Quick news on a couple of experimental gigs – one featuring Cindytalk vocal/noise icon Gordon Sharp at the head of a surge of electrophonic noise, the other headed up by the computers-versus-early-music-instruments conflations of Stephan Mathieu…
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Chaos Theory Music Promotions presents:
Becoming///Animal + The Brain Center At Whipple’s + Mark Dicker Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Thursday 5th April 2018, 7.30 pm – information here, here and here
“We proudly present a special event at Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston, with the latest project by bassist Massimo Pupillo of Zu and vocalist Gordon Sharp of This Mortal Coil and Cindytalk, Becoming///Animal. Their first album ‘A Distant Hand Lifted’, is an intense, filtered orchestra that roars and hisses, becoming one with magnificent haunting vocals. It’s out now on Trost Records.
“The Brain Center At Whipple’s is an experimental semi-improvisational trio who use noise and electronics shamelessly. Last seen by us when they DJed at mouse on the keys, Mutiny on the Bounty and Strobes at Rich Mix London last year.
“Mark Dicker of Bruxa Maria and Palehorse will be performing his solo project, rife with heavy electronic sounds and audio experimentation.”
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Stephan Mathieu + Howlround IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 14th April 2018, 7.30 pm – information here and here
“Stephan Mathieu is a self taught composer and performer working in the field of electroacoustic music. His sound is largely based on early instruments and obsolete media, which are recorded and transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and dedicated software processes; it has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the work of Colorfield artists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.
“Stephan operates Schwebung Mastering, a high end service specialized in preparing audio for analog and digital products and runs the Schwebung label from the Rhine valley near Cologne.
“First coming to prominence with hugely-acclaimed 2012 LP ‘The Ghosts Of Bush’, Howlround is a quintet (four slightly battered machines, one operator in the shape of sound artist Robin The Fog) that creates recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden – a process that has seen their work compared to William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and even the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread.
“In an age where one can create all manner of electronic music with a simple swipe of a mouse, Howlround prove not only how much fun is to be had in making things complicated again, but conversely just how little effort is sometimes needed to create a genuinely uncanny and beguiling sound-world: the rough underbelly of our pristine, Pro-Tools universe. Their latest release, a split LP with Marta De Pascalis, recorded right here at IKLECTIK will be released shortly, with a 6th official LP following later this year.”
Information’s starting to come through on a defiantly heterogenous and diverse festival springing up in Stoke Newington towards the end of the month, delving into electroclassical and folk music forms, queerness, multiculturalism and the concept of English nationality in (and in spite of) ugly times. Details on this are still taking shape, so I’ll drop in what I’ve got now and add to it later, when I can…
The Old Church, The Nest Collective & others present:
‘What is England?’ The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England,
20th-23rd April 2018, various times – information here
“A four-day festival in the run up to St George’s Day, ‘What Is England?’ offers a chance for everyone to reimagine ‘Englishness’ in an inclusive, welcoming way, at a time when a toxic form of nationalism is on the rise.
“The festival includes the European debut of ‘The Good Immigrant’, an electroclassical song cycle for voice looper, sitar and electronics about race and identity by vocalist/composer Bishi. Co-produced with composer and sound designer Jeff Cook, the song cycle received its world premiere at The Ferus Festival in January 2018 in New York. The music is inspired by ‘The Good Immigrant’ by Nikesh Shukla, a collection of essays by 21 BAME writers, ruminating on race & identity in contemporary Britain. Each song is a response to a particular essay in the book, with special audio quotes sampled in from personal interviews conducted with writers Nikesh Shukla, Salena Godden and Darren Chetty, ending with a choral setting of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Where The Mind is Without Fear’.
“In this work, Bishi takes a personal & intersectional journey reflecting on her experiences. As a British-Bengali daughter of immigrants, adopted by London’s community of alternative queer nightlife, she has lived through a unique cross-section of London’s contemporary urban landscape. ‘The Good Immigrant’ is a call to arms to explore our differences so that we may find more unity and empathy in a divided world. Having been trained in eastern and western classical music, and experienced performing in a Bulgarian choir, Bishi takes her influences from a variety of musical styles. Major musical influences include electronic producers Burial and Arca, and vocalists such as Meredith Monk and Lisa Gerrard.
“Also as part of the festival, modern folk initiative The Nest Collective presents a very special St George’s day involving established and merging talent in English folk, again looking at the idea of Englishness. Confirmed artists so far include Ansuman Biswas, Suna Alan and John Spiers.
“Believing that “music spreads throughout the environment like a perfume.. it soaks into the fabric of other things and people”, Ansuman is an Kolkata-born percussionist, interdisciplinary artist and composer who has been commissioned by Tate Modern, National Theatre, English Ballet and has worked with Bjork and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and in world music hybrid quartet Newanderthal (“four humans, three continents”).
“Suna is a Kurdish/Alevi singer based in London whose family moved to Smyrna (Izmir) in her early childhood (meaning that much of her formative years were spent surrounded by traditional Kurdish dengbêj music and Kurdish-Alevi laments within a rich cosmopolitan cultural environment). Her main focus is Kurdish folk songs from the four regions of Kurdistan, namely Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, but her repertoire also includes Armenian, Greek, Sephardic and Turkish songs.
“John Spiers, known better in folk circles as Squeezy, has made a name for himself as one of the leading squeezebox players of his generation, playing with Eliza Carthy’s Ratcatchers band, Bellowhead and the duo Spiers and Boden (with Jon Boden).”
Rough details on the festival dates and events below: with panel events, DJs and an as-yet-unrevealed event for the Sunday slot, expect things to expand. With ‘The Quietus’ involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if a New Weird Britain strand began to weave its way into proceedings…
Friday 20 April, 7.00pm – festival launch: ‘The Good Immigrant’, plus NTS and The Quietus DJs and What Is England? panel event – tickets
Saturday 21 April, 10.30am – OPEN: Morning including “make-you-own-flag” event with OPEN:Art/Output Arts – tickets
Saturday 21 April, 7.00pm – The Good Immigrant, with DJs and ‘The Good Nationalist?’ panel event – tickets
Sunday 22 April – details t.b.c.
Monday 23 April, 7.00pm – Nest Collective’s St George’s day event featuring Ansuman Biswas, Suna Alan, John Spiers and others t.b.c. – tickets
Dips into the mid-twentieth century New York School (including its work with graphic scores) and into unintentionally sprightly electronica characterise a surprisingly sober, instrumentally-based April show for Kammer Klang.
Kammer Klang presents:
Kammer Klang: Caterina Barbieri + Zwerm Ensemble (playing John Dowland, Earle Brown and Joanna Baillie) + RAM Experimental Music Ensemble (playing Morton Feldman) Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 3rd April 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Opening, the Royal Academy of Music’s Experimental Music Ensemble present Morton Feldman‘s rarely-performed, highly textured septet piece ‘The Straits Of Magellan’. Dating back to 1961, the piece’s graphical score is an array of coded time boxes, each containing representative symbols for single or simultaneous notes/durations/colourations; while the dynamics of the composition are explicitly and sternly noted (with minimal note attacks, a generally quiet approach but multiple instructions for glissandi, harmonics etc), the pitches are left entirely up to the players’ choices. Here’s one of the many possible interpretations:
In the middle of the bill are Belgian electric guitar quartet Zwerm Ensemble (avant-garde favourites whose collaborations and performance credits include Fred Frith, Mauro Pawlowski, Larry Polansky, Eric Thielemans, Yannis Kyriakides and Etienne Guilloteau) The four members (Toon Callier, Johannes Westendorp, Bruno Nelissen and Kobe van Cauwenberghe) will present arrangements of ‘Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens’ (by peerless Renaissance lute composer John Dowland), ‘December 1952’ (by twentieth century “open form” pioneer Earle Brown,and, like the Feldman piece, sourced from a graphic score) plus a performance of ‘Last Song From Charleroi’, a new seventeen-minute work for four electric guitars and tape composed by Joanna Bailie. Examples of playing, pieces and general composer tone below…
Headlining, Italian composer and voltage-controlled-sequencer specialist Caterina Barbieri will perform a solo electronic set of her “ecstatic computation” music. Berlin-based, she explores “themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism” and “psycho-physical effects of repetition and pattern-based operations in music, by investigating the polyphonic and polyrhythmic potential of sequencers to draw severe, complex geometries in time and space.”
In practise, this is surprisingly accessible. Her work (including her recent ‘Patterns Of Consciousness’ album, composed entirely on Verbos Harmonic Oscillator and ER-101 Indexed Quad Sequencer) initially sounds closer to the pop-synth airiness of Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream records from the ‘70s; even to the rhythmic clink of Larry Heard or the warm chitter of Jean-Michel Jarre. But even if there are similarities to ‘Pong’ or ‘Popcorn’ – especially live – this is merely a side effect of structure. Caterina’s work is intended as an austere examination of qualities: its primitive but plaintive blippery coming about due to her wish to avoid signature synth sounds, concentrating instead on careful shifts of accenture, attack and shaping on basic sine tones, accelerating and decelerating. The emotional content – like the unexpected danceability – apparently comes despite her intentions. Live, she fits right in with populist EM; sometimes, though, in the studio, she can come across as more raw, glitchy and forbidding. Perhaps in the tougher Kammer Klang environment, more of this side will will emerge.
It’s not exactly surprising that Kavus Torabi has finally gone solo. There’s too much hopeful, demanding inventiveness in him ever to submit entirely to the dynamics of a group, despite the fact that he’s currently got at least three on the go, most of them with him at the helm – the brassy lysergically-illuminated avant-pop of Knifeworld; the ritual instrumentalism of Guapo, and the cantering countercultural circus of Gong (transferred onto his lanky shoulders, history and all, following the 2015 death of Daevid Allen).
What’s more surprising is the direction he’s chosen for the first records under his own name (the new ‘Solar Divination’ EP and a full upcoming album for later in the year). A darker, more agrarian take on his psychedelic homeground, this time it’s drumless, bassless, hornless – rinsed clear of the capering squirrel energy he’s shown for twenty-odd years, in order to reveal muted, angsty bones. Mostly based around slow, smoky-lunged harmonium stretches and sparse flotsam drags of guitar chording, this is a more foreboding turn of song, haunted by deaths, loss and disintegrations. It’s never mopey or lachrymose, thank goodness (even in Knifeworld or The Monsoon Bassoon, Kavus knew how to undercut joyous tootling with passing shadows without souring the milk) but these new songs are overcast with sombre vulnerability: the gravel-grain in Kavus’ voice welling up from deeper, ghostlier territories than before.
Despite being a couple of decades younger than Kavus, Cosmo Sheldrake has been out on his own for a bit longer. It’s been four-and-a-half years since Cosmo put out anything as part of super-eclectic mongrel troupe Gentle Mystics, but during that time he’s been gently dabbing the release schedules with occasional singles, videos and EPs of his own. Earlier work brought some of the Mystics weird and charming vibe along with it: a homemade-toy, party-in-the-fairy-forest feeling, Cosmo lilting skewed nursery-rhyme verses over softly bouncing weaves of melody. In the videos, he came across as a generous digital troubadour on a set of meandering visitations, playing his lashed-up keyboards-and-tech assemblages for performances in model villages, truck beds, pigsties and fishing boats.
Byronic-looking but Branestawm-minded, Cosmo’s a shed-pop tinkerer and a baffling multi-instrumentalist with a mixed mystical/academic background. Part kid’s entertainer and part hippy-boffin, he has a shamanical nose for the margin between nonsense and connection. More recent efforts (trailing the imminent release of his debut album ‘The Much Much How How and I’) have seen chewier, pacier and poppier songs. The videos, meanwhile, have become an ingenious riot of increasingly theatrical, fantastical and sometimes macabre fabling in which foil monsters swim in canvas seas and giant fluffy headlice run amok. There’s a communal, childlike warmth to what he does: not perhaps a guileless wonder, but a sense of celebration, where fables and singalongs and misadventures become part of the accepted, useful junk with which we build our nests.
Kavus’ upcoming tour is a brief series of simmering April dots around England and Wales; Cosmo’s is a more leisurely, lengthy two-month loop, garlanding the British Isles and western Europe. They’re not sharing any shows, or even any venues. The only time they overlap in any respect is on the 25th of April, when they’re playing different but simultaneous one-man shows a stone’s throw apart in Bristol. It would be nice to think of them looking up midset on that one evening, peering across that city-central loop of the Avon, and nodding to each other. Not necessarily natural comrades but, in their way, parallel leywalkers. Each with a bit of Barrett in the back pocket, each with a peculiar charm of innocence, each with fingertips in the otherworldly and the mythic. The uncontainables…
Kavus’ tour also happens to be a chance to catch an intriguing spread of fellow musicians, reflecting the wide body of musical ideas and affinities he touches upon. While in Margate (squeezed into a former Victorian coach house transformed into the Japanese/Alpine cheese dream of a minature theatre), he lines up with two left-field folk acts: the organ-draped, ridge-walking green-chapel psychedelia of Arch Garrison and the mysterious brand-new “wonk-folk” of Bovril (featuring Tuung’s Mike Lindsay). In Birmingham, the bill sharer is Scaramanga Six songwriter Paul Morricone, providing gutsy acoustic songs of fear and brutality with lashing of dark Yorkshire humour. Paul and Kavus also reunite in York for the Tim Smith fundraiser Evening of Fadeless Splendour, alongside the off-kilter art rock of Redbus Noface and the sarcastic-bastard English songcraft of Stephen Gilchrist (a.k.a. Stephen Evens).
On his Manchester date, Kavus will be supported by Peaks (Ben Forrester, formerly of shouty slacker-punk duo Bad Grammar and Manc math-rock supertrio Gug, now performing “loop-driven emo pop”). In London, it’ll be V Ä L V E – once an avant-garde solo project (full of belches and found sounds, situational scoring and sound-art jokes) for Kavus’ Knifeworld bandmate Chloe Herington, now an increasingly ubiquitous three-woman live trio (evolved and evolving into a warm-hearted feminist/Fluxus/Rock In Opposition massing of harps, bassoon, punk bass and singalong bunker-folk). In Leeds, Kavus plays the quiet support act in a free gig for tintinnabulating Sheffield post-metallers May The Night Bless You With Heavenly Dreams (whose echoing tremstrumental pinings add a little magical shimmy to the usual doleful post-rock astronomy) and Bristolian experimental rockers Madilan (whose songs recall both the angst-shredded psychedelic night-journeys of Oceansize and also, in their spindly electronics and Autotuned vocal musing, post-Oceansize rocktronicists British Theatre).
In contrast, most of Cosmo’s dates are solo – possibly because once he’s unshipped his assorted instruments and gizmos (from euphoniums and banjos to loop pedals and pennywhistles), there’s not much room for anyone else in the dressing room. Nonetheless, support for eight of the European April dates comes from Liverpool-based Norwegian girl trio I See Rivers, who wed their outstanding and eerily resonant Scandinavian vocal harmonies, sunny dispositions and scanty guitar to their own balloon-light, touching folk-pop songs and to heart-thawing covers of Daughter (Medicine), George Ezra (Budapest), and Whitney Houston (‘80s wedding fave I Wanna Dance With Somebody).
For the London album launch for ‘The Much Much How How and I’, Cosmo and I See Rivers are joined by Bunty – “multi-dimensional beat merchant and vocal juggler” Kassia Zermon. Also to be found fronting jazz/junk/folk trio Le Juki, co-fronting dub act Resonators, and co-running Brightonian experimental label Beatabet, Kassia’s run Bunty for years as a loopstation-based “one woman electro-orchestra” bolstered by her multi-instrumentalism and vivid imagination. Parallels with Cosmo are clear (the looping and beatboxing, a life blossoming with social art initiatives and therapeutic work beyond the entertainments) and she guests on one of the ‘Much Much’ tracks (very much an equal passing through, with a cheeky hug and a bit of upstaging), but her own vision is distinct. Giddier, jazzier, less directly English in its whimsy, with input from her Moroccan heritage and from her taste for Andy Kaufman; a slightly more cosmic playbox; imaginary languages; an undiluted Brightonian fabulosity.
Kassia’s last Bunty album, ‘Multimos’, was a pocket-sized multimedia event spanning apps, interactive AV, dream machines, audience choirs and gaming cues. Time and occasion will probably only allow a smidgin of that, this time around, but it’ll be a window onto her explosively colourful world.
The Mother’s Ruin, 7-9 St. Nicholas Street, Bristol, BS1 1UE, England, Wednesday 25th April 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
West Street Live, 128 West Street, Sheffield, S1 4ES, England, Thursday 26th April 2018, 7.00pm (supporting Madilan + May The Night Bless You With Heavenly Dreams) – information
An Evening Of Fadeless Splendour @ The Fulford Arms, 121 Fulford Road, York, Yorkshire, YO10 4EX, England, Friday 27th April 2018, 7.00pm (with Redbus Noface + Paul Morricone + Stephen Gilchrist) – information here and here
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England, Sunday 29th April 2018, 7.00pm (with V Ä L V E) – information here and here
Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England, Thursday 5th April 2018, 7.30pm (album launch, with Bunty + I See Rivers) – information here and here
Soup Kitchen, 31-33 Spear Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M1 1DF, England, Friday 6th April 2018, 7.00pm (+ tbc) – information here and here
Headrow House, 19 The Headrow, LS1 6PU Leeds, Saturday 7th April 2018, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Fluc + Fluc Wanne, Praterstern 5, 1020 Vienna, Austria, Austria, Monday 9th April 2018, 8.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Feierwerk, Hansastr. 39-41, 81373 Munich, Germany, Tuesday 10th April 2018, 7.30pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Artheater, Ehrenfeldgürtel 127, 50823 Cologne, Germany, Wednesday 11th April 2018, 8.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information
Molotow, Nobistor 14, 22767 Hamburg, Germany, Thursday 12th April 2018, 7.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Lido, Cuvrystrasse 7, 10997 Berlin, Germany, Friday 13th April 2018, 8.00pm (with I See Rivers) – information here and here
Paradiso, Weteringschans 6-8, 1017SG Amsterdam, Netherlands, Tuesday 17th April 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Exchange, 72-73 Old Market Street, Bristol, BS2 0EJ, England, Wednesday 25th April 2018, 7.30pm (+ tbc) – information here and here
Ancienne Belgique, Anspachlaan 110, 1000 Brussels, Belgium, Friday 27th April 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
Ninkasi Gerland Kafé, 267 Rue Marcel Mérieux, 69007 Lyon, France, Wednesday 2nd May 2018, 8.30pm – information here
Point Éphémère, 200 Quai de Valmy, 75010 Paris, France, Thursday 3rd May 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
News on an interesting jazz/world concert series kicking off at the ever-promising Poplar Union, plus a Scandinavian-tinged classical/folk/fusion event in Stoke Newington…
“Fast Fusion is a live pop-up music installation bringing artists from jazz and world music genres together to write ten minutes of new work in just five hours. You get to witness the magic of art being made live in public before artists formally perform their final piece(s) at the end of the afternoon. The live audio is recorded to produce the Fast Fusion Takeaway Track(s), which you can then stream or download free. Sessions are also filmed and edited down to a short documentary-style video of the speed composition process.
“The second session (and first public session) brings together a dynamic group of musicians – singer/multi-instrumentalist Louisa Jones (who plays double bass, accordion and clarinet, and brings the swinging sounds of early jazz styles), Shirley Smart (a versatile, inventive cellist, and rare exponent of jazz cello), Mulele Matondo (a visionary bassist and guitarist from the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Yaw Asumadu (a master drummer, xylophone player and flautist from Ghana).”
The first session (a private jam in Studio Lumumba in East London to test the waters) featured Mulele Matondo plus London jazz trumpeter Mike Soper, Eliane Correa (a prolific Latin/jazz/fusion pianist, composer and arranger) and Lizy Exell (leader of the Old Hat Jazz Band and drummer for some of London’s other finest rising jazz groups, including Nerija). Here’s what they came up with:
Further sessions will follow – some of them at Poplar Union, although the idea is to bring the pop-up Fast Fusion format to many different performance spaces around London.
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Woodburner presents:
‘Nordic Folk Meets Baroque’: Erik Rydvall, Olav Mjelva & Max Baillie The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England
Wednesday 4th April 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
“Two award-winningstars of Scandinavian folk music – nyckelharpa player Erik Rydvall and Hardanger fiddle player Olav Mjelva – team up with violin and viola virtuoso Max Baillie for their debut concert here in London at the gorgeous Old Church in Stoke Newington.
“Having met in the snowy north of Norway in February, they posted some videos of their unique renditions of Bach; a few days and over sixty thousand views later they were quickly picked up by Classic FM online, Norwegian Radio, and were invited to perform live on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune program on April 2nd.
This is their special debut concert in London together. They will present a brand new concert of music including Bach, Merula, and Couperin played in a unique way that brings together string traditions from Norway, Sweden and the Baroque period alongside both traditional and original music from Scandinavia.”
(I’m sure I’ve come across something like this before… ah, yes, here it was…)
More News From Nowhere presents:
MNFN Good Friday All-Dayer (featuring Kodian Trio + Warren Schoenbright + V Ä L V E + Marlo Eggplant + Minus Pilots + Ow Te + Blick | Trio + Grave Threat + Red Team) New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Friday 30th March 2018, 3.00pm – information here and here
Walthamstow experimental evening More News From Nowhere hops the Lea again for another stint at the New River Studios in Harringay: this time an all-dayer.
A number of improvising threesomes are on hand. Kodian Trio (tagged as “meticulously disjointed free improv” by ‘Cyberinsekt’) unites saxophonist and Raw Tonk label head Colin Webster (who played at MNFN’s February event), Belgian dronetronic guitarist Dirk Serries (better known as Vidna Obmana or Fear Falls Burning) and Shatner’s Bassoon drummer Andrew Lisle. A more directly ambient-jazz approach is offered by Blick | Trio (comprising Blowpipe/Gyratory System veteran Robin Blick on assorted wind and brass, Andrew Moran on drums and James Weaver on bass, synth and programming). It’s a bit of a competition, but probably the least formal of the lot are Stoke-on-Trent-based “math-jazz wizards”Ow Te (featuring members of Stokie punks Amateur Assassins and Bong Idle, and citing a love of Karate, Codeine and The For Carnation, among others).
Another trio is being brought in by reedswoman and experimentalist Chlöe Herington: her increasingly industrious V Ä L V E project continues to build on its beginnings (synaesthesic graphic scores created and realised by Chlöe, bound in with specific memories and events) while simultaneously evolving into a R.I.O./Raincoats-friendly three-woman exploration vehicle via reeds, bass, concert harp and voices. Further female input into the all-dayer is provided by Marlo Eggplant (the Corpus Callosum label head, onetime Olympia punk and lead figure in the “Ladyz In Noyz” initiative), whose own dense drone improvisations are built with processed autoharp and contact mics.
As regards duos, there’s an appearance from Minus Pilots (percussionist Matt Pittori and bassist Adam Barringer, who “weave sparse textures, crumbling atmospheres and fractured drones with currents of gentle crackle”) and from slithering, thickety London drums-and-electronics pairing Warren Schoenbright (Daniel McClennan and Matthew Pastkewicz) who craft lengthy, ambitious and luminous experiments from poised near-silence to hammering viciousness.
A collaboration between two other projects (the “hard Brexit/funeral electronics” of Ashcircle and the effects-chain noise of MNFN’s own Tim Cowlishaw as Violence) was scheduled to lead to Cruciform Passage Grave: something slanting towards the New Weird Britain end of sinister occult soundcraft. In the event, this needed more rehearsal than time allowed; so instead, Tim’s bringing in Cowboy Flying Saucer drummer Dave Bamford to open up the evening with a reunion of their “kraut-psych-improv-noise” duo Red Team (while Ashcircle’s Tom Macarte and Ciaran Mackle reformat themselves as the siren-in-a-washing-machine screech of Grave Threat).
Bernhard Living presents:
‘Corpora Aliena 2’: Liz Helman + Bernhard Living + Christine Webster + Olga Fedorova/Outlaw Compound IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 24th March 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
The second evening in wind-multi-instrumentalist-turned-digital-composer/curator Bernhard Living’s ‘Corpora Aliena’ evenings at IKLECTIK (I missed the first one) continues to present artists who work across a wide range of creative disciplines (in this case, composers who are also filmmakers) while simultaneously keeping up a fair gender balance. Evening no. 2 is “a concert of analogue and digital experimental music performances based on the theme of dreams and shadows… composers who produce subdued sound textures and thoughtful sonic meditations.”
Bernhard is a onetime contemporary classical flute virtuoso with a foot in the British improv scene: from the ’60s onwards he performed Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Cage and Varèse, and worked with Cornelius Cardew, Hugh Davies, Barry Guy, Mike Westbrook and Linder Sterling’s Ludus. His work from the ’90s onwards has been minimal, electronic and concentrates predominantly on sound colour and sonic textures. That said, he claims inspiration from a vast range of American, European and Russian influences (including jazz, Soviet avant-garde visual arts and techno, the last of which he’s attempted to reinvent as an “evolved non-dance form… one that exists within a different cultural context and along a different time continuum.”
The evening features screenings of two works in which Bernhard collaborates with Russian artist and photographer Marinesca Marinesca (who herself cites a different range of inspirations including Hitchcock, Murnau and Tarkovsky plus “the gothic, the works of Dutch masters, the gentle poetry of Goethe and the dark stories of Edgar Allan Poe”, has a mood inclination towards the “classical subtle world” and who appears in her own work as using a “graceful, autistic androgyne” alter ego character. Marinesca also displays a readiness to draw directly from her own dreams, something she appears to share with Bernhard. Their ten-minute ‘Untitled Dream (Homage to Erik Satie)’, with music by Bernhard and images by Marinesca, is based on two separate dreams, each experienced by the two artists separately on the same night. They’ll also be debuting another new 2018 work called ‘The Metaphysics of Colour’. For some pointers towards what to expect, here’s their earlier minimal mood-and-motion piece ‘Dream Door’.
Self-taught London composer and video artist Liz Helman will be presenting tracks from her recently released album ‘Daylight Dreaming‘, which continues her place-sensitive delving into music based on field recordings and her aim of “following the thread of the sound to its ultimate destination, which she likes to think of as sonic alchemy.” She’ll also show three of the short experimental films she made in London between 2007 and 2014, visually exploring “notions of dislocation, memory and displacement”: two from 2014 (‘Light [Drone]’, which uses the processed sound of a Seasonal Affective Disorder lamp, and ‘Peripheral’) and 2013’s one-minuter, ‘Imprint’.
The methods of the Paris-based ambisonic electro-acoustic composer Christine Webster have been influenced by cinema and literature narratives, by the concert possibilities of multiplayer game and virtual reality networks and most recently by the modular synthesis revival. She’ll be mixing between improvised abstractions as well as create live remixes of some of the sound elements from her recent organic/meditative album ‘Iceberg the Drift‘, released earlier this year on Sublunar Society. Christine will also be showing her twenty-six minute 2012 audio-visual piece ‘Fukushima Days’ – a collaboration with Super 8/Rutt Etra video artist Kantoh featuring manipulated footage from the Japanese nuclear disaster, and aiming for “a dark and oppressive feeling, but not without a sense of tragic beauty… a clear support to Fukushima’s endless victims, a warning about the worldwide permanent nuclear threat we have to cope with.”
Bernhard will also be screening new material by Russian digital artist Olga Fedorova, including her ‘Outlaw Compound’ project made in collaboration with multifaceted Belgian vocal/electronic musician Yannick Franck (Raum, Orphan Swords, Idiosyncrasia and Y.E.R.M.O.) and inspired by “tiki culture, exotica, magick and other manifestations of modern escapist tendencies… the fascination of the industrialised world for a widely fantasised state of primitive innocence that it perceived as a lost paradise.” The first Outlaw Compound album ‘New Primitive‘ was recently released on ZamZamRec.
MacGillivray + The Doomed Bird of Providence + Harpoon Group The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Tuesday 20th March 2018, 8:00pm – information here and here
For anyone who missed MacGillivray‘s performance at the Antigen evening in Ipswich last night, she’s headlining again in London on March 20th, formally launching ‘Watermarked in Flame’ (her latest mini-album of scarily reworked traditional folk songs via “sea-wrecked electrics and salt-luck vocals”). For anyone who missed my summary prior to the Antigen show, here it is again.
“When she’s out and about playing music, writing or committing performance art, Kirsten Norrie goes by her ancestral Scottish name MacGillivray, pulling her matrilineal Highland heritage over her head like a mask. With many wannabe artists, this kind of method ends up as no more than an affectation: people short on colour, scraping at the bottom of the pot of history in a vain attempt to garner the last scraps of savour. With Kirsten, it’s different: if it’s a mask, it’s the kind that renders everyday matters and habits transparent, allowing her to express deeper and stranger ideas and fancies fervently. What emerges is startling. MacGillivray it is, then.
“Discovering her is a little like being startled by a slow-motion jack-in-the-box: she’s already got eight albums behind her, a couple of soundtracks and poetry collections, and a collaborator roster which bags a list of left-field folk musicians of all strands and odd definitions, including The Fall (yes, folk, really), The Pogues’ Jem Finer, Dead Rat Orchestra, Trembling Bells and Current 93. Her performance art involves powerful weird rituals – furiously smoking cigars in Sigmund Freud’s garden; conflating mediaeval stocks and death metal; eating chandelier glass in an abandoned shopping centre; carrying a dead sheep on a pilgrimage. As a musician (both recorder and performer), she’s similarly unnerving: experimenting with loudness and quietness via folk drones, piano, savagely distorted electric autoharp and vocal wails, but refusing to hide behind them. Slender, still and intense, she rules a stage, dragging up distressed ghosts and the aftermath of harsh laws and bare beliefs. On this occasion, she’ll be performing tracks from her forthcoming mini-album, ‘Watermarked in Flame’.”
Since I wrote that, ‘Watermarked in Flame’ has surfaced on Bandcamp and revealed itself as a superb live document (akin in certain respects – technological approach, transformative preoccupations and feminist undercurrents – to Kerry Andrew’s similar reinventions as You Are Wolf), in a variety of voicings from softly accessible to eldritch croons and stifled screeches, all filigreed by sparse and singular piano, lap steel guitar, harmonium or electric autoharp (plus some electric guitar apparitions from Primal Scream’s Henry Olsen).
Support comes from The Doomed Bird Of Providence (replacing Mark O’Pilkington & Michael J. York’s Strange Attractor/Coil spinoff, Teleplasmiste) and from Dead Rat Orchestra’s Robin Alderton ( under his Harpoon Group alias.
The Doomed Bird Of Providence was initially the vehicle for the dark songs of Australian émigré Mark Kluzek, who lurched from memories of baked red soil and the bleakest of Aussie colonial Gothic in 2011 with ‘Will Ever Pray’: comically grim and overwrought, it was enough to make Nick Cave sound as cuddly as Burl Ives, and was a furrowed coffin-moan too far, even for me. A second album, ‘Blind Mouths Eat’, arrived in 2013, in which Mark honed and solidified his compulsion to tell stark, painful accounts of cruelties and injustices at the ruthless edge of Victorian Empire.
Following a relocation from London to Manchester, ‘Burrowed Into The Soft Sky’ arrived in September 2017, displaying a shift from songs into twenty-minutes instrumental narratives. Rather than using words, Mark currently bears harsh witness to Australian history via the sifting, blaring reeds of his accordion and a shifting band including percussionist Ian Hothersall, Current 93 violinist Joolie Wood, Extreme Noise Terror bassist Stafford Glover and SOUP/Croft’s Drew Barker; its folk-drone rattle and far-adrift traditional melodies creating a subtly nightmarish, primeval, post-Godspeed depiction of hot sun, hard deeds and fraying roots.
As Harpoon Group, Robin Alderton performs in an arc of creaky audio technology – “Dansettes spinning dubplates, reel-to-reel recorders flailing, dictaphones dying, overdubbed cassettes and bust samplers”. Drawing on found sounds and fragmented antique recordings filtered through or played on these contraptions (and processing them his fine arts background), he endeavours to craft new collaged compositions in a spirit of benevolent, sympathetic audio necromancy, via “ideas of sound recording technology, nostalgia, memory and place – the processes of deterioration, and of the failure of (or grasp for) memory.” There’s not much on him so far, but I did dig up these two brief phone-filmed fragments from gigs in recent years.
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Nest Collective presents:
India Electric Company The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, St Pancras, London, WC1N 1AZ, England
Friday 23rd March 2018, 6.30pm – information here, here and here
Coming from an altogether less murky zone, singing multi-instrumental duo India Electric Company (Cole Stacey and Joseph O’Keefe) perform at the Foundling Museum as part of their promotional jaunt for their ‘Seven Sisters’ album. Expect explosively emotive folk-pop, weaving in Irish and Eastern European content to spin out and enrich their songs.
Woodburner presents:
Gabriela Eva + Yasmyn Hendrix Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Tuesday 20th March 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
On video, Gabriela Eva is a colourful explosion of appropriated and deftly spun images. In many respects she’s a tourist, but the kind who pulls off her acquisitive magpie business to perfection – a keen eye for the fabric she can repurpose, the hairstyle she can adapt, the body-paint or tattoo that can be repositioned. A globetrotter and a photographer’s darling even before she dropped her debut EP last month, she’s a natural at the subtly chameleonic star act; the dance of other people’s veils illuminated, assimilated and penetrated by her own charisma.
I’m hoping that this translates well to the stage once Gabriela’s tucked under the stairs at Servant Jazz Quarters – belatedly launching that selfsame EP, trapped behind her guitar without access to the self-edit suite, the quick-change boudoir screen and the magical boxes for makeup and jewels. That’s when it’ll either all fall apart or show its core roots. She doesn’t lack courage: previously part of Colchester duo Passive Passengers, she’s busked alone, braved the stage at Ronnie Scott’s and she’s certainly thrown her meme-anchors down (while “future organic” could mean bloody anything from cottage-industry world-changers to rich hippies with busy self-aggrandising Snapchat accounts, “driven, dyslexic, dreadlocked” is as good a packed’n’loaded personal tag as I’ve heard recently).
As for the music, there’s skipping rhythmic and harmonic footwork from jazz, some rhythmic echoes from hip hop, some party looseness from the breezier end of soul and R&B. You can trace your fingers through Gabriela’s songs and tease out strands from clear forebears – Erykah Badu, Astrid Gilberto, Van Morrison, Minnie Riperton (for her part, she claims Nina Simone, Little Dragon, Alanis Morrisette and Incubus) – yet her prime musical descent (probably through accidental parallels) seems to be Eva Abraham, the acoustic London jazzfolksoul luminary who, despite having boiled up cauldron after cauldron of superb transfigured rootsiness for twenty years now, seems doomed to remain a perpetual (though beloved) secret.
Setting aside the quick visual fix of a memorable video, though, that’s not a bad place to be, musically. Close your eyes and you’re still left with Gabriela’s rolling carpet of songcraft: just picking three, there’s her conversational, hip-hop storytelling cover of Estelle and Kanye’s American Boy, the airborne soul-jazz of Sailing Over The City and the twinkling Rise Up (heading that first EP – a light-touch groove salute to advance-and-reclaim, flickering through a clutch of delicate psychedelic changes and nodding to the short-lived but renewable hopes of the Arab spring).
In support is Yazmyn Hendrix, whom I last saw four-and-a-half years ago providing guest-vocal accompaniment to What?! (a long-dispersed jazz-rock trio). Nowaday’s she’s still most visible for further collaborations (with Euro-soul act Retrospective For Love and with jazz-rapper Mrisi) plus a smattering of Soundcloud cover versions (including Laura Mvula’s Green Gardens, John Legend’s All Of Me, Adele’s Chasing Pavements and Massive Attack’s Teardrop). By herself – armed with a microphone, a loop station, and assorted live percussion and beatboxing – she creates layered a capella choirs and vocal ensembles out of herself: either simple classic sounding pop songs, the cover versions mentioned above, or assorted vocalese experiments.
So far there’s not much direct evidence of the harnessed synaesthesia which Yazmyn claims shapes her music-making (and which means that she “associates each song, each word and each instrument with colours and textures”). Let’s assume that the full breakthrough in that direction is still working its way through development and caution, and that one day she’ll be giving us her own ear-boggling parallel to ‘Medúlla’ or ‘Starsailor’ or Todd Rundgren’s ‘A Capella’. Given her tunes-over-weirdness tastes, I’m guessing that we can rule out a head-to-head with Mike Patton in more tangled territory. For now, she stands as a capable one-woman Manhattan Transfer (or a sleepier, slowed-paced Grace McLean) for contemporary pop songs; and that’ll do in the short run.
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Decave Discovers presents:
Cavey + Moon Panda The Waiting Room, 175 Stoke Newington High Street, Stoek Newington, London, N16 0LH, England
Monday 26th March 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Young post-blues singer-guitarist Luke Cave – a.k.a. Cavey – is already known as half of stoner-fuzz rock duo Rad Frü. He’s already engaging in some solo wing-stretching, parking the Zep-happy Rad in favour of collaborating with Blaenavon bassist/producer Frank Wright, laying down songs with junior Wrecking Crews full of heavy-duty young session dudes. Not far out of his teens, it’s as if he’s trying to echo Robert Plant’s career development, while simultaneously crushing it down from fifty years to a mere decade.
Perhaps that’s a bit glib of me, as well as overstating the classic rock thing. Similarly, I’m not sure if he’s the same Luke Cave as the one who sprang (literally) from Nick Cave’s loins back in 1991, but even if he is, there’s not much trace of Cave the Elder here. Cavey himself cites Jim O’Rourke, T-Bone Walker, Hamilton Leithauser and Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen as influences; and in his light-touch songs I can also hear a dash of Gomez. Here’s a live performance of his recent Living Room Parade single, plus the studio take of its predecessor Day And Night.
Born in Boston but currently London-based (and sporting members coming in from Denmark, Sweden and Scotland), dream pop band Moon Panda will inevitably always ring Californian, not least because of the sheer sun-kissed San Diegan beauty of frontwoman Maddy Myers. A blonde, delicately-freckled photographer’s dream on honeyslide vocals and soft dots of bass guitar, she probably finds this kind of objectivifying attention a damn nuisance. For one thing, it distracts from the thoughtful, intricate details of the songs she writes: just as there was always more to Stevie Nicks than posturing and chiffon, there’s more to Maddy than blank-canvas prettiness or swoony lashes.
Let’s be honest – most dream pop bands think it’s enough to deliver blank blocks of navel-gazing noise and dirty snowplough billows: retrodden, remasticated sub-Lushness. Moon Panda don’t. Their songs are constantly, carefully changing beasts: encapsulated within their yearning melodies and taffy-stretched hooks, they have finely honed choral a capella parts, strange and revelatory key changes, sudden pauses and unorthodox shifts of time and dynamic. As with Gustav Moltke’s carefully-placed, only-there-when-you-need-them tidal smooshes of guitar, Maddy’s keen awareness of structure – of spectral drama, of just how softly and subtly you can make a jump-cut work – has a tendency to shatter the mood from within with a hard-hook shift in rhythm and intensity.
The lyrics too, eschew the cough-syrup blankness and drunken, dissolved sensual dazes of the genre; in effect, avoiding its copouts. Instead, Moon Panda are dream pop on the verge of waking up, or of piecing together the dreamwork. Shades of vulnerability, disquiet and suspicion run through these words: I’m still processing them, in the way that one works over the puzzling gristle of a dream, but I’m suspecting that these are songs for the gaslit, the fearful, the unwittingly immured: that they’re the etchings of the beginnings of an escape kit. Their videos, too, have an awareness to them – the disassociative motion, fall and sleep-roll of severed doll parts, ever-so-slightly reminiscent of Todd Haynes’ ‘Superstar’ and its Barbie-puppet retelling of the Karen Carpenter story; the road trip photography with its trapped, continuous-loop feel; Maddy’s own blank-faced ballet moves in which limbs stretch or a back twitches into restless determination.
It’s a shame that ‘Twin Peaks’ appears to be over and done now, and that Moon Panda are a year or two behind its production curve. In some respects they’d have made an ideal Roadhouse band. On the other hand, perhaps I’ve missed the point. Perhaps they wouldn’t have fitted the bill: not quite suited to the seamless and ominous cool, nor enigmatic enough for us to project our hungers, our apprehensions and confusions onto. From here, Moon Panda seem more like a measured curious hand rippling the waters or testing the surface of the mirror, fingertips uncovering and assessing what would otherwise been smoothed away. A band and a songwriter to keep a woken eye on, I think.
News on spring concerts by Manchester modern classical ensemble Psappha (one of the more gracefully eclectic groups of their kind). Summary (and slightly tweaked press release mashups) follow…
“Meaning ‘The Hammer Without a Master’, Boulez’ iconic work is a classic of the twentieth century whose sonority and sense of time and direction were profoundly influenced by music from Asia and Africa: named after a text by surrealist poet René Char, it features mezzo-soprano with six instrumentalists in the unusual combination of alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylorimba, and percussion. Berio’s ‘Naturale’ pairs live musicians with recordings of Sicilian street vendors highlighting the contrast between flowing folk melodies and the raw, natural voice of the street singer. Takemitsu’s ‘Towards the Sea’ recalls the ebb and flow of the ocean and was commissioned by the Greenpeace Foundation for their Save the Whale campaign.
“Tom Harrold’s new work ‘Dark Dance’ (supported by the Fidelio Charitable Trust) has been commissioned by Psappha to complement the Boulez. Psappha’s Artistic Director Tim Williams says “Tom has more than risen to the challenge… his piece is exhilarating and full of rhythmic energy across its eight-minute span”, while Tom himself adds “this is perhaps one of the most unusual pieces I have ever written. I’ve really taken the opportunity to experiment. It’s been a cleansing and enlightening experience for me and I’m enormously grateful to Psappha for commissioning me to write the piece.”
Here are two previous examples of Tom’s work to provide some pointers: his chamber ensemble piece ‘Bone Meal’ and his bass-trombone-and-tape duet ‘Hard Hit’, both of which demonstrate the lively, dancing wit of his writing and sensibilities.
Psappha will continue their ‘Demystifying New Music’ initiative by screening Barrie Gavin’s 2005 biographical film ‘Pierre Boulez: Living in the Present’ prior to the concert: ticketholders can turn up to this free event at 6.00pm.
In April, Psappha will stage ‘A Wonderful Day’, exploring the connections between jazz, rock, classical and street music, and teaming up with conductor Stephen Barlow and with “the best jazz guitarist this side of the Atlantic” – Salford’s own Mike Walker. Mike (plus his reeds-playing cohort Iain Dixon and drummer Mike Smith) will play alongside Psappha on the premiere of a new Walker ensemble composition ‘Autonomy’, which “combines classical music with the improvisation and rhythmic drive of jazz”. Mike Walker also returns as the soloist on Steven Mackey’s classical/rock fusion piece ‘Deal’, while Psappha play alone for the late Fausto Romitelli’s palindromic work ‘Amok Koma’ (which draws inspiration from German punk rock).
The event as a whole is named after the Anna Clyne piece which completes the programme, in which a small ensemble play a hushed, affectionate supportive structure to the integrated tape of the songs and conversation of a Chicago street musician “whose natural, slow voice conveys a sense of both joy and struggle” (and which, much like the fragment of tramp-sung hymn in Gavin Bryar’s ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, gives the work its emotional core and its sense of small, fragile, hopeful humanity persevering against a largely indifferent world).
Here’s the previous Psappha-commissioned Walker orchestral piece ‘Ropes’ (featuring the ensemble’s “22 strings” in collaboration with his jazz quintet); plus other recordings of the Romitelli and Clyne pieces.
For May’s ‘Here and Now’ event, the audience is invited to “take a tour of the Whitworth art gallery through music and art. Promoted by music therapist Rachel Swanick as part of the ‘Here and Now’ wellbeing project this is a unique event where visual art and music sit side by side, sparking your imagination and enticing you to look again, with new eyes… Psappha invites you on a musical adventure through the gallery, stopping off along the way to experience each new work performed live by world-class musicians.
“Played alongside Joshua Frankel’s award-winning film, Judd Greenstein’s ‘Plan of the City’ imagines the architecture of New York blasting off into outer space and resettling on Mars! David Fennessy’s ‘5 Hofer Photographs’ takes inspiration from Evelyn Hofer’s eclectic photos of 1960s Dublin which will be projected as part of the performance, and Michael Gandolfi’s ‘History of the World in Seven Acts’ prompts the viewer/listener to experience the natural ebb and flow between colourful geometric animation and music.”
In addition, four new pieces inspired by items in the Whitworth Collection are being contributed by “young, upcoming composers” – David John Roche (a duo piece), Dani Howard, Will Frampton and Bethan Morgan-Williams. Information on these is still scanty, but here are samples of previous compositions by the four (two of them performed by Psappha):
‘Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître’ – Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Manchester, M4 6BF, England, Thursday 22nd March 2018, 7:30pm – information here and here
‘A Wonderful Day’ – The Stoller Hall, Chetham’s School Of Music, Long Millgate, Manchester, M3 1DA, England, Friday 20th April 2018, 7:30pm – information here and here
‘Here And Now’ – The Whitworth, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6ER, Thursday May 17th 2018, 6:30pm – information here and here
From March to May, women’s music collective Scordatura continue their mission to present, perform and illuminate work by female composers, via a series of monthly concerts in London or Oxford.
The March date in London is “an evening of wind chamber music from some of Europe’s most exciting female composers.” Living composers will be represented by Judith Weir’s ‘Mountain Airs’ (a free adaptation of two traditional Scottish melodies, which dates back to 1988); but there’ll also be wind quintets by a pair of bold and prolific twentieth-century French composers (Claude Arrieu and Hedwige Chrétien) as well as by English serialist grande-dame Elisabeth Lutyens.
In addition, there’ll be a performance of ‘Trio For Winds’ by the late Prague-based Scottish composer Geraldine Mucha, whose work was obscured for much of her lifetime (partly due to Cold War politics and partly due to so much of her energy and social value having being subsumed into other work as chatelaine and foundation head for her talented father-in-law, the Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha).
In April, three Scordatura members – cellist and artistic director Rachel Watson, clarinettist Poppy Beddoe, and pianist Cecily Lock – will be playing a set of chamber trios in Oxford. Two are by living composers – ‘Arenas d’un Tiempo’ by Cuban-Afro-American Tania León and ‘Canta, Canta!’ by Thea Musgrave.
The remainder are historical – ‘Passacaglia on an Old English Tune’ (by the slim-catalogued but accomplished post-Impressionist Rebecca Clarke); ‘Sonata for Clarinet and Cello’ (by the smart, witty and superbly spirited Phyllis Tate); ‘Andante for Clarinet and Piano’ (by the elegant twentieth-century neoclassicist Alice Mary Smith); and ‘Three Pieces for Cello and Piano’ (by Nadia Boulanger, whose exemplary work as a teacher of other composers from Philip Glass and Elliott Carter to Aaron Copland tends to overshadow her own compositional reputation).
Scordatura return to London (and the Old Church) in May for an evening of cello ensemble music. This will include pieces composed and performed by a guest – Manchester cellist Polly Virr (another latter-day tech-savvy polydisciplinary, who works with Rachel Watson in flashmob ensemble The Street Orchestra of London and whose work outside of the immediate classical sphere covers the string loop pedal duo Täpp as well as work with indie-folk band Ideal Forgery plus various Manchester singer-songwriters).
Landscape- and travel-inspired, Polly’s pieces include standard playing and cello-body percussion plus occasional extended technique and voice, in a similar manner to other post-classical/pop-friendly solo cellists like Laura Moody, Philip Sheppard, Zosia Jagodzinska and Serena Jost. She also draws additional inspiration from post-classical electronic dance artists such as Phaeleh. I’ve pasted in a couple of her Soundcloud shots below.
The other items on the programme include the Cello Quartet by Grażyna Bacewicz (a violin soloist and onetime Boulanger student who became one of the first internationally-recognised Polish female composers) and ‘Chant’ by the humble, undersung Scottish composer and multi-instrumentalist Marie Dare (for whom I’ve found a lone biography here) As with the other two concerts, there are a couple of pieces by living women, both of them cello quartets – the slow windings of Tina Davidson’s ‘Dark Child Sings’, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s ‘Las Sombras de los Apus’ (an early piece rising from dark tones to swarming explosions and dance rhythms, balancing – as with most of her music – the European and Latina aspects of her own multicultural heritage).
Dates as follows:
‘The Grand Tour: European Music for Wind Quintet’ – The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England, Sunday 25th March 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
‘Scordatura at St Michael’s’ – St Michael & All Angels Church, 33 Lonsdale Road, Summertown, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX2 7ES, England, Friday 20th April 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
‘Celli! Music for Cello Ensemble’ – The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England, Saturday 19th May 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
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UPDATE, 16th March 2018 – …and, if you can’t wait that long, I’ve just found out that the people behind the London New Wind Festival are staging a London evening of new music by women composers, as part of International Woman’s Month; a couple of evenings before the first of the Scordatura concerts.
Yuko Ohara – Rising Eels (for oboe & trombone) Margaret Lucy Wilkins – “366” (for solo trombone) Dorothee Eberhardt – Campion (for bass clarinet & piano) (UK premiere) Violeta Dinescu – Lichtwellen (for solo B-flat clarinet) (UK premiere) Michiko Shimanuki – First Snow (for solo piano) (world premiere)
Catherine Pluygers – Japan (for ensemble) Janet Graham – From Dawn to Dusk (for flute, oboe and piano) Erika Fox – Remembering the Tango (for flute and piano) Ming Wang – Die Verwandelten (for solo bass flute) Enid Luff – The Coming of the Rain (for solo oboe).
London New Wind Festival presents:
‘New Music by Women Composers’ Schott Music Ltd, 48 Great Marlborough Street, Soho, London, WIF 7BB, England
Friday 23rd March 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
This music’s currently so obscure that this is the only soundclip I could find for it…
IKLECTIK and Kate Carr present:
Hadi Bastani + Pouya Ehsaei IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Wednesday 14th March 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
For this event, London-based sound artist Kate Carr curates a showcase of Iranian experimental electronic music, centring on artists from Tehran: a scene mapped and logged by by sound artist and anthropologist Hadi Bastani (via the Digital Arts and Experimental Music Scene of Iran Facebook page from his own base in the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast).
For all of the focus on Tehran, everyone involved in the concert (from Kate on down) seems to be a diasporan: Hadi living and working in Belfast, gigmate Pouya Ehsaei based in London, and even Kate’s an emigre from Australia. As for originally scheduled third act and “chaotic worlds” envisioners 9T Antiope, in spite of their Iranian origins they’re actually based as nearby as France… and can’t make it as planned, since it seems that even pre-Brexit, visas can be as hard to get in Paris as they might be in Tehran. It all adds a slightly mournful sheen to the occasion. Tehran may have been the original testing ground, but it’s not sending any immediate representatives; and leaving it doesn’t always seem to have made things easier.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs too much. The scheduled appearances by Hadi and Pouya are still on track. In addition to his own sonic contributions, Hadi will be providing an introduction to (and discussion of) the Tehran scene; while Pouya (already a veteran collaborator with dancers, performers and filmmakers as well as other experimental musicians) will be displaying his mixture of “found sounds and folkloric music… focusing on their aesthetics and cultural significance and how these can be applied in modern experimental compositions”. Meanwhile, if you’re curious about what you’re missing due to the absence of 9T Antiope, see below:
Echo Trails + Djanan Turan The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 3BL, England
Saturday 10th March 2018, 7.30pm – information
This month, the roiling, thrilling, mostly-acoustic post-folk band Echo Trails resurface for a Clerkenwell gig in the vaults of the Betsey Trotwood. If you missed them a month ago (at the Magic Garden), here’s what I said about them back then:
“Selling Echo Trails as being some kind of hopeful mashup of “epic groove and post-rock” is a massive undersell. Just because they’ve got a little Godspeed string thunder in them on occasion (and know a thing or two about old-school jazz’n’R&B propulsion) doesn’t mean that they’re one of those bands that milk the juice out of other genres and feed it into papery approximations.
“A well-honed acoustic band is like a set of unhindered precision muscles, able to flex rhythms on the fly and dance in unexpected curves, and this is just such a band. Fronted by Dimitra Tzanakaki (a ballsy, smouldering Greek blend of Beth Gibbons, Tori Amos and Bette Midler) they’re a supple alliance of guitar, voluble double bass, viola and drumkit, the song undercarriage slipping easily from Mediterranean folk to psychobilly to a salsa set-to or to shedbashing Led Zeppelin thrills. Since their arrival in 2014 they’ve phased out keyboard and phased in pedalwork, enriching texture even as the instrumentation shrank: hence the post-rock tag, but there’s Schönberg, Piaf, Korn, Temper Trap, bebop and Hidden Orchestra tucked into their bag of influences along with Godspeed.”
In support is Turkish singer turned Egg collaborator and London bandleader Djanan Turan, who specializes in light, chatty near-acoustic party pop with a timeless perpetually-youthful feel. Into the pot – along with her own warm and garrulous vocal – go Turkish beats, cabaret pop, mellow synth riffs, raga, woody spiralling clarinet lines and slithering Romani/Med-jazz guitar (the latter courtesy of Funkshy’s Fatih Ebrem).
Djanan’s also known for organising one of London’s female artist platforms (the Anatolian/Middle-Eastern-flavoured Hura Nights). In keeping with this, her own songs always sound and feel as if she’s invited you back into her kitchen to keep you abreast of developments and to talk a friendly blue streak about whatever’s crossing her mind – world peace, personal disagreements and reconciliations, the position of women, youth recalled and put into deeper perspective. Despite the hints at New Age positivity (I suspect that that kitchen has a couple of crystals hanging in the window), underneath that loquacious flow is an accomplished songwriter with her dancing feet firmly in touch with the ground. There may be gush involved, but it’s never flippant.
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A few days earlier, Echo Trails are making another London appearance at New River Studios as part of a film evening. As well as closing the show with a full set of their own songs, they’re one of four artists/bands performing live soundtracks to existing silent films. More below…
Colliding Lines present:
‘Colliding LDN: Reanimation’ New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Thursday 8th March 2018, 8.30pm – information here and here
Live cross-disciplinary art promoters Colliding Lines begin “a new, bi-monthly night of live art, sound and vision, presenting experimental collaborations and post-label projects from select performers. ‘Reanimation’ (is) a live re-scoring of mostly Soviet-era cartoons and surrealist animations by four different artists).”
The programme features two shorts by veteran Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky (1968’s anti-bureaucratic musical fable ‘The Glass Harmonica‘ and 1972’s ‘The Butterfly‘), as well as alternative 1968 tellings of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (‘Rusalochka‘ by Ivan Aksenchuk) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (the National Institute of Mental Health’s polemical ‘Curious Alice‘, which took a somewhat counter-productive slap at the early ‘70s drug culture by making it look even more fascinating to children).
In addition to Echo Trails, live soundtracking will be performed by extended-voice improviser and soundshaper Ingrid Plum (who blends and savages her own glorious clear vocals with sound processing and field recordings, and stirs in influences from neo-classical and from Scottish and Nordic folk music) and by two different sets of electro-acoustic music-making brothers. In-demand collaborators for film, dance and installation work, Kyriakides (Reuben and Jacob, to their mother) build “expansive, enveloping soundworlds” from live instruments, field recordings and found objects across a wide spectrum of musical and stylistic options. Electro-acoustic fraternal drone duo Polbrone are an alternate workframe for Andrea and Simone Salvatici of Glasgow avant-folk minimalists Clorinde, who in this project loop and gradually destroy their own sonic textures (and on this occasion will be aided by improvising cellist Derek Yau).
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A little later on, inspired East Anglian “marginal musician” label Antigen are running a concert over in Ipswich…
Antigen Records present:
MacGillivray + Sealionwoman + Polly Preacher The Smokehouse, South Street Studios, 6 South Street, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP1 3NU, England
Friday 16th March 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
When she’s out and about playing music, writing or committing performance art, Kirsten Norrie goes by her ancestral Scottish name MacGillivray, pulling her matrilineal Highland heritage over her head like a mask. With many wannabe artists, this kind of method ends up as no more than an affectation: people short on colour, scraping at the bottom of the pot of history in a vain attempt to garner the last scraps of savour. With Kirsten, it’s different: if it’s a mask, it’s the kind that renders everyday matters and habits transparent, allowing her to express deeper and stranger ideas and fancies fervently. What emerges is startling. MacGillivray it is, then.
Discovering her is a little like being startled by a slow-motion jack-in-the-box: she’s already got eight albums behind her, a couple of soundtracks and poetry collections, and a collaborator roster which bags a list of left-field folk musicians of all strands and odd definitions, including The Fall (yes, folk, really), The Pogues’ Jem Finer, Dead Rat Orchestra, Trembling Bells and Current 93. Her performance art involves powerful weird rituals – furiously smoking cigars in Sigmund Freud’s garden; conflating mediaeval stocks and death metal; eating chandelier glass in an abandoned shopping centre; carrying a dead sheep on a pilgrimage.
As a musician (both recorder and performer), she’s similarly unnerving: experimenting with loudness and quietness via folk drones, piano, savagely distorted electric autoharp and vocal wails, but refusing to hide behind them. Slender, still and intense, she rules a stage, dragging up distressed ghosts and the aftermath of harsh laws and bare beliefs. On this occasion, she’ll be performing tracks from her forthcoming mini-album, ‘Watermarked in Flame’.
Like Kirsten, Colchester’s Ashleagh Claire Hurren immerses herself in a performance persona, although Polly Preacher‘s “wonky folk troubadour” act is a good deal more comfortable than MacGillivray’s harsher hauntology. That said, the original tag makes her sound a lot kookier than she is. You don’t get cute acoustic numbers about spice racks, paintings and milky heartbreaks. Instead you get a crepuscular, witty electric folk with a homemade feel and a few echoes of lo-fi indie rock. There are a few shades of Kristen Hersh, perhaps even a little Lupen Crook, but for the most part a Polly Preacher song follows its own pattern: cryptic feints into storytelling where the supernatural rubs shoulders with grit, and in which haunted cutlery drawers and fairy tales cross imperceptibly over into stories of how to navigate a female life… or at least how to begin the journey and begin mapping the hazards.
Sealionwoman slightly buck this gig’s tonal trend of “folk meets New Weird Britain”, being much more of a dark-dusk monochromed blues-and-jazz basement affair, albeit filtered through loops, noise and the canny restrictions of being an unorthodox duo. The bare bones and wizard’s brew of Tye McGivern’s effects-laden double bass steps in and out of the shadows with subtle changes of raiment, sometimes clean-limbed and sometimes masked; Kitty Whitelaw ‘s vocals stretch from distracted torch singer to ghostly and mischievous jazz acrobat, running deft arabesques around the shape of the song.
Bar occasional gig notifications, I’ve not encountered Sealionwoman much since getting very absorbed in a live performance of theirs in a Hackney shopwindow back in 2013. My negligence, not theirs. Go back and have a look at that review: I’ve just done so myself, and it captures the compelling sinewy distractions of their live presence, the transformative implications of their name and their thousand-shades-of-black-white-and-grey better than anything I could come up with right now.
Scruff of the Neck presents:
Demons of Ruby Mae + Tonochrome + Daniels Goldseal The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England
Wednesday 7th March 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Leicester-via-Manchester multi-instrumentalists Jonny Gavin and Adam Rowley – a.k.a. Demons Of Ruby Mae – produce a broad, flowing and assured grand pop, the kind that sounds tailor-made for cinema trailers and box set TV. The mixture of luxuriant instrumental illustration and echoing space – plus Jonny’s impassioned vibrato vocal – results in something like the homeless marine-folk piano ballads of Olafur Arnalds with perhaps a little more contemporary pop underpinning. In existence for six years now, they’ve been on the up since releasing the ‘Someday’ single last year.
I’m not sure which Tonochrome you’re going to get on the night – the brasher, shape throwing pop-rock band which puts out singles like ‘Not Gonna End Well’ while grabbing for burnished hooks and straightforward messages; or the altogether more fluid entity which they present on their debut album which blooms through shades of art-rock and scintillating prog (weaving a graceful dance with vibraphones, string sections, moving jazz chordage and pillowing horns, while staying closer to the inquiring pop-shaded spirit of Field Music, Talk Talk and Dutch Uncles than to the likes of Spock’s Beard). Both versions are current; both are contained within the Tonochrome scope; both currently seem to cohabit without stress.
One thing that’s certain is that, following several promising years of finding their feet, Tonochrome are now stepping with great assurance. How they’re going to carry off these subtler shadings live when cut back to their basic five-piece rock lineup I’m not sure, but there’s enough savvy in them to find a way.
Emerging from roots as a somewhat introverted solo project for songwriter Ian Daniels, Daniels Goldseal has evolved into a canny, effective cinematic song-lens through which Ian can both observe and cast fresh light. With Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Mark Lanegan and Lambchop as likely inspirations and/or comparisons, Ian operate an absorptive, drifting frame of reference, orbiting the truth in a haze of tequila tones and commenting in a voice sometimes full of sardonic barfly foreboding, sometimes a dreamy Celtic burr.
So far Ian’s got only four publically-released songs behind him, each with a different soundscape – the muttering dusty guitar of Nectarines, the flatlands gospel pining of Out Of the Woods, the barebones electronic R&B, harmonium scratch and Leon Redbone slurs which come together in June, and the hooded country/barstool-folk of A Woman Is, complete with growling electric piano and distant swerves of pedal steel. I’ve no idea what he’ll try to do live: probably he’ll be bringing these and other songs along in fresh sets of clothes.
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Blind Dog Studio Presents
Colonial Sun + Mally Harpaz + Naomi McLean/Hazel Iris/Aine Mcloughlin St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, Camden Town, London, NW1 1UL, England
Wednesday 7th March 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
While still best known for backing up Anna Calvi, multi-instrumentalist Mally Harpaz has been very active with her own music recently. Her multimedia art collective Blind Dog Studio has been going from strength to strength: their biggest show yet, continuing their aims of proving “a musically cinematic experience”, now comes to St Pancras Old Church.
As before, Mally’s bringing her soundtrack compositions – instrumental chamber pop – to sync with the Clara Aparicio Yoldi video animations which inspired them and which expand on classic paintings. Also as before, Colonial Sun (a.k.a. James Marples, will be performing his dark post-imperial Australian ballads with cello and percussion.
In addition, recent Guildhall graduate and budding composer Naomi McLean, renegade opera singer-turned-experimental folk-popper Hazel Iris (whose melliflous EP ‘Misfortunate Tales’ is out now) and accordionist Aine Mcloughlin are teaming up to perform classical compositions – possibly newly written and possibly not. Blind Dog aren’t giving away much beyond expansive murmurs of “candles and viola, mesmerising arias, exceptional guests before the altar”, so while you’re waiting to be swept away by the churchy glamour, here’s a bit of Hazel plus a Mally song from last autumn…
There are still some tickets left for the rollicking, rampaging twentieth-anniversary concerts for venerable yet vital psychedelic noise label Rocket Recordings. These will be packing out the Garage and its sister venue Thousand Island in north London for three consecutive days over an early March weekend.
It’s not the first time that Highbury Corner’s been rammed with psychoactive weirdness and well-plumbing musical explorations. In its earlier incarnation as Upstairs at the Garage, the smaller Thousand Island saw hundreds of strange and wonderful leftfield acts pass through; to pick just one example, twenty years ago the building hosted occult ensemble Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels and their ‘Highbury Working’ “beat seance” in which Alan Moore and David J explored and mined the hidden histories of the Holloway Road from the horse goddess Epona to the rapidly poisoned utopianism of the Black House, from the schemata of Aleister Crowley to the madness of Joe Meek. So the Corner’s no stranger to strangeness… but it’s good, for a full weekend, to see strangeness rise so outrightly overground amongst the traffic fumes, creeping gentrification and salsa nights.
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The Rocket days kick off on Friday 9th. Fluxus-inspired Italian garage groove-band Julie’s Haircut mingle smearing, chuckling Ash Ra Tempel guitars and flutes with a Georgio Moroder wobble, while from Sweden there’s creamy-toned garage darlings Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation (whose more recent recordings pulse along on a fluting, closed-eyed Can patter) and the detailed anticipations of Flowers Must Die, who burst shining locked disco grooves through hanging tapestries of improvised “oriental-influenced” psychedelia (like an unexpected frug in a Tibetan temple). A couple of spinoff acts from Salford industrial/sociological alchemists Gnod are playing– the fleshy beats, brutual mechanisms and cellar drones of Chris Haslam’s electronica project Dwellings and the “slow burning vocal loops (and) devotional mindscapes” of A.P Macarte’s AHRKH. Also on the bill is the spontaneous, impulse/emotion-driven semi-improvised “dirty techno” of Coldnose, swilling in acid house, industrial, electro, drum and bass and distorted vocal snarls. For the after-show winddown, there’s DJ-ing from assorted Teeth Of The Sea members, but more on them later…
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Sorry, but it’s returns only for Saturday 10th. Although Hills (with their gruff and deafening meditational rock, like Joy Division trapped inside a raga) have had to pull out, their Swedish compatriots Goat (costumed acid/world fusioneers who’ve already made a big splash at Glastonbury) are still in play. So are Italian “kosmitronic” rockers Mamuthones – a delightful confection of slippery tinkling rhythms, chatterbox riffage explosions of lateral noise and sing-song babble, they’re what Dutch Uncles might have sounded like if they had less of a taste for arch Roxy-isms and had taken more of a liking to Pere Ubu. There are also slots for the onetime heavy doom-psych of Hey Colossus (who, like their spiritual forebears The Birthday Party, are evolving steadily out of the chaotic London murk they began in and starting to tell stories) and the bellowing, unreconstructed Tyneside sludge-acid of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. Minimalist Malmö trance-rockers Ved preview their imminent Rocket EP ‘DDTT’, and there are sets from amelodic No Wave revisitors Housewives, block-partying noise duo Gum Takes Tooth and the elasticated buzzing Russian “stargaze” band Gnoomes.
In addition, there’ll be a rare solo appearance by Teeth Of The Sea’s modular analogue synth guy Mike Bourne who – in parallel to his band work – has recently put out a couple of odds and ends on Bandcamp including the gradually-evolving ‘pætʃ’ album of electronic experiments (including black-and-white vampire music and harmonium/Harmonium-esque sketches with a dash of Geiger-counter, and the vast shadow-steeped minimalism of his soundtrack to Ben Lister’s horror short ‘Wine Dark Sea’). Opening the evening, the blipping electronics, kettle-banging, forceful ranting and rises to aggressive crescendos of Temple Ov BBV (a collaboration between Gnod and Dutch experimental psychedelicists Radar Men From The Moon) resemble a more spacious meeting between early Swans and cultural rhythmatist John Chernoff). DJ-ing for the evening comes from a four-strong squad of Cherrystones, Jamie Paton, Mike Keeling and Chris Reeder.
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The highlight of the Sunday show – at least as far as Rocket themselves are concerned – has been their success in securing the British live debut for the duo project by Polish reeds/keyboard player Wacław Zimpel and his compatriot, the “magic brutalist” Stara Rzeka guitarist/singer Kuba Ziołek, as Zimpel/Ziołek. They’ll be showcasing the psychoactive-minimalist jazz-folk stew of last year’s eponymous album.
That said, there’ll be pretty strong competition from trumpet-toting electronic rock partisans Teeth Of The Sea. Having DJ-ed on the first night, they’re returning at full band strength for what will presumably provide another exhilarating set and another chance for us all to slither around in a puddle of non-stick definitions (are they noise? are they rave? are they dream-metal? are they what you might’ve had if Miles Davis had rashly agreed to a Foetus production job?). Also returning are Gnod – this time in person, playing a “greatest hits” set, which you can vote for here).
There’s further Gnodness via yet another pair of spin-offs: Paddy Shine’s immersive “tantric vocal loop” project Ayn Sof and Marlene Ribeiro’s work as Negra Branca (around which circulates various splutters including “squashy analogue”, “temple goddess” and “dreamscape”). Veteran psych bass player Gareth Turner is making two appearance – one as a third of the Anthroprophh trio (in which he’s joined by Heads guitarist Paul Allen and drummer Jesse Webb to blend “garage-bound filth (with) wayward, abstract artistry”), and the other as half of Kuro (in which he grabs a double bass and joins forces with violinist Agathe Max for electrically-enhanced string-drones). Finally, there’s also space for Liverpudlian heavy-psychedelic noise-rockers Bonnacons Of Doom and shamanic ritual trio H.U.M. (Mark Wagner, Heloise Zamzam and Uiutna) whom I last described as “a kind of psychic cross-cultural art coven, citing “alchemical practice, incantation, chanting, drones, ritual drumming, French variété” as both inspiration and activity.”
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Further details and ticket/info links below… if you’re reading about this for the first time, you’re already stragglers, so get going…
Baba Yaga’s Hut & DHP present:
‘Rocket Recordings Twenty’ The Garage/Thousand Island, 20-22 Highbury Corner, Highbury, London, N5 1RD, England
Friday 9th March 2018, 7.30pm
Saturday 10th March 2018, 3.30pm
Sunday 11th March 2018, 7.30pm
– information here and here
Throughout March, King Crimson-affiliated experimental rock trio Stick Men wind their bouncing, droning, percussive way around Europe. Fronted by veteran singing Chapman Stick maestro Tony Levin, propelled by drummer Pat Mastelotto (an ever-underrated master of electro-acoustic kit and rhythmic surprise) and completed by polydisciplinary Touch Guitarist Markus Reuter, their journey takes in assorted clubs, small theatres and music eateries in Austria, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, France, Finland, Spain and England. These venues might be somewhat smaller than the lofty theatres which Pat and Tony have recently been filling as part of the current eight-man Crimson, but this is a positive thing. It’s one of the few chances you’ll get to experience this level of inventive extended rock musicality in this size of venue, and Stick Men (playing to growing, enthusiastic knots of people) deserve far better than their spin-off status, a box they’ve long since wriggled their way out of.
Via both instrumentation and the inescapable Crimson connection, the 1980 template set by the latter band’s ‘Discipline’ album casts quite a long shadow over Stick Men – the knotty polyphonic staccato, the metrical puzzles, the whomp’n’chunk of two sets of hands hitting two touchstyle fretboards. But this was always a template partly shaped by Tony; and although the band’s musical direction does draw somewhat on the flinty, monolithic ecstasies of Crimson music (expect a few ‘Larks Tongues in Aspic’ instrumentals to make a bloody-knuckled showing, alongside a voyage through Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’) and their last album carried the tongue-in-cheek title of ‘Prog Noir’ title, they’re not constrained by style, choosing rather to percolate within it like one of Tony’s beloved espressos before flooding outwards in all directions.
In fact, there’s a surprisingly un-prog breeziness to what they do. Tony might have waited until his autumn years before turning to frontman work, but his warm easygoing nature and gently kidding demeanour proves a fine fit for the role; and it’s his flowing omnivorous musicality (rather than Robert Fripp’s looming shadow) which ultimately sets Stick Men’s tone and releases their flow. Prior to and parallel to Crimson, Tony had five decades of first-call sessionwork: his glomping basslines backed and coloured the songs of Paul Simon, John Lennon, James Taylor, Peter Gabriel et al in a manner closer to conversational doo-wop singing than to simple low-end rooting, and some of that singing quality’s migrated to this project.
To an extent, Markus is stuck with a Frippish guitar role (he provides formidable reflections of the latter’s magisterial chops, ambient auroras and swarming killer-bee solo tone) but he also brings a different game to the stage. Outside of Stick Men, his own output has included free-form electric improv, protracted psychedelic drones, tundra-fire accompaniment to Siberian throat-singers, wild higher-mathematical dance frenzies and immense algorithmic orchestral pieces. With Stick Men his sometimes stern, magisterial-seeming stage presence regularly breaks out into unguarded humour and bursts of cerebral romanticism played out through the fretboard. Meanwhile Pat’s bridging, gizmo-assisted drumming can (and does) slip easily and unshowily between tacit Ringo Starr accompaniment, mathematical sledge-blows and intricate polyrhythmic dance-club rushes a la Marque Gilmore.
While most dates see the band playing alone, in Italy their Veneto date features support from Italian Chapman Sticker/bass guitarist/singer Emanuele Cirani, who usually trades in haunted, distorted block riffage as Colpo Rosso. In England, their Wolverhampton date is shared with friendly British troupe The Fierce & The Dead, who’ve been rebounding around the gaps between garage rock, prog, highlife and post-hardcore since 2010 and now seem poised on the brink of a substantial breakthrough. In Spain, the opening act in Madrid is XaDu, the hanging, questioning, avant-progressive jazz-rock duo put together by cross-genre Spanish drummer Xavi Reija and Serbian texture-jazz guitarist Dusan Jevcovic, who play up a complex two-man interplay while simultaneously sousing it in a dirty, deconstructive electrical storm.
Full dates:
Planet Live Club, Via del Commercio 36, 00154 Roma, Italy, Friday 2nd March 2018, 9.00pm – information here and here
Viperclub, Via Pistoiese 309/4, Piazza Ilaria Alpi e Miran Hrovatin, 5, 50145 Firenze, Italy, Saturday 3rd March 2018, 9.00pm – information here and here
Blue Note, Via Pietro Borsieri 37, 20159 Milano,, Italy, Sunday 4th March 2018, 9.00pm – information
Club Il Giardino Lugagnano, Via Ugo Foscolo, 37060 Sona, Veneto, Italy, Monday 5th March 2018, 9.00pm (with Emanuele Cirani) – information here and here
Porgy & Bess, Riemergasse 11, 1010 Vienna, Austria, Wednesday 7th March 2018, 9.00pm – information here and here
Budapest Jazz Club, Hollán Ernő utca 7. 1136 Budapest, Hungary, Thursday 8th March 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Sono Centrum, Veveří 105, 603 00 Brno, Czech Republic, Sunday 11th March 2018, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Lucerna Bar, Vodičkova 36, 110 00 Praha, Czech Republic, Tuesday 13th March 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Robin 2, 20-28 Mount Pleasant, Bilston, Wolverhampton, WV14 7LJ, England, Thursday 15th March 2018, 8.00pm(with The Fierce & The Dead) – information here and here
Acapela Studios, Capel Horeb, Heol Y Pentre, Pentyrch, Cardiff, CF15 9QD, Wales, Friday 16th March 2018, 9.00pm – information here, here and here
Trading Boundaries, Sheffield Green, near Fletching, East Sussex, TN22 3RB, England, Saturday 17th March 2018, 9.00pm – information here and here
L’Empreinte, 301 Avenue de l’Europe, Savigny-le-Temple, Paris, France, Sunday 18th March 2018, 6.00pm – information here and here
Tavastia, Urho Kekkosen katu 6, Helsinki 00100,Finland, Monday 19th March 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
Westking Music presents:
Roshi Featuring Pars Radio + KES + Ivan Bushbye + Euan Sutherland The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England
Tuesday 6th March 2018, 7.00pm– information here and here
Multiple influences come into play in the music of Roshi Nasehi – her Iranian heritage (embodied in her parents, their memories and their old cassettes), the folk songs and choirs in the Welsh milieu of her upbringing, the bleeding-in of tunes from 1980s British pop radio; piano and violin lessons and the jazz she studied at college in Cardiff; her early stint singing with Keith Tippett. All of these have settled somewhere in her current work, but none of them in a fixed and permanent location: they’re loose factors, like an office full of papers which can be picked up and whirled about by a fresh gust of wind from an open window.
During eighteen years in London Roshi has made a name for herself as performer, collaborator, workshopper, academic, installationeer and recorder of musical events. Her main song outlet is Roshi Featuring Pars Radio, a collaboration with Graham “Gagarin” Dowdall (prolific percussionist, producer, Pere Ubu-ist and John Cale/Nico collaborator). They describe it as “Welsh-Iranian folk pop”, with an electronic, experimentalist edge to it; a shuffleable span of folktronica strata which somehow captures the thinning links, the stubborn clingings and the disjunctive adaptations of the immigrant experience (whether circumstances have blown you into town from Alavicheh or from Gorseinon).
Some of Roshi’s ‘80s pop heritage manifests in its echos of Kate Bush – I don’t mean in Bronte-pop twirls or vocal lushnesses, but in beautiful cramped murmurs which recall the subvocal/sublingual keenings and chamberings of ‘The Dreaming’. The soundworld is deliberately intimate but obscure; Gagarin’s signature “sound-leakage” palette of finely-milled noises interpenetrating field recordings, Roshi’s keyboard parts questioning and unanchored; her language shifting between English and Pharsi, with versions of Iranian songs cut and rising up through the deck.
Also playing are the usual Westking gig-gaggle of emerging students, undergoing their solo live performance assessment by being hurled into support slots. This time round it’s lo-fi electronic pop/soul musician KES, “understated folk” performer Euan Sutherland and contemporary pianist Ivan Bushbye. All of them are too fresh on the scene to have much online to follow up on (Euan also shares his name with a Scottish clothing magnate who got tangled up with the Co-op a few years ago, and this doesn’t help either). However, I did find this video of Ivan playing Ryiuchi Sakamoto’s ‘Forbidden Colours’, so that will have to do for now.
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Back at the very start of May, there’s a summit of young female songwriters tucked away into the basement of Servant Jazz Quarters.
Sublime Music presents:
Bella Spinks + Laura Frances + Gillie Ione Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Thursday 1st March 2018, 7.30pm– information here and here
Brightonian Bella Spinks has been performing in public since she was twelve: not annoying R&B impressions on the top deck of the bus to Worthing, but a full-blown debut at the Concorde 2 round about 2006. Since then, she’s had plenty of time to broaden and hone her ideas, and has filled the interim years well, preparing her developing work and playing teenaged support slots to a range of performers from Martha Wainwright to Sea of Bees, Ellie Goulding to Ron Sexsmith, The Staves to Viv Albertine. As for herself, she’s already a mistress of the verbally and musically articulate solo piano ballad, a songwriter who can build a hooky and accessible pop single around Platonic philosophy, and a woman with a knack for sonorities (be it undulating basslines, hot-space gaps in the vocal lines or the woody rhythms of a struck’n’knocked piano frame).
The debut album isn’t due for another few months, but come along to celebrate the recent, aforementioned Platonic single ‘Noble Lie’, in which Bella muses and storytells across various forms of implied alchemy. Right now, she’s on a cusp – some idiot could talk her into smoothing everything down into mainstream kitchen-radio ballads, or she could hang onto her inquisitive nature and keep driving down the path of her subtle, slightly bookish originality. I really hope that she sticks with the latter.
She’s tagged as “a dark, baritone Joni Mitchell baring herself in her songs with a refreshing depth and brevity”, but rather than carrying out yet another sub-Joni confessional shtick Laura Frances wraps herself in the robes of yearning, classic dark-folk: the kind which I first heard on my mother’s Cynthia Gooding records from the 1950s folk revival – rich-voiced, majestic and ancient. It’s unsurprising to hear that her songwriting springs first and foremost from poetry, her stark modernity constantly slipping back towards mediaeval mystique. It’s also unsurprising to hear Mazzy Star and Leonard Cohen also mentioned in her train of influences. There’s a touch (just a touch, mind) of the urban-playing/rural-dreaming Gothic to her tunes: solemnly waltzing guitar, lonesome woodsaw string parts, and the abiding melancholy in her tone.
With a mini-album (2016’s ‘Misapprehension’) and a couple of standalone download singles behind her, Welshwoman-turned-Londoner Gillie Ione makes quick darts through self-produced restless talky songs, like well-made Tracy Chapman /Melissa Etheridge pieces with an experimental pop bent and bonus scurries of motormouthing. On record, she floats about between introspective guitar lines, spacious drum patter and strange ambients knocks and wanders; the scenery shifting behind her fluttery chatting, her glinting disparate observations being molded into a larger, broader picture of meaning.
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Society of Imaginary Friends presents:
SOIF Soiree: HARE !!! (the Musical) – Society Of Imaginary Friends + Hungry Dog Brand + Gisela Meyer & John Human + Outre Dan Steele (Darren & Isobel Hirst) + Tamara Canada + Blert Ademi + Global Warming Records + Cian Binchy Kabaret @ Karamel Restaurant, The Chocolate Factory 2, 4 Coburg Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6UJ, England
Friday 2nd March 2018, 7.30pm – free event – information here
Greeting the alleged arrival of the English spring (I’ll believe it when I see it), Society Of Imaginary Friends are bringing another of their art-pop mini-musicals to the March event in their monthly Wood Green soirees. This time, it’s ‘HARE!’ about which they’re saying nothing yet, though you can pick up a few clues from the evening’s lead-in text – (“…we climb out of our warm dark burrows into the golden slanting sunlight, our hearts swell with joy, and we dance a manic tarantella – chase each other in crazy circles, play-box under the serene blue sky and, as the moon rises, the static electrical frenzy of fizzical freedom – it’s mating time!”)
All right – stand by for sex, violence and gratuitous crocuses. Meanwhile, here’s something they did earlier…
Making Soiree returns are pianist/composer Blert Ademi and regular-of-regulars Cian Binchy (actor, standup, spoken-worder and autism activist, just back from his Mexican tour). Fresh to the Soiree stage are emerging R&B singer Tamara Canada, post-apocalyptic ecologically-obsessed techno burster Global Warming Records (a.k.a. ‘Driftshift’ presenter Franziska Lantz from Resonance FM) and author/reviewer/punk-poet Martin Dowsing’s Hungry Dog Brand (providing “very English sounding fictional narrative-based songs in a new wave / garage rock style with a touch of seaside gothic” plus a touch of the abrasive wit of their “No Wankers Aloud” club nights from the much-missed original 12 Bar Club).
In typically diverse Soiree fashion, the evening’s rounded off (or thrown engagingly off course) by a turn from internationally acclaimed cellist and concert pianist Gisela Meyer (who, surprisingly, is dropping bow and abandoning keyboard in order to sing three Debussy love songs accompanied by Anglo-Indian classical/improv pianist John Human) and by what looks like a partially-exploded performance by the Outre Dan Steele duo, a.k.a. Darren and Isobel Hirst. Darren (who’s squeezed writing for the NME, working as a vicar, reviewing theatre and being a “professor of baseball” into his life so far), will be interrupting, or moonlighting from, the duo in order to deliver Shakespearean soliloquys. I’m presuming he means actual Shakespeare rather than anguished cod-Tudor monologues about the pains of being a twenty-first century Renaissance man…
The usual Soiree terms and conditions apply – free entry, but you pay for the fine vegan grub. As regards some advance listening, with music and sound for several of the acts wilfully obscure, stuck in the MySpace graveyard or mysteriously pulled from circulation, here’s what I could throw together. Apologies for the occasional bedroom/phone footage look…
Late in March, the composition department of the Royal Academy of Music makes its way over to IKLEKTIC for “an evening of cutting edge new music, specially written for academy performers. The concert will showcase a hugely diverse range of musical influences. Come along and hear new music from the next generation of composers.” No names have been announced yet… but then, that’s part of the point. Come and be in at the start of some new careers.
Just under two weeks earlier, the London Composers Forum will be running a Composer’s Voice event for March, coinciding with International Women’s Day, with a concept which speaks for itself:
“This concert will feature exclusively new live and recorded music composed by the female members of LCF, performed by women. With a mixture of choral, vocal and instrumental pieces, it is sure to be full of variety and interest.
“There will be a discussion on the theme of “music by women” between the composers and performers that we hope the audience will participate in also; and an opportunity to discuss several hot topics relating to IWD, music by women, parity and what happens next…”
Royal Academy of Music presents:
Royal Academy of Music: Composer’s Platform IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Tuesday 20th March 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
London Composers Forum presents
The Composer’s Voice: Music and Discussion for IWD 2018 Tea House Theatre, 139 Vauxhall Walk, Vauxhall, London, SE11 5HL, England
Thursday 8th March 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
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Taking a break from performing on ice sculptures and space shuttles in favour of a pub backroom, the Ligeti Quartet have set up a regular monthly gig with Nonclassical in Dalston, to showcase contemporary exploratory string music.
Nonclassical presents:
Ligeti Quartet + John Kameel Farah The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, Hackney, London, E8 3AS, England
Wednesday 14th March 2018, 8.00pm – information here and here
This March, they’ll be presenting the European premiere of Anna Meredith’s ‘Tuggemo’), as well as performances of Kate Whitley’s ‘Lines’, Christian Mason‘s ‘Eki Attar’ and Tanya Tagaq‘s ‘Sivunittinni’ (as originally rendered by the Kronos Quartet, with the strings emulating Tagaq’s barrage of Inuit vocal effects via an array of frictional and percussive bow techniques devised by arranger Jacob Garchik).
Here’s a clip of the Ligetis performing an earlier Meredith work, plus the original Kronos performance of ‘Sivunittinni’, an earlier Kate Whitley strings-and-piano piece, and Christian Mason’s ‘Aimless Wonder’.
The Ligetis’ guest on this occasion is a pianist – Canadian musician John Kameel Farah, who surrounds and combines his piano playing with an array of synthesizers and processors which filter, warp and orchestrate his performance, which itself allies contemporary classical music with baroque, electronic, Early Music and Middle Eastern elements.
John will be premiering his new composition ‘Spinning Thread’ as well as drawing four more pieces from his back catalogue and from recent album ‘Time Sketches’ (‘Fantasia’, ‘Distances’, ‘Behold’ and ‘Maqam Constellation’) plus a performance of William Byrd’s ‘Hugh Ashton’s Ground’.
DJ sets will be provided by Ben Vince (a musician better known for his frenetic sets of improv/loop saxophone playing).
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More Nonclassical DJs (in the shape of Laurence Osborn and others) and more technological approaches and motifs will be showing up for the last of the four events covered in this post. While much of this year’s Convergence festival leans towards avant-garde pop artists with a foot in the contemporary classical world (John Cale, Kamaal Williams, Ben Frost, Simian Mobile Disco and Charlotte Gainsbourg are all appearing over the course of the month), the second in the festivals’s ‘Rise Of The Machines’ concert series takes a witty but serious look at the ongoing crossover between classical music and computer/systems thinking.
Convergence 2018 presents:
‘Convergence: Rise Of The Machines #2’ Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England
Sunday 18th March 2018, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Conductor Jessica Cottis (who also contributed to the City of London Sinfonia’s ‘Modern Mystics’ series last year) will be leading a thirty-piece orchestra, bolstered by live devices operated by members of Langham Research Centre (who maintain vintage electronic instruments in order both to safeguard the performance of 20th century classic electronic repertoire and to apply “period electronica” to newer compositions). Composers Beni Giles, Laurence Osborn, Josephine Stephenson, Jo Thomas and Max de Wardener have all collaborated on the event’s world premiere centrepiece, ‘Concerto for Drum Machine & Orchestra’, each of them contributing one of five movements to a composition which “places the drum machine centre-stage as solo musical instrument, bringing the sounds of dance music and hip-hop to the classical world.” Plenty of young and youngish contemporary composers have attempted to bring forms inspired by rave, techno, house into New Classical. As far as I know, this is the first such piece to surrender entirely to the primacy of beat and box.
In Nick Ryan and John Matthias’ violin-and-string-ensemble piece ‘Cortical Songs’ “the orchestra is partially controlled by the neural patterns of a tiny computer brain. The resultant work takes the orchestra into an ethereal sound world of lush strings juxtaposed with the skittering crackles of neural activity.”Magnus Lindberg ’s ‘Engine’ (which dates back to 1996) “(was) inspired by the computing language associated with using the Patchwork1 programme. ‘Engine’ is a sort of generator of musical material, which operates according to the rules pre-established by the composer. The texture is composed by the machine, on which the composer imposes dozens of constraints.” Finally, Barry Guy’s 2015 piece ‘Mr Babbage is Coming to Dinner!’ “was inspired by Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2… The graphic score – hand-drawn and partially coloured by Barry Guy – is a work of art in itself (and) calls on spontaneity and improvisation from the orchestra.”
I tracked down a couple of previous performances of ‘Engine’ and ‘Cortical Songs’ for illustration, so here they are:
Over in New York, the Ecstatic Music Festival continues throughout March with three more concerts across a brace of Thursdays, criss-crossing contemporary classical percussion, slam poetry, choirwork, experimental pop and progressive industrial metal in a thrilling cross-genre splay.
Arone Dyer’s Dronechoir & Mahogany L. Browne
Thursday 1st March 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
“Dronechoir is the latest innovation by Arone Dyer of Buke And Gase. Since February 2015 she has been examining dis/comfort within performance through a series of long-durational choral pieces, and has assembled a group of talented women from completely different musical backgrounds to engage in spontaneous performance that bridges the gaps between them.
“They’ll be joined by the celebrated poet and spoken word artist Mahogany L. Browne (Cave Canem Fellow and Programming Coordinator of Black Lives Matter Pratt @ Pratt Institute) for an evening of powerful vocal performances addressing Black Lives, gender equity and racial equality (featuring poets Imani Davis, Shanelle Gabriel and poet and singer Camonghne Felix).”
Glasser (acoustic trio) + big dog little dog
Thursday 22nd March 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
“Glasser (aka Cameron Mesirow), known for her ethereal vocals and atmospheric electro-pop, will venture into fresh sonic territory with her new all-acoustic trio, which features multi-instrumentalist Robbie Lee and bassist Eleonore Oppenheim.
“They will be joined by big dog little dog, Eleanor’s new duo project with composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery. Each band will perform sets of their own material, then together they’ll premiere a new piece written for the Festival.”
Bent Knee & Mantra Percussion
Thursday 29th March 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
“The “silo-smashing” sextet Bent Knee “taps into chamber pop, industrial rock, metal and prog-rock” (‘Wall Street Journal’). This hard-hitting experimental Boston band comes together with the visionary, “superhuman” (‘Time Out New York’) Mantra Percussion for new works expanding their already enormous scope and sound. The two ensembles will perform separate sets and then come together to premiere a new work by Bent Knee that weaves influences from across the rock, pop and avant-garde spectrums into a seamless, thrilling whole.”
As with the previous month’s worth of EMF concerts, all of these will take place at Merkin Concert Hall @ Kaufman Music Center, 129 W 67th Street, Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, NY 10023, USA.
Following on from the various posts I’ve done on Tim Smith fundraiser gigs, here’s details on the first three to go public this year (in Birmingham, York and Preston). They’ll be shows which are obviously of interest to fans who’ve followed Tim’s work in and out of Cardiacs, but in their lively breadth, they offer plenty for those who’ve never even heard of either Tim or the band.
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Die Das Der & The Catapult Club present:
A Tim Smith Fundraiser: The Courtesy Group + The Nature Centre + Ghosts of Dead Airplanes + The Crooked Hooks The Cuban Embassy @ The Bulls Head, 23 St Mary’s Row, Moseley, Birmingham, B13 8HW, England
Wednesday 21st February 2018, 7.30pm – pay-what-you-can event – information
The Birmingham event takes place at a Moseley joint generally better known for Latin music: hemmed in by rum posters and playing under the Cuban flag are various Brum-area acts with assorted mind-expanding sympathies, from the slightly fey to the outright bolshy.
I’ve encountered The Nature Centre before – light-touch “fololoppy” banjo-and-keyboards Anglopop meeting a Barrett-y/Partridge-y/Smith-y sensibility, while smuggling in strange tales of misogyny and telepathy under the cover of cuteness – but the other bands playing this pay-what-you-like gig are new to me. Shades of Captain Beefheart, The Fall and Ian Dury infest The Courtesy Group, thanks to Al Hutchin’s pop-eyed, pop-jawed declaiming over tunefully abrasive hubcap-guitar rock grooves (which travel from beaten-up armchair argument to deafening industry, and which deploy an extended armoury including baritone guitar and beatboxing).
More zig-zagging commentary and tossed-salad narrative come from The Crooked Hooks, who seem to have started from an electric folk groundpoint (with a flick of country fingerpicking) but then rapidly twisted and buggered it up with dirty art rock. They’ve ended up sounding like a collision between Kevin Rowland and Stump: admittedly, a Kevin who’s let the quest for soul slip through his fingers while he was sunk in esoterica about lost continents, nursery rhymes, insults and horses.
Finally, the sludgy jangle of self-deprecating trio Ghosts Of Dead Airplanes defines itself, variously, as “post-post-punk” , “paunch-core”, “noise-pap” and “stupid”. Lurching about all over the shop on a sprawling, surprisingly diverse noise-pop chassis, they formerly bit chunks from what sounded like everything from Pop Will Eat Itself, Nirvana and Gary Numan through to The Double; but more recently they’ve been sounding like anxious boys sticking their bewildered heads out of the billowing trailsmoke-ball of My Bloody Valentine.
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Maeve Pearson, Jock Bray, Ian Hughes and Simon Piper present:
An Evening Of Fadeless Splendour: Kavus Torabi + Redbus Noface + Paul Morricone + Stephen Gilchrist The Fulford Arms, 121 Fulford Road, York, Yorkshire, YO10 4EX, England
Friday 27th April 2018, 7.00pm – information here and here
Several actual Cardiacs (and honorary family members) are showing up at the York gig. Kavus Torabi will be including it as part of his upcoming tour of new solo material featuring a more serious change of tone, in which he’ll be applying his offbeat psychedelic imagination to sombre-yet-colourful acoustic guitar wrangles, ghostly harmonium drones and dark airs about preoccupations and mortality… as well as the odd Knifeworld piece. (Note – if you’re in London on 22nd February, he’ll also be previewing this tour set in Kings Cross.)
Stephen Gilchrist (a.k.a “Stuffy” or, more recently, “Stephen eVens”) will be playing some of his guitar/melodica/microsynth songs about wilful disappointments, bloody-mindedness, childhood holidays and other sardonic aspects of the human condition. For a man who’s ostensibly such a downbeat bastard, he’s always proved a very engaging live performer, clearly relishing his own gallows humour and the grin beneath the growl. (Having delivered one of the finest British songwriter albums of 2017 also helps, I suppose…)
Stephen also pops up as part of the lineup of Redbus Noface, the ongoing band project by Mark Cawthra (Tim Smith’s primary foil in the early Cardiacs lineups). Helping Mark and Stephen land the Redbus cargo of chunky art-rock and skewed perspective are Bob Leith (another Cardiac) and Mick Russon (sometimes of Cardiacs-inspired Midlands wonk-pop band 7shades, more on whom later). Bar sporadic gigs, Redbus has been pretty quiet since the release of debut album ‘If It Fights The Hammer, It Will Fight The Knife’ nearly seven years ago: perhaps they’ll have something new for us now.
Completing the evening’s entertainment is an appearance by main Scaramanga Six songwriter and frontman Paul Morricone, delivering a solo acoustic guitar package of Scaramanga songs and (perhaps) some additional work in progress. His main band, with their Yorkshire-Krays schtick and their tuneful swagger, might be one of the proudest live acts around; but even without them Paul’s presence is undiminished. He’s still got that big, carrying voice, plus two decades of tough, smart tuneful rock songs behind him – many of them mercilessly skewering toxic masculinity from an insider perspective, focussing not just on its frightening cruelties and callousnesses, but also on its footling self-delusions, its stunted fears and resentments, its swaggering nightmares.
With his work given a new uncomfortable resonance in these days of exposed misogyny, Paul frequently offers grim theatre, with clear lessons beneath the tunes and the dark characterisations. Thankfully, the wider wit and elan of his songwriting – its other varied subjects include stagefright, dreams, and the battle for independence of mind and action, often addressed with dark and melodramatic humour – ensure that an audience with him is far from being a brutal drag-down.
Further details on the show are yet to be confirmed but the planned visuals by Kandle Voodoo, plus the efforts of assorted DJs, will help grease the brain and ensure that everything should roll on until two in the morning.
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Hyena Inc. presents:
The Whole World Window 2: The New Continental, South Meadow Lane, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8JP, England
Saturday 11th August 2018, 12:00pm – information here and here
By far the biggest of the three events is the Preston one – a twelve-hour all-dayer happily yomping along in the footsteps of a previous attempt back in 2016.
In some respects it’s a rerun, with plenty of the same faces showing up. Promoter Greg Brayford is bringing his own mutant power-pop trio All Hail Hyena(whom I described back then as “Bo Diddley rocking an birthday-cake castle”). Prime Cardiacs acolytes 7Shades are still probably as close to the punchy, cartwheeling late-‘80s Cardiacs sound as you’re going to find without a time machine. Also making return appearances are odd-fit acapella jazz’n’Latin pop singer Asha Hewitt (a.k.a. “Moon Ahsa”, sometimes part of Solana) and the deafening hardcore tinkle of Britney (I’m sorry, but I can’t top my 2016 description of them as “one-and-a-half-minute bursts of earsplitting rock numbers plastered with crumpled ice-cream-van melodies…”)
In other respects, WWW2 is a monstrously ambitious jump-up from the last time around, with Cardiacs-community names coasting in from all over the country and from further afield in Europe. The last of the 2016 returnees is Sterbus, bringing his lovingly boiled-up jam of Smith, Fripp, Zappa and ‘90s rock influences over from Rome (and travelling in cahoots with Dominique d’Avanzo, his usual clarinet-and-voice foil). As with the York gig, Kavus Torabi will play a mostly-acoustic solo set; also in attendance are his fellow Londoners The Display Team with their brass-heavy, complicated-but-catchy avant-rock songbook.
Continuing his ongoing journey from the American underground to the hearts of an increasing number of unsuspecting British freaks, former Thinking Plague/5uu’s polyinstrumental wildcard Bob Drake pops across the Channel from his south-of-France home with a cavalcade of lighthearted weird-fiction tales for guitar, voice and funnybone. From Tyneside and Northumberland, the recently reunited Sleepy People (complete with original frontman and ongoing Ultrasound icon Tiny Wood) will be bringing their pumping, spiralling kaleidoscopic psych-pop for strange city corners; while twilight-folk singer Emily Jones, from Cornwall, will be unpacking her own tales of sea-wives, suspect fairies and haunted post-war bungalows.
The rest of the bill features some rich north-western and Midland pickings which have caught Greg’s eye. Former Polyphonic Love Orchestra members David Sheridon and Debz Joy are making what I think is their first live appearance in their new post-punk fabulist guise as Army Of Moths; Telford-based punk-pop absurdists A Pig Called Eggs sound like John Otway and Syd Barrett happily sharing a single body, but struggling for control of a jouncing mathcore band. Rounding the bill off are Mancunian loop-pedal-pushing lo-fi noise-pop soloist RoBotAliEn (a moonlighter from frequent Hyena-gig guests Sweet Deals On Surgery) and folk-singer Cassandra Payne, whose 2016 debut EP ‘Sheltering Tree’ blends a Northern English folk heritage with lessons and Americana ideas picked up from journeys through the Appalachians, the wilds of Vermont and the bohemian idyll of Cape Cod’s Provincetown.
Greg has also promised a rash of zines, merchandise and commemorative souvenirs, plus a couple of mysteries in the shape of Hannah’s Storey (a top-secret duo being assembled especially for the event) and a similarly secret headliner (which, given the calibre of the people he’s already managed to sign up, ought to be very special indeed…) Meanwhile, for a peek at the previous Whole World Window concert in 2016, see below.
A couple of quick dips into wider worlds, with minimal blather from me..
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This isn’t the first time I’ve featured the audio-visual collaborations of jeweller and live artist Poppy Porter and multilayering bass guitar maestro Steve Lawson, but if you haven’t heard of/seen either of them before, nor encountered their unusual duo approach, here’s an opportunity to go and immerse yourself at a new show in Steve’s current home town of Birmingham…
Steve Lawson/Poppy Porter: Illuminated Loops Tower of Song, 107 Pershore Road South, Kings Norton, Birmingham B30 3EL, England
Sunday 25th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here
“Steve Lawson and Poppy Porter bring their amazing music and live art show to Birmingham. Steve plays his textured bass guitar loops, Poppy draws what she sees. Poppy is synaesthetic – she “sees” sound, and as the images appear on the paper, Steve treats the emerging art as a graphic score, folding it back into the music in way that creates a glorious feedback loop of art influencing art. It’s an immersive experience, to watch the art take shape before your eyes, to hear the music morph and twist as it is improvised in response to the art.”
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Back in London, the Nest Collective (in collaboration with internationally-minded arts inspirers Dash Arts) have been broadening their commitment to presenting and celebrating the breadth and ongoing relevance of folk music by staging Queer As Folk, “an ongoing series of events celebrating the work of LGBTQ+ artists working in folk, world, and roots music”.
I don’t feel well-equipped to dig into this topic in depth yet. Most straight blokes such as myself who start digging – even with the best intentions – into LGBTQ+ history and culture tend to find it rapidly and explosively unfolding into our faces like a long-compressed jack-in-the-box… or, more accurately, as if someone’s abruptly whisked our blinkers away and we find ourselves in the heart of a bustling, previously invisible party (with its own long-running stories of love and loss, inspiration and pain, quarrels and solidarity, bullying and resistance). It’s quite jolting – although often inspiring – to be confronted with one’s own ignorance.
During my own lifetime, while lesbian women have had an long-established presence in the singer-songwriter field (the redoubtable Holly Near and Joan Armatrading in the ’70s, Melissa Etheridge and Judy Small in the ’80s, the Indigo Girls in the ’90s, to name just the obvious few), it’s been more difficult to identify other aspects of the queer spectrum within folk unless you were already deep in the scene or privileged with word-of-mouth knowledge. Still, all of that is there – as, indeed, it’s everywhere – and this gig, while first and foremost an occasion for good music, should help any fresh attendees to open up a new perspective (and perhaps offer some new interpretations of folk traditions with their shifting tales of love, lust, disguise and transformations).
Enough of me and my vagueness. Here’s Nest Collective’s matter-of-fact briefing for the evening: the rest can just be learned in time…
“Born and raised in southwest Virginia, Sam Gleaves performs innovative mountain music with a sense of history. Sam carries on the ballads, dance music and storytelling he learned from numerous mentors in the Appalachian tradition including multi-instrumentalist Jim Lloyd and ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams. He tours extensively in the U.S. and, in 2016, toured the UK supporting Peggy Seeger.
In 2015, Sam collaborated with producer Cathy Fink and released a debut record of original songs, titled Ain’t We Brothers. In 2017, he appeared at the Cambridge Folk Festival and brought forth a new eponymous record with his singing partner Tyler Hughes, a fellow southwest Virginian steeped in the region’s musical traditions, which has received glowing reviews… Appalachian novelist Lee Smith has heralded Sam as “the best young songwriter around… courageous as hell and country to the bone.”
“Landless are Ruth Clinton, Meabh Meir, Sinead Lynch and Lily Power. They sing unaccompanied traditional songs from Irish, Scottish, English and American traditions in close four-part harmony. Their repertoire features songs of love, death and lamentation, as well as work songs, shape-note hymns and more recently penned folk songs. They’ve performed in a variety of settings, both in Ireland and abroad, and are closely involved with traditional singing sessions in Dublin and Belfast.”
Filthy Lucre presents:
Filthy Lucre: “Lingua Inota – A Night of Imagined Languages” Hackney Showroom @ Hackney Downs Studios, 13-15 Amhurst Terrace, Hackney Downs, London, E8 2BT, England
Saturday 24th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
“Every song in the night uses invented languages to express the things that real words can’t touch… The divinity of nonsense has served, like music, to say the unsayable. Whether associated with religious ecstasy or utopian projects, these utterances are inscrutable yet intimate.”
For a while now, freewheeling concert/club night/collective Filthy Lucre (run by composer Joe Bates, clarinettist Anthony Friend and composer/conductor William Cole) have been putting together events “tied together by artistic concepts, such as cultic rituals and urban sprawl.” I’ve not caught up with them before now, but this event’s an ideal opportunity to get a feel for how they think.
Incorporating chamber choir and synthesisers, the Filthy Lucre ensemble will be performing ‘Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (Do You Believe In The Immortality Of The Soul?)’ the final, morbidly romantic langue inventée work from renegade Canadian composer Claude Vivier (infamously found in manuscript form on his desk in the aftermath of his murder, which it seemed to predict in its envisioning of a narrator stabbed in the heart by a potential lover). Also in place on the bill will be an exploration of the original lingua ignota of visionary theologian, polymath and composer Hildegard of Bingen (she of the hallucinatory Christian visions and the remarkable command of twelfth century experience from its musicality to its medicine, its theological orientations to the outer fringes of its philosophy).
In addition, Filthy Lucre will be tackling the “nonsense” of the David Bowie/Brian Eno collaboration ‘Warszawa‘ (born from Bowie’s blind phonetic transcriptions of Polish folk song) and the “electric babble” of Talking Heads. I guess they could mean the band’s pulsing Afrodelic loft-music setting of Hugo Ball’s ‘Gadji beri bimba’ (from ‘Fear Of Music’) but it could extend to any of David Byrne’s chopped songtexts – in particular, those on 1980’s haunted, free-form-sermonizing ‘Remain In Light’ and its funk’n’free-association follow-up ‘Speaking In Tongues’ (which could also have lent its name to the event).
There will also be new music by Laurence Osborn (‘ELITE’, scored for tenor, keyboard, two synthesizers and tape), art by Georgia Hicks (inspired by the illustrated manuscripts of Hildegard’s visions, which depict reality as a wheel) and a Hildegard-themed film by Paul Vernon. Various musical arrangements come courtesy of event coordinator Joe Bates himself, and from Emma-Jean Thackray.
Some examples of what’s on offer or what might be propelling the thoughts behind it can be found below…
(Update – 19th February 2018 – have just been able to share the Paul Vernon Hildegard trailer too. Looks as if music by Xenakis and Cocteau Twins has been added to the brew…)
Even more than the Magic Garden (as covered a few posts back), Camden’s Green Note serves as a London folk-boutique par excellence. Most evenings, its small café space wedges in the cream of roots acts, the care they take over choice, presentation and atmosphere often justifying the priceyness of an evening out. You get what you pay for.
Here are a few things on offer there during early February:
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Ian Beetlestone & The Drowning Rats
The Basement Bar @ The Green Note, 106 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7AN, England ·
Saturday 10th February 2018, 8:00pm – information here, here and here
Plenty of charming elements and conversational topics converge in Ian Beetlestone. He’s a Yorkshireman-turned-Londoner, a pop and chanson connoisseur, a gay man and a cabbie. Several of these come together in his lively, engaging cabbie’s blog; even more of them combine in the fact that for the last couple of years Ian’s driven the capital’s first (and, to date, only) rainbow-coloured taxi (for what it’s worth, it’s becoming a much-loved city ornament both inside and outside of Pride, and he gets more stick from fellow cabbies over the Transport for London logo than he does for the LGBT+ associations).
As for the musicality, that flourishes in his all-singing acoustic trio The Drowning Rats, who offer “(a) unique combination of ratty jazz, drowned pop, magic, mystery, darkness and light to the capricious twin deities of love and song with ever pleading, hopeful eyes.” Having started up in Leeds about a decade and a half ago (and survived a subsequent re-potting in London), they’ve been the players of regular gigs in Soho (until recently, at the Blue Posts) and their home turf of Kings Cross (at the Star of Kings) as well as the Green Note.
With Ian’s florid piano backed by Dom Coles’ drumkit and Tom Fry’s double bass (and with occasional visitations from beery horns and assorted vocal foils), they deliver songs bursting with melody, harmony and joie de vivre; nodding to Brel and barrelhouse, Tom Waits and Paul Weller, Nina Simone and the Shangri-Las; suffused with wry reflection, wit and camaraderie. Ian rolls them out in a joyful soul growl – honey, gravel, fur and phlegm, with the hint of a romantic tenor under the wear and tear. It’s a little Tom Waits, but it’s rather more Dr John (if instead of immersing himself in the Big Easy, he’d taken a ship up the Thames estuary to found a bayoux in a London canal basin).
If you’re specifically after queerness, you’ll find it in the subtle and rosy sexual glow which illuminates many of the songs like fireside warmth, and also in the elastic inclusive community etched out in hints and amongst the broader scope of Ian’s songwriting. Inclusivity’s the word, in fact: there’s little details and easter eggs sown throughout the songs if you want to pick them up and decode them, but in general it’s all woven together with subtlety and open-heartedness. You can walk through their door and enjoy epic magic-realist power ballads about the A40, jaunts around the concerns, compromises and evasions of friendships, sly ballads which put the boot into Soho gentrification, and cheerfully apocalyptic accounts of mornings-after… all without worrying that you need to belong to any particular club. Although, in the extremely cosy confines of the Green Note’s basement bar, you’ll soon feel as if you do belong to one.
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Matshidiso + Alice Phelps The Green Note, 106 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7AN, England
Sunday 18th February 2018, 8:30pm – information here, here and here
I’m not sure just how hard you have to work, just how much you have to do, blossom and branch out before you burst the “secret” side of “well-kept secret” wide open. I would have thought that Matshidiso would have reached that point a long time ago.
Music flows through pretty much everything she lives and does, stemming from the cosmopolitan stew of her upbringing (a native Londoner with Jamaican and Sotho heritage, a classical piano trainee with a parallel love of soul, hip-hop and the cream of 1970s singer-songwriters) and blossoming into her realisation of herself as do-it-all artist – on-call pianist and singer, producer/writer/arranger for herself and for others. Sometimes a band leader, always a constant communicator, Matshidiso has led creative workshops; run song sessions across the internet from her own front room and played venues from the Southbank Centre to South Africa. All this and she’s also a qualified and multilingual international human rights barrister (with experience fighting sex trafficking rings in Ethiopia); a spokesperson for activism around positive African and female identity; a visiting music therapist at the Royal Marsden; a rehabilitating coach and encourager for young male offenders at various prisons; and a onetime relief worker in Haiti.
All of which would be gems on anyone’s resume (and which suggests someone who’s already learned and given back more than most of us will in an entire lifetime) but as a musician, the final proof has to be in the songs Matshidiso sings. Traditional they might be, but she’s learnt well from the craft of forebears such as Roberta Flack, Laura Nyro and Lauryn Hill, creating harmonically rich keyboard-driven work drawing from songwriter soul, gospel and pop through which she roams with self-awareness and generous interest in other people’s efforts and struggles.
Maybe Matshidiso’s relatively low profile is because of the fact that, despite being the best part of a decade into her career, she’s yet to record a debut album, or even that many releases. There’s been a smattering of very occasional singles; there’s been a 2012 EP of nursery rhymes reconfigured for adults (an idea that fits neatly into of what ‘The Guardian’s called her “whimsical yet solicitous” approach, and one that’s far more successful than its spec would suggest). In many artists this would seem to be a flaw – a shortage of the hunger, the self-assertion, the pushy pride which is needed to succeed.
I’d suggest the opposite – that Matshidiso’s artistic presence is one that’s absolutely caught up in the moment, too much so to have prioritised lumping her output down into artefacts or commodities. Her work is live, whether it’s in the concerts in which she improvises made-up-on-the-spot stories from the personal accounts of audience members, or the connection she makes with prisoners, the lost, the under-represented as part of work which goes beyond being an entertainer and engages itself with re-weaving music (with all of its connecting and healing qualities) back into the fabric of everyday life.
Opening the show is Leeds-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alice Phelps (who, with her full band, was delighting Daylight Music earlier in the weekend). Harpist, guitarist, pianist, violinist and rich grainy singer, Alice spins blues into folk, Irish, Chinese and otherworldly elements to create original songs and a full-bodied chamber pop. On this occasion, she’s on her own; but she’ll be back at the Green Note next month with a full ensemble of strings, harp and choir. For now, enjoy her songs in their simpler format.
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A few more familiar faces are showing up at the Green Note at around the same time. On 12th February, contemporary female folk ensemble Tell Tale Tusk, who work “spellbinding (and award-winning) vocal harmonies…around melodious instrumentals to reimagine folktales old and give light to folktales new” bring their harmonies and humour back to Camden Town for an evening of old and new songs. On 14th February, Alice Zawadzki – whose name has been scattered around these pages for her voice and/or violin work alone or with Sefiroth, Jamie Safir and others – presents a Valentine’s Day Special of known and unknown songs, covers and originals (assisted by dual cello improvisers Alice Purton and Shirley Smart). Or – if you fancy a different venue and a different blend of polycultural acoustica – then on 8th February Manchester world quintet Kabantu are launching their debut album down at Rich Mix in Shoreditch. Plentiful…
Tre Voci presents:
‘Auro’ (with Tre Voci + Kit Downes + Southbank Gamelan Players + Nonclassical DJ set) Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Wednesday 7th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Classical/experimental cello trio Tre Voci (who, back in December, were integrating and sparring with an Iranian hand-drummer and a Norwegian soprano, continue their tradition of cross-pollinating musical events by collaborating with jazz pianist/organist Kit Downes and four players from London-based Indonesian percussion ensemble the Southbank Gamelan Players at a pre-launch event for their upcoming EP ‘Auro’ (released on 25th February).
The gig’s being done in cahoots with Nonclassical, who are releasing the EP, performing (via head honcho Gabriel Prokofiev) a DJ set embracing and challenging western classical traditions, and hosting this interview in which Tre Voci’s Torun Stavseng and Gregor Riddell expound on the EP and on what they’re hoping to achieve with the concert. The interview reveals that not only will there be a extra guest appearance from cellist and singer Laura Moody, but that in an attempt to emphasise “the transcendental qualities of Gamelan music (which) lend (themselves) well to an innovative use of light and space” they’ll attempt to use the Chapel’s architecture to transport the audience into a “kaleidoscopic, illusory realm playing with their sense of space, time, light and sound. We will position the Gamelan players on the main stage whilst Kit will be hidden behind the organ and the cellos symmetrically dispersed in the corners of the chapel, with the aim to create an interplay with the sound reflections against the stone walls.”
The collective piece being performed and premiered here is ‘To Shadow’, composed by Bryn Harrison, which he describes as consisting of “rising lines in which the parts ghost each other… An idea I’ve been working with in this piece and other recent projects has been to increase the levels of repetition as the piece continues to create the feeling of being inside the music. I like to resist change when I working, trying to think into an idea rather than out of or away from it. There’s a different kind of musical development at play, where the act of listening changes rather than from specifically what happens in the music. I’m interested to see how this work with this particular combination of instruments and with the freer elements that Kit brings to the piece.”
Kit’s own recent ‘Obsidian’ album featured him playing various structured improvisations on a variety of church organ, so it looks as if the Chapel’s resident Willis organ will also be taking a jazz hammering. In addition, Kit has written a quartet piece for the ‘Auro’ EP (‘The Cult of John Frum’) which features himself on Hammond organ and will be performed at the concert. Depending on various sources, the concert will also feature fifteenth century music rearranged for cello trio (probably the Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem pieces featured on ‘Auro’), various group improvisations and a performance of John Cage’s ‘The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs’.
Psappha presents:
‘Caught In Treetops’
St Michael’s Church, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 5DG, England
Thursday 15th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Mancunian classical ensemble Psappha are performing a showcase of emerging composers at a mid-month concert in their main Manchester home.
‘Caught In Treetops’ is centred around Charlotte Bray’s piece of the same title, a work for solo violin and ensemble which responds to two contrasting lunar poems (“A Match with the Moon” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and “The Moon Sails Out” by Federico García Lorca). For this concert, it will features guest appearances by violinist Benedict Holland and conductor Mark Heron. Here’s an earlier performance of the piece by Neue Musik and Wibert Aerts:
The concert also showcases a selection of pieces from Psappha’s own emerging composer schemes. Robert Reid Allan‘s ‘The Palace Of Light’ is a sympathetic piano tribute to a notorious Glasgow cottaging location, musically characterised by tinkling water-dripping notes and an apprehensive, fractured romanticism, while Anna Clyne’s ‘Paintbox’ is “an immersive soundscape which combines recorded voice, breathing and other sound loops with a sonorous cello line” exploring “the life-changing effects of the atomic bomb.”James Williamson‘s ‘Fault-Klang’ equates extended clarinet techniques with geologic upheaval; Michael Cryne‘s flute-and-pedal-electronics piece ‘In Cloud Light’ takes its inspiration from the kinetic wind sculptures of American artist Anthony Howe. Will Frampton‘s ‘The Greening Variations’ is a violin/cello/piano trio in which each successive variation refreshes – or “greens” the previous one on an instrument-by-instrument journey “commencing…in an extreme register before narrating its way to a climatic melody accompanied by distinctive trill figures.” Written for mixed-percussion soloist, Lucy Armstrong‘s ‘Space Adventure’ works from a pulp science fiction scenario of hapless human explorers being obliterated by merciless aliens. Inspired by “an experience of being trapped in a place that is usually bustling with life, but is now deserted”, Bethan Morgan-Williams‘s ‘In Kenopsia’ is a unsettling, deceptive duet between a trombonist and a violinist (the first a live performer, the second only a strange mnemonic presence on electronic samples pieced together, warped and reshaped as a phantom accompanist).
Bar the Clyne, all of these pieces are already well-established in the Psappha repertoire, and you can watch and listen to previous performance of them below. In addition, if you turn up with your ticket at 6.40pm before the concert, there’ll be a “Demystifying New Music” talk introducing you to the composers and expanding upon their ideas.
Sprawling out over a long month between early February and early March, Théâtre Volière’s Marchland performance season will transform the City of London’s Bridewell Theatre into a recreation of “a secluded European theatre” aiming – via discussion and performance, music and acting, photography, discussion and art – “to explore what it means to be European today… everything that is good and bad about the human response to being pushed up against “otherness”…. (to) come together to share and unpick these European stories in an attempt to answer the question, “how do we live together?”…” Slipping in under the frowning threat of a hard, bruising Brexit and the rising of surly, xenophobic British fences, it’s a welcome and timely thing.
In principle, ‘Marchland’ is theatrical. Threaded through the season are performances of Volière’s own ‘Arnika’ dealing with the corrosive effects of dreadful secrets and guilt, post-Nazi occupation, in an Alsace town (exemplifying “the tragic choices forced on a border community trapped in a cycle of international vengeance” and of its quadralingual companion piece ‘Retour au pays‘, “exploring the multi-lingualism of border regions and its effect on their cultures” via the story of Alsatian poet Andre Weckmann and his journey – as a forced military draftee – through the Wehrmacht, the Russian front and the Free French). Also on offer are two pieces by La Soupe Compagnie: ‘Macao et Cosmage‘ (their headphone-driven children’s tale of colonialism – “part Japanese kamishabaï paper theatre, part pop-up storybook” – performed in a tiny twelve-person booth), and their poetry-and-puppetry-incorporating ‘Evocation’, a transposition of ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (Albert Giraud’s Symbolist poem-cycle of conscious, candid estrangement and displacement) to a Victorian-era Brighton Beach where it’s fed through the experience and cyclic memories of a traumatised young female refugee (scored by electro-acoustic composer Antoine Arlot). There’ll also be a festival-spanning interactive attempt (featuring the combined efforts of Marchlands artists and audience) to create and represent a borderland country of the imagination.
Yet – point for point and performer for performer – the majority of the festival is musical, bringing together a fascinating sweep of players from across Europe and interspersing them with British musicians exploring transcontinental roots and history (whether these are their own – as in the case of British-based Sephardic ensemble Sefiroth – or where their curiosity, studies and sympathies have led them.
Here’s a breakdown of the musical events, condensed from various bits of the programme text.
Carneval String Trio
“Carneval String Trio (made up of violinist Kamila Bydlowska, viola player Shiry Rashkovsky and cellist Timothée Botbol) have created a fascinating programme of twentieth-century music for us. Vanished kingdoms and shifting borders here, in an Eastern Europe where identities and allegiances were torn apart under the most savage circumstances imaginable.
“They’ll be playing pieces by Zoltán Kodály, Ernő Dohnányi and Gideon Klein, works that shock and mesmerize in equal measure. Each of these composers used folkloric themes to express their unique national identities, and yet these identities were rewritten for them many times as borders shifted and ideologies fought over their homelands. This is music that challenges us to ask “what is left of our identity when it is warped and usurped by the forces of nationalism?”
“The cultural and political history of the former Yugoslavia features large in this year’s ‘Marchland’. Greek guitarist Nikos Baroutsakis joins the conversation with a recital of music from the Balkans and the wider region, where Europe meets the Middle East. He’ll be playing pieces inspired by the folk culture of Armenia, the Balkans (including the former Yugoslavia) and Turkey.
“Carlo Domeniconi’s Variations on ‘Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım (I’m On A Long Narrow Road)’ – a Turkish folk song of pain and suffering – opens the programme. It is followed by four traditional Armenian dances arranged for guitar by Iakovos Kolanian. Finally, a rare performance of Dusan Bogdanovic’s ‘Six Balkan Miniatures’, composed for and dedicated to, world peace during the Yugoslavian Civil War.
“Fran & Flora are cellist Francesca Ter-Berg and violinist Flora Curzon. BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction described them as fiercely passionate and a string duo bound for glory, and that says it all about their approach to music making and their musical influences. For ‘Marchland’, they will be exploring musical styles from Eastern Europe, and how they are influenced by ongoing exchanges and tensions across borders and migrating communities. Expect soulful laments, exquisite songs, irresistible dance tunes, and tales of their musical adventures as outsiders intent on incorporating traditional music-making into their own, unique style.
“In addition, they’ll also perform in a double bill of music and conversation with Nikos Baroutsakis (extending their programme, their distinctive music-making interspersed with anecdotes and insights from their musicological travels in the Balkans) and, in another event, pairing up with Alex Batesmith’s dramatised talk ‘Blackbirds and Blue Helmets’ (about his experiences as a UN war crimes prosecutor in Kosovo and his travels in the former Yugoslavia).
“This is a melting-pot of rare and deeply-affecting music, woven around an ancient folktale. A resourceful harper charms his audience to sleep in order to steal their magical harp – The Oak of Two Greens. The harp belongs to the king of the Tuatha da Dannan; a legendary tribe which, according to legend, brought music to Ireland. Bardos Band follow the route this music might have travelled, using voice, harp, medieval fiddle, gittern, flutes and symphony to create an enchanting wash of sound.”
(Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any embeddable examples of the Bardos’ treatment of ‘The Oak Of Two Greens’, but it’s close enough to Christmas for me to offer you this…)
“The Bardos Band’s Sophia Brumfitt and Leah Stuttard also make up the early-music due Maiden In The Moor. For their own ‘Marchlands’ performance they’re reviving the music of Occitania, a vanished kingdom that once straddled Southern France and Northern Spain.
Maiden In The Moor
“The Occitan Troubadours sang of loyalty, love and longing, and their language and music survived through travelling poets and illuminated songbooks long after their culture was devastated by the Albigensian Crusade. Their work had a profound influence on European music and culture, and echoes of it can be heard in lieder, folk music, and the work of the singer-songwriters of our own time. The programme includes Troubadour and Trouvère songs, songs from the courts of Aquitaine and the Languedoc, and Spanish pilgrim songs.”
(Although there’s not much Maiden In The Moor material online, here’s an example of Occitan songcraft…)
“Norway’s KultNett bring together some of the foremost folk musicians and storytellers from beyond the Arctic Circle to examine the history of the peoples of Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people. Storytelling, a fast and furious fiddle and the traditional ‘joik’ of the Sámi are interwoven to create a performance that explores and interrogates the dynamics of cultural and ethnic hegemony in the Nordic region of Europe.
Ignacio Evangelista: ‘After Schengen’
“Adapted especially for Marchland and illustrated by a multi-media presentation, this is a truly immersive experience; a rare insight into a rich and vibrant borderland culture from the Northernmost reaches of Europe. They’ll also play in a separate double bill with Bardos Band, presenting an extended version of their Marchland programme.
“Inspired by Ignacio Evangelista’s photography sequence ‘After Schengen’, we brought together three artists to create an interdisciplinary event, ‘Before and After Schengen’, exploring the politics and the poetry around notions of the vanishing border.
Shiry Rashkovsky
“In front of a screening of his work, Ignacio will be talking about his fascination with Europe’s disused border posts. His talk will be interwoven with poems by Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes, written in response to Ignacio’s images and read by George himself. The whole will be framed by a unique performance of musical fragments and improvisations devised by Carneval String Trio violist Shiry Rashkovsky (also an associate member of the Philharmonia Orchestra).
This is a truly international collaboration that encapsulates perfectly the spirit of ‘Marchland’). Expect to find yourselves pondering the ephemeral and often arbitrary nature of borders. ‘Before and After Schengen’ will also be performed as a separate double bill with another extended performance of Kultnett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’.
“Sefiroth is an international collective of musicians founded by brothers Nick and Alex Roth to explore traditional Sephardic repertoire. music from the descendants of the Jews who left Spain or Portugal after 1492. Sung in Ladino (a language primarily spoken by Sephardic Jews), these ancient songs weave stories of love, loss and yearning for home, and evoke the lands where the 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, modern harmonies and trance-inducing rhythms. They’ll also be performing separately alongside Maiden In The Moor in a double bill; setting the revived music of a vanished culture alongside the living, evolving traditions of a banished people.
“Sweden and Denmark’s Åkervinda perform their unique, modern Scandinavian folksongs. Jazz singers at heart, and influenced by artists such as Björk and The Real Group, they share a deep love of folk music. Through improvisation, they breathe new life into traditional songs, singing stories of women through the ages in a programme of haunting harmonies and dazzling improvisations inspired by women’s history and the shifting populations of Europe. Their appearance at Marchland marks the opening of a UK tour and the release of their latest album. They’ll also be performing in a separate double bill with Maiden In The Moor.
“What can we say about our show ‘A Vanished Kingdom’? Not much, since it’s actually mostly your show and you’ve yet to devise it! Come and help make a season-long, open-access interdisciplinary event to be presented on the closing day of the season.
“On three consecutive Saturdays we’ll be meeting to create our own Vanished Kingdom – an imaginary borderland with its own culture, geography, history, language… All devised by you. If you’re a visual artist, writer or performer, if you’re someone who wants to share ideas in a supportive and respectful environment, if you’re someone who enjoys playing and make believe, then join us and artists from the Marchland season to help make something truly unique. You are welcome to come and go as you please for the duration of each workshop, and even to just quietly observe the controlled chaos! It’s completely free to participate.
On the 3rd March, we’ll be presenting the audience with a free ‘Vanished Kingdom’ event featuring the stories, songs, dances, artwork, history, geography of a European borderland of our participants’ collective imagination. As an opener to the presentation, there’ll be another chance to hear a performance by Åkervinda (giving us their perspective on women’s history and cross border co-operation) plus a one-off set from three members of Sefiroth (Alex Roth, Alice Zawadzki & Olesya Zdorovetska).
“Expect, perhaps, robust and lively debate about the tensions between regional identity and cross-cultural fertilisation, absurd flights of fancy and charming anecdotes, and a rich tapestry of differing viewpoints and traditions. Looking forward to meeting you at the crossroads!”
All events are at The Bridewell Theatre, 14 Bride Lane, Blackfriars, London EC4Y 8EQ, England. Dates are as follows.
Nikos Baroutsakis – Thursday 8th February 2018, 1:15pm
Fran & Flora – Friday 9th February 2018, 1:15pm
KultNett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’ – Friday 9th February 2018, 7:30pm; Tuesday 13th February 2018, 1:15pm; 16th February 2018, 1:15pm; 17th February 2018, 9:00pm
Bardos Band’s ‘The Oak of Two Greens’ – Monday 12th February 2018, 1:15pm
Before and After Schengen – Thursday 15th February 2018, 1:15pm
Sefiroth – Friday 16th February 2018, 7:30pm; Saturday 17th February 2018, 2:00pm; Friday 23rd February 2018, 7:30pm
Maiden in The Moor – Wednesday 28th February 2018, 1:15pm
Åkervinda – Friday 2nd March 2018, 1:15 pm
Double-bill concerts:
Nikos Baroutsakis + Fran & Flora – Saturday 10th February 2018, 2:00pm
Bardos Band’s ‘The Oak of Two Greens’ + KultNett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’ – Saturday 10th February 2018, 7:30 pm
‘Before and After Schengen’ + KultNett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’ – Thursday 15th February 2018, 7:30 pm
Alex Batesmith’s ‘Blackbirds and Blue Helmets’ + Fran & Flora – Tuesday 20th February 2018, 7:30 pm
Maiden in the Moor + Sefiroth – Thursday 22nd February 2018, 7:30 pm
Åkervinda + Maiden in The Moor – Thursday 1st March 2018, 7:30 pm
‘A Vanished Kingdom’:
Free-entry workshops – Saturday 10th February 2018, 9.30am; Saturday 24th Feburary 2018, 2.00pm, Saturday 3rd March 2018, 10.00am
Presentation concert (plus pre-concert performances by Åkervinda + Alex Roth/Alice Zawadzki/Olesya Zdorovetskaya) – Saturday 3rd March 2018, 2:00 pm
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 