, expect to hear brand new material from their new LP ‘Tempest’, produced by Jaime Gomez Arellano (Paradise Lost, Cathedral, Ulver).
“ZAUM are a monolithic doom, mantra-based psychedelic experience, featuring bass and drums merged with sitar and synth textures, layered with melodic vocals and Mongolian throat singing. The huge impression they’ve left on post-metal, drone, post-rock and doom fans from gigs including Incubate Festival have gained them attention from bands such as OM, Sleep and Ufomammut. This is the duo’s fourth European tour, celebrating the release of their latest album ‘Eidolon’.
“Wren are a powerhouse of raw, controlled fury. This London band flawlessly combine the aesthetics of post-metal pioneers, the bleakness and control of ambient doom and the unbridled rage of sludge metal. Over the years, they’ve tested the waters with a couple of shows at The Facemelter, a few short UK tours, and more recently have begun their climb through the ranks with the release of their latest EP ‘Host’ via Holy Roar Records, support slots with Minsk, Kowloon Walled City, Bossk, Rough Hands and Bad Guys, and a gig at the famed Incubate Festival in the Netherlands. If ever a band encompassed seething angst that’s moments away from bubbling over the surface, this is it.”
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Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
Alpha Male Tea Party + Valerian Swing + Asian Death Crustacean Birthdays, 33-35 Stoke Newington Road, Dalston, London, N16 8BJ, England
Friday 28th April 2017, 7.00pm – information here and here
“Fans of riffs and odd time signatures! Get ready for a hell of a big night!
“Hailed as both “tear-jerkingly beautiful” and “18-carat fun” by ‘Rock Sound‘, Alpha Male Tea Party‘s explosively upbeat guitar-driven rock has made them legends in the math rock scene. We’ve enjoyed them at ArcTanGent, Dunk!festival, StrangeForms Festival and Handmade Festival, and after a healthy dose of national and international tours, they continue to be a band that gets better and better. Their new album ‘Health’ is out this year.
“Described as “borderline insane, wildly syncopated, and above all- precise” by ‘Echoes And Dust‘, Valerian Swing are an eclectic and experimental math rock trio from Italy. With a couple of stupendously good albums, European and American tours and an SXSW appearance under their belts. They have an insatiable appetite for playing live, and can’t see any better reason than for the release of their upcoming album ‘Nights’.
“Formed in the Midlands in late 2013 from an unlikely fusion of various projects, the four-piece Asian Death Crustacean channels post-rock, extreme metal, jazz and ambient/electronic music into extended instrumental compositions. Having spent three years refining their sound and playing shows in the Midlands and London, culminating in headlining a UK tour in summer 2016, they’re now focused on recording their debut album. Very impressive live and we can’t wait for them to get themselves on record!”
I was moved to jam these three early April gigs together for a preview. On the Wednesday, it’s up to you whether you go for the tangled electric loom of wonky pop/jazz/punk noise or for the hundred-year-old pop hits with the Keep Calm And Carry On teatowels. Either way, you still get to attend the latest mixed-music-and-poetry SOIF cabaret on the following Friday…
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Bad Hedge presents:
The Display Team + A Sweet Niche + Ham Legion The Birds Nest, 32 Deptford Church Street, Deptford, London, SE8 4RZ, England
Monday 3rd April 2017, 7.00pm – information
“A repulsive onstage three-way shocker! For one night in April, three heavyweights of the widely ignored wonk rock scene will spill off the stage in one of London’s best (and cheapest) small venues. And all for free! The Display Team: nob-bothering high-octave brutalitarians; like a small orchestra with big balls. A Sweet Niche: skronky honkies that bring an ominous twistin’ y’all can’t be resistin’. Ham Legion: kaleidoscopic power-pop rompers with more dinner ideas than you’ve had hot.”
For a little more on these people from back in the ‘Misfit City’ archives, have a peek here, here and here. Meanwhile, here’s the obligatory fistful of tunes.
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Wiltons Music Hall presents:
Monday Night Music: Patricia Hammond with Matt Redman
The Mahogany Bar @ Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, Whitechapel, London, E1 8JB, England
Monday 3rd April 2017, 8.00pm – free event – information here and here
“An evening of rousing Edwardian pop! Patricia Hammond and Matt Redman, world-renowned specialists in authentic historical performance, will play an assortment of pop songs from the Edwardian era, including some of the first songs ever written about motorised transport: Willie Had A Motor-Boat, In My Merry Oldsmobile, My Rickenbacker Car, Wait Till You Get Them Up In The Air, Boys, and many, many more delights. If you’re very nice to them, Patricia and Matt also promise some rousing singalongs to gems such as If You Were The Only Girl In The World and, for the WW1 Centenary’s sake, Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag.
Matt will be performing on piano, guitar, banjo and accordion, and will treat people to instrumentals of some of the new dance crazes of the 1900s and 1910s, such as tango, chorinho, ragtime, Hawaiian and blues. Of course, this being Wilton’s, songs of the great music hall era will also feature. All together now!”
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Society Of Imaginary Friends present:
Society of Imaginary Friends Soiree: “For Absent Friends” (featuring Society Of Imaginary Friends + David Skinner + The Support Stockings + Cian Binchy + Millie George + I Am Her + Martin Wakefield + Evie + Jed Demochowski + Anne Corrigan + Dj Onjdrew + others t.b.c.) Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Friday 7th April 2017, 8.00pm – free event – information
The latest in Society of Imaginary Friends’ ongoing series of grab-bag gigs, featuring a number of faces which ought to be familiar from recent performances:
“A sunny spring park comes to life crowded with absent friends, friends turned imaginary, walking with the sun, singing and humming, playing rounders, turning summersaults, laughing with the children,climbing trees, smiling into the breeze and as the sun sets we gather round a bandstand at the centre of a green. Vegan ma-nah is brought out by sensual peace-loving Daleks… a gorgeous offering of sound and light a celebration of friendship.
“Performing on 7th is the virtuosic guitarist and velvety voiced singer David Skinner; harmonious vocal stylings from our choir The Support Stockings; fresh from his sold-out national tour, Cian Binchy; the fabulous young poet and star of the Round House and Young Vic Millie George; urban punk from the mighty Julie Riley‘s I Am Her; Martin Wakefield and Evie with inspiring poetry, music and verse; Jed Demochowski (of the VIPs) and his new band; Anne Corrigan delighting us with her poems; DJ Onjdrew, and a couple of super amazing surprise star guests. Plus us, theSociety Of Imaginary Friends.
“Please come and bring a memory, a line or two about your absent friend to say on the night. Looking forward to seeing you there. Don’t forget it is free entry and there is amazing vegan food and award-winning beverages to purchase.”
At pretty short notice, there’s a chance to see a version of guitarist Alex Roth‘s spellbinding Sephiroth project in Camden Town this coming Thursday (while Alex takes a little live-refresher break from recording his debut solo album).
Mosaic Nights presents:
Sefiroth Trio
Basement Bar @ The Green Note, 106 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7AN, England
Thursday 16th March 2017, 8.30pm – information here and here
Sephiroth Trio, 2016
From Alex: “Sefiroth is the group I co-founded with my brother Nick to explore traditional Sephardic (Judeo-Spanish) repertoire. After releasing an EP in 2012 and staging a multimedia theatre show in 2013, we put the project on hold for a while, but I’m really excited to be getting members of the band together to play these achingly beautiful songs again. This intimate trio performance at one of London’s cosiest venues will feature new arrangements of traditional melodies which have been haunting me for years now. Given the intimacy of the venue, booking is highly recommended!”
The trio performing are the same trio who performed at the Play For Progress fundraiser mentioned here last December – Alex on guitar, plus Shirley Smart on cello and Alice Zawadzki on voice and violin. (Shirley is also the woman behind the Mosaic Nights organisation presenting the concert – they put on a variety of monthly folk/jazz/classical fusion events. I’ll need to look out for more of those.)
Here’s more information which I’ve scrounged up on the project:
“Sung in Ladino, these ancient songs weave timeless stories of love, loss and yearning for home, evoking the lands in which the Sephardic diaspora settled: Iberia, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The group’s arrangements are as porous and wide-ranging as the history of the Sephardim, combining acoustic and electric instruments, improvisation and trance-inducing rhythms. Following the release of its debut EP… Sefiroth’s multimedia theatre show ‘Arvoles Lloran por Lluvia’ (brought) its experimental arrangements to life through dance, digital projection and production design. It was hailed as “absolutely incredible” (Musicians Benevolent Fund), “striking and innovative” (‘Plays to See‘) and “flawless… an incredibly fascinating collaboration between music, dance and digital media”…”
You might not get the dance and visuals this time, but you’ll get the music up close and personal. Alex isn’t kidding about the intimate venue. Green Note is tiny, and its basement bar more so. At time of posting there were only twenty-one tickets left. Move fast. To encourage you, here are snippets from the EP and the multimedia show, plus the full version of the latter if you want to see and hear more. (And if you miss out on a Sephiroth ticket, there’s always the rather rowdier She’Koyokh Baltic kletzmer gig over in Kings Cross the following night…)
There’s plenty going on at the three-day mid-March Sheffield Classical Weekend, with the city permeated with music including many old and new favourites. Among what’s on offer are two different performances of Arvo Pärt’s ‘Fratres’ (one by a wind band, one by a host of strings), two Dreams of China concerts covering formal Chinese classical compositions) and a host of choral shows (the classic monk’s-debauchery of Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’ via Schubert’s ‘Mirjam’s Siegesgesang’ and Brahms’ ‘Ziguenerlieder’, through to a variety of pops choirs.) Though I’d advise checking out the entire, pleasingly diverse programme, here are my own brief and subjective picks from it, if you’re interested.
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Oliver Coates & cellists: ‘Canticles of the Sky’ – Kelham Island Museum, Alma St, Sheffield, S3 8RY, England, Saturday 18th March 2017, 3:30pm & 5.00pm – information
“A UK premiere featuring star cellist Oliver Coates (Radiohead, ‘Under The Skin’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’). Olly and a host of cellists will surround the Kelham Island audience and lift you skyward with this ethereal and dreamy work from Pulitzer and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams. Also featuring extracts from J.S Bach’s Cello Suites.”
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Five Choirs: Sounds From Heaven – St Marie’s Cathedral, Norfolk Row, Sheffield S1 2JB, England, Sunday 19th March 2017, 2:30pm – information
“Perched around the sides of the excellent acoustic space within the Cathedral Church of St Marie, five Sheffield chamber choirs – Abbeydale Singers, Sheffield Chamber Choir, Sterndale Singers, Sheffield Chorale and Viva Voce – will “create a swoonsome heart-lifting soundscape of song.” As well as old and new choral standbys by John Tavener, Arvo Pärt, Felix Mendelssohn and others, the concert will include the premiere of ‘Kraal’ a commission for five simultaneous choirs written by Jenny Jackson (a member of Sheffield’s own contemporary composer collective, Platform 4).”
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More music fostered by Platform 4 will be popping up a few times over the weekend. Flautist Rachel Shirley performs “a selection of colourful and inventive works for flute, piano, blown bottles and saxophone“; there’s an evening date at Yellow Arch Studios with players from Sheffield Music Academy, performing the collective’s own “imaginative cutting-edge compositions”. There’s a “mind-bending” collaboration with Opera On Locationin which “stories are turned upside down and endings become beginnings in (a) selection of operatic palindromes, where the music is the same both backwards and forwards… featuring Paul Hindemith’s short opera ‘Hin Und Zurück’ (‘There And Back’), plus new bitesize and puzzling pieces…” Platform 4 also contribute the cello-and-electric keyboard piece ‘Upright Stance’ to be performed alongside Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto at Oliver Coates’ concert with Sheffield Music Hub Senior Schools.
Opera On Location with Platform 4 – Upper Chapel, Norfolk Street, Sheffield, S1 2JD, England, Friday 17th March 2017, 8:30pm – information (contains strong and sexually explicit language – recommended for 18+)
Rachel Shirley: ‘Hooting & Drinking’ – Channing Hall @ Upper Chapel, Norfolk Street, Sheffield, S1 2JD, Saturday 18th March 2017, 3.30pm – information
Oliver Coates & Sheffield Music Hub Senior Schools: ‘From The Heart: Shostakovich’ – City Hall Ballroom @ Sheffield City Hall, Barkers Pool, Sheffield, S1 2JA, England, Sunday 19th March, 12:00pm – information
Platform 4 with Sheffield Music Academy – Yellow Arch Studios, 30-36 Burton Road, Neepsend, Sheffield, S3 8BX, England, Sunday 19th March 2017, 6:30pm – information
Each of these mini-concerts sets one of Boulez’s first three Piano Sonatas against another piece. ‘The Conflict And The Passion’ pitches ‘Piano Sonata No. 1’ against Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata in a study of thwarted passions. ‘Deconstruction & Digitalisation’ presents the classical deconstruction of ‘Piano Sonata No. 2’ and the electro-acoustic contrasts of ‘Anthemes II’. ‘Choice And Chance’ (the only one of the concerts to feature two Boulez compositions) offers ‘Piano Sonata No. 3’ and the clarinet-and-orchestra piece ‘Domaines’, contrasting a piece in which major options are available to the performer and one which is considerably more ordered and regimented.
The series opens on Friday with a special Boulez-inspired concert in which “the avant-garde becomes child’s play… primary school children from across the city explore the curious frontiers of contemporary electronic music and present the results of their musical experimentation.”
Sound Laboratory:
‘Computer Music’ – Firth Hall @ University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 2TN, England, Friday 17th March 2017, 1:30pm – information
‘The Conflict & The Passion’ – Upper Chapel, Norfolk Street, Sheffield, S1 2JD, England, Saturday 18th March 1:30pm – information
‘Deconstruction & Digitalisation’ – Upper Chapel, Norfolk Street, Sheffield, S1 2JD, England, Saturday 18th March 3:30pm – information
‘Choice and Chance’ – Upper Chapel, Norfolk Street, Sheffield, S1 2JD, England, Saturday 18th March 5:00pm – information
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Among the Chinese-inspired events is one in which Chinese and European chamber music merge as celebrated guzheng zither soloist Xia Jing teams up with The Fidelio Trio (Darragh Morgan on violin, Adi Tal on cello and Mary Dullea on piano). They’ll be presenting a concert of brand-new musical premieres – Gao Ping’s ‘Feng Zheng’ (‘Kite’), Jeroen Speak’s ‘Silk Dialogues 7’, Dylan Lardelli‘s ‘Shells’, and ‘Time Bends In The Rock’ by Sheffield-based composer Dorothy Ker.
In addition, there’s a variety of pop-up performances across the three days, featuring abbreviated sets by event headliners plus showings by small instrumental and vocal groups. It’s an open-minded spill moving out from classical forms to embrace folk, alt.chamber and other kinds of music.
One promising set of contributors are Manchester quintet Kabantu, who’ve thankfully dropped their previous name Project Jam Sandwich and who also “throw away the rulebook to bridge countries and cultures, creating an exuberant and joyful soundworld… vocal harmonies from South Africa coalesce with everything from Celtic reels and Brazilian samba to Balkan folk music and beyond.” Featuring violin, guitar, cello, double bass and percussion in addition to voices, they’re playing a pop-up show but also two separate consecutive-but-entirely-different sets at Yellow Arch Studios.
Classical by Night – Kabantu @ Yellow Arch Studios, 30-36 Burton Road, Neepsend, Sheffield, S3 8BX, England, Sunday 19th March 2017, 6.30pm & 9:30pm – information here and here
The third of the year’s Society of Imaginary Friends soirees takes place in north London on the first Friday in March – the usual cosy-glorious, thought-provoking mishmash of sundry singer-songwriters, poets, classical musicians and people with ideas, encouraged and topped off by the all-bases-covered chamber pop of the Society themselves.
Society Of Imaginary Friends present:Society of Imaginary Friends Soiree: “A Breath Of Fresh Air” (featuring Society of Imaginary Friends + Anne Corrigan + David Skinner + Martin Wakefield + I Am Her + Duet Diana + Millie George Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Friday 3rd March 2017, 8.00pm – free event – information
Word from SOIF’s Alfie and Louise:
“People have said “my goodness, Soif Soirees are unpredictable,” “Soif Soirees are like nothing I have experienced before,” or even ‘Soif Soirees feature some of the most moving and talented performers in London,’ and that Soif Soirees are a ‘a breath of fresh air.’ So this is our theme for our March Society of Imaginary Friends Soiree. A breathe of fresh air… remember what that used to feel like? Sweet oxygen hitting your lungs?… Your body aching with gratitude for the relief of it?… Yes, that’s good old Soiree wholesomeness… brought to you by our sponser TOYFE inc (Turn Off your Fucking Engine).
“Like a breeze from the mountains, we have new work from the incredible Millie George (poet laureate of the new generation); Duet Diana (a.k.a. Katie Morel Orchard and Sarah Lenney with their gorgeous operatic duets); punk mistress I Am Her (a.k.a. Julie Riley); god of small things Martin Wakefield. David Skinner is coming all the way from Cork, Ireland to delight us with his velvety tones and virtuosic guitar playing; the extraordinary Anne Corrigan will be reciting her poetry and – like a glass full of magical Listerine – we have the Society Of Imaginary Friends, so breathe deep and tune in. Remember the Piccadilly line is now running twenty-four hours, and there will be incredible vegan food on sale by the master chefs Kathy and Roger. We hope to see you on Friday for fun and a breath of fresh air…”
There are a few tasters below. I’m sorry that I couldn’t find more.
Some news on some upcoming kletzmer-related gigs in New York and across England during the first couple of weeks in March.
In New York, as part of the Jalopy Theatre’s ongoing NY Klezmer Series in Brooklyn, there’s a newly created, first-collaboration show from two Vancouver-based musicians – singer-songwriter-accordionist Geoff Berner and singer Luisa Muhr (both of whom can collectively muster up talents across novel-writing, theatre directing, community activism and movement art, but that’s several other stories…)
“Being part of the Klezmer and Yiddish music and performance scene in the US, Canada and Europe, Geoff and Luisa first met at the renowned KlezKanada music camp where they spent many hours singing together. ‘Songs of People Other People Don’t Like So Much’ has been created out of the necessity of producing political work in times that need it. Geoff and Luisa will sing you stories of the underdogs (and unpopular overdogs) of our society: some in Yiddish, some with quite some Klezmer, some in their own words, some in someone else’s. Join us, listen, engage, and enjoy!”
The project’s too new for soundclips or videos: but here’s Geoff performing a solo song from 2013 (tearing with righteous venom into Vancouver’s rotten civic developments), and Luisa fronting a Yidishe Lider concert about a year ago.
In addition to the Jalopy show, Geoff and Luisa are presenting another Brooklyn performance, in the shape of a preview version a couple of days earlier at Freddy’s Bar & Backroom. This is a pay-what-you-like event (though they suggest a ten bucks minimum and you’re also tied to a minimum-of-two-drinks rule). This particular evening is for twenty-one year olds or over: not because of any added salty adult content, but purely because of licencing laws for the bar.
Dates:
Freddy’s Bar & Backroom, 627 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, New York City, New York State, NY 11215, USA, Tuesday 7th March 2017, 8.30pm – information
Jalopy Theatre & School of Music, 315 Columbia Street, Brooklyn, New York City, New York State, NY 11231, USA, Thursday 9th March 2017, 8:30pm – information here and here
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Meanwhile, back here in England, She’Koyokh – who have been hailed as “one of London’s musical treasures” (‘Evening Standard’) and “one of the finest kletzmer ensembles on the planet” (‘The Australian’) – are out on the road launching their fourth studio album, ‘First Dance On Second Avenue’.
“With a name roughly translated from the original Yiddish as “nice one”, She’Koyokh have spent over a decade absorbing the rich folk music traditions of Jewish Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Balkans. Their evolution spans the origins of busking at East London’s Columbia Road flower market to performing in the famous concert halls of Europe including Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Gasteig in Munich and London’s Southbank Centre. She’koyokh’s members hail from the UK, USA, Serbia, Sweden and Turkey, forging a unique sound that is traditional yet original.
“Their live shows are an expertly crafted, multi-lingual exploration from the Baltic to the Black Sea virtuosic, toe-tapping klezmer instrumentals, Gypsy music, soulful songs and the best Balkan dance tunes from Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. They’ll take you on a journey sampling polyphonic singing from Bulgaria, a Serbian song about a pigeon on the raspberries, a steamy quarrel between mother-in-laws in a Turkish sauna, a duet between a father and daughter about who she’s going to marry – in the end she chooses the drunken one! – and a love song for a Gypsy girl with penetrating green eyes.”
Dates:
Turner Sims Concert Hall, University of Southampton, University Road, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, England, Tuesday 7th March 2017, 8.00pm – information
StaggerLee Wonders IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 8th December 2016, 8.00pm – information here and here
Billed as “an evening of radical poetry and prose fused with free improvised music”, this event’s title is taken from James Baldwin’s blazingly scornful, almost conversational poem – itself named for the black outlaw/hoodlum who flits and thunders through a set of conflicting American tales and songs, taking on the roles of murderer, proud badass, pimp and more.
In all cases, Stagger Lee’s become a byword and signifier for transgressive black resistance to cultural pressure and norms. A lengthy lope in a thickly jazzy, declamatory style, Baldwin’s version takes up the final, revolutionary Stagger Lee position, setting aside the thuggery, choosing instead to weigh up the protests, delusions and not-so-secret wickednesses of white hegemony in one Afro-American palm (seamed with exile, scepticism and righteous ire) before firing up his sardonic, acidic tongue to flay and spit the flesh right off their bones. It’s not clear whether Baldwin’s take will be performed as the evening’s centrepiece, or whether it simply serves as an inspiration; but it certainly sets the bar high, both artistically and politically.
Various performers, both black and white, are confirmed to attend. Hopefully, they’ll all rise to the explicit challenge. Reknowned for his weighty slowhand approach, jazz pianist Robert Mitchell has worked with Epiphany3, F-ire Collective and Panacea. Jazz/folktronicist Corey Mwamba plays small instruments, dulcimer and electronics across assorted projects but is best known for his highly dynamic, hammers-to-humming vibraphone playing and for the ongoing questioning spirit which he explores in both live music and academia (and any intersections he can make between the two). Voices come from restless, movement performer and polygenre singer Elaine Michener (recently seen at the Cockpit Theatre in a quartet with Alexander Hawkins) and from storytelling singer/composer Debbie Sanders (currently heading up Mina Minou Productions, previously embedded in proto-acid-jazz, trip-hop and British R&B via work with Skylab and Chapter & The Verse).
Bass and drums are provided by two stunning soloists who also happen to make up one of London music’s most formidable rhythm partnerships. Both double bass player John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders are capable of a breadth of sound and attack on their respective instruments, running across an orchestral breadth from whisper to hailstone attack (via conversation or monologue, from growling belligerence to kidding conversation or querying patter).
More people may be showing up to play, but that’s already a pretty thrilling loose sextet to work with and to choose from.
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Trio Generations is an intermittent name for a convocation of three top European improvisers, Maggie Nichols, Lisa Ullén and Matilda Rolfsson. Formed last year, they’re playing a couple of English shows to bookend the upcoming weekend. Outlines below, mostly from the Café Oto pages:
Trio Generations, 2016
“Maggie Nicols joined London’s legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist. She then became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the group Centipede, led by Keith and Julie Tippets and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the remarkable Feminist Improvising Group. She lives in Wales and continues performing and recording challenging and beautiful work, in music and theatre, either in collaborations with a range of artists (Irene Schweitzer, Joelle Leandre, Ken Hyder, Caroline Kraabel) as well as solo.
“Matilda Rolfsson is a Swedish percussionist and free improviser, based in Trondheim, Norway. During the spring of 2015 she was temporarily based in London where she finished her masters in free improvisation and the relationship between improvised music and dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. During her London stay Matilda got the chance to meet and play with some of Londons most efficient improvisers: Phil Minton, Sylvia Hallett and London Improvisers Orchestra with Maggie Nichols. With her 20” vintage Gretsch bass drum, Tibetan bowls, gongs, bells and plastic isolations, sticks, fingers and brushes, Matilda explores the free improvisation and the instant compositions shaped in the moment: dynamics, orchestrations – structure and chaos. To make rules and break rules, always with the question: where’s the music going, and where’s the freedom?
“Pianist Lisa Ullén grew up in the northern part of Sweden, and is based in Stockholm. A versatile player with a singular musical vision, Lisa has repeatedly proven her ability to imprint her absolute sense for tonal texture on whatever musical context she appears in. Besides working as a soloist and leader of her own groups, Lisa has collaborated extensively with many well-known Swedish artists and dancers, and has also scored several dramatic productions. She’s also performed and recorded music by contemporary composers.”
To provide a sense of what might be coming, here’s the full half-hour set from their debut performance at IKLECTIK in 2015: a fractured, prolonged collective improvisation which swaps mood, pace and suggestions like a game of speed poker, with passing shreds of blues. Although Lisa and Matilda match her with lethally-aimed flinders of explosive, challenging percussion and piano, Maggie remains the centre of attention via a performance that’s as much stand-up comedy or theatre piece as it is free jazz. She produces not only the clucks, hisses, pants and operatics of free-voice improv but a bewildering spiky cavalcade of female voices and archetypes (hopeful chitterer, wise sly crone, mother in labour, put-upon wailer, deft gossiper) while including fleeting lyrics from jazz, blues or music hall and assorted Dada twists (including a phase which sounds like a demonic toothbrushing session).
This month’s Trio Generations dates:
Xposed Club @ Francis Close Hall, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, GL50 4AZ, England, Friday 9th December 2016, 8.00pm (with Chris Cundy) – information
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England, Monday 11th December 2016, 8.00pm – information
At the Café Oto show, John Edwards will be joining in to make the group a quartet. While there’s no support act at Oto, at the Xposed Club Cheltenham reedsman/multi-instrumentalist Chris Cundy will be providing a solo slot on bass clarinet and saxophone. A tactile extended-technique player, Chris began as a self-taught Medway busker coming into his own under the combined influence of Eric Dolphy (on record) and Billy Childish (in the flesh and in the kitchen). Following a relocation to Cheltenham to pursue fine art, Chris has broadened his scope into a world of other collaborations in film, electronica, free improvisation and pop. He’s worked extensively with Fyfe Dangerfield (as part of the Guillemots horn section and as an integral member of Gannets), with Canadian freak-folkers Timbre Timbre and a succession of left-field singer-songwriters. His extended techniques (including multi-phonics, circular breathing and microtonality) have also led him into exploring the works of Cage and Cardew and those of contemporary avant-garde composers such as Thanos Chrysakis and Pete M Wyer, as well as producing a growing number of albums of his own work.
This just in – Lee Fletcher, touring soundwizard for Billy Bottle & The Multiple, just tipped me off about this Bandcamp montage he’s just made of their currently touring show ‘The Other Place’.
There should be a YouTube version shortly, which I’ll paste in when it’s available. Meanwhile, there’s more on the show in general here, and more on its current dates here.
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One of the ‘Other Place’ dates is in London this weekend – taking place at Camden People’s Theatre, as part of their ‘All The Right Notes’ “gig-theatre” festival exploring the interaction, interweaving and intersectionality of theatre and music on the fringes. While on the subject, I should post up a little more about the festival, since it’s starting today.
So here’s a rapid rundown of what’s on offer in ‘All The Right Notes’ between 15th November and 3rd December. Most of the text is stripped and compressed from the homepage (where there’s full dates, times and details if you want to pursue the shows in depth). I’ve added or rearranged a few things where necessary, including some personal impressions. Because performance artists aren’t the only people who can mash up texts… oh yeah… (postures)…
Some of the shows are pretty much straight musical gigs, with the theatre inherent in the performance rather than explicitly mounted as part of the staging. Digifolk musicians and quixotic archivists The Memory Band (who, in their own words, “navigate a dream landscape of fading identity, dredging up forgotten histories from old maps” and “the ghost-lit back-roads of British traditional music where digital machinery and acoustic musicians congregate to make old music from the future”) offer a performance previewing their upcoming fifth album ‘A Fair Field’, which spans a world of folk word and song from the fourteenth-century narrative epic ‘Piers Plowman’ to the generation of unaccompanied English folk singers who passed in the mid-twentieth century to Northumbrian modernist poet Basil Bunting. It’s best to let them map out their own album description too – “the music was fed by stories of magical hares and the recollections of ballad sellers bearing placards at the great fairs of times past, the fields of which now lie buried beneath leisure centres, electricity substations and retail parks. It traces the connection between the headstone of a man killed in Norfolk by the sails of a windmill, the first observations of solar flares, incendiarism, council estates and an old man’s recollection of ploughing the land by starlight in another time.” Later in the season, Daniel Marcus Clark‘s ‘Between’ looks for “the story in every song and the song in every story” in a solo set delivered by beat-up old voice and a pair of guitars via a mood and method compared variously to Marc Ribot, Mississipi John Hurt and Vincent Price.
As you’d expect from a theatre space preoccupied with fringe activity and political art, there’s a strong representation of standalone and intersectional aspects within the broad church of contemporary dance music and the cultures which make it up, taking in hot and fluid topics of race, feminism, class, communality and chosen ways of self-expression. Accompanied by beatboxer/vocalists Kate & Nate (from Battersea Arts Centre’s Beatbox Academy), actor-writer Lauren Gauge will present her raw feminist comedy-with-music ‘The Unmarried’, a drama of raucous, brassy, party-friendly resistance to patriarchy, rhythmically underscored by a live mix of beat-boxing, ‘90s dance hits and old-school UK garage tunes – “gig theatre… theatre you can rave to.” Earlier in the season, reknowned London grime MC Flowdan will present a special performance of his lyrics (stripped from their soundsystem context and performed with voice alone under a spotlight), while the festival will close with musician-performer Will Dickie’s live-art DJ set ‘The Rave Space’ (a staged rave which explores the ideals and situation of unity through dance culture, and which overlaps the boundaries of dance party communion and theatre-space performance, although Will’s keeping schtum about precisely how this occurs…)
Several pieces operate within the publically settled, privately fragile area of contemporary early adulthood and its codes of faith,behaviour and expectations which end up being kicked around by our own doubts and insecurities and by the challenges and occasional perversities of our individual drives and experiences. Songwriter, actress and theatre maker Isobel Rogers performs her open-mic drama ‘Elsa’, about a woman working in a coffee shop while pursuing her dreams on the side. As she drifts in and out of the characters who come into the cafe, Elsa is confronted with different characters from both literature and reality and begins to lead the lives of Nina, Miranda, Lillian and Grace in her own head. Keeping a part of herself elsewhere through song, Elsa plays a trick on a world that keeps telling her how to “be”.
Heavier notes are provided by Rachel Mars and Alicia Jane Turner. The former (with musical support from singer-songwriter Louise Mothersole of Sh!t Theatre) performs her proudly spiky, witty work ‘Our Carnal Hearts’, “a gleeful, thrilling and murky celebration of envy, competitive spirits and all the times we fuck each other over… performed with a live surround-sound choral score, it is born from the suspect parentage of an ideological rally, a drunken sing-song and a seductive dream.” The latter uses her skills as composer, performance artist and multi-instrumentalist to present ‘Breathe (Everything Is Going To Be Okay)’ – “a full-body immersion of soaring strings and spiralling sound in a daringly vulnerable solo performance exploring the relationship between our bodies and minds… blending visceral live music with intimate confessions, Breathe is an unflinchingly honest dissection of our daily anxieties and fears.”
As you’ll guess from the above in particular, not everything in the festival is kid- or family-friendly, but there are some exceptions. Moths (performer/musician Joe White and theatre maker Tanya Stephenson, both of whom also work with perennial percussion-fest STOMP) present ‘Pale Phoebe’ – a performance mingling storytelling, clever lighting and projection effects and percussive, androgynous contemporary synth pop to tell the dreamlike story of an imagined journey to the moon. In ‘The Castle Builder’, punky, childlike, lo-fi electropopper Kid Carpet and actor-storyteller Vic Llewellyn join forces for a playful, uplifting show based around true tales of unlikely people who created extraordinary outsider art just for the pleasure of it. In the process, they ask questions about art, who it’s for and what mark it leaves on the world. In addition, each performance will feature a different maker, who at the end of the show will present the audience with something they build or create using the debris from the show and anything else they find scattered around the stage.
If you’re after more esoterically cerebral (or potentially baffling) performances, a couple of those are waiting in the wings. Perhaps coincidentally, both are two-handers featuring frenetically active male text’n’context shredders and reknowned female experimental violinists who blur the boundaries between being muses, partners and upsetters. In ‘Within The Context Of No Context’ Tim Parkinson and Angharad Davies explore the crossover between theatre-as-sound and sound-as-theatre via prepared-violin music drama interpretations of avant-garde compositions by Louis D’Heudieres, Stefan Thut, Alison Knowles, John Cage and others (with a title inspired by George S Trow’s influential essay about the decline of society in the new age). In ‘Seeping Through (CPT)’, regular collaborators Aisha Orazbayeva and Tim Etchells perform an intense, rolling two-hour improvisation in spontaneous fragments, with text and music treated as fluid forces in the same space, fading in and out of each other, breathing together, cutting and cancelling each other, creating a dynamic and always unstable landscape. Tim collages and constructs the show’s verbal content from diverse fragments of notebook scribbles, past performance text and works in progress, creating collisions, loops, and unexpected connections between different spoken materials; while Aisha plays vigorously deconstructed classical violin using extended technique, strange sounds, and “radically remixed and quoted” elements from the classical repertoire. (As an example, below is an earlier Etchells/Orazbayeva work: nearly six excruciating yet compelling minutes of the duo wringing as many disrupted nuances as possible from brief sentences and clauses recited over grinding string noise.)
Also on the festival bill are a pair of straight (well, relatively straight) musicals. “Misguided and aspirational” performance art group mingbeast present their “uplifting musical” ‘Awful Things Can Happen At Any Time’ (in which two barely-prepared pop wannabes struggle to get their act and songs together on a shared and battered iPad, jostling the business of dreaming about being in a band and actually becoming one).There’s a work-in-progress showing of Duckie star Boogaloo Stu’s ‘The Regeneration Game’, a comedy musical taking well-deserved sideswipes at the property racket currently turning scores of community pubs into community-detached luxury flats. See landlord and landlady Kev and Babs, from closure-threatened pub The Dog & Dumplings, plan to take on the big boys in a tale of “a boozer in decline, dodgy developers and dogging…”
A couple of pieces embark on voyages into the family and the circumstantial shocks and resolutions to be found within it. Armed with voice and electronic drumkit, poet-musician Antosh Wojcik performs his innovative, touching ‘Building A Voice-Percussion Gun To Kill Glitches In Memory’, in which he explores “the effects of dementia on speech, memory and motor skills. Assigning rhythms to family members, Antosh attempts to build a ‘voice-percussion gun’ to destroy inherited Alzheimer’s. Poems become beats become glitches in time in this poignant and mesmeric display of live drumming and spoken word.”Ziad Nagy’s ‘Too Human’ is “an interdisciplinary exploration into the chasms of family constellations, the fragmentary structures that make us who we are, and the insatiable desire to make things better. Through the disjointedness of live collage making, experimental music production, and confessional storytelling, Ziad lays bare what at first seems idiosyncratic and slowly transforms into the poetically ubiquitous.” (As you can see, I didn’t much feel like paraphrasing all that.)
Other events include a panel session discussing why live music and theatre are converging (featuring contemporary music theatre driver Patrick Eakin Young, journalist/editor Andrzej Lukowski of ‘Time Out‘ and ‘Drowned In Sound‘, and punk singer/theatre maker Racheal Clerke); and ‘Controlled Madness’, in which DJ, party promoter and acid house philosopher-celebrity Andy Blake engages in a late-night quasi-symposium (lit and soundtracked to conjure up a backstreet backroom atmosphere) with cultural commentators Ben Bashford and Joe Muggs, dealing on party culture and its role (questioned or otherwise) in contemporary society.
The ‘Big Bang’ evening features four work-in-progress shorts and excerpts – a love monologue from poet Ross Sutherland (compiled from actual outbursts he’s shouted at drum and bass DJs mid-set); ‘High Rise Estate Of Mind?’ (a tower-block, housing-crisis, class-and-character study in beatbox, rap and spoken word by Paul Cree and Conrad Murray of Beats & Elements); a scratch performance of sleepwalking, sleeptalking husband-and-wife dream drama by Lillian Henley and Tom Adams; and Nima Séne’s ‘I Belong’, in which Nima and her alter ego Beige Bitch explore the concept of belonging (nostalgia, deluding, seductive and political) via a melange of theatrical tricks, electronic sound, pop culture and autobiography.
Probably a good place to start (assuming that you can clear your evening) is tomorrow’s special night-after-opening night show ‘Note Form’. This features music-heavy excerpts from ‘Awful Things Can Happen At Any Time’, ‘High Rise Estate Of Mind?’ and She Goat’s ‘DoppelDänger’ (a “theatrical live-music gig of original music and unlikely cover songs with synth-pop, electronic textures and baroque harpsichord”); plus a standalone piece – ‘The Beginning Of The End Of The Heroic Child’, a “secular ecstatic ritual” by Nwando Ebizie‘s Afro-Anglo-Caribbean goddess persona Lady Vendredi which “transform(s) pain into beauty via the medium of discarded remnants of empty trash signifiers. Moving from the sea beneath the waters of the past through the fourth dimension and passing to a glimpse of a forgotten future. A rite for all of those who wish to take part in an inter-dimensional breakdown. A wild ride down a rabbit hole of splintering realities. Dogmas challenged, desires and dreams unravelled.” I think that pretty much covers everything – and so does this.
Some quick news on an interesting-sounding concert tomorrow, which I’ve only just picked up on:
Irish Heritage presents:
Daire Halpin & Jean Kelly: David Wallace’s ‘London Irish Reflections’ The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Monday 14th November 2016, 7.00pm – information
‘London Irish Reflections’ is a new song-cycle for soprano, acoustic and electric harps and electronics, which merges two distinct art music traditions – Western classical and traditional Irish – and which is based on the reflections and insights of the London Irish community. The piece came about through Cork-born cousins and musicians Daire Halpin (soprano) and Jean Kelly (harp) commissioning a piece from a Kilkenny-born musical polymath (composer, pianist, conductor and dancer David Wallace) in order to explore their interest in the diverse and sometimes contradictory experiences of those, like themselves, who’d emigrated from Ireland to London.
Thought up by a four-person creative team, all of them London Irish (with the fourth being ‘Guardian’ journalist and deputy business/consumer affairs editor Dan Milmo), the piece expanded into a communal musical reflection on the experience of Irish immigration to London within current living memory. Drawing on Dan’s interviews with attendees at the Southwark Irish Pensioners project, it was supplemented by similar discussions with family members and friends within the London Irish community, including Dan’s conversations with members of the Bloomberg group ‘Paddy Chat’ and a swathe of people ranging from working artists to manual labourers who laid the foundations of the London Tube train network to the chief executives of several major London firms.
The song cycle is structured around various themes – including displacement and belonging – which surfaced as common shared threads within Dan’s various interviews, with the words of the interviewees have been rearranged to both form and inform multi-perspective reflections throughout the piece. Dan comments “I found a lot of the discussions at the Pensioners Project very moving because the interviewees had so many fascinating stories to tell about themselves but they had never been recorded.”
Jean confesses that “we were moved by the tales of hardship endured by the audience members – a generation of Irish emigrants who arrived in London in the 1950s and ’60s. The comparison to our own trouble-free, racism-free experience of moving to London was shocking to me, and I came away feeling that I owed a huge debt to this group of people who contributed so much to change the attitude towards Irish people in Britain, and who allowed my transition from Cork to London to be so smooth.” However, ‘London Irish Reflections’ actively celebrates the community’s experience as much as dwelling on its hardships. Daire adds “being an emigrant myself, I found a lot of the literature focused on the darker, tragic side of life as an emigrant. I wanted to explore the experiences of other emigrants and find a way to share our stories so we can reach out to the many, many people whose lives have been touched by emigration.”
David Wallace adds: “I have tried to create a sound world for each of the bodies of text that allows the message behind the text to really shine through. Working with both concert and electric harps helped to create a contrast in sound world that the text seemed to contain, one where the old and the new collide with the same agenda: the sense of loss at having to relocate.”
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For something slightly similar and imminent – musically different but based around community vox pops (admittedly the pre-Brexit voices of depressed communities in southern England) – you could compare and contrast this with Billy Bottle & The Multiple’s ongoing roadshow ‘The Other Place‘, which rolls into London next Sunday. This has also reminded me of ‘I Could Read The Sky’, the 1999 Nichola Bruce film on the London Irish emigrant experience, which was soundtracked (with typically mournful rhapsody) by Iarla Ó Lionáird. I’ll have to dig that one out again…
Well… another busy Saturday if you’re in London or the Home Counties. Sorry – despite the past weekend’s splurge on Bristol, I need to pick up on more of my coverage of events outside of the south-east. In the meantime, though, there’s these…
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Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
Jazz Market: Vels Trio + Adam Betts + Sneaky New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Saturday 29th October 2016, 7.30pm
“We’ve got some stunning gigs coming up for all tastes, and this one is no exception. The Jazz Market at New River Studios features world-class musicians bringing us their brands of electronica, math rock, jazz, hip hop, fusion and serious grooves.
“After we saw the three young experimental jazz musicians of Vels Trio playing with Mouse On The Keys and Luo for Small Pond, we knew we needed more. Born out of collective obsession, emotion and improvisation, Vels Trio sculpt contagiously frenetic composition, channelling ingrained deep grooves, progressive soundscapes and contemporary hip hop productions. A band to challenge the psyche of jazz lovers and curious, broadminded and savvy music lovers.
“Adam Bettsis the drummer behind phenomenal math rock pioneers, (and Brian Eno’s favourite experimentalists) Three Trapped Tigers. Watch Adam flawlessly play intricate beats to perfection, while triggering his pre-programmed instruments live via Ableton: his appropriately titled album ‘Colossal Squid’, recorded in one live take, is out at the end of November, with a single out in October.
“Sneaky (an extraordinary upright bassist who plays a gorgeous instrument designed by Mo Clifton, who also designed one for Lamb bassist Jon Thorne), was classically trained on double bass and cello and completed a music degree before getting involved with Manchester’s club scene alongside musicians like James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, Mr Scruff, Andy Votel and Mark Rae. After moving in with DJ, turntablist and beatsmith Peter Parker, various jam sessions led to them forming the unlikely band Fingathing, playing with beats, basslines and electronics to make ultimately danceable music.
“After seven years of worldwide touring, three albums, several singles and EPs released through Grand Central and Ninja Tune records, Sneaky moved to Berlin in 2007 to further his musical inspiration and has been making his solo mark ever since… ‘Feel Like A King…Pluck A String’ was released in 2009 on the Big Chill Label and follow up ‘Feel Like A Remix’ in 2010. Whether you’re after impeccable playing or a headnoddingly groovy beat, Sneaky and accompanying drummer Gianpaolo Camplese will deliver.”
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Tuesdays Post present:
Tuesdays Post: Lucid Brain Integrative Project + PREHISTO’ZIK + Georgina Brett The Muse Gallery, 269 Portobello Rd, Ladbroke Grove, London, W11 1LR, England
Saturday 29th October 2016, 7:30pm – information
“Emmanuel Reveneau is a French artist involved in music, video and theatre, whose work is deeply informed by self-organization theories, situationism and irony. As The Lucid Brain Integrative Project, he currently uses self-designed looping software, Noundo, to improvise wacky atonal groovy soundscapes influenced by free jazz and and the Canterbury scene. Emmanuel headlined at the Y2K International Live Looping Festival (Santa Cruz, California) in 2014 and curates loop festivals in France since 2013, notably the Loop Jubilee series.
“Before being a clarinetist, Nelly Meunier was an archaeologist: ever since, she has been searching for links between past and present. She currently plays with the collective Orkestronika and the circus company Tewhoola (amongst others) as well as developing her solo project PREHISTO’ZIK, in which she makes her own instruments (based on actual archaeological and ethnological knowledge) and loops them with a RC505 to create ancestral landscapes. As she puts it: ‘In music sets of PREHISTO’ZIK, I try to create an anachronistic mixture: one side is the looper, modern ethnocentric equipment of occidental culture, and the other side the timeless and universal sounds of materials like clay, wood, stone, bone.’
“Georgina Brett’s music is created using her voice and effects pedals, creating instant choirs of sound, often in an hypnotic style. Georgina’s music adheres to some avant-garde principles, using harmonious parameters instead of the more dissonant style of its post WWII exponents. Georgina’s music is also gradually becoming a great vehicle for more experimental work, delving into expressive work which plays with the rich world of the media, politics and history using matrices, semiotics and phonetics. Her latest release, ‘The Eclipse Collaborations’, is an album featuring sixteen collaborative pieces: Georgina’s work also features in the recent movie ‘The Killings of Tony Blair’.”
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Finally, various Tigmus-affiliated artists (on tour or fancying a one-off) coalesce in Oxford for an evening of latterday folk directions.
Tigmus presents:
The Travelling Band + A. Dyjecinski + Arch Garrison + The Great Western Tears The Bullingdon, 162 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1UE, England
Saturday 29th October 2016, 7.00pm – information
Manchester indie-folkers The Travelling Band are on an eighteen-date tour to celebrate ten years of existence and to map out future directions following the departure of founding guitarist Steve Mullen. The band have spent much of 2016 touring as support act and backing band to American country-rock singer Lissie.
The band’s main guest here (as on all current tour dates) is London-based Canadian A. Dyjecinski, frontman for garage-rockers Dracula Legs and current purveyor of gnarly backwoods alt.Americana: his debut solo album ‘The Valley Of Yessiree’ is out on The Travelling Band’s own label Sideways Saloon.
A gentler Anglo-psychedelic approach is offered by Arch Garrison, the compact song vehicle of North Sea Radio Orchestra‘s Craig Fortnam, who’s been singing nylon-string guitar songs about lost people, childhood and chalkhill psychogeography for two albums now. Usually accompanied by the knowing baroque-modern keyboard stylings of James Larcombe, on this occasion Craig’s playing solo and acoustic.
The opening slot on the show is taken by Oxford acoustic-country duo The Great Western Tears, augmented by pedal steel player Kurt Hamilton and backup harmoniser Fern Thornton. Expect an authentic dip into American roots music and the Ameripolitan ethos (or as authentic as you can get in Oxfordshire), citing Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, old time country tunes and late ’60s West Coast acoustica as its inspiration.
More by chance than design, today’s preview post (for Saturday 15th) covers both sides of the Atlantic.
I’ve been following (and tracing back) the career of singer/songwriter Trevor Wilson for a while now – from his cross-genre experiments at Bennington College to his scatter of solo records and his more recent work steering the eerie/joyous glee-pop unit Anawan. Having opted to leave New York (after one last concert in his Brooklyn base), he’s now upped sticks to North Carolina and settled in the “art mecca” city of Asheville, where he’s wasted little time, not just putting down roots but making them work. Details on his first post-New York concert below:
Trevor Wilson + Jackson Emmer + Michael Chinworth
‘The Back 40’, 60 Craggy Avenue, Asheville, North Carolina, 28806, USA
Saturday 15th October 2016, 6.30pm – free event (donation suggested) – email for more details
Trevor says “after some months of finding my way around, I’m very excited to announce my first performance here. Remarkably, I will be joined by none other than Anawan members Ethan Woods and Michael Chinworth, as well as two new singing partners, Jeremiah Satterfield and Laura Franke. Michael will perform a set, and so will Jackson Emmer, one of my oldest and dearest friends. This will all happen in a backyard farm just through the woods from my house in West Asheville. It will be an outdoor, bonfire-style concert, and we’ll convene at 6:30 to chit chat and snack. I’ll be performing some Anawan material with Ethan and Michael, as well as some new material with Laura and Jeremiah.”
The new material may or may not relate to Trevor’s upcoming new album ‘Sour Songs’ which he describes as featuring “the most direct, pop-oriented, and fun tracks I have ever created. They’re based around the keyboard, and a lot of them feature electronic beats. It’s definitely a departure, but it feels honest, and really connected to where I am at right now. I truly can’t wait to share them with you.”
Meanwhile, here’s an appropriately rural clip from a few years ago, featuring Trevor singing in the fields (albeit up in Vermont), plus an Anawan video from around the same time.
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On the same Saturday, back in London, it’s another day and another Daylight Music show. Following last week’s organ-and-voice extravaganza, the Daylighters continue to happily mull over ten years of presenting everything from electronic bleeps to uke-toting folkies via unusual instruments and classical inroads. This week leans more towards the latter…
Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 236: Emily Hall + Ryan Teague + Resina + Lucy Claire Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 15th October 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information
Emily Hall writes contemporary and avant-pop-slanted takes on the classical song cycle, instrumental narrative and opera. This has led her into commissions for (among others) London Sinfonietta, London Symphony Orchestra, BBCNOW, the Brodsky Quartet and Opera North. It’s also led to collaborations with the likes of the English author Toby Litt (who co-wrote her song-cycle on the diverse “everyday wonder and lurking fear” nature of motherhood, ‘Life Cycle’ – see the excerpt above) and Icelandic poet/occasional Bjork lyricist Sjón, who crafted the words for her haunting trio opera ‘Folie à Deux’.
The latter begins with a man singing an awed paean of worship to an hillside electricity pylon and goes on to explore the consequence of a religious frenzy being transmitted from one person to another, and a relationship in isolation succumbing to the weight of a wild delusion. It’s scored for two singers and a pair of harps (one acoustic, the other electromagnetic) and you can listen to it in full below.
There’ll probably be samples of these plus Emily’s other works in the Daylight showcase. She will be accompanied by Khoros Choir and by classically-inclined singer-songwriter Ana Silvera. Emily has also helped to invent a triggering instrument-cum-mobile, which fits in a suitcase, so with any luck she might be bringing that along too.
Bristolian multi-instrumental composer/producer Ryan Teague has followed a gradually developing path from his minimalist electronic roots which has incorporated classical, electronic, acoustic and soundtrack work and approaches learned from all these fields (as well as from gamelan, a form which informed his ‘Storm Or Tempest May Stop Play’ piece premiered last year at Daylight Music).
Ryan’s upcoming album, ‘Site Specific’ features full-band music pulling in influences from impressionistic early-’70s electric jazz. His performance on Saturday sees him accompanied by bass clarinettist Gareth Davis, electric pianist/synthesizer player Dan Moore and drummer Mark Whitlam.
Karolina Rec is an Warsaw-based cellist and composer working with improvisation and texture under the project name of Resina. In addition to her own work, she’s been involved with several Polish bands and projects including Kings of Caramel, Cieslak and Princess, Nathalie And The Loners, and Anthony Chorale. Here’s a little of her textured post-classical performance looping:
There will also be contributions by composer-performer Lucy Claire. She’s a late addition and there’s not much news on exactly what she’ll be doing. Her work stretches from soundscapes and soundtrack to deeper and more involved contemporary classical works, so she might be performing anything from a between-acts soundscape to a tape-and-keyboard piece to stints on the in-house pipe organ and piano. Here’s a taste of some of what Lucy does:
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In the evening, Lithuanian-born singer-songwriter/kanklės player Jausmė and novelistic folkie Sian Magill return to south London’s Magic Garden, following up their show back in July.
Jausmė + Sian Magill
Heavenly Sunday Folk @ The Magic Garden, 231 Battersea Park Road, Battersea, London, SW11 4LG, England
Sunday 16th November, 9.00pm – free event – information
The last time Jausmė was here, she was duetting with cellist Nicole Collarbone. This time, she’s on her own. Although she usually labels her songcraft and instrumentalism (voice and kanklės, plus the occasional effects pedal) as “urban etherealism”, and generally lets it fall somewhere between its Baltic roots and her adopted home of Milton Keynes (when she’s not guesting on other people’s techno and sub-bass tracks), she’s billing this Saturday’s music as “soul, jazz and folklore”. This either means that she’s found a new smoothed-out direction for her psaltery songs, or uncovered a new twist. Come and see. Meanwhile, here are two of her songs played out on the grasslands. (The second one might provide some explanation…)
Building on what looks like a fruitful gig friendship with Jausmė, Sian Magill brings more of her detailed folk songs into play – immaculate and quietly smouldering; modern-traditional; emotion-soused but steeped in intelligence.
Here’s some more upcoming September shows in London – a musical setting of First World War poems down at the Horse Hospital courtesy of parts of the Crass family, and an all-star, all-female folk meet at Kings Place to celebrate the collective indigenous folk music of Scotland and England (nice to see some fellow feeling there).
Sadly, both of these concerts are on the same night, so choices will need to be made – unless you take a good look at the timings and figure that you can make the best of both, via a gruelling sprint or rapid Tube ride between Russell Square and the upper reaches of Kings Cross…
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Penny Rimbaud recites the Works of Wilfred Owen (with Kate Shortt & Liam Noble) The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Friday 9th September 2016, 7.00pm – information
A couple of notes from the event blurb:
“As part of the exhibition ‘Under The Changing Light: The Landscapes of The Somme’ (consisting of photos by Toby Webster), Penny Rimbaud recites the works of Wilfred Owen with Kate Shortt (cello) and Liam Noble (piano).
Penny Lapsang Rimbaud was born in south-west London. He is a poet, writer, philosopher, painter, and musician. He was formally a part of the performance art groups Exit and Ceres Confusion. In 1977 he co-founded the anarchist punk band Crass with Steve Ignorant, which disbanded in 1984. From then up until 2000 he devoted himself to writing. He returned as a performance poet working with Australian saxophonist Louise Elliot, as well as a wide variety of other jazz musicians as the group L’Académie Des Vanités.”
Regarding Penny’s accompanists, both Kate Shortt and Liam Noble have previous Rimbaud form. Both have collaborated with him in L’Académie Des Vanités forebear Last Amendment – itself formerly the Crass Collective or Crass Agenda performance art group, set up as a post-split arrangement enabling former Crasseurs to work together without either over-commodifying their ex-band’s name or being restricted by its form.
Liam needs little introduction to those who’ve seen his spiky, droll playing across the British jazz scene over the last two decades (initially playing with Stan Sulzmann, John Stevens, Harry Beckett and Bobby Wellins, latterly leading his own projects or collaborating with Christine Tobin). So far, Kate is arguably less well-known; but her witty multi-instrumental singer-songwriter contributions to contemporary British cabaret have drawn comparisons to both Victoria Wood and Jim Tavares. Her Crass connections, continued membership of L’Académie Des Vanités and willingness to provide more sober aspects to events like this one demonstrate that she’s by no means cocooned in the cabaret box.
As for Penny himself – a lifelong anarcho-libertarian and punk hero who was initially inspired by an unlikely literary combination of Ernest Hemingway, Henrik Ibsen and Walt Whitman – there’s plenty to say on the varied subject of Crass and his work in and out of it. This is generally handled by better counter-culture historians than myself. If you’re new to Penny (or to Crassage in general), here’s a fairly good place to start, courtesy of ‘The Quietus’…
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Kings Place Festival 2016 presents:
‘Songs of Separation’: Eliza Carthy + Karine Polwart + Mary Macmaster + Kate Young + Hannah James/Hazel Askew/Rowan Rheingans (Lady Maisery) + Jenn Butterworth + Jenny Hill + Hannah Read
Hall One @ Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, England
Friday 9th September 2016 – 9:45pm – information
From the Festival promotional info:
“In June 2015, ten of Scotland and England’s leading female folk musicians joined forces to explore the rich musical, cultural and linguistic heritage of the two countries. What emerged is one of the landmark collaborative folk albums of recent years, Songs of Separation.
Various Artists: ‘Songs Of Separation’
“‘Songs of Separation’ is an outstanding collaboration between ten of Scotland and England’s leading female folk musicians. Devised and recorded in just six days, on the fairytale Hebridean Isle of Eigg, the musicians explored the rich musical heritage of the two countries, drawing on their respective and collective musical experiences and crafting something both new and very special.
“Celebrating the similarities and differences in our musical, linguistic and cultural heritage, and set in the context of a post-referendum world, the work aims to evoke emotional responses and prompt new thinking about the issue of separation as it occurs in all our lives. The collection of traditional and original songs aims to get to the heart of what we feel when we are faced with a separation; linking us both to previous generations who shared the same human experiences and responses to separation, and to generations that will follow. The horizons of the project are already evolving and speak as much about connection, as they do about separation.
“The album was launched in January 2016, with a sell-out tour and received exceptional reviews from the music press and musicians alike. Opportunities to experience ‘Songs of Separation’ performed live are rare… and unmissable.
“A richly evocative and quietly provocative collection of traditional and newly composed songs, the artists behind this album include two of the most celebrated contemporary voices on the UK folk scene, England’s Eliza Carthy (fiddle, percussion) and Scotland’s Karine Polwart (tenor guitar, Indian harmonium); two boundary-breaking Scots, Mary Macmaster of The Poozies (harp) and Kate Young (fiddle); Hannah James (accordion, percussion), Hazel Askew (flute, melodeon, harp) and Rowan Rheingans (banjo, fiddle, viola) from the award-winning English ensemble Lady Maisery; Jenn Butterworth (guitar) and Jenny Hill (double bass), brilliant backline players who have worked across both the English and Scottish trad scenes; and Hannah Read (fiddle, guitar), a New York-based musician and singer who spent much of her childhood on the Isle of Eigg.”
This is the last ‘Songs Of Separation’ concert of the year, with previous 2016 performances having occurred at assorted festivals (Celtic Connections, Dumfries and Galloway Festival of Arts, Cardiff’s Festival of Voice, the Cambridge Folk Festival) as well as shows in Edinburgh, Stroud, Didcot and Bury. The project is ongoing, with recent developments including onstage collaborations with schoolchildren and mythology-inspired plans for field recordings, among other ideas.
In between appearances at the WOMAD and Supernormal festivals, Georgian saz player and singer Aşıq Nargile is embarking on a three-date British microtour in August, calling in at points in Scotland, Yorkshire and London.
In case you’re looking at the picture and thinking (lazily) “another girl folk singer”, it’s worth noting that “Aşıq” is an honorific, not a forename. It denotes a particular type of traditional Georgian bard, multilingual and mobile, who travels through the country’s diverse regions as vessels for music, news, concepts and culture both old and new. (A little like a Caucasian version of a West African griot, although perhaps without the satirical upsetter elements).
Originally from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Nargile Mehtiyeva has carried the cosmopolitan traditions of her home town with her, but has chosen to base herself in the southern Borcali region. For the moment, she’s the only female aşıq at work there. A trilingual singer and player of the saz lute since her mid-teens, she’s now both a teacher of the traditional forms and (via the Sayat Nova initiative) an ambassador for Georgian culture. Her concerts involve interlocking musicality and literacy – a “vocal recital of epic folk poetry (in) Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Russian… by turns ecstatic and deeply expressive… interspersed with bursts of virtuosic, highly ornamented saz.” in the shape of “moving laments or upbeat folk dances.” For those who don’t speak any of those languages, the shows are still musically sensual experiences – propulsive and silvery cascades of wiry stringwork, accompanied by a vocal like an elastic lassoo and the stately assurance of someone backed up by a couple of thousand years of heritage.
Tour dates are as follows:
The Old Hairdressers, 23 Renfield Lane, Glasgow G2 6PH, Scotland, Tuesday 2nd August 2016, 7.30pm (supported by Tut Vu Vu + Muldoon’s Picnic) – information
Delius Arts & Cultural Centre, 29 Great Horton Road, Bradford, BD7 1AA, England, Wednesday 3rd August 2016…. (+ support act t.b.c.) – information here and here
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England, Thursday 4th August 2016, 7.30pm (with Heather Leigh) – information
While the Bradford gig is solo, the Glasgow show sees Nargile playing as part of a splendidly adventurous and diverse triple bill alongside two very different Glaswegian groups who have next to nothing in common bar their musicality.
Despite their cosy and informal appearance, a name that comes from drunken Irish misadventure, a repertoire reaching from “the sublime to the ridiculous” and their emphasis on fun and friendship in singing, acapella group Muldoon’s Picnic unites a number of very dedicated and talented Glasgow-based singer and scholars. Its six or seven regular members (not least in-house arranger Katy L. Cooper) have already made their mark in a brace of other vocal ensembles – Trembling Bells spin-off Crying Lion, Glasgow Madrigirls, The Four Hoarse Men, Voicebeat, Voicemale, Sang Scule, and “barbershop-prog” group Honey & The Herbs – plus more church, chapel, cathedral, workplace and community choirs than you could shake a stave at. As for that repertoire, it embraces gospel, shanties, Scots ballads, English carols, Afro-American spirituals, sacred harp songs, Victorian parlour music and music hall songs and assorted pieces cast up and circulated by the world music movement. Where other choral groups dabble, this one delves. The songs are sung not just in English but in other tongues of the British Isles (Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Manx and Welsh) and further afield: Breton, southern African Sotho, Ugandan Luganda and eastern European languages (Bulgarian, Croatian and Georgian – in the latter’s polyphonic music, they touch base with Nargile.)
The third act on the Glasgow bill, Tut Vu Vu, play their dark-browed and looming electrophonic instrumentals in a cloud of disinformation. When someone compares them to Anaïs Nin and David Lynch and they claim that it’s all a misunderstanding; someone else mentions musique concrète and they respond with askance, amused looks. When given the chances to set things straight, they deliver misleading mission statements filled with science fiction technogabble about phased plasma and hydrogen sulphide. What’s demonstrably true is that they’re an alliance of Glasgow art-punks who’ve already been around a decade’s cycle of experimental groups – Iban Perez in The Sparkling Shadazz, Rags & Feathers and A Rhythmtic) Raydale Dower, Matthew Black and Jamie Bolland in rattling theatricalists Uncle John & Whitelock.
Expect something of an oblique and inscrutable wall between the quartet’s current work and their previous brainy trash-lungings. A band apparently in search of a new dialect (while drawing on assorted shredded utterances from Krautrock, Beefheart, ‘90s rave or ‘80s arsequake) a typical TVV track can be a bizarre collage of muffled falsetto wails and feedback drones, of layered tribal toms and analogue-synth bass-farts, of approaching-horns guitar shapes; all of which is cunningly and immediately sculpted for maximum enigmatic impact, rather than being tossed out of the speakers for someone else to sweep up.
In London, Nargile is playing a double header gig with Heather Leigh. One of the most unconventional pedal steel guitarists in contemporary music, Heather belies her traditional country music heritage (a West Virginia birth, a descent from coal miners) and instead reinvents both her instrument and her voice as a conduit for strange and ghostly improvisations. Aided by cruel amplifier tones and strange, skittering, instinctive hand techniques, her compositions emerge like spectral possessions of strings, pedals, larynx and language. Often touching on themes of trauma, abuse and hidden, subjective experience, Heather’s eerie and disturbing work has already led her to collaborations with Peter Brötzmann, Jandek, Thurston Moore and plenty of others since her emergence in the 1990s.
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August also sees the start of Borderless, a delightfully rambling live music series at Battersea Arts Centre running roughly parallel to the Olympic Games in Rio. Run in collaboration with GOAT Music (set up last year by former Roundhouse music bosses David Gaydon and Lou Birkett) it aim to showcase “the UK’s best homegrown talent and unique artists from around the globe, in the intimate and beautiful setting of the Council Chamber… Borderless will provide an alternative cross-cultural celebration. Samba to tropical beats, dance to Afrobeat legends, skank to reggae and let the new generation of jazz take you to another place. Break down the borders and shuffle your feet to global rhythms to hear the biggest tunes from all over the planet. We’ll also provide a platform for the freshest artists and exciting talent currently taking the UK by storm. Hear the artists sound tracking the underground scene, dominating the airwaves and paving the way for the alternative UK music scene.”
Glad to hear it. Bring it on. What do you have?
GOAT Music and Battersea Arts Centre present:
Borderless: Hackney Colliery Band + Bring Your Own Brass Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, Battersea, London, SW11 5TN, England
Tuesday 2nd August 2016, 8.00pm – information
Hearing about Hackney Colliery Band initially caught me between hackles and chuckles. For a moment, I thought it was about taking the piss out of a great and still-living industrial British art form while cynically attempting to replace it. After all, when there are still genuine colliery bands maintaining the tradition across old mining heartlands from Tyneside to Derbyshire, Shropshire to Leicestershire and the Rhondda Valley (and dotted across the Yorkshire pitscape from Grimethorpe to Dinnington, Frickley to Queensbury) why would you want to substitute them with a slick London parody? On the other hand, my sense of the absurd soon kicked in – since Hackney’s been sprouting all kinds of cartoonish artisan features for the past decade (from craft beer to boutique muffins and shoes), why not an ersatz coal mine?
As it happens, HCB have got little to do with any of this. The name’s a little dab of post-modern British showbiz and the band (excellent, by the way) don’t stick to the grand dignity and mournfulness of colliery music, being more of an omnivorous brass beast immersed in and rejigging a variety of horn-party traditions from jazz, r&b, funk and others, including New Orleans tunes from both fun and funerals. Much the same can be said of the support act, Bring Your Own Brass – a band who, as “up-and-coming brass hip-hop ripsnorters”, have been known to parp out a Rakim cover or two. If this makes them sounds like a novelty act, they aren’t. Sound and vision reveal them to be well-scrubbed, well-studied white disciples of a wide span of styles, clambering over Afrobeat, rap, funk and marching-band ideas with head-bopping panache.
Recently, both bands seem to have cornered the market in boutique festivals and showbiz event (between them they’ve got Olympic Games and Brit/Mercury award appearances under their belts, as well as shows at Ally Pally, with slots at Wilderness, Stow and Meatopia to come later in August for BYOB and a hefty European tour for HCB). HCB’s previous set at the MOBO awards suggests that they can impress at a formal roots level as well, unless it was a case of contacts trumping authenticity. Just as long as bands like these aren’t crowding out bands like Kokoroko; although BYOB’s teamup with Bristolian rapper and slam poet Solomon O.B (see below) suggests that, as far as fellow musicians are concerned, there aren’t any practical or philosophical problems.
Cockpit Productions present:
Jazz In The Round: Ant Law Trio + Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed + Zoe Rahman The Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, Lisson Grove, London, NW8 8EH, England
Monday 25th July 2016, 7.00pm – information
I’ve just caught up with The Cockpit Theatre’s regular monthly jazz extravaganza (which is pretty good going on my part, since it’s only been happening for four-and-a-half years already…) This month, the 2016 summer season concludes with a triple bill of London jazz acts, plus the usual warm-up DJ set from Jazz FM’s Jez Nelson and Chris Philips (‘Somethin’ Else’, ‘The Blueprint’, ‘Chris’ Starpoint Radio’). As ever, the audience is positioned around the band in a thrust-stage setting, allowing a different sonic perspective and sense of involvement.
A member of Tim Garland’s all-star Lighthouse quartet, guitarist Ant Law uses bop jazz, folk-rock and Carnatic music as part of his musical palette (which also includes modern jazz, heavy metal and M-Base-inspired rhythmatism). A onetime Edinburgh University physics graduate and Berklee College alumni, he also works with Paul Riley and Trio HLK (with Richards Kass and Harold), with “proggish” fusion quartet Project DSB, plays as a regular sideman with Camille O’Sullivan and leads his own quintet. On this occasion, he’s performing with his trio – completed by drummer Asaf Sirkis and bass player Matt Ridley – delivering fluid rapid compositions in a constant state of teasing upheaval.
Led by alto saxophonist and Tomorrow’s Warrior Cassie Kinoshi, Seed are a ten-piece band combining jazz with inner-city London, West African and Caribbean influenced grooves. The stellar line-up of some of London’s most up-and-coming young jazz musicians also features Miguel Gorodi and Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpets), Joe Bristow (trombone), Theon Cross (tuba), Chelsea Carmichael (tenor sax), Joe Armon-Jones (piano), Oscar Laurence (guitar), Rio Kai (bass) and Patrick Boyle (drums). An alumnus of all-female TW band Nérija, Cassie is a diverse, inquisitive composer whose own music takes inspirations from jazz and black cultural history but also delves into lighthearted chiptunes, classical chamber music inspired by subjects as diverse as Chaucer and Tetris, and sombre electronic soundscapes.
British/Bengali pianist and composer Zoe Rahman creates music formed by her mixed heritage, her initial training as a classical musician, and her very broad musical taste, with her love for contemporary jazz as the binding agent. On this occasion, she’ll be playing solo.
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Countermeasure: 14 Characters A Cappella The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Sunday 31st July 2016, 2.00pm – information
Fourteen-piece Canadian vocal troupe Countermeasure make a visit to London at the month’s end, as part of their European tour. I could mine the press release for details on the prizes they’ve won and the other groups they’ve collaborated with; but the truth is that, when talking about vocal groups, somehow that mass of information always seems to mean less. Maybe one’s just impatient to be seduced by the voices… so here they are, delivering a multilayered take on Cole Porter’s I Got You Under My Skin; working in tricks and tips from close-harmony, contemporary R&B, jazz vocalese and broken beats.
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Back at the Cockpit, there’s a production of Pasek & Paul’s ‘Edges’. …
CC Productions present:
‘Edges: A Song Cycle Following Coming-Of-Age Questions’ The Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, Lisson Grove, London, NW8 8EH, England
Saturday 30th July 2016, 7.30pm
Sunday 31st July 2016, 5.00pm
– information
Part theatre musical and part song cycle, ‘Edges’ was originally written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul while they were still students at the University of Michigan, many years before they were conquering Broadway with ‘Dogfight’, ‘James and the Giant Peach’ and ‘A Christmas Story’ and being hailed as the heirs to Rodgers and Hammerstein. The piece has been described as “a witty and honest look at the choices we make and what happens when we are on the edge of our lives. Covering such issues as love, commitment, identity and meaning, ‘Edges’ follows four adults escaping expectations and their complicated relationships.”
This production of the show features musical actors Adam Bailey, Peter Cumins, Laura Mansell and Catherine Mort. Here’s a clip featuring a montage of songs and moments from a previous production at the Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, New York State.
This weekend, in London, mostly-unplugged afternoon Daylight Music will bow out for the summer with a distinctly maritime-toned concert – and one which features another choir as the headlining act. I’ve been tempted to give Daylight’s organisers a bit of stick for their interest in choirs this season, but it makes no more sense than ribbing them for liking performers with acoustic guitars. While, for me, the scratch-choir-does-pop-hits musical meme gets too cosy too quickly, Daylight has done its level best to vary the choral diet, with this week’s headliners delving back into deeper folk roots (and the other acts on the bill ranging out across nautical atmospheres and underwater imaginings).
At the other end of the country, in Sunderland, film-makers have teamed up with art-rockers, bleepers, folk singers and community consciousness to create a picture of the First World War’s impact on a thriving north-eastern community. Keeping true to their inspirations, they’re premiering their work there. We Southerners will have to wait, and quite rightly too.
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Daylight Music 231 – Cecil Sharp House Choir + Lisa Knapp + The Hermes Experiment + David Julyan & John Potter Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information
“Known for its unique, spirited and moving a cappella renditions of traditional songs from the British Isles (and occasionally beyond), Cecil Sharp House Choir is one to catch. Helmed by inspirational choir leader, Sally Davies (and open to any confident singer able to hold a tune, learn by ear and be keen to perform), the choir performs regularly at Cecil Sharp House and at a host of other venues and events including the Southbank Centre, the Roundhouse, the House of Commons and the Oslo Musikkfest.
“Singer and fiddle player Lisa Knapp burst onto the scene in 2007 with her much lauded debut album ‘Wild & Undaunted’, which contained refreshing interpretations of traditional folk songs peppered with highly distinctive original pieces. Numerous appearances across BBC Radio and BBC4’s Christmas TV folk song extravaganza followed, as well as a performance tribute to the late Lal Waterson for BBC Electric Proms. Further recordings (made in collaboration with her musician/producer husband Gerry Diver) have included the EP ‘Hunt The Hare – A Branch of May’ and 2013’s ‘Hidden Seam’ album. Lisa’s BBC work continued with Radio 4’s acclaimed ‘Shipping Songs‘ in 2015 (musing on the extraordinary sounds from far-off places on the Shipping Forecast), and it’s this which should inform her July Daylight appearance, which features a duo performance with Gerry Diver and a song sung with the Cecil Sharp House Choir.
“Park Lane Group Young Artists 2015/16 and winners of Nonclassical’s Battle of the Bands 2014, The Hermes Experiment is a contemporary classical music quartet comprising harpist Anne Denholm, clarinettist Oliver Pashley, soprano Héloïse Werner and double bass player Marianne Schofield. Their performance style has been hailed as “meticulously nuanced, witty and chic” by The Times, while The Evening Standard has acclaimed their “whole new expressive world.” Capitalising on their deliberately idiosyncratic combination of instruments, the ensemble regularly commissions new works, as well as creating their own innovative arrangements and venturing into live free improvisation. So far, the ensemble has commissioned thirty-one different composers at various stages of their careers. The ensemble also strives to create a platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration and they recently created a ‘musical exhibition’ with photographer Thurstan Redding. Future plans include a residency at Aldeburgh Music in September 2016 developing a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale with director Nina Brazier and composer Kim Ashton.
“The Hermes Experiment’s Daylight performance this weekend will be a marine-themed set first performed in 2014 (and recently revived at a Park Lane Music Group concert at St John’s Smith Square earlier in the year), at which they performed Giles Swayne‘s ‘Chansons dévotes and poissonneuses (Devout and Fishy Songs)’, a setting of three piscatorial poems by French Symbolist Georges Fourest. Whether they’ve got time for some of the other songs for the St Johns set – Kate Honey‘s ‘Predator Fish’, Freya Waley-Cohen‘s ‘Oyster’, Josephine Stephenson‘s ‘tanka’ – remains to be seen.
“As the fourth act, David Julyan (a film composer best known for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan on Memento’ and ‘The Prestige’, as well as for horror movie ‘The Descent‘) will be teaming up with John Potter (of ambient project The Music Of What Happens) in order to create a live sea soundscape.”
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Field Music/The Royal Northern Sinfonia/Warm Digits + The Cornshed Sisters
‘Asunder’ – film premiere with live score Sunderland Empire Theatre, High Street West, Sunderland, SR1 3EX, England
Sunday 10th July 2016, 2.30pm and 7.30pm – information
“Northumbrian art poppers Field Music (with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and electronic duo Warm Digits) are set to perform a newly commissioned live score to accompany ‘Asunder’, a film telling the tale of the North East’s involvement in the Battle of the Somme (one of the most horrific battles in World War One) through largely unknown personal experiences. The collaboration marks the Battle’s centenary. Royal Northern Sinfonia will be conducted by Hugh Brunt, Artistic Director of the London Contemporary Orchestra (and Radiohead collaborator). Sunderland folk quartet The Cornshed Sisters will also perform an a cappella rendition of traditional Wearside folk tune The Rigs of Sunderland Fair.
“‘Asunder’ brings together the stories and images of the past with music from the present to tell a poignant and relevant story of what happened to a typical British town during the First World War, with virtually all of the its men abroad fighting and all of its women and children left behind. The North East was in the front line, thanks to its shipyards and munitions factories.
Through the stories of half a dozen people from Tyneside and Wearside, ‘Asunder’ uncovers just what life was like on the home front – with bombs falling on Britain for the first time, conscientious objectors sentenced to death, and women working as doctors, tram conductors and footballers, some of them (God forbid) wearing trousers.
“The story begins in the pre-war Edwardian golden era when cricket, football and rugby boomed, and aeroplanes and cars pointed to a bright new future – only for this progress to be horrifically reversed through the early years of the war. This culminated on 1st July 1916 in the Battle of the Somme, when British, French and German forces began one of the most traumatic battles in military history. Over the course of just four months, more than one million soldiers were captured, wounded or killed in the Battle, a confrontation of unimaginable horror.
“The story is told through a beautiful film carefully crafted by documentarist Esther Johnson using archive and newly filmed footage, and narrated by Kate Adie (with Alun Armstrong as the voice of the ‘Sunderland Daily Echo & Shipping Gazette’).
“‘Asunder’ will premiere at the Sunderland Empire on 10th July before touring at selected venues around the country (dates to be confirmed).
“Field Music’s David Brewis says of the commission:
“The chance to write something completely new and play it with an orchestra doesn’t come around very often. And as we heard about the plans for the film, the idea of telling a more complete story about our home town and how the war affected it was very appealing. There’s nothing quite like hearing a full orchestra right in front of you and if we get it right, then the balance between what you see and hear on screen and what you see and hear from the musicians should be spectacular. One of the other things which intrigued Peter (Brewis) especially about this project was our love of the orchestral music from that period. Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ premiered in 1913, Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ in 1912. Bela Bartok and Maurice Ravel were composing, as was Claude Debussy, so it was a time of huge change in harmony and composition and we’ve dipped into that period for inspiration a lot.”
“Writer and ‘Asunder’ creative director Bob Stanley comments:
“For me, ‘Asunder’ is an opportunity to work with a group I’ve admired from afar for years, Field Music, and one of my favourite documentary makers, Esther Johnson, as well as a group I only discovered last year but are one of the most thrilling electronic acts in the country, Warm Digits. The premiere will be a truly unique event – the combination of a live score to a new film featuring some incredible archive footage and fascinating local stories, along with the other events going on inside and outside the Empire should be a really memorable day, and I hope one that people will be talking about for years to come. I want everyone who sees it to take pride in the region’s unique history and to feel they can help to build its future.”
A couple of London experimental gigs for the coming week, briefly explored:
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The Horse Improvised Music Club presents:
Noel Taylor/Asaf Fleischmann/Ulf Mengersten + Adam Bohman Text Quartet + Antonio Cunzo/Joe Wright/David Stockard/Tony Hardie-Bick IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Tuesday 5th July 2016, 8.00 pm – information
Three small-group performances from the South Bank London improvisers’ hub; following, in part, their tradition of putting well-known improvisers together with lesser-known ones.
The opening act is a scratch quartet of rising Aberdonian jazz saxophonist Joe Wright and Carrickfergus-based percussionist David Stockard with pianist Antonio Cunzo and Chapman Stick player Tony Hardie-Bick. (While it always gives me a lift to see a Stick pop up anywhere in music, since I’ve always loved its clipped-but-singing polyphonic tones, Tony also seems to have the most interesting backstory within the quartet. From being Sham 69’s keyboard player during the late ‘80s, he’s moved from backing up other people’s punk polemics to spending most of his time as a software instrument developer, coaxing new levels of performance interaction out of touchscreens and wearable tech. As a performer, he’s been known to drag his protesting Stick flex-first across gallery floors, an art-punk flourish which I guess is a change from the cloud of warm jazzy reverence which usually surrounds the instrument.)
Veteran London acoustic-noise’n’objects performer Adam Bohman takes the middle slot with his Adam Bohman Text Quartet, completed by Adrian Northover, Sue Lynch and Hutch Demouilpied. While Adrian and Sue are usually saxophonists (working together in David Petts’ Remote Viewers and Hogcallin’) and Hutch is a trumpeter and sound designer, it looks as if everyone’s working with voice this time.
There’s not much information on this other than that it’s a text piece, but some guidelines might come from Adam’s work on “talking tapes” during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – lo-fi audio collages which ranged from spontaneous dictaphone observations (Adam discovering and illustrating the ordinary and mundane anew, in slurred Dada-esque tones) to ludicrous cartoon vocal pieces. The ‘Music and Words’ collation of these odds-and-sodes was described as “a laugh-out-loud avant garde album” and later releases were even funnier, pushing into prank-and-sketch territories like a splicing of Bob Cobbing with a one-man Pete’n’Dud. Have a listen to When A Man (in which a trio of growling Adams parody both bozo masculinity and thunder-throat action-film trailers, like a squad of querulous Daleks bloated on bright orange corn snacks), or White Sauce Without For Those Who Don’t (Adam’s cutup account of a single Christmas, chopped across with assorted literary, musical and familial distractions).
It is, of course, thirty years on from all of this, so you might get something far more sombre. Since the Quartet are performing something called “the Robin’s Nest Revisited Vocal Quartet”, I wouldn’t bet on it..
The last act of the evening are a trio connected to large-scale improvising institutions in two European capitals. Longstanding improv clarinettist Noel Taylor (Splatter, London Improvisers Orchestra, plenty more) will be playing with Ulf Mengersten (a double bass mainstay of Berlin Improvisers Orchestra) and pianist Asaf Fleischmann.
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Hominid Sounds presents:
Mark Dicker + Guncleaner + Johnny Broke + tbc New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Thursday 7th July 2016, 8:00 pm – information here and here
To celebrate the release of Mark Dicker‘s new tape ‘Frog Eggs’, London experimental label Hominid Sounds are putting on “a night of clangs and bangs.” There’s a gradually expanding bill for this, featuring various electronic noisemakers and beat-glowerers from the more unruly edge of London electronica. Mark himself (the man “responsible for the noise behind (the recently deceased)Palehorse“ is headlining, bringing “supersonic modular-synth slow jams” (for a little more on Mark and how he thinks, there’s a ‘Quietus’ interview here). So far, he’s being supported by “clanging, banging techno noise project”Guncleaner (featuring two members of secretive, elusive London heavy math-rockers Nitkowski) and by “improvised, analogue-synth acid techno” act Johnny Broke (initially a solo project by Shitwife‘s Wayne Adams, which now seems to have expanded and welcomed one half of north London noiseniks Death Pedals). More performers to be confirmed…
I’ve not got much information or workable noises for this concert. For starters, I only bounce around on the outside of this particular musical scene (like a stray static spit in the mix); It also seems clear that it’s a lineup of sound-artists in deliberate flux and change, demonstrating very different faces to their usual output; and even by noise music’s usual enclosed standards, information on this show seems to be insiders-only. So you’ll need to just attend and take a chance on what it might be like.
I did succeed, however, in pulling up a little recent Johnny Broke-ism and a Dicker track from early last year, so here they are:
While I missed the chance to plug the Sin Eater Festival a few weeks ago, I’m just about in time for the modest fireworks which herald the Frome Festival in Wiltshire.
I’m too late to plug the opening party (in which Frome’s own electro-poppers Sweet Machine shared a bill with psychedelic synth-cabarettier, rock biographer and all-round performance character Alan Clayson); I don’t have much to say about the festival’s big-draw act Reef (currently enjoying a new revival of their original ‘90s revival of 70s blues-rock); and I feel sorry that the free gig by “ukular fusion” band The Mother Ukersdoesn’t involve furious Mahavishnukulele jazz shredding (instead of being a variation on banjo-happy rockgrass covers). But there’s plenty more on offer, so here are a few other things picked out from the billing.
It’s by no means everything on offer (the festival’s full of visual art, talks and theatre; there’s plenty more jazz and classical; and there’s a show by Billy Bragg which will probably take care of itself) but these represent the bits-between-the-bits which are closest to ‘Misfit City’s natural constituency (if such a thing exists).
At the upstairs room at the Archangel pub, The Magical Folk Garden continues to turn itself into an annual institution with a series of cushion-strewn/standing-room-only unplugged gigs, creating a “euphonious forest of folk and contemporary acoustic music from some of the UK’s finest talents.” It’s all pretty well-scrubbed and tasteful – there’s nothing to scare the horses here. That said, a few of the performers might own horses, and some might whisper them; while a few might go all ‘Poldark’ and ride off on one, bareback and bare-chested, a honey-coloured guitar bouncing up and down on the withers (it all probably depends on the state of the booze and the pollen count).
The Tuesday show features two Bath acts – lit-pop cello-and-guitar duo The Bookshop Band and romantic solo-balladeer Tom Corneill – plus the sunny pure-pop/psychedelic fizz of Trowbridge’s The Pigeons.
The Wednesday show has a band-backed performance from Frome’s Al O’Kane (a gravel-and-honey country-blues-folker who, with his mix of rolling American roots guitar and British mysticism, can come across as a one-man ‘Led Zeppelin III’). Also playing are Alex Taylor (bouncy, jazz-and-funk-tinged, broadening his sound and filling out his pockets with pedals and loops) and young songwriter Emma Shoosmith, whose output has ranged from thoughtful folkified Taylor Swift covers to the lilting ska-tinted song shown below.
The Thursday show has a chamber-folk air. Bookshop Band multi-instrumentalist Beth Porter returns with her own augmented-string quartet band The Availables and her own clutch of intricate literary songs. Also on board are the strings, percussion rustles and detailed guitar of Rivers Of England (fronted by Rob Spaulding) who, although they take on some pretty familiar modern folk tropes, land them in an interesting marginal territory in which the early-’70s John Martyn and the early-’80s Julian Cope sit down to exchange lines and tips. The bill’s completed by the lost-boy charm of Avebury singer-songwriter (and Nick Harper protégé) George Wilding with his warm, abstracted songs of distraction and heartbreak (simultaneously soothing and haunting).
The Friday folk-final involves wayward Bristol-and-Bath folk septet The Cedar. Beth Porter makes her third Magical Folk Garden appearance of the week as the band’s cellist, alongside five other musicians. Playing a variety of instruments and implements (from guitar, glockenspiel, viola, organ and ukulele to calculator, screwdriver, musical and tri-square) they weave Neil Gay’s slightly distracted songs into a musical fabric that’s sometimes Belle-&-Sebastian communal, sometimes music-school precise, and sometimes as frayed as a scrap-basket oddment.
The rest of the evening gently mixes Western with Western. Accompanying herself on guitar, baritone ukulele, harmonium or shruti box, Bradford-on-Avon’s Jess Vincent delivers a set of original country-folk songs with a sound and demeanour that’s seen her compared to both Iris DeMent and Kate Bush. Evening openers Ali George and Ruby Brown do their own take on Gram-and-Emmylou duets, filtered through Ali’s trunkful of original English folk/clawhammer guitar songs.
The town’s Rook Lane Chapel arts centre is hosting plenty of events. These two in particular caught my ear:
Snowapple Rook Lane Chapel, Bath Street, Frome, BA11 1DN, England
Thursday 7th July 2016, 7:30pm – information
“Snowapple is an outstanding female harmony trio from Amsterdam who draw on folk, classical and chanson influences, in unique, charming and beautiful arrangements of original songs. Having sold out the Granary for the last two years, Snowapple have earned a reputation all over Europe and the US, and this year appear in the perfect setting of Rook Lane Arts.”
Praying For The Rain Rook Lane Chapel, Bath Street, Frome, BA11 1DN, England
Friday 8th July 2016, 8.00pm – information
From the blurb: “Known for their dynamic and compelling live performances, Praying For The Rain blend contemporary folk, Celtic and world music with irresistible rhythms, memorable melodies, beautifully crafted vocals and inspired musicianship. Their music brings to mind a modern blend of Crosby, Stills and Nash, Robert Plant, to Fleet Foxes and the Dave Matthews Band, creating a truly uplifting experience. Following last year’s sell out concert, Praying for the Rain return to Rook Lane for Frome Festival 2016. Expect an exhilarating night of high energy, movement and wonderfully engaging songs.“
I’m sure I remember Praying For The Rain from when I was a regular at Martyn Swain’s wonderful Dreamhouse acoustic nights, a refuge of warm bohemian chic and unplugged music alongside the Splash Club in scuzzy mid-’90s Kings Cross. These were the same shows at which I was delighted by up-close performances from Marcy Detroit, Simons Warner and Whitaker and many more… there’s a little bit about Dreamhouse here, since someone’s been writing a crowdfunded book about the Splash years (and you can still pitch in to help it). Dreamhouse was the kind of night where you could expect table candles and belly dancing interludes most weeks; but during their own slot, Praying For The Rain completely overflowed the little Water Rats stage with finger-cymbals, accordions, cellos, cirrus-band harmonies and what seemed like about ten people on whispering percussion, temporarily transforming the place to a full-on New Age folk temple.
Although they seem rather more bluesy and straightforward-rootsy than I remember through the gauzes of memory, it’s good to see that they’ve lasted the twenty-year distance and garnered themselves a new up-to-date list of comparisons.
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Over at the Granary, there’s a semi-unplugged triple bill and a visit from a ‘Misfit City’ favourite.
Three Is The Magic Number presents:
Three Corners + Molly Ross + Gum Girl The Granary @ The George Hotel, 4 Market Place, Frome, BA11 1AF, England
Friday 8th July 2016, 8.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like
Regular Frome-and-Wiltshire unplugged night Acoustic Plus takes on a new identity for this three-act bill of “original songs, haunting vocals, mesmeric music” celebrating a diversity of approach via three different acts. Molly Ross offers fledgling piano pop touches on folk and R&B; Three Corners (with their roots in 1980s new-wavers The Impossible Dreamers, and featuring ex-Dreamers Nick Waterhouse and Caroline Radcliffe) play sparse, questing songs around more of a loose blues-and-jazz-informed tip; but the one I find most interesting is the dreamy beat’n’texture pop of Gum Girl.
As Arch Garrison, North Sea Radio Orchestra mastermind Craig Fortnam and Stars In Battledress‘ James Larcombe explore gentle, intricate psychedelic folk: partly gentle clean chapel tones, partly kosmische textures, partly chalk-ridge geomancy. A duo of Craig’s nylon-strung acoustic guitar and James’ assorted keyboards (organ, monosynth, harmonium and piano), their two albums’ worth of songs have enabled Craig to bring the smaller and more personal songs he writes to life, when they don’t fit the grander feel of NSRO. Their ‘Will Be A Pilgrim‘ album was one of my favourites of 2014 – an unexpected gem of small voice and thinking space. Support comes from local favourites Dexter’s Extra Breakfast, playing Dave Clark’s soft-petalled and “Weltschmerzian” songs of middle-aged reflection.
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John D Revelator The Griffin, 25 Milk Street, Frome, BA11 3DB, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 8.00pm – free event
At the Griffin, John D Revelator will be bringing along their dark-tinged acoustic swamp-pop for a free show. Even if there’s not actually such a thing as the “Somerset Levels delta”, they’ll lie to their last tooth and their last busted guitar string trying to persuade you that it does exist.
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Towards the end of the festival, the second of Frome’s two substantial concert halls is offering two very different performances on the same day. One is a post-lunchtime concert of vividly Catalonian Spanish classical music from the twentieth century; the other is an evening show of polymusical fusion from an all-star collective trio.
Elena Riu & Clara Sanabras: ’A Taste Of Spain’ Cooper Hall @ Selwood Manor, Jacks Lane, Frome, BA11 3NL, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 1.00pm – information
Pianist Elena Riu and singing multi-instrumentalist Clara Sanabras (the latter on voice, harp, oud, charango and guitar) perform selections from the ‘Songs & Dances’ of Catalan impressionist/miniaturist composer Federico Mompou and the ‘Spanish Dances’ of his compatriot Enrique Granados, interspersed with Clara’s performances of the original Catalan folk songs on which Mompou drew.
“Birdworld is made up of musicians Adam Teixeira (drums/percussion), Gregor Riddell (cello/electronics); and Alex Stuart (guitar). The project came about when Gregor and Adam met during self-directed Banff Creative Residencies where they discovered a shared interest in blending electronic and acoustic sounds. Since Adam moved to the UK in 2014 they have continued to develop BirdWorld, adding Alex along the way. Combining their artistic voices as both instrumentalists and composers, the trio will showcase each members original compositions arranged specifically for this unique musical exchange. Creating a unified sound that blends the inspirations of modern jazz, world music, contemporary classical, rock and electronic music in a rare concert setting.”
Here’s a video of the original two-piece in action, to give you two-thirds of an idea of what might be on offer.
Some news on a huge online event tomorrow… too big to capture in a single blogpost, but here’s an introduction and a way in…
“All over the world on the day the sun stands still, people are enjoying and sharing an age-old tradition. Join in and get connected!
“Solstice celebrations have existed for as long as people have been looking at the sun. Especially for indigenous peoples whose habitats were closely tied to the cycle of the sun and earth, the solstice was a marked point in the year. Whether celebrating the day the sun never sets, or celebrating the rebirth of sunlight after the darkest period of the year, humans have observed the seasonal milestones and created spiritual and cultural traditions reflecting the diversity of the sounds of the earth.
“For over a decade Charlie Morrow and his friends, veterans as well as newcomers to the avant-garde music and poetry scene, have travelled the world over to produce, record and participate in Solstice events and celebrations. From their combined experience came the idea to bring this multitude of events and performances home to anybody who would like to learn more about it or follow it live on ‘the day of’. This is a huge technological and organizational challenge that has never been done before, bringing together a large number of people around the globe in an exciting multilevel, multi-stream production.
“On June 21st, 2016, Solstice 2016 will connect science, art, design, and technology in a global celebration across all twenty-four timezones. The multi-stream twenty-four-hour event begins during Happy Hour (5:00pm – 6:00pm), starting at the International Date Line. Using the latest communication technology, we will follow the solstice moment and ‘feeling’ around the globe and capture all kinds of people’s experiences.
Moving west and broadcasting one hour per each of the twenty-four time zones, we follow the Earth spinning, ‘handing over’ the solstice moment to each following time zone at 5.00 pm. In addition, moving north and south within each time zone, different climate regions with specific geography and cultures are being made visual and brought into focus: from the Arctic where the sun never sets, to the Antarctic where there will be total darkness. We keep moving west, one hour per zone, until we come back to the International Dateline at ‘the end of the day’ or twenty-four hours later.
“The stream features art, music, and poetry from each timezone, sounds and videos of the earth from NOAA, indigenous and international poetry curated by Jerome Rothenberg and Bob Holman, music from twenty-four time zones curated by RIP and Adrian Hayman with Marc Nasdor and much more.
“Solstice 2016 shows the myriad and invisibly powerful ways that design pulls the strings of our world through gestures, languages, sounds, music, tools, art and even whole societies. The Arctic Studies Center of the Smithsonian Institute contributed their own unique collection of materials from their archives and current research from the Arctic and Subarctic, and video from the Museum of the American Indian. There will be a beautiful mix of materials showcasing endangered languages, astronomy, poetry, literature … Aztec sun gods, Southwestern ‘sun daggers’ and much else (some never seen or heard before). Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Solar Lab provides high intensity sun streaming from fourteen satellites.
“Viewers around the world will be able to catch the 24-hour feed throughout the Solstice period from the homepage via their smart phones, tablets or laptops, or attend one of the intimate live Solstice Pilot Launch parties to connect with an international community of Solstice enthusiasts. After the event, the Solstice 2016 website will feature highlights of the program and an interactively searchable database with contributions from our participants. It will be an assembly of unique world music and historical solstice materials for each time-zone as well as poetry, stories and event listings.
“This platform gives a live counter point to the additional artistic and science events and programs that are happening in planetariums before and after the Solstice as well. One notably important Solstice 2016 event will be in Warsaw, celebrating the 500-year anniversary of the renaissance mathematician and astronomer Copernicus, an early scientific Solstice hero who taught us that the earth evolves around the sun, and not the other way around.
“We expect that the use of social media will create a viral communication wave that runs around the earth melding comments, dialogue, events, photos, videos, sound recordings and local music to a degree the world has never seen before. The top moments will likely be combined into a beautiful video production, pod-casts and book.
“Some of the participants in this event have collaborated before on (Solstice) celebrations and artistic or musical endeavours; others are newly embracing the idea to share their talents and spirit on this special day in this unique way and add to the multitude of sounds and voices. The enthusiasm is overwhelming and promises that this day will be an amazing, deep collaboration about the sun and the earth, its people and its celebrations.
Three more engaging shows around the London fringes. Two have press releases which speak for themselves, while I wrote some babble for the other one (since it’s the first time I’ve covered one of the bands in a long time, while the other band turns out to be a trio who could use some more words spent on them)…
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Crick Crack Club Presents
Fairytales for Grown-ups – The Devil’s Purse The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Wednesday 22nd June 2016, 7:30 pm – information
“Beguiling, tricksy, highly-strung, and suspiciously helpful – the Little People are waiting in the shadows, beneath your feet, under the tables, and even in the cracks in the walls. They’re waiting to prove just how hard it is to tell that they are there… On hot summer nights their world is a breath away and on long winter evenings they have far too much time on their hands.
“Dominic Kelly, Bridget Marsden and Leif Ottosson fuse storytelling performance and Nordic music in a wild journey into the cinema of the imagination. A lost traveller finds himself guided through the mountain mists; a farmer marries an apparently perfect wife; a drunk gambles with a purse that is forever full, and an anxious mother watches her child turn to skin and bone… Come spend some time in the company of Themselves, the Gentry Below, the Good Folk, the sylphs, the sprites, the fairies, and a labyrinth of stories.
“Dominic is a performance storyteller whose dynamic style has captivated audiences across the UK, Sweden, and around the world. He has performed in many prominent venues and festivals including The Barbican and the National Theatre in London, The Times Literature Festival, and on tour internationally from India to the Arctic Circle. Bridget and Leif form a duo whose interpretations of Nordic folk music take place in a filmic borderland of tunes and soundscapes. Leif challenges conventional ways of using the accordion and has distinguished himself on the Swedish folk scene as an instrumentalist, composer and arranger. Bridget studied folk music at Stockholm’s Kungliga Musikhögskolan: her band Stormsteg won Best Newcomer at the Swedish Folk & World Music Awards 2012.”
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IKLECTIK presents:
Rothko + Ghost Mind IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 23rd June 2016, 8.00pm – information
At IKLECTIK, a concert of two fascinating experimental acts creating powerfully visual and immersive music.
Aiming to explore the full sonic possibilities of his instrument (and inspired by the towering ‘Seagram Murals’ in the Tate Gallery), bass guitarist Mark Beazley founded Rothko in London during 1997. The initial lineup was a triple-bass trio with Crawford Blair and Jon Meade (of on-off London math-rockers Geiger Counter), which for three years clanged, droned, whirred and rumbled around its own constantly expanding iron-grey niche.
Creating great frowning arches of dark notes, torrential thrums of noise or transcendent etched outlines in the lower ranges, Rothko insisted on being judged as pure music, batting away any enclosing accusations of being post-punk, post-Gothic, post-rock, or anything similar. Somehow they managed to achieve this aim, defying all expectations by becoming universal and making inroads into the awareness, the perception and the affections of a wide and diverse audience. They found favour amongst the kind of sternly political art-music devotees who’d immerse themselves in ‘The Wire’, amongst the brain-knitting psychedelic leanings of London math-rock enthusiasts, and amongst the surprised followers of various indie bands who’d taken a shine to them and taken the opportunity to stick them onto a live bill. After three albums (and various EPs and collaborations) they bowed out in 2001 after a successful support slot with Porcupine Tree, playing to an audience of progressive rock fans.
While the original Rothko is arguably the best-known version, Mark maintained the Rothko name and core concept for another nine years across a solo presentation, a bass duo, an wide-screen ambient septet (which swallowed up consenting fellow travellers Delicate AWOL) and a more rhythmic quartet. While the various versions of the band were always underpinned by Mark’s resonant four-string underlay – a slatey burr or baritonic voice speaking out of the deep – the bass-guitar-only rule was relaxed to allow other instruments into the space such as flute, voice, electric guitar, piano and viola (while the synths and drums of the last and longest-lived lineup even occasionally hinted at a post-Can rumble). After Rothko, Mark took his skills and explorations solo, and formed new bass-friendly projects: Low Bias (with Pere Ubu’s syntheur Gagarin), Signals (with Phil Julian and textural guitarist Chris Gowers), Tetherdown (with Anne Garner and James Murray), and Rome Pays Off (in which he reunited with Crawford Blair)
Reactivated in 2015, a revived Rothko saw Mark re-teamed with ex-Delicate AWOL bassist and later solo recordist Michael D. Donnelly (his main partner in the post-2000 lineups). Together, they revisited their previous duo work while expanding it with additional lessons learned (in technique, in sonic attitude, in being an interpreter of feeling) during the five year break. A new EP, ‘Severed Tense’ arrived in September last year; a new album ‘Discover The Lost’ is now available on pre-order.
(recent Rothko track Truths And Signs)
This particular gig at IKLECTIK, however, showcases a newer Rothko lineup of Mark plus Johny Brown (the latter better known as the frontman of long-running post-punk poetry rockers Band Of Holy Joy, with whom Mark played during the Rothko layoff). Eschewing both past and recent work, they’ll be performing a set of all-new material from a work in progress – a new album called ‘A Young Fist Wrapped Around A Cinder For A Wager’, which they’re planning to record shortly.
While I might be behind the most recent developments, listening to the recent Beazley/Donnelly material has reminded me about what drew me to Rothko in the first place – their ability to grab such fascinating visual evocations out of the kind of low frequencies which you’d think would restrict them. From dirty crumbling bass notes they sketch a grumbling, majestic London ambience of half-forgotten post-industrial structure: the kind you find while turning down sidestreets running under grimy, half-forgotten Victorian railway viaducts or hosting the grand shells of factories. At least, that’s what they seem to do from where I’m listening. Mark apparently draws significant inspiration from sojourns in quiet rural locations far from the pressure and grime of great cities. It’s generally true that what any one listener draws out of Rothko tends to be only a few facets of the band’s mysterious kaleidoscope.
With roots in the Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra, Ghost Mind is an experimental soundscape collaboration currently consisting of trumpet player Pete Robson, percussionist Stuart Wilding, and Jon Andriessen on heavily-treated guitar, combined with a background of found sounds gathered from around the planet. They present themselves as “a four-person trio” (the fourth member being the titular ghost). Live, they’re a magical concoction, with Stuart’s percussion exploits recalling the startling, fleeting and unforgettable work that Jamie Muir brought to various Derek Bailey bands and King Crimson in the 1970s, Pete’s trumpet journeying from jazz-mute musings and trombone impressions to free-improv mouthpiece splutters, and Jon’s heavily-processed guitar creating dense architectural fabrics and noise blocks but sometimes rising up with plangent, momentary clean licks.
Working together, Ghost Mind create aural experiences which suggest both the world traveller and the documentary edit suite. Their instrumental illustrations and interspersed field recordings link temples to shopping precincts or treetops hung with birdsong, or link toyshops to ping-pong matches; while further human-driven sounds flicker briefly through the mileu via interjections of harmonica and glockenspiel, water-warbling bird whistles, drum notes to shoe-scrapes and miscellaneous tickings. The fact that it all sounds musical throughout – as compelling to children and casual attendees as to dedicated deep listeners – is another of their creative triumphs.
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Tigmus presents:
Ánde Somby: The Animals Inside The Man And The Man Outside The Animals Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Friday 24th June 2016, 7.00pm – information
“The Sámi people are a transnational minority living in Sápmi, an area of land stretching across the borders of northern Scandinavia, Finland, and throughout the Kola Peninsula of north-western Russia. Yoik (also spelt joik or jojk) is the Sámi’s ancient and characteristic vocal art, with yoiks traditionally used to invoke a person, animal, place, or experience. You don’t yoik about something, you just ‘yoik it’.
“Ánde Somby yoiks animals including salmon, grouse, bear, crow and mosquito, but his signature yoik is that of the wolf. The wolf yoik is a traditional yoik that Somby has developed with dramatic elements in an expressive performance. Somby has been an active musician since 1976 and has performed for royalty, heads of state and even at the funeral of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren! His many animal yoiks are inspired by the idea of transformation in the pre-Christian Sámi religion, when the noaidi (shaman) used yoiks to transform into an animal and back into a human. Somby is also a professor of law at the University of Tromsø and is engaged in Sámi social and political issues.
“In January 2016 Somby released the album “Yoiking With The Winged Ones”, recorded outdoors in Lofoten by the renowned British sound artist artist and field recorder, Chris Watson. The recordings took place in Kvalnes, mid June 2014, in a moment while the Arctic winds were having a little rest.”
Fresh off their appearance at the remarkable Sin Eater Festival (which I’ll really have to pay some better attention to, next year), psychedelic folk duo Rusalnaia embark on a short English tour this coming week.
A sisterly alliance of acclaimed Anglo-American dark-folkster Sharron Kraus and prog/neopsych-influenced American folkie Gillian Chadwick (of Ex Reverie and Woodwose), the duo originally took shape while both women were neighbours in Fishtown, Philadelphia. Named after a placatory festival for mischievous, tickling and murderous Slavic water-nymphs, citing such touchstones as Comus, Trees, Mellow Candle, Ingar Bergman and Jefferson Airplane as influences, and self-described as “a luminously pagan witches brew”, the project is a close-bound duet of voices and (mostly) acoustic guitars. Softly-sung, it limns its lovely and carefully-crafted songs with a halo of harmonies and a mood of anticipation (and, on record at least, dashes of electric acid lead guitar, dulcimer, penny whistles and goat’s-nail shakers).
The imminent second Rusalnaia album ‘Time Takes Away’ is a rockier affair than the debut. In order to perform it live, Gill and Sharron will be backed by Sheffield drummer Guy Whittaker (Magpies, Big Eyes Family Players, Sarah Smout) and by Nottingham acoustic/electric guitarist Nick Jonah Davis (an acclaimed modal player in a mingled Bert Jansch/Nick Drake/John Fahey tradition, who usually plays either solo or as a member of the Fains duo alongside violinist Jo Cormack). Between them, Sharron and Nick will also be covering most of the tour’s support slots as solo performers.
Tour dates are as follows:
The Booth Hall, 3 East Street Hereford, Hereford, HR1 2LW, England, Monday 20th June 2016 (with Sproatly Smith + Jus-Jay DJ set) – information here and here
Dulcimer, 567 Wilbraham Rd, Chorlton, Manchester, M21 0AE, England, Wednesday 22nd June 2016 (with Sharron Kraus solo slot + Nick Jonah Davis) – information
Tor Bookings @ The Golden Lion, Fielden Square, Todmorden, OL14 6LZ , England, Thursday 23rd June 2016 (with Nick Jonah Davis + Fuzzy Hell + Frances Chang) – information
Nottingham, Friday 24th June 2016 (possible gig – venue details and support t.b.c. – keep checking Sharron’s Facebook page)
There will also be two further Rusalnaia festival appearances – at the free Leigh Folk Festival, Leigh-on-Sea, on Saturday 25th June; and at the SoL Party event near Hawkhurst in Kent (some time between Friday 8th and Sunday 10th July, during which time Sharron will be performing another solo set).
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En route, Rusalnaia will be linking up with some other, fascinating folk performers. The Hereford show features (in addition to a DJ set by Jus-Jay) Sproatly Smith, a self-propelled Welsh Borders institution led by guitarist and sonic visionary Ian Smith and multi-instrumentalist Matt King. This acoustic/electric collective create enthralling music inspired by rural life, ancient landscape, sundry traditional piecings (they draw on all manner of British Isles folk), Anglican metaphysics (they’ve written a whole album of Thomas Traherne poetry settings) and transitional psychedelic experiences.
The Sproatly sound is that of hilltop trips, in either sense – they sound like wide-open rural receivers, drawing in feelings, events and memories across multiple times and from multiple simultaneous perspectives. They spin out booming resonant instrumentals; hums and fragments and drones; tangles of spidery guitar and banjo; drifting childlike backward-reverbed vocals, nursery rhymes and field recordings, while still touching the earth with one toe (via singer Sarah’s anchoring of words and melody). Sitting at the heart of a growing Hereford scene of exploratory traditional musicians; they’ve redubbed their home country “Weirdshire”. When you listen to what their surroundings have inspired in their music, you can entirely empathize.
At the Sheffield show – dedicated to the summer solstice – one of the event organisers, Rob Lee, will be adding a DJ set drawing on “ethnographic recordings, velvet-clad Canterbury scenesters, private-press vanity folk, analogue madrigals and pagan jazz.” The folk remit is expanded even further with the addition of performance artist Arianne Churchman, who explores British folk traditions and rituals and reinterprets the same into modern life. Not a musician per se, she uses film, sound sculpture and costumed dancing in her works; so expect something a little immersive which won’t necessarily stay on the stage. Here are a couple of videos – one dealing with her Metal Harvest project and one recording a previous collaboration with Sharron Kraus.
Possibly encouraged by promoters Tor Press (who’ve already got a reputation for presenting and championing interesting music in and around their Yorkshire fastness) the Todmorden show teams up the travelling Rusalnaia circus with a couple of artists from New York State’s DIY label Life On An Island.
I’m not sure of the identity of the woman who travels under the name of Fuzzy Hell, nor of where she parks her guitar: the information which I can pick up suggests Long Island beginnings but a possible self-chosen, on/off exile in rural Ireland. All I can go on are the songs, which are wonderful. Sharply observant, witty, detached and sometimes sad; their spare, precise fingerpicking seasoned with sonic reversals, sound-aura or tape warble, their tone lies somewhere between Liz Phair and Dorothy Parker, dipping into classical legend, contemporary barlife and timeless personal complications with an equal and universal aplomb and without floundering self-indulgence. The kind of bird-bright-eyed songwriter whom you’d yearn to meet, but would be terrified of making a fool of yourself in front of.
Frances Chang is currently best known as the co-fronter of New York neo-shoegaze band Giant Peach, whose insouciant guitar-fuzzed alt.rock songs have garnered them plenty of praise in recent years. Her work as songwriter, however, started around a decade ago with her own bedroom solo project Neato Fleets (which apparently informs this current solo outing). Sonically, these songs can travel quite a distance from traditional or even psychedelic folk – electric from the off, the technique often a lo-fi indie scrub, the presentation sometimes undergoing casual, almost unconscious intensifications into deafening distortion. But the underpinnings are folk, and are evidence of the sensibilities of a born singer-songwriter – melodic, open lyrical examinations and sharings of intense, expanding feelings, and of making sense of the inrush of sensation when you seem to be missing a thicker skin. It’d be interesting to see what she makes of this different live setting – a thousand miles from home, in an English market town, in a mostly acoustic milieu.
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Misfit City 