More new-ish performance territories; this time down in south London by Nunhead Green, where a somewhat battered but much-loved and independent-spirited shopping local parade currently hosts the Strange Parade venue. The latter is hosting “a night of low-voltage experimental acoustic performance and visual art” at the end of the week, co-curated by Merlin Nova along with filmmaker and photographer Sophie le Roux. This is the second night in the series, which aims to “use no electronic machines (apart from a kettle) and aim to curate acts which have used as little electricity as possible during the processes of their practices.” Tea, whiskey and pom bears are provided as an extra audience incentive; and the last event, back in November, featured (in addition to Merlin) performances by avant-garde double bassist Otto Willberg, all-forms free dancer Sofia Filippou and visual artist Flora Hunt.
Merlin’s been in here several times before as a boundary-hopping singer-instrumentalist, sound artist, poet and monologuist who plunges her imagination and thirst for performance into any opportunity and shapes her art and the situation to fit. Initially a radio broadcaster and soundscaper, she’s the possessor of an unsettling vocal range and a ravenous perspective which she uses for everything from imaginary dronefolk music and the weirdest of weird pop to solo audio dramas…. here’s a selection of what she gets up to.
Of the two other musicians featured this week, ‘Misfit City’ has previously crossed paths with bass clarinettist/saxophonist Yoni Silver while he was backing Charles Hayward in twisty groove ensemble Timestretch Alarmsong during October last year, and as part of the Ashley Paul Ensemble back in 2017, although he’s also noted for his work with the Hyperion Ensemble. He also sings and plays violin, piano and computer, sometimes simultaneously, so his options for noisemaking are pretty varied. Here’s the A-side of his recent ‘Nethertongue’ cassette, one of his Denis D’Or trio tracks and a solo…
As for Aga Ujma, I’ve been hearing about her for a while: a young Polish singer-songwriter and composer also enthralled by English and Indonesian music forms and the connections she makes between them. Though she can quite happily make her way as a singing guitarist with a nice line in Joanna Newson covers (an artist she sometimes resembles, not least in the reedy glory of her vocals) she’s a committed ethnologist who creates art in accordance with her extensive studies, and is as much likely to accompany herself on a quiverful of rarer instruments – the Javanese gamelan-related gender barung xylophone and plucked siter; or the Indonesian sasando, “a gorgeous thirty-two-string, butterfly-winged zither”.
The remainder of the evening’s visual art component comes from Yael Roberts, who “hand-prints from found wood to create large scale installations (exploring themes of death, mortality, repetition, and presence.” While she’s got a parallel line in performance art (much of which is captured on video and stills here), her contributions to this particular evening appear to be static art: a set of ceramics made in collaboration with Goldtapped Gallery’s Juliet Fleming.
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I should also mention that Aga Ujma is also playing a couple of other London gigs in February. One is a LaLa Records’ Pin Drop Sessions in Peckham where she’s in a double bill with double bass player singer-songwriter Nina Harries.
As a player, Nina follows in a family tradition (her father Tim Harries has double-bassed prominently for Steeleye Span, Bill Bruford’s Earthworks and Brian Eno, amongst others). That said, her musical development and appetites are very much her own; formed not just by parental example and extensive classical training but by immersion in dance theatre and in work with “story telling star gazing ukulele agit-pop” band The Burning Glass, gonzo bluesman John Fairhurst, folk-punkers Barbarella’s Bang Bang, electro-classicalists the London Electronic Orchestra and Symphonica. Her technique’s impeccable and her songwriter voice wide and unfettered, as happy with the whimsical as the mesmeric.
The other concert, a week earlier, is a SOAS music showcase in the centre of town which also features world fusion band The Sages (previously The Seven Sages), featuring Yijia Tu, Peadar Connolly-Davey and Gregor Bauer, and blending music strands from East Asian folk music and Chinese Sizhu with those of western forms of folk and indie rock.
More about them here – “as a diverse cosmopolitan generation growing up under an age of globalization and other social changes, the band aims to explore to break through concepts such as “East” and “West,” cultural identity, and musical “genres” through both original composition and adaption of traditional folk music. Indeed the “The Sages 竹林七贤” is a reference to a group of seven literati, artists and scholars in ancient China who chose to escape mundane and hypocritical secular life and status to live in the remote natural countryside with the companionship of music, poetry, art (and wine) in search of a higher spiritual fulfilment.”
Some examples of what The Sages play are here:
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Dates:
Mortal Oil 2: Aga Ujma + Yoni Silver + Yael Roberts + Merlin Nova + Sophie Le Roux
Strange Parade, 123 Evelina Road, Nunhead, London, SE15 3HB, England
Friday 24th January 2019, 7.30pm – information here
SOAS Concert Series presents:
The Sages + Aga Ujma Brunei Gallery @ SOAS, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, Bloomsbury, London, WC1H 0XG, England
Friday 21st February 2020, 8.00pm – information here and here
LaLa Records presents
PinDrop Session: Aga Ujma & Nina Harries One & All Cafe, 28 Peckham Rye, Peckham, London, SE15 4JR, England
Friday 28th February 2020, 7.30pm – £10 or pay-what-you-can event – information here and here
Here’s two pissed-off, crap-boyfriend shots from Sophie Onley. I certainly wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her. It’s not that she’s going to bulldoze you like Nicki Minaj: she’s not into the cartoon superheroine stuff. It’s more that she’s already something of a mistress of rebound.
Again, not in that she’ll promptly plunge into the arms of another unsuitable boy; more that it doesn’t take long for the scales to drop from her eyes, for her to laser in on the inadequacies which she’d previously ignored, and for her to then brush you off in song. She’s fine with addressing her own vulnerability, her own sense of outrage and hurt, but after that she locks it down and knocks it right back.
Behind the hi-NRG beat and the offbeat puffy keyboards, ‘Broken Doll’ is classic girl-group stuff. The lyrics are a barrage of quickfire moon-in-June rhyming and indignant complaints – “you’re the puppeteer, / you can pull my strings, / you’ve got to keep control,”; “take me out of play, like a throwaway,”; “you’ve got a heart of stone, / you’ll end up all alone.” But when Sophie delivers her verdict that it’s all “like a fairytale of a princess locked / in a prison tower – / on the final page, there’s no handsome prince, / ‘cos you were just a coward”, there’s that note in her voice; pointedly sour, cutting, entirely justifiable.
Plenty of shallow, lustful men covet the point when a girl becomes a woman. Here’s the flipside they’re scared of: the moment when the gullible eyes staring up at them harden, get wise to them and won’t be fooled any more, and they feel their power shrivel.
Trance-pop banger ‘Web of Lies’ comes at it from another angle: Sophie as assertive woman scorned, zooming in over bouncing synth booms, yelling back over being negged and toyed with – “always playing games, no two days the same… you hang round ’til the bitter end, now you tell me you want to be my friend.” As with Broken Doll, her nasal voice has a powerful witchy edge to it, a touch of razor blade under the frills. I think it’ll be a while before people are shouting “yass, queen” at her, but this is a strong start.
Secret Treehouse: ‘At Sunrise”
With ‘At Sunrise’, Secret Treehouse give us one of those clapalong synthpop anthems that make us feel that that they’re about to lead us out of the nightclub on some kind of procession. Think John Barnes’ You’re the Voice, although Secret Treehouse’s Anja Bere offers a much cooler and airier voice to fly like a banner over the martial beats.
There’s not much more to the lyrics than waking up next to your lover and feeling that you could take on the entire world, but the song still recaptures the immensity and fulfilment of that feeling. “Are we allies?” asks Anja, but doesn’t even take a moment before she affirms it. As simple as anything, and as satisfying as simple.
Jakk Jo: ‘All Dat I Do’
Bloody hell, please spare me from Jakk Jo and his Dirty South rap ramblings on ‘All Dat I Do’ – like some smug drag of a neighbour who spends his life languidly boasting on about how much better his backyard parties are than yours. Singing as if he’s got a personal summer shining down on his crib; while you, you poor bastard, have to spend your time still shivering under the January greys.
Few things are more tedious than someone else showcasing their party, aren’t they? Jakk songspiels in true idling playa style, if everything is spilling into his lap. If you bumped into him at his neighbourhood New Orleans mall and sneaked a look at his shopping list it would probably read something like “swimming pool, models, pussy, booze, and that other guy’s bitch”. God knows that that’s pretty much what this song amounts to. A few buddies – Cre8tive, Kil’lab, 93Bread – pitch up to the mic in order to spurt a few rap bars of their own, but it’s predictable bragging, gym-flexing, bitches-and-bitches-and-ball-wit’-my-crew stuff which flits past like a summer fly.
It’s a shame really, since aside from the actual words, this is by no means bad. General Savage’s Miami production is actually rather wonderful, illuminating the whole song in a dreamy, spacious blue-sky light and wrapping several of the vocals in artful Autotune stepping or a cunning heat-haze of backwards distortion. The melodies in the arrangement lick back on themselves, little Caribbean tides, with a perky tickle of steel-drum riff being a particular pleaser. But by cracky, if I could surgically remove the rhyming bores on top, I would.
Yeah, OK, I’m being unfair. There’s more to Jakk than this – a tougher, more urgent side – and I shouldn’t be demanding that he wallows in all of Nawlins’ problems just so that I can get a poverty-porn fix. It’s just that this kind of insubstantial poolside bollocks doesn’t half reduce a man to a mannequin – and under the grey humph of a London January, I’m not good as a party guest and I’m damn grumpy as a neighbour.
Sophie Onley: ‘Web Of Lies/Broken Doll’ Nub Music (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming double A-side single
Released: 3rd January 2020 Get it from: download from Apple Music and Amazon; stream via SoundcloudDeezer or Spotify Sophie Onley online:
Secret Treehouse: ‘At Sunrise’
self-released (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 17th January 2020 Get it from: download from Apple Music or Amazon Music; stream via Deezer or Spotify Secret Treehouse online:
Jakk Jo: ‘All Dat I Do’
Jakk Jo (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 17th January 2020 Get it from: free download from Bandcamp; stream via Soundcloud Jakk Jo online:
Three quieter tracks – let’s start soft and get louder…
A couple of decades ago, George Moorey was the multi-instrumental half of the criminally-unknown Gloucester duo Ghosting, who gifted us with a succession of gorgeous and breathy low-key pop singles and a couple of obscure albums before their singer-songwriter half Dan Pierce followed another calling and headed off to County Durham to become a vicar. Since then, George has sometimes resurfaced as a producer, or as a sporadic instrumental illustrator of Gloucester history.
Now, however, he’s re-teamed with singing drummer Shane Young (from late-era Ghosting) to form The Powdered Earth. New songs and stories are promised; but for their curtain-raiser, ‘The Atlantic’ George briefly and wordlessly steps out on his own, sketching out the musical terrain at the break of dawn before coming back to lead us into it properly.
What wells out of the speakers at us has many of George’s hallmark Ghosting touches. There’s his sparse but luminous sonic touch (here, it’s mostly carried by softly-couched piano echoed by distant fluting synth, and impelled by deep-rooted waves of drone-bass). There’s that intimated, yet subtly forensic, focus on emotional detail, drawing you in. Pull the ingredients apart and you’ve got a typical piece of soft-edged film soundtracking; but put them together the way George is doing it, and you end up with the prelude to a kind of musical novel, something closer to Peter Chilvers’ intermittent work with Tim Bowness. Unexplicit; eschewing clumsy points; providing clues and pointers to something which only gradually comes together and reveals itself. It’s over in two-and-a-half minutes, brought to a delicate halt in mid-pace. I’m already looking forward to whatever comes next.
More stories are supposed to be coming from Norwegian singer-songwriter Simen Lyngroth‘, whose debut album ‘Take All the Land’ was a set of autumnal reflections and hauntings on jealousy, insecurity and secret trepidations. ‘Morning Light’ is the first song in a forthcoming set which wraps into a fairytale: a sort of Scandinavian slice of magic-realism in which a young man searches for “the spark”.
Perhaps it’s just a more mythical and sensitive way of tackling the sophomore album jitters. Certainly, ‘Morning Light’ has all of the indications of being a palate cleanser. It’s as simple as can be. An acoustic guitar, a voice, a frail harmony; the outline of a hometown visit, a return to childhood haunts. A revisiting of old views and landscapes in order to recharge, but at all times carefully skirting stagnation. “It’s what I need. / Lazy walks around the park… / I need this morning light to call my own – / these few moments awake / before I’m breathing in water again.” Another frangible overture.
Dutch singer-songwriter Marle Thomson has already made a mark at home, and while ‘Expectations’ sees her slipping a little deeper into Anglo territories, it’s still an indicator of how accomplished she is already and how little she needs to change. Mellow beat-pop – with its slow hip-hop jams, its crafty drop-outs and its rare-groove echoes – has been an over-populated territory for the past few decades: and refreshing that is a delicate matter of not messing too much with the formula, but polishing and emphasising particular isolated aspects as you build it around your core of song. Marle does just that with ‘Expectations’.
It’s not a game-changer by any means, but that’s part of the point. ‘Expectations’ is about anxieties and FOMO; it’s about the way that it’s not just celebrities who feel compelled to live out their lives broadcasting images, but the way that all of us now do via timelines and digital shopfronts, instagramming and influencing, feeding a general hunger while breeding another helpless hunger all of our own. (“Expectations, like a nail into the wall / I need everything, everything, or nothing at all.”) In response to its theme, it’s musically relaxed, with flickers of both Erykah Badu and early-’80s Steve Winwood – its rhythm ticking along like an old grandfather clock, its guitar line springy like a hair-curl rather than a disco pulse; its synths little warm, edgeless wellings and air-puffs which just happen to be there at precisely the right time.
Marle’s voice is breezy, intimate, unshowy but effortless winding itself around the blue notes needed to emphasis regret (“On my own, off the beaten track, / I didn’t know, I didn’t know – / I fell right through the cracks”) and understated revelation. By song’s end, everything is filtered, resolved and successfully reset, for now: “just ‘cause I’m giving it up, doesn’t mean I give up, no.” Next step coming.
The Powdered Earth: ‘The Atlantic’ The Powdered Earth (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download-only single
Released: 11th January 2020 Get it from:Bandcamp The Powdered Earth online:
Simen Lyngroth: ‘Morning Light’ Apollon Records (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 17th January 2020 Get it from:Apollon Records (parent album) Simen Lyngroth online:
Marle Thomson: ‘Expectations’ BERT music (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download/streaming single
Released: 17th January 2020 Get it from:Apple Music, Soundcloud (stream only) Marle Thompson online: <
A set of upcoming showcases happening at opposite corners of the country.
Ragga Gröndal’s currently a little-known name over here. In Iceland, though, she’s a much bigger deal – hailed as one of the country’s most remarkable singers. Performing in both Icelandic and English, she spans folk, pop and classical elements: less of an upsetter and groundbreaker, perhaps, than most of the Icelandic musicians who make the crossing over to Britain, but as the expounder of a kind of refined pop purity that’s actually a broad umbrella for a rich blend of other musical aspects, she does well. Here’s the blurb:
“The sound of Ragga Gröndal’s music is warm, adventurous and modern, yet accessible for curious music-lovers. (She) has worked with the same musicians for a decade and together they have toured all over Europe and created many beautiful and unforgettable moments. The band consists of musicians who are all independent artists in their own right; Guðmundur Pétursson (guitar), her brother Haukur Gröndal (woodwind player) and Claudio Spieler (percussion)… Each and every concert becomes a unique journey between the musicians, the audience and the performance space.”
For this special one-off show in London on the 19th, Ragga’s just bringing Guðmundur Pétursson: a musician whose work stretches from pop to his own classical guitar concertos, he’s an ideal and flexible foil.
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There’s a Success Express quadruple bill at Zebranos in Soho on the 21st, part of a new fortnightly showcase scheme. It’s all free to get in, but you pay Soho prices for your drinks and they suggest you book ahead for a table if you want to get in and sit down.
As leader of The Velveteen Orkestra, Dan Shears dresses his dramatic sky-high vocals and rockabilly guitar in a wagon circle of string trio, piano and drums; sometimes evoking the country pop of Del Shannon or Dion, sometimes a Russian tundra shimmer, sometimes Muse-ian histrionics. Seasoned Aussie guitarist-singer-songwriter Ben Eaton is as smooth and gritty and no-nonsense as a well-maintained backroad: he’s a constantly busy professional with weddings, corporate events and similar cover-fests under his belt along with the gigs stuffed with originals, but don’t let that put you off too much. He’s a witty performance livewire who’s more than capable of transcending any workaday made-to-measure gig as well as pulling off blues-funk shows of his own.
Two more singer-songwriters are on the bill. Hattie Erawan – until recently known as Hattie Marsh – is Norfolk-born, has mingled Thai and English heritage and a forbidding expression, and also has about five years of playing London acoustica mainstays like the Bedford and St Pancras Old Church. She’s got Joni Mitchell, Nirvana, and Sheila Chandra down as influences: the outcome is bare, clear modern songs with a hard electric edge, sung with a hint of storms and in a tone like a steel statue. Sessioneer/producer Matt Ryan is embarking, or perhaps reembarking, on a solo career. His lone available track, a demo for The Last Time, is a polished bit of white R’n’B: while it’s a tad conservative and stripped-back in its current state, emotionally it’s a good deal more convincing than much of what reaches the charts. Worth keeping an eye on.
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Although it does have a lower-income ticket option, another upcoming showcase – ‘On The Nature Of Things’ – isn’t free; but, to be fair, it’s less likely to cover its expenses with beer money and upmarket bar food. Its aims are to be “quiet… introspective… an intimate evening of music. Immerse yourself as we relish in the more subdued side of music for one night through folk song, piano music, ambience/electronic and some modern classical. It is a space to listen. Expect fairy lights, darkness, and music to make you sit in awe, cry or sleep.
“‘On The Nature Of Things’, which this event is named after, is the debut album by Glasgow based musician and composer Blair Coron, who shall be hosting this event and is currently touring the UK with it. His intention is to create enchanting atmospheres allows for the audience to listen to the performers and to set course for introspection and meditation.”
Blair’s own work blurs around classical and near-ambient ideas for piano, acoustic guitar and string ensemble. He describes the album as “a delicate exploration of the intricacy and fragility of life, nature and the surrounding world. It is love…mortality…the sublime…a personal mantra…every thing.” So far, on spec, typically New Age-y and easily consumable; but he also mixes in poetry, chamber chorale, mandolins, birdsong and folksongs and (somewhere) a Nintendo handheld games console. If you’re worried that his deliberate gentleness places him on the wrong side of tentative, don’t. The results are edgeless and delicate, deliberately softened and frangible; but they have their own dainty logic and an openness which is rare. Streets away from the guarded blandness of much of the post-classical wash.
He’s been doing these shows for about a year now (from Edinburgh to Yorkshire to Inverness and Manchester) and I’ve not heard about them before this; but there are currently two OTNOT shows happening soon, both featuring Blair and ukulele-folkster Zoë Bestel. If you read that last phrase and thought cutesy versions of old pop and indie hits, think again. Zoë’s of that small number of people who turn the uke into a kind of perpendicular harp, using it to underpin a gorgeous art-pop folk soprano and a series of bewitching small-place songs. The kind of song and delivery that kills casual chat and has a roomful of people rapt and focussed entirely on what they’re seeing and hearing.
The London show – on the same night as Success Express – also features a couple of German musicians. Pianist, composer and sound designer Tom Blankenberg (who runs the Convoi Studios in Düsseldorf) works in a similar post-classical vein to Blair, although a more austere one. In recent years, he became interested in writing for solo piano: the result was his debut album ‘Atermus’, released last year and containing thirteen tracks in which strangely tender romantic melodies are concealed in minimalist sparseness, as if Bill Evans were communing with Arvo Pärt. In contrast, Anin Rose creates gospel-infused piano pop – not at the brassy end of either, but at the silky reverberant intersection of both. On record, a subtle reverb skitters almost imperceptibly around her songs and harmonies chase the main vocal like kissing clouds: live, I’m guessing that she does it all by presence.
The Glasgow show – in early February – features a pair of Scottish folk musicians, Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach. A fiddler and pianist respectively, they’re rooted in tradition but immersed in present impression, “interested in making music filled with spontaneity, sensitivity and freedom. Inspiration comes from their pasts and surroundings, feeding music that’s rooted in tradition, whilst stretching it’s possibilities through improvisation and imagination.” Their latest release, last summer’s ‘Air Iomall’, was inspired by a trip around the currently uninhabited Shiant Isles off Scotland’s west coast, and their instrumental responses to the history that hangs around the places.
I’m hoping that Blair continues with these shows: they have a potential for some serious beauty. Previous evenings have included appearances by fellow Glaswegian post-chamber composer Richard Luke, piano improviser Carla Sayer and harpist Esther Smith; jazz/soul/gospel harmony duo Canter Semper; The Silver Reserve (a.k.a classical guitarist/looper Matthew Sturgess, who “plays delicate, sparse music (and) songs about out-of-body experiences, monogamy, small-town community Facebook pages and much more”; alt.folker Thomas Matthew Bower as Thomas & The Empty Orchestra; Jamie Rob’s post-everything project Poür Me, ambient song trio Luthia and drift band Neuro Trash; plus a further spray of diverse singer-songwriters in the shape of Simon Herron, Leanne Smith, Kate Dempsey, Mathilde Fongen, Hollie “Haes” Arnold, Leanne Body and Megan Dixon Hood. There’s a whole softened and glorious world opening up here.
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Dates:
Sunday Hive Sessions with Buzz Music Group presents:
Ragga Gröndal The Troubadour, 263-267 Old Brompton Road, Earls Court, London, SW5 9JA, England
Sunday 19th January 2020, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Success Express Music presents:
The Velveteen Orkestra + Ben Eaton + Hattie Erawan + Matt Ryan Zebrano Bars, 18 Greek Street, Soho, London, W1D 4DS, England
Tuesday 21st January 2020, 7.00pm – free event – information here and here
‘On The Nature Of Things’:
SET (SET Dalston Lane), 27a Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England – Tuesday 21st January 2020, 7.00pm (Blair Coron + Anin Rose + Zoë Bestel + Tom Blankenberg) – information here, here and here
Old Trinity College, 35 Lynedoch Street, Glasgow, G3 6AA, Scotland – Friday 7th February 2020, 7.00pm (Blair Coron + Zoë Bestel + Charlie Grey & Joseph Peach ) – information here and here
The last few tickets are selling out for the return of Byron Wallen’s audacious gamelan reinvention of Boards Of Canada’s ‘Music Has The Right To Children‘, playing in Bristol and London next weekend (following its London debut a couple of years ago). Quick repro of the blurb here:
“Having previously sold out two nights at London’s famous venue the Jazz Cafe, Byron Wallen comes to EartH, Hackney and Bristol’s Thekla for two incredible shows in January. His fantastic show pays homage to Boards of Canada’s seminal album ‘Music Has The Right To Children‘ working with his rarely used Gayan Gamelan Ensemble for a truly unique night.
‘Music Has The Right To Children‘ is the debut studio album by Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada. It was released on 20 April 1998 in the United Kingdom by Warp and Skam Records and in the United States by Matador Records. The album stands as the Scottish duo’s magnum opus, made all the impressive by the fact that it was their debut record. An adult meditation on childhood, concerned with play, naïveté and nostalgia, all tinted with rosy pastoralism, the sensitivity of the compositions marry beautifully with Byron’s orchestration of the gamelan sound.”
The band is Byron Wallen (trumpet and conches), keyboard player Chris Jerome, bass player Paul Michael and drummer David Dyson, with the Gayan Gamelan Ensemble made up of Freddie Abel Parish (saron, trumpet), Wilf Diamond (gongs, trombone), James Wade-Sired (saron demung, peking, trombone), Thomas Morley (bonang barung, keyboards) and Tara Jerome (bonang panerus, keyboards). Here’s Byron talking about the project, and a snippet of last year’s Gayan Kraftwerk project.
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On a more purist electronica tip, there’s an evening of post-classical beat-and-synthery a few days later in London, when a couple of acts on the Denovali label come out and do their thing.
Thomas Bücker, a.k.a Bersarin Quartett has been at work for a decade now on an evolving body of music from the gushing, overwhelming haunted-rehearsal-room ambience of his debut album, the graceful space-capsule visions of the follow-up and the melancholic minimal sheen of the third effort. While Bersarin music has all of the soundtrackery smoothness of its genre, there’s a yearning side to this which cuts through the drawbacks of slickness. The project’s newest album, ‘Methoden Und Maschinen’, sometimes refines this and sometimes slips deeper into aspects of post-rock guitar gutturality and Tangerine Dream sequencer dreams.
In support, former Old Apparatus member LTO showcases his own new “Déjà Rêvé“ album focussing on an “abstracted sense of time and place” via busy floating piano patterns, room booms, vaporous keyboard pads and passing comment from cirrus guitars and mournfully reverberant brass hangings. It sounds as if the world of post-ery has gone so far round it’s colliding with early Mike Oldfield albums again. No bad thing.
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Dates:
Soundcrash presents:
Boards of Canada’s ‘Music Has The Right To Children‘ played by Byron Wallen’s Gayan Gamelan Ensemble
Thekla, Floating Harbour, The Grove, Bristol, BS1 4RB, England – Friday 17th January 2020, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Bersarin Quartett + LTO The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Tuesday 21st January 2020, 5.00pm – information here, here and here
For their ‘Ecstatic Dances’ concert tour this month, Manchester Collective team up with Danish instrumentalist and storyteller Poul Høxbro in a programme of “Nordic myths, songs and dances; ones that bring a chill to the air” – esoterically-inclined repertoire works, new material and transformed folk songs from England, Scotland and Scandinavia. On this occasion, the Collective are coming out as an augmented quintet – string quartet plus electric bass guitar – with Poul, sometimes called “the great man of small instruments”, working from his armoury of flutes and percussion, including tabor, pipe and the quease-inducing rhythm bones (crafted from the ribs of a diseased, or possibly just deceased, Irish cow).
Amongst the folk songs “from some pretty dark places” which are scheduled for performance is the Norwegian ‘Fanitullen’, or ‘The Devil’s Tune’, apparently “conceived during a violent and bloody wedding in 1724 which the Devil himself attended.” Similarly mythical themes should be stirring in their performance of occult-minded composer Peter Warlock‘s ‘Capriol Suite’; while various excerpts from Thomas Adés‘ ‘Arcadiana’ “evoke various vanished or vanishing idylls” either aquatic or pastoral, plus an evocation of the tomb of Baroque storytelling painter Nicolas Poussin. There’ll also be new work, a world premiere from contemporary composer Paul Clark, most recently recognised for his New York project ‘Norma Jeane Baker of Troy‘ with Anne Carson, Renee Fleming and Ben Whishaw (a spoken-sung transfiguration of Euripedes’ ‘Helen of Troy’).
From the Collective: “While we were building the show, we had a moment when we realised that this combination of instruments has literally never been heard before. The set that we are presenting is all new – terrifyingly, ink-barely-dry new. Ancient music, brought vividly to life for 21st century ears… Full disclosure – ‘Ecstatic Dances’ feels scary for us. New work is always frightening, mostly because until you start making it, you never really know what you’re going to end up with. Fortunately, we’re not particularly fond of being comfortable.”
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On 16th January, Scottish classical guitarist Jamie Akers will be setting up in London’s Old Operating Theatre as part of his ongoing project to stir up more interest in neglected nineteenth century female composers for the guitar (following his release of new performances of their music on 2018’s ‘Le Donne e la Chitarra’ album).
“ The early 19th century has been described as the first golden age of guitar music. A time from which, a treasury of music of great emotional depth and technical brilliance was bequeathed to posterity. Profound works, written by the great composers and virtuosos who populated the concert stages and publishing houses of the age, have been continuously in print and regularly performed for almost two hundred years. However, alongside the famous names and renowned masterpieces, some of the most original and exciting music of the era has fallen into obscurity.
“Languishing in libraries, ignored by performers and neglected by archivists, the loss of the repertoire of 19th century women guitar composers has caused an imbalance in our view of history, as well as a notable vacuum in our artistic heritage. The absence of these works from concerts and recordings has led to a mistaken belief that before the modern era, women composers were a rarity and women’s creative impulses were either suppressed or unformed.
“This concert is intended to remedy this misperception, giving voice to the forgotten outpourings of artistic sensibilities silenced by unforgiving prejudice. While classical music has traditionally been perceived as a male dominated affair, many women composers throughout its history have written unique and expressive works. From the mediaeval religious works of Hildegard von Bingen to the suffragette anthems of Ethel Smyth, the creative impulses of women composers have taken flight in spite of societal pressures and historical neglect.
“The composers featured in this concert, Athenais Paulian, Emilia Giuliani and Catharina Pratten were highly respected in their day. They were society figures, famed performers, teachers of royalty, whose works were widely disseminated and gained international acclaim. Given the recognition they received during their lifetimes, the subsequent neglect of their music highlights the ongoing struggle to achieve equality women composers face, an issue this concert aims to address.
“This is a rare opportunity to experience the breadth of expression, formal mastery and emotional heights that the music of these unjustly neglected composers achieved and which, despite our modern advances in equality, has yet to secure the respect and recognition it deserves.
“The music concert will be preceded by an introduction to and demonstration of how the old operating theatre was used from 1822 until 1862. The space where the music will pay was once the room where women in the 19th century went through surgery without anaesthesia nor antiseptics. Join us for this incredible experience!”
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On 24th January, London chamber group Eos Ensemble play IKLECTIK. The regular trio of the two founder members (composer/clarinettist Paul Evernden and violinist Angela Najaryan) plus regular pianist Thomas Ang are on this occasion expanded by the addition of cellist Corinna Boylan in a typical programme of mingled classical and obscure contemporary chamber music.
It includes Linda Catlin Smith’s ‘Among The Tarnished Stars’, a piece which the composer has described as “travers(ing) a variety of terrains, usually through the variation, or re-translation, or reconsideration of simple things, harmonies, melodies, intervals. I was especially interested in seeing what I could do with the various sound colours of these instruments, sometimes looking for blend, sometimes for independent pure lines. I am fascinated with small changes, subtle gradations and shadings. I like how these things contribute to something we might almost call ‘mood’.”
Also on offer is a performance of deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Tree/Peace’ (a seven-part set of listening/reacting sonic explorations which, via dynamics, articulations, phrasing, sectioning and styling, mimics the life cycle of a tree) and Philip Cashian’s ‘Caprichos’ (an uneasy set of pieces inspired by various grotesques by Goya which originally satirised 18th century Spanish society). The evening ends with Olivier Messiaen’s prisoner-of-war camp classic ‘Quatour Pour La Fin Du Temps’, with its mingled influences of birdsong and Biblical revelation.
Various previous versions below:
* * * * * * * *
Dates:
Manchester Collective with Poul Høxbro: ‘Ecstatic Dances’
The Crypt @ Leeds Town Hall, The Headrow, Leeds, Yorkshire, LS1 3AD, England – Wednesday 15th January 2020, 8.00pm – information here and here
The CLF Art Café, Block A, Bussey Building, 133 Copeland Road, Peckham, London, SE15 3SN, England – Friday 17th January 2020, 8.00pm – information here and here
The Stoller Hall, Hunts Bank, Manchester, M3 1DA, England – Sunday 19th January 2020, 5.00pm – information here and here
Twilight Lives: Surgery & Music for and by 19th Century Women The Old Operating Theatre Museum, 9a St Thomas St, Southwark, London, SE1 9RY, England
Thursday 16th January 2020, 6.15pm – information here, here and here
IKLECTIK presents:
Eos Ensemble IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Friday 24th January 2020, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
If you missed Holly Penfield’s London launch gig for her ‘Tree Woman’ album back at Halloween last year – or if you attended and wanted to see it again – then she’s looping back on herself and staging another one at the 100 Club on 8th March. For those unfamiliar with her, here’s what I wrote (indeed, here’s what I recycled) last time.
“Raised in San Francisco (and a veteran of the 1980s LA pop scene with the scars to prove it) Holly spent much of the ‘90s writing and performing the psychodramatic one-woman pop show ‘Fragile Human Monster’ in London and elsewhere. A show with such troubled and intense undercurrents that it eventually blew itself apart, it’s now spawned a return… but under very different circumstances. The whirling mirror-glass synths and saxophones of the old days have been replaced by a gritty post-Americana rock band (which growls, gnaws and struts through her songs like a Cash or Waits ensemble) while Holly herself has mostly forsaken standing behind a keyboard (except for when a grand piano ballad calls for that set of skills).
“It’s funny, sad, uplifting and stirring all at once. Once the very embodiment of storm-tossed waif and precarious survivor, Holly’s now a wiser and much happier woman. She still absolutely owns the stage, though, helping herself to a big dollop of the jazz and blues flavourings which shaped her initial development, playing a dash of ukulele and engaging in some zestful shimmying (and some delightfully ludicrous party outfits, worn with wit and flair – it seems as if her recent steps away from cabaret involved at least one sly step back).
“What hasn’t changed is the quality of her singing, and of her songs. While old FHM standards like Misfit, The Last Enemy, puddle-of-grief ballad Stay With Me, and slinking fingersnapper You Can’t Have The Beauty Without The Beast have shed skins and made the transition to the new show, Holly’s also been dipping into a trunk of neglected and mostly previously unheard work, including the tremendous state-of-the-world song Confessions (based around a lyrical hook she once dangled in front of an intrigued Joni Mitchell) and the vivacious Tree Woman (a more recent effort in which she vigorously embraces both her own ageing and the resilience that comes with it).”
If you can’t wait until March, Holly and her multi-instrumentalist husband Ian Ritchie (the latter an ex-Deaf School member recently fresh off playing sax on the Roger Waters tour) will be playing another London gig this coming Friday, up at the Fiddler’s Elbow. This one will be an “experimental thirty-minute duo gig of originals with vintage ‘80s drum machine… interesting, quirky,and challenging!”
Although Holly and Ian are going out under their Cricklewood Cats moniker (under which they’ve previously released a few synth-jazz swing songs), theirs has been a long and varied partnership also encompassing cabaret, out-and-out jazz balladry, noisy rock diva songs and the bewitching sequencer-torch-pop of the ‘Parts Of My Privacy’ album. So you could expect takes on all of the above and more, including some of Holly’s newer songs. At the moment she’s on a serious creative upswing, and there’s rarely been a better time to see her than now.
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On the following Monday, the reunited and reinvigorated Kenny Process Team launch their own new album, ‘Travlin’ Light With… Kenny Process Team’. Actually, it’s an old one, recorded as a live session over twenty years ago with the band’s 1998 lineup but lost in the abstracted shuffle of the band’s history, which has seen members swap out, disappear, impale themselves on fences and even join Oasis.
Part avant-surf, part Afro-prog and compared in their time to both The Ventures and Captain Beefheart (while proggies will also find parallels with Television and The League of Gentlemen), there’s more on the Kenny Process back story here. In the present, with the addition of Rhodri Marsden as new guitarist (replacing the late Simon King) and thanks to his existing connections with Lost Crowns and Prescott, they’re further cementing their links with London’s current crop of art/prog/psych/cellularists.
Also playing is KPT labelmate Keith John Adams. Once Rhodri’s bandmate in zestful 1990s avant-skifflers Zuno Men, for twenty years now Keith has been a solo act coming at acoustic pop from a gently skewed angle, buffeting around friendly lyrical ideas like a sozzled housefly bumping against a lampshade and turning out understated little song-gems as he does so. His accidental forebears might include Robyn Hitchcock, Kevin Ayers; you might also pretend that he’d been dreamed up from some lazy Walthamstow afternoon when Leon Redbone shared a sofa with the young Bill Oddie.
Opening the evening is The Happy Couple, the languid instrumental duo formed by Kenny Process drummer Dave Ross and his life partner Judith Goodman, born out of two decades of inseparable love mingling with the inspiration of the Epping Forest woodscapes where they live. Judith plays a variety of open-tuned guitars, predominantly a Weissenborn acoustic slide guitar but also a 4-string tenor and a 3-string cigar box model (plus a mysterious “early English” example which suggests a rewriting of instrumental history). Leaving his drumkit behind, Dave plays a variety of mouth-held lamellophones: a classic American jaw harp, Indian morchangs in both brass and iron, a Norwegian Munnharpe and a mouth bow harp created in Devon. As for the music, it’s a relaxed evocation of companionship, glissando and boing and intersecting rhythms: or, as Judith comments, “it’s about the sounds that happen when we put our sounds together. We just create a world we want to be in.”
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The following Saturday, British/Serbian electronic folk project Arhai slip into the little cellar at the Harrison to deliver their own electro-acoustic atmospheres. A two-decade-long project led by singer/composer Jovana Backovic, they were a traditional Serbian acoustic octet for their first ten years, gradually shifting into electric terrain before dissolving and allowing Jovana to form the current duo with British multi-instrumental specialist Adrian Lever (mediaeval dulcimer, hammered dulcimer, guitar, tambura, Bulgarian lute etc). Now they’re Balkan-cum-Gaelic, intertwining ancient and technological: or, as they put it “rethinking the archetypal modes of music performance in the context of modernity”. Which sometimes means they’re ultra-accessible and synth-quilty in the familiar Clannad model, and sometimes means that they’re off and racing like a cross between izvorna and a hyperspatial hip hop track.
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All of the above events will be in London: for the next one, you’ll need to head up to Manchester, where singer, songwriter and electronic pop creator Ben McGarvey, a.k.a. Minute Taker, is unveiling his multi-media performance ‘Wolf Hours’. Ben is no stranger to mixing theatre and music, having already presented a love-and-ghosts story on tour with ‘To Love Somebody Melancholy’ featuring animations from Ana Stefaniak. ‘Wolf Hours’ is an even more ambitious undertaking – “a unique performance combining mesmerising film with a dynamic live soundtrack. From forbidden love in the First World War, to the pain and rage of AIDS, to contemporary hedonism and heartbreak, ‘Wolf Hours’ explores the stories of gay men at different points in time through their dreams. This series of stunning new short films (directed by John Lochland, Joe Stringer, Kirk Sylvester, Raphaël Neal and Ben McGarvey) are accompanied throughout by Minute Taker performing an intimate musical and vocal score that both builds the atmosphere and pulls on the heartstrings. Visually explosive and emotionally thrilling, ‘Wolf Hours’ transports the audience through pleasure, grief, lust, joy and our collective historical imagination.”
In this interview with ‘Superbia’, Ben expounds on the approach he took when putting together ‘Wolf Hours’, which he describes as “jumbled-up memories, fears and fantasies.. It’s presented a bit like late night TV from back in the ’80s and ’90s (when anything queer was relegated to an after-midnight slot!) with different programmes and images emerging out of the static as you drift in and out of sleep… I also decided to include lots of archive footage in the show, which explores the way homosexuality has been portrayed in the media over the years… all of the stuff that finds its way into the subconscious minds of the characters as they lie awake at night, having an effect on how they view themselves and the gay community.” He’s hoping to take the show out on a broader tour much later this year, but for now this is all that you’re getting…
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Dates:
Holly Penfield & Ian Ritchie: The Cricklewood Cats The Fiddler’s Elbow, 1 Malden Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 3HS, England
Friday 10th January, 2020, 8.20pm – no information links, just turn up…
Kenny Process Team + Keith John Adams + The Happy Couple Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Monday 13th January 2020, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Folk and Roots presents:
Arhai The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England
Saturday 18th January 2020, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Minute Taker presents ‘Wolf Hours’ Hope Mill Theatre, 113 Pollard Street, Beswick, Manchester, M4 7JA, England
Friday 24th January 2020, 8:00pm – information here and here
Holly Penfield The 100 Club, 100 Oxford Street, Soho, London, W1D 1LL, England
Sunday 8th March 2020, time t.b.c. – no information links yet
Easing into the new year with some pastoral drones…
Here’s the elusive Cheltenham drone duo Madrona, about whom there’s little else to reveal at the moment. Their name’s taken from a fruiting Pacific coast shrub with no particular outstanding qualities, and even their precise location is questionable (Cheltenham appears to be where they congregate and play live, but it’s also possible that they just blow into town on these occasions, like friendly tumbleweeds). So it’s all in the music, then.
Madrona: ‘Alone with a Crow and a Pylon’
Recent Bandcamp converts, Madrona have begun by mining their odds-and-sods file bank. ‘Alone with a Crow and a Pylon’ originally came out a couple of years ago on a Linear Obsessional compilation. It’s two minutes of oscillating, intentional generator drone; part reed harmonium, part electronics, with the former pedal clanks and the dipping pitches from the latter tying the music in with a feel of ageing but dogged technology. Mixed in are field recordings of birds and the outside air. The crow calls aren’t the standard scene-setting monotonous carks, but wrap around the instrumentation in varied and conversational tones. A single gabby corvid chatting, almost an enthusiast; a live counterpart to the stumbling pulse of the electrical machinery; a soloist working wittily against a conductor. (Sorry…)
Madrona & Chris Cundy: ‘Humming I’
Simultaneously, Madrona are releasing a pair of interrelated tracks recorded with bass clarinettist Chris Cundy. ‘Humming I’, at twelve-and-a-half minutes, is the longer: dissonant layers of baritone and bassy reeds overlaying and weaving through each other at a pace that’s less leisurely than watchful. Cundy’s lines gradually evolve from single sustained stubbornnesses to sweet attenuated micro-melodies stretched out across protracted seconds. While sticking to their drones, Madrona nonethess rise to meet him; adding more consonant pitches to soothe the tension, or shorter rising drone parts as if reaching up.
By the halfway point, Cundy’s fully into jazz minimalist mode, toying with accenture, rallentando, manic flutters and pared harmonics across his short phrases, but increasingly with an undercurrent of blues. It ends somewhere gently celestial: Madrona’s tones resolved peacefully, Cundy playing on an overblown edge tone which nonetheless hovers somewhere serene.
Madrona & Chris Cundy: ‘Humming II’
The nine-and-a-bit minutes Humming II is different from the outset. Warm air rather than disturbed currents, consonant hanging chords of harmonium which vary in their bulk and in subtle changes of intensity. Cundy’s tone may vary from falsetto or didgeridoo to hallucinated cattle or distant motorbike; but a brooding, urgent undercurrent of melody always wins through, whether or not it gets very far. On the other hand, Cundy’s quite capable of wringing the maximum impact out of a simple slow ascending scale, so even the simplest motifs have a surprising substance. It ends on a quiet clatter of keys, like the lashing of the loose end of a film reel.
Madrona: ‘Alone with a Crow and a Pylon’
(self-released)
Download-only single
Released: 3rd January 2020
Get it from:Bandcamp
Madrona + Chris Cundy: ‘Humming I’
(self-released)
Download-only single
Released: 3rd January 2020
Get it from:Bandcamp
Madrona + Chris Cundy: ‘Humming II’
(self-released)
Download-only single
Released: 3rd January 2020
Get it from:Bandcamp
Craig Fortnam’s most recent surfacing (as North Sea Radio Orchestra) was a Robert Wyatt tribute event back in June, accompanied by assorted European Canterbury-scene aficionados and former Henry Cow-ers. Increasingly, that Wyatt connection’s cleaving more and more closely to his own work. It’s not that he absolutely takes on board that Wyatt whimsicality, the covers work or the delightful melting song-rambles: it’s more something about the lack of pomp, in particular in the tone of voice. Like Wyatt, Craig sings in an unaffected, unperformed manner – a delicate cupboard-voice, a step up from speech or chat, allowing itself to be frail but unsilenced: a singing style that’s like a confidence quietly shared in the back booth of a pub.
While this has been evident in Craig’s vocal moments with NSRO, it’s always been more present in his smaller-scale singer-songwriter work as Arch Garrison, in which he’s less sheltered behind chamber woodwinds and strings. Originally a trio including bass, subsequently trimmed to the two-man interplay between Craig and the delightfully welling, psychedelic-chapel keyboard work of James Larcombe, the upcoming English tour sees AG as Craig on his own – just his voice and artful nylon-string guitar, fingerpicked in a way which suggests a British answer to John Fahey’s American Primitive style while drawing from classical, flamenco, African stylings and intents. New songs are promised, adding to Craig’s existing repertoire of soft pushings and reflections on family, geological time, bereavement, and contact with one’s surroundings.
Craig’s tourmate is Emily Jones – a singer-songwriter who’s a little further underground, with only a single 2014 debut album to her name compared to Craig’s batch of projects (although she’s also made marks via a split woodland-folkadelic album with The Rowan Amber Mill). That said, she’s been making progressively bigger splashes this year; emerging from cottages in Cornwall and Salisbury for a growing number of concert appearances. This tour will be her biggest effort to date – six shows up and down the country bringing her feathery songs of hauntings and lovings which blur in and out of folk mythology and present day magic, accessible and human with a gentle wash of acid dreaming and folk baroque.
Along the way, there’ll be various other meetings. In Hexham, it’s just the two of them playing; but in Weston-super-Mare, they’re part of the Winter Warmer event at the Sunfold Hotel, the Weston-super-Mare guest house which is emerging as an occasional local stronghold for music (thanks to the affable-evil presence of Steven Morricone, the more gonzoid of the two Scaramanga Six frontmen, as co-owner). Not only is Steven playing host, he’ll also be spending time onstage maltreating the piano with his Steven Morricone Tyranny solo project, indulging self-confessed “straw man with a fist of ham” tendencies with a clutch of assorted Scaramanga songs (presumably his own more psychobilly offerings, though he’s recently been straying into more obscure and theatrical art-rock set pieces with assorted flavours of Faust, theatre and radio art), plus some new solo stuff and the odd cover.
Also playing are Brum-born but Cornwall-settled duo We Are Muffy, in which The Lilac Time’s Nick Duffy and Ambassadors Of Sorrow leader/frontwoman Angeline Morrison conjure up “poetic narratives of remembered and imagined pasts, combining vocal harmonies with unexpected instrumentation” – somewhere at the country-folk end of the Witchseason sound, with American banjos and fingerpicked guitar dissolving into more British concerns and storytelling styles.
In Hereford, Craig and Emily are playing with spooky sometime Omnia Opera/7shades singer Libbertine Vale, who sets aside the psych/prog electric trappings of her bandwork in favour of macabre a capella renditions of melancholic folk songs about oppression, cruelty and general perishing, albeit with “seeds of renewal”. You don’t get to see much of Libbertine outside of Birmingham and Herefordshire (where she contributes to the county’s growing reputation for psychedelic folk and sundry hauntological business by co-running Unorthodox Paradox), and she spends much of her time on subversive textile art rather than on music, so it’s best to catch her when you can. Especially since her solo act has, so far, resisted the pull of the internet – so no videos or soundclips here.
The Garrison/Jones booking at a Buds and Spawn night in Sheffield is supported by guitar-and-banjo-toting female harmony trio Little Robots. Though the latter have been going for about a decade, they’re busy women with a host of other activities and a commitment to the moment, so actual recordings are intermittent. You can scoop up what there is from their Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages: doses of impeccable Appalachian/Yorkshire fusion.
In Oxford, the support act is “singer-songwriter-psychedelicatessen” Adam S. Leslie, as his Berlin Horse project, wrapping spiky, silly absurdities, Ray Davies echoes and moments of quirky beauty in unalloyed Pepper-flavoured lushness (like an old Puffin Books joke anthology with extra swirl, wit and Lowrey organ colour)
London is the only date for which Arch Garrison will be a twosome, with James Larcombe returning to the fold. They’ll also be meeting up with Chlöe Herington. Temporarily disengaged from pumping regal bassoons and saxophones into the psychedelia of Knifeworld and Hirvikolari, from celebrating Lindsay Cooper in the Songbook project and from the three-headed avant-femme art-music project that her onetime solo outlet VALVE has become, she’s promised to occupy herself in “rebirthing some very old stuff (the vaults have been unsealed!) and reworking some more recent.”
There are no questions about the folky character of the Salisbury gig – it’s being played with Emily and Craig sandwiched between Ian A. Anderson and Pete Aves. Ian’s credentials are impeccable – a veteran British folkster of five decades standing, continuously active since the mid-60s, he’s led the field in acoustic country blues, had a long spell as head of The Village Thing acid folk label, has been a concert promoter and a critic (in particular, as the leading light of ‘Folk Roots’ magazine. Now in his seventies, for the last couple of years he’s been writing and playing solo again. This year’s ‘Onwards’ album compiles, in his own words “fifty years of deathfolk, blues, psych-fi, trad and world twang.”
As for guitarist/banjoist Pete, he too has been returning to solo work after the drying-up of work as regards his role in the currently slumbering High Llamas (and, more seriously, the uprootings and traumas of a divorce and spell of homelessness). Inspired by his recent travails, he’s now turning out simple songs of reproach, road life, and thumbnail character sketches, mostly in an Anglo-American country-folk vein.
* * * * * * * * Both Craig and Emily will also be heading down to Brighton on 21st December to play “little guest sets” at the Winter Wonderland concert headed up by Spratleys Japs, featuring yet another joyfully incestuous array of the British psychedelic stew that bubbles around Cardiacs (see passim…).
The event’s already entirely sold out; but assuming that you can manage to prise a ticket from the cold, dead hand of a Cardiacs fan or an eager Brighton psychonaut, what you’ll be seeing apart from Emily and Craig includes the “lo-fi arty ska” of Hot Sauce Pony, a raucous Brixton four-piece with a lineup including the Gilchrist husband-and-wife couple (singer Caroline and bass player Steve, the latter better known as Stephen Evens, as the “Stuffy” in stuffy/the fuses, as a one-tour Cardiac or as the kit-thrasher behind Graham Coxon) and onetime Rat The Magnificent guitarist Ross Davies. They’ve been touting around a Steve Albini-recorded debut album this year. North-western art pop duo Army Of Moths may have had to cancel, but another longterm Cardiacs affiliate, Matthew Cutts, will be spouting some kind of poetry.
Probably the big draw this year, though, is the resurrected Panixphere – the elusive Cardiacs-family thrash-rock band who’ve surfaced occasionally over the past four decades to play a frustrating brief handful of blasting sets and then immediately dipped back underground. Inasmuch as they’ve had much consistent about them, it’s been Bic Hayes – the intermittently active, sputtering jewel of a guitarist/singer whose juddery, effects-laden playing (like Keith Levene invading a fiery Hawkwind lineup) has graced recordings and concerts by Cardiacs, ZOFFF, Levitation and Dark Star, Pet Shop Boys, Heidi Berry and Julianne Regan’s short-lived Mice. In Panixphere, though, he’s off the leash and free from the big concept or the psychedelic ritual. Historically, it’s been a band in which to drink too much beer and play music much too fast, in snotty punk-metal tradition (albeit while test-bedding or providing an alternative vehicle for assorted Cardiacs and Levitation material, as well as crunchy cover versions of songs by XTC, Nomeansno and, if suitably distracted, early Genesis).
Now, however, Panixphere seem to be taking things a bit more seriously, announcing their return with a swishy verbal fanfare and too many capital letters. “A Three Piece. Three timelines. Formed in 1984. Re-imagined in 1992. Returning in 2020. Experience The Past, Present and Future, simultaneously, in PANIXPHERE – appearing LIVE for the first time in 25 years – preview titles from the FORTHCOMING album ‘Cryptic’, currently under construction and to be unveiled in 2020. This Show Is A Beginning.”
While the lineup has previously included (at various points), Craig Fortnam, Cardiacs capo Tim Smith, Bic’s Levitation/Dark Star bandmate David Francolini and mysterious south London 1980s festi-freaks “Little Hicky” and “Flat Hat’, the revived version is a power trio including singing/shouting bassist Jon Poole (back for a second stint) and Cardiacs drummer Bob Leith. Here’s a clip of an earlier Panixphere, complete with Tim Smith, banging about onstage in 1993. Whether they’ll be any less unruly a quarter-century further on – well, it’s possible but not guaranteed. All this talk of an album, though, suggests that for the first time ever they’re thinking beyond the present, or following through on plans which have previously stalled in a shower of rude fat sparks.
As for the headliners, read here for a more in-depth account of Spratleys Japs’ original life as a Tim Smith/Jo Spratley parallel-to-Cardiacs weird-pop studio project, half-hearted disguised as bizarre pond-scummed Anglo-American swamp rock; and of their recent Tim-less/Tim-blessed live revival, with Jo now fronting a selection of Brighton psychedelic luminaries. Still reanimating the original Smith material, they’re now broadening out with their own new work as well as a couple of unheard Smith treasures.
With Jo now handling all of the vocals – and with Tim’s fuming-friendly/baleful-brotherly presence restricted to an affectionate memory – the band have indubitably lost some of their original charismatic quirk and danger. In return, though, they’ve gained a greater access to the beauty behind the music’s peculiar angles and gurgles, which refracted elements of glam, imaginary folk, tastes of post-Bostonian punkaroo (think Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders) and celestial Mellotron-classical through a skewed Smithian prism… and which still does, dropping it all off into a murky forest pool surrounded by tea-lights, traces of spontaneous ritual and the odd piece of trash. They’re a warmer proposition than they were before – now unrestricted by that Cardiacs tradition of onstage aggro and awkwardness, Jo’s now playing things more as a dancing priestess than the punkette muse she might have been before, blossoming even as the music does.
If all of this still seems compelling despite your lack of a ticket, word’s coming through that the whole shebang’s going to be live-streamed worldwide, in order to raise further funds for Tim Smith’s palliative care. More details on the event page, with the streaming link here.
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Dates: Arch Garrison/Emily Jones tour:
’Winter Warmer’ @ The Sunfold Hotel, 39 Beach Road, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, BS23 1BG, England – Wednesday 11th December 2019, 7.30pm (with We Are Muffy + The Steven Morricone Tyranny) – information here
’Weirdshire’ @ The Babar Café, 31 Union Street, Hereford, Herefordshire, HR1 2BT, England – Thursday 12th December 2019, 7.30pm(with Libbertine Vale) – information here
The Vault, 22-24 Hallgate, Hexham, Northumbria, NE46 1XD, England – Friday 13th December 2019, 8.00 pm – information here, here and here
’Buds & Spawn’ @ The Dorothy Pax, Arch 17, Wharf Street, Victoria Quays, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S2 5SY, England – Saturday 14th December 2019, 8.00pm(with Little Robots) – information here and here
The Library, 182 Cowley Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX4 1UE, England – Sunday 15th December 2019, 8.00pm(with Berlin Horse) – information here and here
The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, England – Monday 16th December 2019, 7.30pm(with Chlöe Herington) – information here
The Winchester Gate, 113-117 Rampart Road, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP1 1JA, England- Tuesday 17th December 2019, 7.30pm(with Ian A. Anderson + Pete Aves) – information here and here
Wonderful Winter Wonderland Special 2019 (featuring Spratleys Japs, Panixphere + Hot Sauce Pony + Army Of Moths + Arch Garrison + Emily Jones + Matthew Cutts) The Green Door Store, 2-4 Trafalgar Arches, Lower Goods Yard, Brighton Train Station, Brighton, BN1 4FQ, England
Saturday, 21 December 2019, 5.30pm – information here and here
As fits Daylight Music’s family-and-all ethos, the final two dates in their autumn 2019 season are Christmassy ones.
The 7th December gig is a burst of Christmas jazz from the extended Tomorrow’s Warriors family, with one of their newer ensembles, the Soon Come Big Band, taking on a jazz version of ‘The Nutcracker’(originally reworked from Tchaikovsky’s original in 1960 by classic partners-in-big-bandery Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn). The score includes the transformation of The Sugar Plum Fairy into Sugar Rum Cherry and that of the Dance of the Reed Pipes into Toot Toot Tootie Toot.
Further info from the National Museum of American History:
“In his original liner notes for the Ellington-Strayhorn Nutcracker Suite, record producer Irving Townsend included the fantastic fiction that Ellington met Tchaikovsky while Ellington’s orchestra was performing at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. Knowing that the Russian died in 1893, a full six years before the American was born, this meeting never could have happened in the literal sense. However, listening to the jazzed-up Nutcracker, one could imagine the work as a meeting place for the three great composers, separated by oceans and decades, but communicating through art.
“Ellington and Strayhorn did not simply place jazz rhythms over Tchaikovsky’s music. Instead, they picked up the notes, recast the beats, communed with the themes, and recreated the work, turning it into something that was at once completely their own and completely Tchaikovsky’s. In doing so, they showed that while music may be the universal language, it is spoken with many accents (and therein lies the fun).”
Also on hand is the Junior Band, a quintet of eleven-to-fifteen year olds taken from the youngest TW performer set Junior Warriors; plus TW’s Female Frontline frontwoman Loucin Moskofian, a young jazz/neo-soul/R&B singer in the classic mould who’s currently creating original work on marginalisation, identity and oppression.
The following week, on the 14th, the form-shifting/try-anything Scottish singer-songwriter and Lost Map label boss Johnny Lynch – a.k.a. Pictish Trail – heads down from the isle of Eigg bringing a bunch of his labelmates with him for their ‘Yuletide In A Scotch Sitting Room’ concert. “Expect a veritable clootie-dumpling of heart-warming wonky-pop, with the occasional cover of an Ivor Cutler song. The Union Chapel will be awash with Scottish voices, people pretending to be Scottish, and probably your Gran. (Everyone’s got a Scottish Gran, right?).” For what it’s worth, they pulled off something similar at Daylight Music the year before last…
Besides Pictish Trail, party confirmees so far are Edinburgh-based “otherworldly rhythm-and-blues” singer-songwriter, instrument-sound-warper and former Stagger Rat Callum Easter and Winchester alt-folkie/This Is The Kit member Rozi Plain. Knocking around at the end of the bill are Glasgow Dreamers, who are, as yet, unidentified. Last-minute Lost Map signing? Impromptu Lost Map supergroup? No-one’s saying.
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The day after the Daylight closer, Callum and Johnny (the latter as the “micro edition” of Pictish Trail) are staying in London and throwing a “whole afternoon-into-evening” follow-up concert at the Lexington. Also playing are a couple of the more recent-years Lost Map signings.
Glasgow indie rockers Savage Mansion are led by singer-guitarist/onetime Poor Things player Craig Angus and specialise in drawling shack songs and literary dada in a Pavement vein. The work of transplanted Frenchwoman Clémentine March fuses Anglo-indie and noise rock with Mediterranean pop melodics and film editor sensibilities, and has led her from her former band Water Babies to a host of projects including floating membership of woodwose-y post-punk performance artists Snapped Ankles and, more recently, art pop choir HAHA Sounds Collective.
More Lost Map extended family members look set to join in at the Lexington, so watch that space…
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Dates:
Daylight Music 325: Tomorrow’s Warriors Soon Come Big Band present ‘The Nutcracker’ + Junior Band + Loucin Moskofian Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 7th December 2019, 12.00pm – free event (with suggested £5.00 donation) – information here and here
Daylight Music 326: Lost Map presents ‘Yuletide In A Scotch Sitting Room’(featuring Pictish Trail + Callum Easter + Rozi Plain + Glasgow Dreamers) Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 14th December 2019, 12.00pm – free event (with suggested £5.00 donation) – information here and here
Lost Map at The Lexington, London (featuring Pictish Trail + Callum Easter + Savage Mansion + Clémentine March + others t.b.c.) The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Sunday 15th December 2019, 4.00pm – information here, here and here
Following (and overlapping) the recent/current set of female poptronic gigs in London (with Caroline Polachek, Imogen Heap, Yeule and others), here are some more.
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Alice Hubble (best known as half of tweetronic duo Arthur & Martha) has been striking out on her own this year and is playing at Servant Jazz Quarters on the 5th. Her debut album ‘Polarlichter’, driven by iPad workings on long journeys and transformed at home via Mellotrons and analogue synths, apparently stems from wistful envisionings of faraway places (including Ruby Falls in Chatanooga, USA, Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies and Dubai’s Atlantis Palm hotel) plus “a desire to work on a project without constraints, to move away from the traditional song writing process and to experiment with the form. Inspired by the ’70s recordings by Tangerine Dream, Ashra and even Mike Oldfield, Alice wanted to take a more delicate approach; a distinctly feminine take on (an) often pompous ’70s progressive synth sound. Other inspirations include Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Lee Hazlewood’s Swedish recordings and 80’s American synth pop band The Book of Love.”
A good set of reference points, although if you are going to snark about the pomposity of your male predecessors it’s best if you’ve built something startlingly different. Much of Alice’s work still cleaves rather closely to those familiar silvery Germanic/kosmische synth tropes, the cautiousness of several generations of post-Tangerine Dream acolytes, albeit with twists of post-punk melancholy and Stereolab-ilk avant-pop.
As for the femininity, it’s present mostly in the preoccupations of Alice’s lyrics, such as the stern reflections on male gaze and pedestal-placing on ‘Goddess’ (“a man idolising a woman to the point that he doesn’t see her as a person. His ‘love’ is all consuming and the focus of his affection is seen merely as an object. As a result he consumes her and takes from her until she has little left, but thankfully she finds the inner strength to walk away.”). All well and good to state; but, given that the song’s mostly concerned with climbing inside its misguided protagonist in order to critique him from within, leaving the woman in question almost as enigmatic, idealised and unexamined as he did, I’m not altogether convinced. But perhaps I’m snarking now – either way, I can’t help but feel that there’s better to come. Alice has a quiet, determined voice: maybe, at the gig, we’ll find out what else it has to say.
Support comes in two parts, one being from jazztronic array Blick Trio, made up of veteran polymathic brass-and-wind-player Robin Blick (from the sprawling Blick/Blake musical dynasty that also includes Mediaeval Baebes’ Katherine Blake), drummer Andrew Moran (who’s put in time in groups including The Violets and Not Cool) and bass player/synth programmer James Weaver (who already plays with Robin in Gyratory System). Prior to Gyratory System, Robin was also in Blowpipe; with both these and the Trio, he’s been building jazz/clubtronic/kosmiche meldings for a good couple of decades. The Trio, however, lean more towards “post-punk rhythms and straight jazz melodies” than the club beats and electrofuzz racket of the previous acts; with Robin’s musicality and wide genre-savviness in particular calling up aural and harmonic/melodic imagery from riffling snake-charmer music to pithead brass band melancholia.
The other support act is Merlin Nova, who vigorously straddles the space between musician and sound artist. Too tuneful to work consistently in the latter mode, and too flat-out sonically ambitious and diverse to be restrained by the former, she instead works both of them to the bone. She creates, records and broadcasts whatever comes to her mind, whether it’s surreal foley-bolstered persona narratives, soundscaped poetry or unorthodox fragmented songs across a vocal range from femme-baritone to skyscraping whistle register.
Merlin’s most recent pair of Soundcloud offerings illustrate her restlessness. Just Calling is one of her most straightforward works (a vocal and reverbscape’d love-song of faith, degrees of separation, faith and independence), while To The Sun is a drone-strings-and-vocalise solar prayer half an hour long, equal parts Alquimia and Sofia Gubaidulina. There’s plenty more to find there, evidence of an ambitious sound creator who’s tapping at the heels of multiple precursors… Ursula Dudziak, Cathy Berberian, outer-limits Björk, Maja Ratkje…
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On the 12th, left-field synthpop writer Carla Dal Forno comes to Electrowerks trailing her newest album ‘Look Sharp’, in which “the small-town dreams and inertia that preoccupied (her) first album have dissolved into the chaotic city, its shifting identities, far-flung surroundings and blank faces”, thanks to her wanderings from her Melbourne origins to London via Berlin, telling “the story of this life in flux, longing for intimacy, falling short and embracing the unfamiliar.”
Sonically it’s frowning post-punk basslines and pearly sheens around subtle hollows; occasional touches of plainsong; arrangements stroked into shape by psychedelic-via-radiophonic synthesizer bends, swoops and flutters – a big step up from the queasy lo-fi wobble of her debut. As with Alice Hubble, Carla rarely changes tone vocally, etching momentary stories of subtle revenges, covert assignations and bleak reflectiveness with the same abbreviated unruffled whispercroon; delivering songs with the crisp, faux-reticent undertones and hardnosed observation of a finishing-school ace who’s opted to spend the rest of her life speaking softly but carrying a sharp hatpin. Simultaneously minimalist and expansive, sensual and austere, revealing and forbidding, the songs of ‘Look Sharp’ are measured diary entries enclosed in dove-grey leather, giving away little but hinting at much more. It’s as if one of the early versions of the Cure had agreed to back Jean Rhys during a venture into confessional songcraft, with Delia Derbyshire adding sonic filigrees.
The whole record sounds attractively antiquated. Not in terms of its harking back to early ‘80s proto-Goth, but in the way it feels as if it’s been written for (and in) a monochrome London of the 1930s: sparser crowds, the hiss of steam trains and the rattle of heels in empty housing courts. In fact, ‘Look Sharp’ functions best when Carla relinquishes the more obvious darkwave thrumbles, loses the bass and trusts to her electrophonic textures and spaces. This lends the instrumentals a touch of 5am light, an air of sneaking out into an unfamiliar town while it’s still slumbering unguarded, with a dream-frown shadowing its features. For songs such as Don’t Follow Me (with its deepening undertone of sexual threat), it allows a more sophisticated atmosphere to build, sound becoming character in the way that scenery and lighting do in film.
In support, there’s electronicist, live-looper and spatial explorer Maria Rossi – a.k.a Cucina Povera. As anyone who’s covered Maria before will tell you, “cucina povera” translates as “poor kitchen” – like “poor theatre”, a way of making the most of minimal ingredients and lean times: indeed, of making a virtue of the enforced simplicity, to the point of deliberately choosing it. Maria’s most recent project – ‘Zoom’, released back in January – had her strip back her already-minimal gear choices to just voice and loop pedal plus the digital recorder which gave the record its name: bar the very occasional bit of huffed or clinked bottlework, or synth bloop, that was it.
Last year’s ‘Hilja’ album applied the Cucina Povera methodology to a gaseous, beatless, haunting form of ambient art pop. It was full of folk-ghosts in the machine, bringing along hints of the ecclesiastic, of children’s songs and of traditional song fragments, much of it pillowed on vaporous keyboard textures and meticulous arrangements. In contrast, the Zoom pieces were recorded in “intimate spaces full of acoustic or ideological intrigue” and were a set of impromptu, improvised rituals-for-their-own-sake. Sometimes gabbled, frequently hymnal and monastic, blurring between established language and glossolalia, they build on the mysteriousness of ‘Hilja’ while venturing into more musically naked areas, taking from the previous album’s most cut-down moments without falling back on its cloudy synth-padded comforts or its pleasing banks of harmony.
Whether these pieces can be transported, translated and performed afresh in other locations is not so clear. Perhaps, for Electrowerks, Maria will improvise a new set in honour of the Slimelight’s fallen ghosts.
Also stirred into the evening’s menu will be a DJ set from darker techno/DIY/industrial specialist Kenny White of the Low Company record store.
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At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a splash of raucous female colour. Riding the momentum from the release of her debut album last month (if you’re a budding remixer or mash-upper, Bandcamp has it complete with sample and stem packs), Rachel K. Collier plays the Grand in Highbury in mid-November, with live percussion and interactive visuals augmenting her storm of sequencers, keyboards and Abletoning. Her house-inspired, undulating electronic club pop has been evolving over six years or so now, including bold intrusions into the world of adverts, collaborations with garage/house stars Wookie, Mat Zo and Ray Foxx, and more recently her current fearless-sounding solo work.
It’s a powerfully assured and complete pop sound, fusing full dancefloor momentum with righteous girl-power; although one that’s been achieved in the face of considerable bullying, scorn and condescension along the way from male musicians. (If the fuck-you beat and withering dismissal in her Dinosaur single is anything to go by. You can’t say that she didn’t get her own back. Success is the best revenge.)
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Dates:
Parallel Lines presents:
Alice Hubble + Blick Trio & Merlin Nova Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Tuesday 5th November 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Upset The Rhythm presents:
Carla dal Forno + Cucina Povera Electrowerkz @ The Islington Metal Works, 1st Floor, 7 Torrens Street, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, England
Tuesday 12th November 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Rachel K Collier The Grace, 20-22 Highbury Corner, Highbury, London, N5 1RD, England
Tuesday 19th November 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
On 6th November, in London, Duncan Honeybourne – a longstanding specialist in British and Irish piano music – premieres Richard Pantcheff’s ‘Piano Sonata’ at the 1901 Club as part of the English Music Festival. Richard himself will be on hand to introduce the piece.
Duncan is also performing a couple of other British piano works – Frank Bridge’s ‘Piano Sonata’ (from the latter’s later post-tonal, post-impressionist compositional stage), and ‘Notturno’, by Bridge’s onetime pupil and champion Benjamin Britten (a competition piece which, rather than foregrounding performer virtuosity, challenges them to create and sustain an atmosphere involving ever-quieter dynamics). Richard Pantcheff was, in turn, Britten’s pupil – so there’s a chain of learning and of respect being explored here.
Versions of the Britten and Bridge pieces are below…
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Mid-month, the Scottish Ensemble embark on their four-date Elemental tour through Scotland, accompanied by Aidan O’Rourke (fiddler for striking post-folk trio Lau) and cross-disciplinary keyboard whiz Kit Downes plus guest violinist/director Simon Blendis (of London Mozart Players, Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa and Schubert Ensemble).
The program centres around a new O’Rourke/Downes co-composition ‘There is no beginning’ (written for harmonium, piano, fiddle and string orchestra) which “fuses the visceral energy and haunting beauty of Aidan’s traditional Celtic roots with wisps of jazz, folk, ambient and classical. Surrounding it will come a clutch of contemporary works that speak to us of all things elemental – space, silence, waves and air – intertwined with melodies which echo an ancient Scotland.
“The performance is inspired by Edwin Morgan’s 1984 poem ‘Slate’, generally accepted as a love letter to a politically- and environmentally-battered Scotland. Through music, alongside its two collaborators, Scottish Ensemble will explore themes of time, change and transformation, particularly in relation to our nation and our world; entities that, as with music, are subject to the constant processes of time. Sound will be used to conjure thoughts of the past, present and future of the land we all share – as well as creating a space to contemplate it.”
Several further string orchestra pieces flesh out the programme. Tansy Davies’ ‘The Beginning of the World’ was originally a 2013 BBC Proms piece and is “a variation on Sellinger’s Round, an Elizabethan theme”; David Fennessy’s 2016 work ‘Hirta Rounds’ is an unconducted piece for sixteen string player in small groups with “many different fluctuations in tempo occurring simultaneously”. From earlier on in the repertoire, there’s György Ligeti’s ‘Ramifications’ from 1968 (a “mistuned” experiment for twelve players in two groups, one of which is collectively tuned a quarter tone higher than standard pitch, and within which there are no stresses, meter or specific rhythm) and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s ‘Andante for Strings’ from 1931 (“a study in dissonant dynamics, with the overlapping of crescendos and diminuendos alone creating a sense of melody out of single pitches in each instrument.”)
Versions of the last two are below…
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Having already made an impression this season at Daylight Music back in October, percussionist Joby Burgess is heading to Peckham’s CLF Art Café for the first in a new round of composer Alex Groves’ itinerant SOLO concerts.
As is the case with performers at all of these concerts, Joby will be playing a brand-new Groves piece (in this case ‘Curved Form (No. 18)’, one of an ongoing series) plus various other unspecified contemporary percussion pieces. There’s not much information on the latter, although there’ll definitely be some Morton Feldman and some Linda Buckley: possibly the latter’s ‘Dischordia’, played on the aluminium harp (as showcased above and below).
Meanwhile, there’s a Joby Q&A here, at the SOLO site, for a window into what makes him tick (and rustle, and rattle, etc.); and here are a few more Joby performances recycled from the Daylight post…
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Dates:
The English Music Festival presents:
Duncan Honeybourne performs Richard Pantcheff’s ‘Piano Sonata’ (première)
1901 Arts Club, 7 Exton Street, Waterloo, London, SE1 8UE
Wednesday 6th November 2019, 6.30pm – information here, here and here
Scottish Ensemble’s ‘Elemental’ tour:
Aberdeen Music Hall, Union Street, Aberdeen, AB10 1QS, Scotland – Saturday 9th November 2019, 7:30 pm – information here, here and here
Caird Hall, City Square, Dundee, DD1 3BB, Scotland – Sunday 10th November 2019, 7:30 pm – information here, here and here
Galvanisers @ SWG3, 100 Eastvale Place, Glasgow, G3 8QG, Scotland – Tuesday 12th November 2019, 7:30 pm – information here, here and here
Assembly Roxy, 2 Roxburgh Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9SU, Scotland – Wednesday 13th November 2019, 7:30 pm – information here, here and here
SOLO presents:
SOLO 07: Jody Burgess The CLF Art Café, Block A, Bussey Building, 133 Copeland Road, Peckham, London, SE15 3SN, England
Wednesday 13th November 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here, here and here
Enigmatically romantic Copenhagen label Janushoved are throwing a fifth anniversary party in London at the start of November. Defining a Janushoved release isn’t a precise art – you can throw around the usual reductive tags like “dream pop”, “dance music” and “ambient”, but establishing a Janushoved sound and feel is more of a textural thing. Music released on the label stretches beyond the usual complacencies, suggesting at least one extra dimension. A Januhoved piece is more like enchantment heard around a grey door; intimate and intimatory, already huge yet incrementally growing, suggesting huge technicolour cloudscapes and bioluminescent pagodas.
Janushoved label curator Mikkel Valentin Dunkerley will be playing a strong role in the show. Unsurprising, since many Janushoved artists are him in some form or another, with or without assorted collaborators. Certainly he’s bringing the expansive, heroic ’80s electronic crownings of Rosen & Spyddet (also featuring mysterious sidekick P.E.) and will be returning for a second go onstage with the incandescent, sighing minimalism of his solo project Internazionale. His Shell Fantasy bandmate Susanne Mouritsen will also step up with the plaintive trance/found sound gush of her own work as Yuri. Various DJs should be playing but are yet to be announced: if nothing else, the three Janushovedians will probably be stepping up to the decks themselves and presenting various influences and inspirations.
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On the same evening, you’ve also got the opportunity to go to something much more abrasive, as the Horse Hospital plays host to an evening of assorted noise and audio mysteries. It’s centred around the ‘Tape 313‘ project by Orlando Harrison (who plays keyboards for Alabama 3 under the alias of “The Spirit”, has touched on work with Coil, Red Crayola, the Amal Gamal Ensemble, Dr Miasma and the Carousel of Headless Horses, Guapo, and The Daughters of God and who puts out strange semi-occult radiophonic collages of music, found speech and rants on Resonance 104.4 FM as ‘The Wrong Show’). Best to let the press release inform… or disinform:
“Reworkings of long thought lost audio tapes obtained on the premises of Senate House, ‘Tape 313’ interrogates two dissident voices, uncovering hidden meaning and deciphering coded messages.
“Stammheim Prison, 1975 — Gudrun Ensslin outlines the political position of the Red Army Faction, eighteen months before her alleged suicide, her voice a ghost in the machinery of the German state. The perpetual revolution of helicopter rotors over the prison house echo the grinding of the wheels of justice below, and the relentless rotation of the swastika at its heart.
“Trafalgar Square, 1956 — Nye Bevan delivers a speech attacking Sir Antony Eden’s Conservative government following the seizure of the Suez Canal. Twenty thousand people heard Bevan speak, after which a crowd marched on Downing Street. Harrison’s deconstructions transform Bevan’s words into air-borne weapons, soaring over the equestrian bronzes of Nelson’s Column, drowning out the death rattle of the British Empire.”
Contributing to the evening alongside Orlando are various people from around the Wannamarchi Club disorganisation (in their own words, “a multinational cabal centred around the labels Broken Britain Cassettes and NKT encompassing events, radio shows and visual art activities.”) Making assorted sounds and projecting visual are assorted industrialists and other noisemakers – S.P.K. visualiser and synth player Dominic Guerin in his Tone Generator persona; Imperial Leather (industrial tapesmiths setting growling toolwork against cutup echoes of rabble-rousing speeches – he/she/they seem to have a particular fascination with Brexit dyspepsia); and David Rage. It’s tricky to track down much of anything about what anybody’s doing, some of them may be working together and some of them might be employing a single-use-then-throw-away name for the evening; but here’s a bit of Orlando and a scrap of Leather.
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Orlando’s Dr Miasma colleague Daniel O’Sullivan has been pretty active recently, gigging his ‘Folly’ album and his Dream Lyon Ensemble around London and Europe. The night after Orlando’s gig, you’ll find him reviving his occasional, unorthodox performance piece ‘The Honourable Daines Barrington’ – trumpeted as “an ecstatic sound and movement ritual heralding the inner succession of the hypostasis and a channeling of musics from the vegetable kingdom… based on the cryptographic responses to the letters of eighteenth century parson-naturalist Gilbert White” (but which he’s also revealed, in an M Magazine interview a couple of years ago), as being about “an atavistic vegetable man” and involving “a very, very awkward costume that’s very difficult to see and perform in.” Here’s just under a minute of him doing it in Moscow back in 2016…
This Daines Barrington revival is part of a similarly unorthodox evening, centred on the release of ‘The Walled Garden’, the brand new album by Suffolk audio-visual experimental duo and “radioactive ambient pop” creators Paper Dollhouse. Daniel will be using the same garden-themed stage set which PD have assembled for this show, upon which they’re promising a “special, spectral, 3D performance” of “the follow up to 2018’s neon-lit ambient pop album ‘The Sky Looks Different Here’, and its sister release ‘All The Colours Align’, to form the final part of a triptych set across the plains of rural Suffolk and London. Inspired by surrounding nature, domestic routine, Maggi Payne and Henning Christiansen’s ‘The Executioner’, the release was recorded on a portable twenty-four track recorder and holds up a mirror to autumn the dawn and early hours, an exploration of synthesiser experiments, field recordings and snapshots of conversations that quietly define areas of personal growth, patience, curiosity, understanding and freedom… Where the group’s previous album explored an audio journey from the rain-soaked streets of East London out to the now fast eroding landscapes of Suffolk, The Walled Garden captures the after-hours ambience that falls across Astrud’s childhood surroundings within the ancient London borough of Southwark, an area with a rich but hidden music landscape home to the outer edges explorations of Coil and Derek Jarman. While field recordings from Nina’s studio in the rural yet equally meditative oceanside pepper the long-form synth transitions and blurred recollections of conversations and early morning reflections.”
Irish looper/layerer Juno Cheetal – a.k.a. Flowers At Night – will also be performing her own audio-visual set, droning away on vintage analogue and digital synthesizer, pulling in rural and urban field recordings, and adding live drums, vocal harmonisations and autoharp. The visual aspects are drawn from her Sherkin Island homeland, near Cork – possessor of a wide variety of spectacular shapings from woodlands to sea views.
The evening’s further expanded by Yorkshire sound collageist Lisa Lavery, who’ll be presenting her soundwork ‘The Valley’ (inspired by the changing social landscape and preoccupations of the Yorkshire Dales, it’s “made up of ‘sounds of the salon’ put through a harsh bleaching process… obsessed with the sheer number of salons in the valley and how that reflects the work opportunities available to women there and their existence as a safe space for women,” and realised with various salon accoutrements – hairdryers, clippers, hair foils and polystyrene wig heads. (Originally commissioned by the Calderdale branch of Yorkshire Sound Women Network – well worth checking out if you’re a sounds-and-noise girl of any age, and you want some active support – she’ll also be playing it as part of YSWN’s Hebden Bridge concert on 5th November.)
Finally, Soho radio show producer and haunted-beatsman King Knut (Knut Jonas Sellevold) will be offering up DJ sets containing “an instinctive, psychedelic mix of private press rarities, industrial electronic work, rock, unearthed 70s library music, Eastern-European folk, Algerian pop, jazz and hip hop” aiming for “a MoonDome garden ambience”
(UPDATE – it seems that Daniel O’Sullivan has in fact now cancelled, but everyone else is still playing…)
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Dates:
Janushoved presents:
Janushoved 5 Year Anniversary (featuring Rosen & Spyddet + Internazionale + Yuri + DJs t.b.c.) The Glove That Fits, 179 Morning Lane, Hackney, London, E9 6LH, England
Friday 1st November 2019, 7.30pm – information here
Paper Dollhouse + Daniel O’Sullivan + Flowers At Night + DJ King Knut New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Saturday 2nd November 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
Moving into its final half, the Daylight Music autumn 2019 season reaches November with a selection of duo/trio encounters (both longstanding and spontaneous), October Daylight’s piano star Matthew Bourne returning to curate and direct his own positional/vocal-orientated event, and an afternoon of current Welsh music.
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The first of the gigs, on 2nd November, involves a number of collaborations. The headlining ensemble is a trio put together by percussionist Bex Burch, a specialist in the gyil (or Ghanaian/Dagaare xylophone) and the bandleader for the Ghanaian minimalist/jazz/post-punk group Vula Viel. She’s picked “soulgaze” drummer Beanie Bhebhe (whose roster of colleagues and employers across dance, funk, indie and dream pop includes Rudimental, Bastille, Paloma Faith and Action Beat) and former Polar Bear bassist Tom Herbert.
Bex says “I wanted to curate a band to play together for the first time. Tom is a bassist I’ve known since watching Polar Bear as a teenager, and we will both be meeting Beanie for the first time on stage. I’m excited to play with two incredible voices in the U.K. scene. This will be a one-time performance: the music that comes through never to be heard again.”
“Three Strings & Two Breaths is the duo of Çiğdem Aslan (voice and frame drums) and Tahir Palalı (Turkish kopuz and bağlama lutes). They focus on Alevi songs from Anatolia – mostly songs of love and mysticism from the fourteenth to the twentieth century.
“As a belief system, the Alevi path is based on love and respect for all people, attitudes, knowledge, sharing and science. Oral tradition is directly relevant… an important source of Alevi beliefs and thoughts are the mystical poems and musical ballads (deyisler, nefesler) that have been passed down from generation to generation, many of which have not been recorded in writing. Alevis believe that one must respect and have knowledge of nature, and the principles of love, tolerance and humanism are significant to Alevi philosophy.
“A meeting of kindred spirits, the music of pianist Maria Chiara Argirò and guitarist Jamie Leeming is a dialogue between two unique artists inspired by jazz, Latin, classical and folk music. At the heart of the duo is a vibrant sense of spontaneity, which embraces the myriad of colours, textures and sounds they create between them. Combined with free improvisation and an intuitive level of interplay, each performance is a one-off experience. They will be presenting music from the upcoming duo album entitled ‘Flow,’ which will be out in 2020.”
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The 9th November concert provides “a rare opportunity to hear new music inspired by the landscape and culture of Wales. Expect an afternoon of carefully crafted pieces that blur the boundaries between contemporary Wales and the otherworldly delights of Annwn.
“Based in Cardiff, Gareth Bonello is and has performed for over a decade under the stage name The Gentle Good. Known for his intricate guitar playing and captivating acoustic arrangements, Gareth was awarded the Welsh Music Prize in 2017 for his fourth album ‘Ruins/Adfeilion’. This concert sees him working in a new trio project with fingerstyle guitarist Toby Hay and singer/harpist Georgia Ruth.
“Toby writes beautifully evocative instrumentals that instantly transport the listener to the mountains and rivers of mid Wales. Twice nominated for the Welsh Music Prize, Toby has toured the UK and Ireland extensively over the last few years and has built a reputation as a captivating live performer. Georgia is a songwriter and musician from Aberystwyth in West Wales. A skilful harpist with a voice of silver, Georgia collaborated with the Manic Street Preachers on their ‘Futurology’ album and was awarded the Welsh Music Prize for her debut album ‘Week Of Pines’ in 2013.”
Also performing is “half-Dutch, half-Welsh singer-songwriter Angharad Van Rijswijk, a.k.a. Accü (who) has been involved in production since her teens and collaborated with writer and comedian Stewart Lee, Cornershop, and Richard James, as well as producing a collage radio series for the BBC. In her music, she brings together a love of production and a turbulent approach to song-writing – which earned her debut album ‘Echo The Red’ the title of ‘Welsh Album of The Year’ by Wales Arts Review. She will be joined at Union Chapel by long-time collaborator and exceptional Welsh songwriter Richard James (formerly of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci).”
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The next two Daylights are being done in collaboration with the EFG London Jazz Festival and present various Daylight-friendly spins on jazz and improvisation.
On the first of these two shows, Norwegian Hardanger fiddle player Nils Økland will be playing “instrumental melodies (which) will react and resonate with the chapel’s nineteenth-century space, taking us on a hushed, deep journey far beyond our resting place in the pews.” From Tomorrow’s Warriors, improvisers Kaidi Akinnibi (saxophone) and Lorenz Okello-Osengor (piano, keyboards) “constantly search for new inspiration, as can be seen in their recent collaboration with the Urdang dance company. They will for the first time incorporate the chapel’s Henry Willis Organ.”
Opening the show, saxophonist Helena Kay and pianist Sam Watts“marry their wildly eclectic backgrounds and influences and give us an opportunity to eavesdrop on a conversation between their two instruments.”
On the second show, Jherek Bischoff will be headlining: “a Los Angeles-based composer, arranger, producer, and multi-instrumental performer whose numerous collaborators include the likes of Kronos Quartet, David Byrne, Neil Gaiman, and Robert Wilson. Bischoff is currently composing music for two new theatre productions and scoring for film and television. His most recent album Cistern, released on the Leaf Label, contains a suite of string-drenched instrumentals.”
One of the latter, from a previous Daylight Music visit, is showcased below.
Also on the bill, the performance of saxophonist Robert Stillman and 12-string guitarist Anders Holst“will draw upon the chapel’s resonant acoustics as a platform for their own works alongside those of Ornette Coleman, John Fahey, and Moondog”. Rosie Frater-Taylor (singer-songwiter, jazz guitarist and ukuleleist) will provide lapping, warm, skilful songcraft to warm everyone up.
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Much is made of the Union Chapel’s terrific acoustics: pianist and improviser Matthew Bourne (relatively fresh from his recent Daylight collaboration with Keith Tippett) is intending to make full use of them on the 30th November when he presents his “voix outré” project of handpicked collaborators, stationing them at different points throughout the building (to present a concert that’s as much about sound spacing as the notes produced) while acting as both audience guide and artist accompanist.
“Seaming To is a composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who has performed and recorded with Robert Wyatt, Jean Claude Vannier, Punchdrunk, Leila, Leon Michener, Larry Goves, Snack Family and Matthew Bourne. She has studied opera at the Royal Northern College of Music and began her career as part of Manchester supergroup Homelife and Graham Massey’s Toolshed.
“Keeley Forsyth is a composer, singer and actor from Oldham. Built upon sparse arrangements, her music is centred around a singular, emotionally raw and magnetic vocal delivery, by turns devastating and uplifting. The characters who populate her songs tell stories of the high and low tides; of freedom and entrapment, of hard won triumphs and the darker corners of domestic life.
“Polly Gone Wrong is an all-female vocal trio singing original songs baked with folk, blues, elements of playful obscurity, and close harmonies. Sometimes they are accompanied by a saw, a bass, a drum, or even beatboxing; sometimes they’re just three female voices in harmony and unison.
“Andrew Plummer is a vocalist, guitarist and composer-producer from Exeter, Devon. Plummer has been the creative force – composing, performing and touring nationally, producing nine albums under his own name, with his musical leviathan World Sanguine Report and with Snack Family (the avant-rock trio co-founded in 2011). He draws on a wealth of influences and pens music that reinterprets musical genre, loaded with visceral tales from the dark side of life, love and death.
“Poet Dorothy Lehane (the author of three poetry publications and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent) will read selected sonnets from her latest publication, ‘Bettbehandlung’.”
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All gigs are at Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England, with a suggested donation of five pounds. Dates below:
Daylight Music 320: Bex Burch/Beanie Bhebhe/Tom Herbert Trio + Three Strings & Two Breaths + Jamie Leeming & Maria Chiara Argirò – Saturday 2nd November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 321: Atsain Priddin: New Music from Wales (featuring Toby Hay + Georgia Ruth + Gareth Bonello + Accü) – Saturday 9th November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 322: EFG London Jazz Festival (featuring Nils Økland + Kaidi Akinnibi & Lorenz Okello-Osengor + Helena Kay & Sam Watts) – Saturday 16th November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 323: EFG London Jazz Festival (featuring Jherek Bischoff + Robert Stillman & Anders Holst + Rosie Frater-Taylor) – Saturday 23rd November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 324: Matthew Bourne presents ‘voix outré’ (featuring Dorothy Lehane + Seaming To + Keeley Forsyth + Polly Gone Wrong + Andrew Plummer) – Saturday 30th November 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
More on the last two DM gigs of the year will be posted up closer to December…
Some interesting technological pop shows (at various scales and predominantly female-driven) are arriving in London shortly.
First of all, Caroline Polachek is playing a small show at Hoxton Hall on 30th October. Though she spent her first musical decade as the leader of clever, multi-media-aware New York pop band Chairlift (best known for their Bruises single) she’s overlapped this with forays into ad hoc/lo-fi/female-fun supergrouping (the Girl Crisis cover band) and pastoral/theatrical electronica (from 2013 to 2015, as Ramona Lisa) as well as being the prime writer and arranger for (if we’re being honest, being the creator of) Beyoncé’s ‘No Angel’. Along the way, she’s established herself as a signally complete and disciplined performer, profoundly hands-on-involved with her own image and how it relates to her music, from designing her own choreography and makeup through to choosing all aspects of wardrobe and video presence.
It seems that in her mid-thirties – and after six years of releasing music on her own in various shapes and forms – Caroline’s starting to settle into the idea of a solo career. Her latest album – this year’s ‘Pang’ – is the first to emerge under her own name: a well-packed set of contemporary R&B/alt.pop with the same kind of expansive ear and mind for exploratory forms as peak works by Kate Bush, Jane Siberry or Björk (or, more recently, f.k.a. Twigs and Jenny Hval). Calling it some kind of solo revelation is over-simplifying; Caroline’s use of various pseudonyms for her one-woman projects always seems to have had more to do with creating useful self-eliding masks in which she can unselfconsciously explore different musical ideas. Like Björk, she’s also a frequent, restless and productive collaborator with others (most recently, with PC Music’s Danny Harle), and like Bjork similarly firm in that she’s ultimately the person in control and making the choices.
The ‘Pang’ singles so far, both musically and visually, show a talent and imagination at a comfortably full (and wide-ranging) stretch. Here are three of them in video form, showing off Caroline’s particular vision.
Playing support at Hoxton is Yeule – a persona project by visual artist and sometime synth builder Nat Ćmiel. A Singaporean-born nomad “obsessed with tinkering and discovery” and currently settled in London, she’s taken her talents for construction, reconstruction and textural explorations of the subconscious deep into her own music. The latter, merging a kind of transplanted Chinese pop with a slippery international EDM lucid drowse and sugary whispery vocals, sometimes makes her resemble an East Asian Julee Cruise settling, like a dreaming moth, into clubland’s sensuality and wilfully fluctuating identity space.
Certainly there’s plenty of surreal Lynchian lushness and reverie to her sound, complementing the smoke-and-mirror verbiage which she generates and which one has to stumble through while trying to get to the bottom of what makes her tick and flutter. Yuele characterises the main component of her work in terms both sensual and psychological (“(a) stifling psychological haze turned into perfume”) and adds, Sybilline, that “it’s difficult for my mind to stay in one place. I can go back to revisit the person I was in my dreams. I see them as multiple people. Sometimes they talk to me, but I’ve cut most of them off because they start screaming in my ear.” All of this inspires her ongoing fluid and successional approach to performance personae, which she continually tries to break down and move through in a series of metaphorical deaths and album tracks exploring the hinterland between death and rebirth, awareness and oblivion. The aforementioned Twigs might be a closer comparison than Cruise: there are similarities in the wispy softness of tone, the lightly assured stepping between different art forms, the moving body as creator’s canvas, the simultaneous exposure and walling off; the final definitions which slip through the fingers of any external searcher.
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Yeule is also playing two further London shows in November. The first is her own – a headliner down in the basement at Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston on 1st November, at which she’ll have a full chance to stretch out and take control of proceedings.
Ijn support is French-born Geiste, who creates her own dramatic, multi-instrumental pop: compelling undulator songs containing slow-burner stories. Also around is Yeule’s fellow Singaporean Kin Leonn, extending the warm, blipping, ambient/electronic instrumental side of the pillowy dream-pop he’s known for back home as a third of Midst. His debut solo album, ‘Commune’, deals with “longing, nostalgia, revelation, and other curious introspections… a dive into the subconscious and a documentation of the sensibilities encountered along the way.”
The second Yuele appearance during November is another support slot nearly three weeks later, over in Hackney Wick, supporting Moscow EDM-er Kedr Livanskiy at a Bloc night. A onetime Russian punk turned electronica explorer (and a member of Moscow’s Johns’ Kingdom collective), Kedr embodies a particular Russian spirit at the moment: the outward reach in collision or contradiction with its own bullish sense of identity. Her wavering vocals are distracted white dance-diva slipping into semi-operatic chant phrases: since it’s all sung in Russian, it all sounds strangely ritualistic and ancient to the ignorant or linguistically challenged (so that’ll be me and most of the rest of us, then). The music itself sometimes summons up some classic old London dance tropes of jungle and drum’n’bass; sometimes lonely analogue darkwave contortions and streetlight synth pads; sometimes international techno blurb and dubby keyboard clanks rebounding off blippy little traffic bleeps and horns.
Also supporting Kedr is Finnish techno diva Detalji (a.k.a. Krista Myllyviita), the night’s smoothest and most direct proposition. Making her UK live debut, she creates a mixture of cellar throb and of clear and arresting pop songs around a sleek IDM chassis, preoccupied with intimacy and detachment, with their overlap with sexuality, with the ups-and-downs of clublife friendships and power games and with the struggling state between urges and self-awareness. You can get suckered in by the cruising beats and the urgent electronic slither: afterwards, you may be nagged and haunted by the words that have slid across your eardrums, carried by the pulse and the needing.
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While looking into the Caroline Polachek date, I couldn’t help but notice how her recent single So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings has certain similarities with Imogen Heap’s similarly sweet’n’horny Goodbye and Go, from fifteen years ago. Most people probably know – and knew – the latter from last year’s slice’n’dice acquisition and remodelling by Ariana Grande. It’s all amicable, all supportive, all respectful – Immi and Ariana are mutual fans, share assorted tips and in all respects are the model of a supportive cross-generational female friendship. On top of that there’s still plenty of Heap sales, shows and activity (more of which in a moment).
Yet it still sometimes feels as if Immi herself has slipped through a crack of public awareness. A fully self-contained female writer, singer, producer and instrumentalist almost a generation before it became commonplace. Known, loved and worked with by other musicians from Ariana to Joshua Radin to Jeff Beck. A polymathic grafter with plenty of industry success over two decades plus a field of work covering theatre, film and classical concert hall as well as pop songs (that’s her score you’ll have heard in the Harry Potter play)… For all that, still in too many respects a cult artist, at least in her home country. I was trying to work out why this was, and whether it was in part the twists of image. While Immi was being overshadowed by fellow BRIT School graduates like Amy Winehouse, it can’t have been because her own songs lacked spirit or immediacy: anyone who thought that couldn’t have heard the suspended tech-apella heartache of her other best-known song, Hide And Seek (or can’t have caught up, later, with the deceptively dense lines of her mother’s-lullaby Tiny Human).
It’s probably more that, in a country that likes its imported and its homegrown pop divas to fit specific strands of celebrity (the light entertainment celeb sprung from national reality TV, the party provider, the own-brand corporation juggernaut selling scent and other beauty-myth trapping, the icon playing out huge-scale soapy stories in public, or a combination of all four), Immi has never really fitted the measures. There’s that lack of mystique, for which she’s happily substituted an affable beanpole strut combined with a chatty, cheery, Essex duchess-next-door poise. There’s that wild sense of dress-up that’s ultimately more about the laugh and the moment than it is about eight hours in wardrobe.
Then there’s the way in which, rather than stamping her name on perfumes and couture, she’s enthusiastically and publicly involved herself in ambitious, constructive and practical tech geekery which is all about shifting control into the hands of artists: investigating blockchain, developing and marketing ungimmicky wearable MIDI instruments and, more recently, putting together the cloud-based Mycelia Creative Passport (which streamlines a user’s digital credentials and payment channels, bringing the workings and remunerations of their career directly into their own hands). Finally, there’s the fully-integrated talent: as well as the dancing and fronting, the skills which guarantee that (Prince-like) she’s responsible for every single note, noise and shaping on her own records – and that its happening at a level which could challenge any other pop producer or instrumentalist, rather than simply being a make-do necessity.
In some respects, then, Imogen Heap symbolises a kind of drive, inquisitiveness and achievement which we don’t associate with (or encourage in) women enough – in or out of pop. A bright, squirrelling intelligence. I’ll admit that such things won’t necessarily smear much righteous mascara; it’s unlikely to fuel and enable some cathartic life-changing bawl’n’bitch right at the moment when you really need one. On the other hand, she won’t sell you crap and you don’t have to trail in her glory: you never have to be the friend who’s ultimately just another fucking minor courtier.
In short, beyond the songs and sounds there’s something about Imogen Heap that makes her seem more like an inclusive brilliant friend than an out-and-out pop goddess. Perhaps in some respects, that’s all for the better. I don’t know whether her model of self-sufficiency and practical enquiry has influenced the other, younger women mentioned here. I’d like to think that in some ways it has.
At any rate – Immi’s ongoing year-long Mycelia world tour touches down at the Roundhouse in London for one of its three British dates during November (the others are in Gateshead and Manchester). Thematically and practically, it links in with the ongoing Creative Passport project, using workshops and talks alongside the concerts to build a canny community of new tech-savvy users.
In addition, this particular tour sees Immi re-united with her old friend and fellow instrumental/production boffin Guy Sigworth, for the first time since their short-lived/one-off album and tour in the early 2000s as Frou Frou (in the meantime, Guy’s busied himself working with a bevy of other singers including Alanis Morrisette, Bebel Gilberto, assorted Sugababes and Chinese electropop chanteuse SingerSen). A new version of Frou Frou takes over part of each of Immi’s shows to resurrect old Guy-and-Immi collaborations. Here’s a live rendition of their old album-launcher Let Go from earlier in the tour, plus a rare of-its-time Frou Frou video from the old days.
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More on other upcoming November femmetronica soon…
Meanwhile, dates for now:
Parallel Lines presents:
Caroline Polachek + Yeule Hoxton Hall, 130 Hoxton Street, Hoxton, London, N1 6SH, England
Wednesday 30th October 2019, …pm – information here, here and here
Parallel Lines presents:
Yeule + Kin Leonn + Geiste Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Friday 1st November 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
DHP Family presents:
Imogen Heap & Frou Frou The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, Camden Town, London, NW1 8EH, England
Friday, 15th November 2019, 7.00pm –
information here, here and here
Bloc presents:
Kedr Livanskiy + Detalji + Yeule Bloc @ Autumn Street Studios, Unit 3, 39 Autumn Street, Hackney Wick, London, E3 2TT, England
Thursday 21st November 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
As part of London Guitar Festival 2019, the International Guitar Foundation presents ‘Venus, Women and the Guitar’ towards the end of October. A concert celebrating women’s relationship with the guitar, and featuring a wide roster of performers including many significant current female classical guitar players, it also showcases an entire programme of guitar compositions by women.
Of the two main composer contributors, Errollyn Wallen has written plenty of works for guitar over the past two decades as part of a career which includes seventeen operas, music for television and assorted works for chamber instrumentation and large-scale ensembles (as well as a musical willingness to explore both standard classical settings and experiments with tape, placement and other media, plus continual rearrangements of the ideas of how we think about music and its intersections with a broader, more diverse culture).
In addition to the IGF-repertoire Wallen pieces which are being played, she’s contributed two new commissions/premieres. The Housden-Tarlton Duo will be performing ‘Two Guitars’, while Tom Kerstens‘ G Plus Ensemble (a two-guitar, string quartet and percussion group, eschewing piano parts in favour of “the unique combination of the guitars’ quickly decaying plucked sounds, the sustained bowed string sound (and) a wide range of vibraphone, marimba and other percussion sounds”) will be performing ‘Road to Strathy Point’. As regards the repertoire pieces, Tom Kerstens returns later in the program to perform the solo Wallen piece ‘Canciones’ while up-and-coming classical guitarist Shannon Latoya Simon will perform a triptych of ‘Three Ships’, ‘Walking Me To Work’ and Night Passage’ (meanwhile, here are the Kerstens versions of a couple of these).
The other dominant composer of the evening, Laura Snowden, hasn’t been working for nearly as long but her career’s already moving from strength to strength. Also reknowned as an exceptional and versatile performer on guitar, she’s been described by ‘Classical Guitar Magazine’ as “linking guitar’s past, present and future” and will be performing her own solo piece ‘Anpao; L’étoile et la Rose’.
As regards her other pieces, the Mēla Guitar Quartet (Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Daniel Bovey, Jiva Housden) will play ‘My Clock Is Broken’ (which they premiered at the Purcell Room earlier in the year); VIDA Guitar Quartet (Mark Eden, Mark Ashford, Amanda Cook, Christopher Stell) will be joining up with concert saxophonist Amy Green to perform ‘Light Perpetuum’; and two VIDA members will be returning in their other configuration as the Eden Stell Guitar Duo to play ‘Damn everything but the circus!; The Snow Globe’.
The work of five other female composers will be performed as part of the concert. VIDA’s Amanda Cook will team with violinist Liz Cooney for Effy Efthymiou’s ‘Two Reflections’ of which “(the) elliptical movement and improvisatory feel are designed to create a seductive ambience – almost like being in a dream. The lilting phrases move easily from one time signature to the next, producing a free flow of sound and a subtle feeling of repose. Light interweaving melodies rotate with rough, percussive sonorities to evoke the whole spectrum of feelings that one might experience through reflection.”
Rather magically, Effy is half of a mutually supportive duo of composing twin sisters, along with Litha Efthymiou, and the two compose both together and apart. Litha, too, is represented in this concert. Her piece ‘States Of Ice: Diamond Dust’ (like ‘Two Reflections’, originally a 2012 IGF commission) will be performed by Johan Löfving. It’s “a poetic representation of the ice phenomenon “diamond dust”… its light, ponderous beginning exploits the guitar’s delicate timbral qualities, while the second, more aggressive section is quite percussive in texture, depicting the full gamut of elements that constitute this elusive state of ice.”
Johan will return with his Flauguissimo Duo partner, flautist Yu-Wei Hu, to play another previous IGF commission, Charlotte Bray’s ‘Here everything shines’ (apparently “largely inspired by Cesaria Evora’s ‘Petit Pays’, sung in Cape Verdean Portuguese. The title comes from the translation of the line ‘ki ca ta brilha’, an idea which resonates throughout. A gritty and impassioned fast section opens the piece, the non-stop flute/violin line dashing around being punctuated by stabbing chords on the guitar/piano. The intensity grows until a lush slow section takes over, the melody singing vibrantly over an arpeggiated figure. Similar material to the opening then returns in an extended version, with the piano taking on the fast energetic figure and violin interrupting. Expressive and very free, a quiet section follows. The pace slows and lines glimmer as if caught by rays of sun bouncing off the ocean. Abruptly, the opening material intervenes one final time, with the lively melodic line heard once again in the flute/violin part, the guitar/piano seemingly edging it on.”)
Opening the concert, G Plus Ensemble will be playing Anna Meredith’s ‘Spook (for string quartet, guitar and marimba); and finally, there’ll be another premiere. Kevin Daniel Cahill (G Plus Ensemble’s other guitarist, and a passionate musical emissary and fosterer in his own right) has commissioned and will be performing a Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade piece called ‘Wallflower’. Unlike the evening’s other pieces – resolutely acoustic – this one will feature electric guitar and electronic looping (perhaps capturing in its sonics Ninfea’s love for composing for “old, new, and damaged musical instruments.”)
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At Milton Court on 2nd November, as part of the Barbican’s ongoing Life Rewired season, composer Emily Howard will curate ‘Ada Lovelace: Imagining the Analytical Engine’, an afternoon which she devised as “an uncompromising musical tribute to a woman who united the worlds of 19th-century romanticism and cutting-edge science… thinker, computer pioneer and enchantress of numbers…”
The concert will combine words and music to offer a post-millennial perspective on the legacy and achievement of the woman often considered to be one of the world’s first computer programmers and a considerable Victorian mathematician, as well as someone who enthusiastically united the concepts of maths, music and poetry. The Britten Sinfonia and mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons will be performing various specially commissioned works of “scientifically inspired music by Howard and her contemporaries plus music created by artificial intelligence written in tribute to Lovelace.”
As well as a brand-new Howard world premiere (which I can’t find anything on, but which, under the circumstances, you can expect to be replete with involved and enthusiastic scientific or mathematical references, as much of her other work is), there’ll be a performance of her 2011 speech-song work ‘Ada Sketches’ (for mezzo, flute, clarinet and percussion, with a libretto by Laura Tunbridge in which Lovelace dreams of Babbage’s Difference Engine producing notes instead of numbers).
There will also be world premieres of new works by sound artist/composer Patricia Alessandrini, by composer and turntablist Shiva Feshareki, and by Royal Northern College’s PRiSM Team directed by Emily Howard and on this occasion led by Robert Laidlow. There’s not much news or commentary on these either, yet; but you can expect further intersections of orchestral playing with contemporary technology, and with scientific motifs and themes.
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On 3rd November – also at Milton Court – Belgian ensemble Echo Collective will perform the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann’.
Unfinished at the time of Jóhannsson’s death last year (although an earler or work-in-progress version does seem to have been performed at Conway Hall three years ago), and exploring “arts, politics and unity” and “the communal transfer of artistic ideas beyond borders”, this string quartet piece was inspired by four years of dialogue with Jóhannsson’s friend and German painter Thilo Heinzmann (a sensual minimalist who works with more reluctant materials than most such artists – including unbound pigment, absorbent cotton, styrofoam, fur and porcelain as well as bursts of feather, fossil or other found and planned-in objects – with the aim of expanding technique and of raising the textured work off the flat plane of the canvas to present its details in a more three-dimensional manner). Unusually for a Jóhannsson piece, it doesn’t incorporate electronics, drones or treated instruments; instead relying on the unadorned strings alone.
The work was finished by the Echo Collective under leaders Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermant. Reviewing their studio recording in ‘The Guardian’ last month, John Lewis noted that “the spartan setting often enhances the grave, stately beauty, particularly when Jóhannsson starts to invokes early music. ‘Shell’ resembles a Bach partita played in ultra-slow-motion; ‘Low’ sounds like a Gregorian chant transcribed for strings; ‘Lacrimoso’ is a heartbreaking, Vivaldi-like canon. There are a few moments where Jóhannsson hints at complexity – the baroque waltz ‘Danse’ sees him shifting time signatures to disconcerting effect – and it’s tempting, if a little depressing, to imagine how he might have developed and matured in this setting.”
Opening the concert will be French electro-acoustic musician Félicia Atkinson. Previously known as Je suis le petit chevalier, her own compositional voyage was originally rooted in sculpture and visual arts: it has built up from her quiet near-ambient early albums based around guitar and Rhodes electric piano to more detailed and demanding works involving (according to lastmusic.fm) “concrete music, ASMR voices, minimal electronics, field recordings, improvisation with guitar and piano, abstract distortions and infra basses, always held by a strong sense of musical harmony… The problematics of sound installation, multichannel diffusion, and performance are starting to play a key role in her musical practice.”
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Dates:
International Guitar Foundation & Kings Place present:
Errollyn Wallen & Laura Snowden (Venus, Women and the Guitar)
Hall Two @ Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, England
Sunday 27th October 2019, 3.00pm – information here and here
Ada Lovelace: Imagining the Analytical Engine Milton Court Concert Hall @ Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 1 Milton Street, Barbican, London, EC2Y 9BH, England
Saturday 2nd November 2019, 6.30pm – information here and here
Echo Collective: 12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann Milton Court Concert Hall @ Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 1 Milton Street, Barbican, London, EC2Y 9BH, England
Sunday 3rd November 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Alt-rock trio Hurtling (fronted by My Bloody Valentine tour noisemaker Jen Macro) have a debut record to offer you – ‘Future From Here’, on Onomatopeia Records – and are launching it at north London’s The Islington in the middle of October. Their sound’s relatively easy to peg – post-Pixies, post-grunge, post-dreampop – but difficult to dismiss. There’s a full cupboardful of familiar indie rock ingredients to hand, but all reshuffled and re-examined via Jen’s particular perspective and inspired by the disorientations of touring, the displacement of emotions, the waywardness of health: the bumps and setbacks of a bright, questioning human organism pushed into too much motion. Sometimes, despite the noisy ethic, it’s surprisingly gentle; sometimes sludgy guitar parts pile up like rainbow cement ooze; sometimes it’s all about the vocal harmonies.
Once upon a time, most of Hurtling were part of cunningly witty indie/artpop sloggers stuffy/the fuses, and their glowering former employer (and current Onomatopeia labelmate) Stephen Evens is also on hand for the evening: ostensibly in a support slot, but probably to keep a dyspeptic jaded eye on them and to crush their remaining youthful dreams beneath his tapping boot. He’s playing solo – probably with guitar, microsynth and anything else portable which he fancies and which comes to hand – and is still working his own 2017 debut album, ‘Bonjour Poulet’. Which is fine, since it was excellent: a mordant larderful of creaky treats which revealed themselves to be gappy armour-plate wrapped around a surprisingly tender heart. He’ll probably give you all that sardonic, seen-it-all expression: actually, he’ll be pleased to see you.
London-based Swedish “post-death music” quartet Junodef fill the other support slot. Their debut single, a soft-strummed slice of spectral folk with additional Gothic guitar boom and the bleakness of a death metal song, was called Make You Die. Subsequent work hasn’t travelled too far from those initial emotional roots, although they’ve toyed with spooky progressive rock keyboards, acid rock shadings and lingering dark-country embellishments (the latter suiting both the paired vocals of Tyra Örnberg and Karin Grönkvist and their admiration for Emma Ruth Rundle and Chelsea Wolfe).
More recently Junodef have been feeding in noirish elements from trip-hop and droning electronica, citing inspiration by Portishead and Young Fathers. At the same time, they’ve upped their Bad Seeds clang and their clarity and put greater emphasis on their visual work, resulting in their most vividly fleshed-out songs and atmospheres yet. Don’t expect floppy Goth ragdolls: this band has a tough core, and a storytelling streak that’s just beginning to come into its own.
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In the same week, on the following day, relentless psychedelic noise-fosterers Baba Yaga’s Hut are putting on a Bethnal Green gig for block-party-inspired thunder-twosome Gum Takes Tooth. Singer/electronic bombardier Jussi Brightmore and wired-up drummer Thomas Fuglesang have been at this for a decade now, producing a music that’s
grinding and urgent, slow yet filled with unnerving impetus.
As with plenty of British acts on the weird/occult cusp, Gum Takes Tooth are fascinated by ritual (attempting to initiate it in both their recorded output and, more significantly, in their live performances) and with the jarring subconscious impact on the human animal from the mechanisms of technology, hierarchy and blunt cultural forces which surround us. Their last record, ‘Arrow‘, focussed on London gentrification from the perspective of those squashed under or flicked aside by its well-heeled, well-polished bespoke shoes; and on the savage simultaneous pressures from above to indulge the inner beast in competition, in nationalism, in a fracturing of common responsibility and empathy. While writing ‘Arrow’, Jussi saw all of this as a kind of cultural intoxication with the emphasis on toxic: it gave the duo a musical and moral focus which they’ve pursued ever since.
A couple of years ago, open-minded Sheffield Afrobeat/noise/dance-pop combiners Blood Sportcalled it a day. Two-thirds of them – drummer Sam Parkin and guitarist/Octatracker Alex Keegan – have since resurfaced as Hyperstition Duo, a blistering stew of kit-rattles and synth noise smudging and battering the line between live gig and avant-garde DJ electronica. They’ll be supporting Gum Takes Tooth on this occasion: but where the headliners favour slower pace and a ritual weight, the Hyperstitioneers prefer a break-neck-speed informational barrage.
At the end of this past summer, Hyperstition Duo released their debut EP ‘Virotechnics‘. There’s the usual jargonated hype to go with it – “summoning egregors of the Anthropocene, (they) plunge deep to deliver a maximalist collective immersion into their own lysergic phonosphere. Lurching, polyrhythmic pathways crumble and re-assemble; elastic dynamics snap; propulsion sparks from the nerve-centre of machine and corporeal entanglement… templexing, möbius loops and cybernetic subjectivities abound in an attempt to conjure escape vectors in a world of ubiquitous sound.” For once, the texture of the press release – a plunge into lathering, urgent verbalisation – actually fits the texture of the music.
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Overlapping the Gum Takes Tooth/Hyperstition Duo concert, Ben Vince’s south-east London clubnight Ellipsis (blending strands and clumps of experimental dance and experimental pop) ventures up north to Dalston on the same night for an evening of seamless switching between stage and DJ deck. I’ve not encountered Ellipsis before, but I’m impressed with what I’m finding out now.
To headline this time, Ben’s enticed the perplexing Dutch-born Mancunian Bunny Hoova down for her full-band London debut. Her work is simultaneously delightful and frustrating. At its simplest, it’s a kind of fall-apart dream pop – intermittent rhythms, addled guitar chording and bass thumbing, a cloudwork of woven-in samples, and a constant tripping over unvoiced questions, obscured conclusions and the track-loops of the thought-train. But while most dream-pop sinks into a narcotized structural conservatism (strumming away in the same key while admiring the whorls of sound coming through the pedalboard), Bunny’s material seems constantly uncomfortable, actively intelligent, and hovering at the midpoint between insight and misdirection. She’s been yoked in with experimental pop deconstructors/faux-idiot savants like Tirzah and Micachu, and I can see why. There’s that classical conservatoire training: coyly hinted at in the PR, for extra credit, but in practise forced off into the distance like a spurned aunt (even as it’s being used as the counterweight to punkish anti-technique). There’s the idea that the usual rules of pop song and riff culture are being scorned in a meticulous matter-of-fact way via an admixture of free play and cerebral manifesto.
Plenty of the songs on Bunny’s debut album, ‘Longing’, have the sensual drag-and-tug rhythm of slow jams; but rather than focussing a mood or a regular pace, they wander off at instinctive mental tangents or hiccup into a different arrangement; the instruments and samples entwining in a scratchy, bewildered, irregular intimacy. At times she seems to be taking up an erratic desert map scrawled by Captain Beefheart and attempting to apply it to close urban living. At other times, she seems to be spontaneously transposing into song experimental short stories about offbeat relationships, jolting encounters or small moments which change the course of a life; rich in detail and significance, short on conclusion. Plot and flavour are stretched out and split into gobbets, like odd-shaped beads necklaced on a guitar string. Her most-talked-about song, Lazy_Easy, is a scrubbing, slurred, pointed dissection-tract covering both the implicit and explicit links between consumerist culture and animal cruelty: more of a wall-collage with blended-in musical notes than an actual song. The world she flits through feels as rickety as a condemned flat; one that she’s too good for and shouldn’t have to live with, but which she has to accommodate and fit her voice to.
Also playing are a mixed bag of London and Manchester electronic experimentalists with bedroom studios. Gribs is a creative DJ and electronic musician, a label co-boss (Tobago Tracks) who in her own music weaving connections between straight-up dance music (trap, jungle, bass culture) and lo-fi DIY sound-and-voice experiments. There’s a distinct edge of discomfort to her work: not so much or so often that it repels, but her found vocals and implied song characters seem uneasy, morbidly eccentric or disassociated from the music’s rhythmic propulsion or sensual salve.
More DJ-ing and deckmixing comes from J.B. Glazer, another London-based creator of peculiar counter-intuitive dance music: for him, a kind of relentlessly alienated mirror-image R&B, all of its comfort and slickness rusted away into disassociative ennui. In the work of both Glazer and Gribs, there’s an echo of chopped-and-screwed culture: the slowing, the altered-state disconnections and new connections, the sense that they’re using alienation as a kind of gatekeeper (if you like dance but are prepared to discard much of its qualities of release or of socializing, then perhaps you can squeeze through this door).
Rounding things out (or upsetting any remaining unspilled applecarts) there’s the mysterious and performative Halfs – from what I can work out, a try-anything beat-making romper on Manchester’s queer arts scene. I’ve found a very fruity synthdance EP of his/theirs from 2017, so there are a few slurps of its whooping dayglo industrial tones below. There have also been percussion-favouring mixtapes and albums which have been whipped capriciously on and off Soundcloud, but are gone now: other than that, there seems to be involvement with scratch theatre, video and so on. In order to properly keep up with Halfs, you need to subscribe (both literally, and in terms of consistent loyalty) so just consider this vague, semi-accurate plug of mine to be a jumping-on point and take it from there.
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Dates:
Onomatopoeia Records presents:
Hurtling + Stephen Evens + Junodef The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Islington, London, N1 0XT, England
Thursday 17th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Gum Takes Tooth + Hyperstition Duo The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9AG, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 8.00pm – information here, here and here
Ellipsis presents:
Bunny Hoova + Gribs + J.B. Glaser + Halfs SET (Dalston Lane), 27a Dalston Lane, Dalston, London, E8 3DF, England
Friday 18th October 2019, 9.00pm – information here and here
Retrophonica is a new, very accessible multi-media performance project; currently focussed on the branching aerials, primal wooo and touch-me-not anticipations of theremin playing. It’s launching itself with an evening of two (identical) concerts in the yawning brick gullet of the Brunel Museum’s Grand Entrance Chamber (also known as the top of the southern Thames Tunnel shaft).
Celebrating the instrument’s centenary, these will be an “immersive evening of music for theremin and full orchestra”, while delving into the story of the instrument’s creator, Léon Theremin. From here, it sounds as if the concerts will be a cross between a pops-orchestra occasion, a slide-show history lesson writ large and a session of nostalgic avant-garde tinkering; all of it enclosed in that bleak, beautiful and magnificently functional Victorian civil-engineering maw.
As they say themselves,“prepare for an immersive audio-visual experience, complemented by cocktails, lightshow, and narration, featuring original and adapted music for theremin by Dmitri Shostakovich, Bohuslav Martinů, Miklós Rózsa, Les Baxter, Claude Debussy and John Williams, performed by Retrophonica with thereminist Charlie Draper, new arrangements and works by Alex Palmer, and bespoke narration from author Ken Hollings.”
You might already know Charlie from all manner of bookings, everywhere, for both theremin and ondes martenot: here’s an earlier mention. Alex has written and arranged extensively for theatre, film and concert hall, and looks as if he’ll be adding the sweeter edge to the evening. As for Ken, although I suspect that he’ll be operating on calmer terms tonight, he’s most likely to be the one to toss in a wild card or two. Having started work in the 1970s as a literary factual editor (how ominous such a description sounds now) he went on to an early-’80s spell as vocalist and cut-up’er in Manchester post-punk band Biting Tongues, followed by an expansion into essays, libretti and experimental fiction (all of which have dipped into and across other disciplines from Japanese films to twentieth-and-twenty-first century politics to data structures).
I’ve no idea who’s contributed the orchestra. As for the cocktails, there’s no further word on them; nor on how you might mix one called a Thames Tunnel.
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Just under a week later, downriver at Deptford, London art-rock/post-punk/improvisation godfather Charles Hayward will be putting together the second of this year’s “genre-fluid” Charles Hayward Presents concerts at the Albany, unfurling “new sounds from the underground and outsider scenes of London and beyond” and massing together elements of jazz/improv, art punk, noise, contemporary classical and electronic music.
According to Charles himself, his own performance centrepiece will be the project-cum-band “Timestretch Alarmsong… a sequence of tunes and sound snakes that I’ve put together with Tom Challenger (Dice Factory/Ma saxophonist), Yoni Silver (multi-instrumentalist with Hyperion Ensemble and many others), Roberto Sassi (Cardosanto/Anatrofobia/Snorkel guitarist), Nick Doyne-Ditmas (double bassist and Hayward collaborator in Monkey Puzzle Trio).
“It’s tightly rehearsed and goes through a wide range of attitudes and (more importantly) emotional energies. To my ears it’s super exciting and I feel like we’ve pushed at a few barriers and come up with something new that has melody, shape and grooves from light to super heavy/dark. There’s no clips available but we will be recording the project for future release. All the players are fantastic musicians and working on the project has been a study in joyful cooperation.”
In the absence of a collective clip, here’s a scatter of solo ones and examples of related projects:
Three other acts join in for the night. ‘Gentle Persuaders’, the latest album from contemporary drum/noise/saxophone ritualists Sly & The Family Drone – is intended as “the politest of bludgeonings”; its creators still merge Ayler-esque free jazz, industrial rock pummel, celebratory machine hiss and the loose-hanging exploratory feel of a bass-less duo. They also still give out drums at their concerts, inviting a congregation of noise.
Also back in the fray is V Ä L V Ē, with music that’s less workshop than workshed. Strongly DIY (featuring reed instruments, electronics, invented gizmos, bass guitar, concert harp and singing women), it’s the sound of a trio of highly trained musical minds phasing back into spontaneity and play. A sort of three-way attempt to become idiot savants via assorted glitchery and boink, semi-spontaneous nursery rhymes and tunelets and musical devices (built out of shelves, tobacco tins, old house bells and similar Branestawmery), but via a female pattern.
Finally, there’s Atatat – a solo project from Liverpool art-freak music mainstay J.C. Barbara (best known as drummer/ranter for aPAtT and Barberos, and here using a very Haywardian array of drums, contact mics, loops and vocals).
Designer Raimund Wong (whose work has adorned posters and releases by Total Refreshment Centre, Church Of Sound and Baba Yaga’s Hut, and who shares Charles’ interest in chance theory and the ingenuity forced on artists via DIY minimalism) will be DJ-ing.
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Dates:
Retrophonica Brunel Museum, Railway Avenue, Rotherhithe, London, SE16 4LF, England
Sunday 13th October 2019, 6.00pm & 8:30pm – information here, here and here
Charles Hayward Presents… (featuring Sly & The Family Drone + VÄLVĒ + Timestretch Alarmsong + Atatat + DJ Raimund Wong) The Albany, Douglas Way, Deptford, SE8 4AG London, United Kingdom
Saturday, 19 October 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Rarescale‘s Carla Rees is performing an October solo tour of England and Northern Ireland, playing music for various flutes (standard and Kingma Systems, alto and bass, baroque flute d’amour and piccolo) augmented by Kyma electronics.
Several compositions are being performed. The first, giving the evening its title, is Simon Emmerson’s ‘Solo Flute Quartet’ which employs extra-keyed Kingma System flutes (optimised for multi-phonics and quarter tone pitches) alongside live sampling and surround sound. Simon: “Following a recording session in the summer of 2017 the idea of using multiphonics as the generator of both harmony and melodic mode evolved rapidly and the piece was completed in January 2018 and performed a month later at City University. The four flutes (piccolo, concert flute, alto, bass) are played in varying rotations for the 16 short sections of the work. The live electronics freezes, spatialises, echoes and projects the live sound into labyrinths of colour on a surround sound system.”
The second piece (being performed at Coventry, London and Bristol) is ‘Islands’, by Carla’s regular Rarescale collaborator Scott Miller. According to Scott: “‘Islands’ is more about the river than the islands. The river is dynamic, in constant motion, many layered. It responds to the presence of objects – fish, birds, people, islands–and moves, transforms, and shapes these same objects. We can observe its passage and potential, and we can enter and navigate it. As a metaphor for the composition, the performer enters the river of processing and navigates it sonically, from island to island. The islands emerge from the river, made of the stuff that lies beneath the surface, providing unique environments that are a part of and separate from the river. The performer’s interactions with the river and the islands influence the environment immediately and downriver, which is really just a function of time, like in music. Islands can be understood as the confluence of many independent environments which unfold in generally predictable ways over the course of the composition.”
To represent this musically, Carla will be feeding her flute through ecosystemic programming within her Kyma system to create “a sonic environment modelled on a stretch of the Mississippi River.”
A third piece (being played at the Leicester, London and Belfast dates) is ‘tree flute’ by Karen Power, who has written a number of works in which specific recordings of environmental sounds inform and are played against live solo instruments. For ‘tree flute’, field recordings of wind moving through trees are paired with the baroque flute d’amour, an instrument which Karen finds “more vulnerable than its modern equivalent, which for me makes it more interesting. Each and every note has a unique character that is brought out when performer and instrument meet. The wooden and simple frame of the flute is the starting point and why I have paired it with the wind.”
Commenting further on the piece, Karen explains that “the field recordings are all sounds of wind moving through trees and the ground. They are not audible, but do surround us in every forest or park. They may not be audible, but they do adhere to their own time and pacing, which is governed not by man but by the weather. This pacing forms the basic structure of this piece. In the live performance the flautist is partially cut off from the aural score and only hears an individual private aural part, which guides her. The audience only hear the first ‘wind’ sound at 0’40’’ therefore the performer must prepare us for this. She will hear such sounds in her aural part ahead of us and so tries to add the missing context for us. This pull back and forth between the private aural part and the public aural score is a core component of this and other works, which I believe provides the perfect platform for true interpretation and active listening and responding to happen.”
The Belfast date also features Sungji Hong’s 2015 piece ‘Shine’, originally written for Carla and featuring a double performance by her (the live in-concert performance and an electronically treated recording of the same part for her to play against).
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Back in London, at the end of the month, inquisitive experimental pianist Xenia Pestova Bennett pops up at City University to play Luc Ferrari’s ‘36 Enfilades for piano and tape’ to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of his birth.
One of the pioneers of musique concrète (alongside his Groupe de Recherches Musicales colleagues Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche), Ferrari was known for his tape pieces observing and reproducing daily life and the flow of ideas. The ‘Enfilades’ (a rarely-performed duet between piano and reel-to-reel tape) are an example of this technique crossing over to link with more traditional performance, scored piano material played in time with assorted taped sonorities which alternate rapidly between the industrial and the musical, the eerie and the whimsical.
Some of the pieces last for no more than a handful of seconds. Xenia describes them as “witty, virtuosic miniatures… a whirlwind exploration of style, riven with quotations from other composers including Schumann and Brahms.” Ferrari himself noted “they start and they are already finished. Sometimes, they do not even start, do not have a beginning. Then, is it a suite? It is perhaps a theatre. Is this the old dream never to finish or that always to start again? And then, the ideas which pass so quickly and then the desire to take up the ideas already given and then the pleasure of transforming them as themes which come to give a rhythm to the travel. Then, finally, these small pieces, they make large one…”
French pianist and frequent Ferrari interpreter Michel Maurer has reinforced the idea that the entire piece is like a self-contained episode of musical theatre in which “the solo protagonist (is) a pianist playing the role of a musicologist who had discovered an anonymous manuscript”; also, that it is something like “a treasure hunt” in which both the score and the tape recording themselves contain written or spoken texts and clues from the “unknown” composer, and in which the performer “(has) to question himself about the music he (is) playing.” Here’s Michel presenting his own performance of ‘Enfilades’ plus discussion.
Xenia will also be performing several small compositions from her repertoire of John Cage pieces, as well as two compositions by Annea Lockwood, who’s celebrating her own eightieth birthday at around the same time as the Ferrari ninetieth. While she’s gained the most attention for her conceptual “piano transplant” events (in which defunct pianos are removed from concert halls and music rooms and taken far away to meet various ritualistic but natural ends, such as immolation, immersion, or being planted into the ground like seeds), Annea is also the creator of a varied chamber music catalogue including piano compositions and tonescapes with multiple extended-technique string moves.
In this particular concert, Xenia will be playing Annea’s ‘Red Mesa’ (in which a minimal/apprehensive mood of tolling midrange notes, abrupt fanning chords, interior piano mutings and zither strums develops into a shifting and sketchy open-ended study, a stormy interlude of high drama and a fade into unresolved nothingness) and her pouncing, highly dynamic ‘RCSC’ (in which skeletal notes and silences play against strum-scurries, scratched harmonics, choked hammer mutes, slow dive-bombs and so forth).
To illustrate, before the event, here’s a Ricardo Descalzo performance of ‘RCSC’ and an Andrea Lodge performance of ‘Red Mesa’ as well as Xenia’s own performance of some Cage music on toy pianos (accompanied by her duo colleague Pascal Meyer).
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Dates:
Carla Rees: ‘Solo Flute Quartet: Music for Flute and Electronics’ tour dates:
Ellen Terry Building @ Coventry University, Jordan Well, Coventry, West Midlands, CV1 5RW, England – Wednesday 9th October 2019, 1.00pm – information here
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England – Saturday 12th October 2019, 8.30pm – information here and here
PACE1 @ De Montfort University, Mill Lane, Leicester, LE2 7DR, England – Wednesday 16th October 2019, 7.00pm – information t.b.c.
Victoria Rooms, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1SA, England – Friday 18th October 2019, 1.15pm – information here
Sonic Lab @ Sonic Arts Research Centre, 4 Cloreen Park, Belfast, BT9 5HN, Northern Ireland – Thursday 24th October 2019, 1.00pm – free event – information here
The unnerving, brilliant Afrofuturist beat-poet and sonic manipulator Camae Ayewa – a.k.a. Moor Mother – swings back to Europe for a brace of concerts during October and November, during which she’ll showcase her latest project, ‘The Great Bailout’. This is a collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra (arguably the capital’s most committed ensemble to both new classical concert music and its intersection with other musical forms and disciplines). It follows Moor Mother’s earlier work this year as part of liberation-jazz group Irreversible Entanglements and her recent contributions to the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s fiftieth anniversary album ‘We Are All On The Edge’ (in which she layered her poetry over the exuberant live improvisations of the surviving members of the original resistance jazz band.) For a more in-depth summary of her explosive protest-griot work, click here.
There’s not much advance publicity regarding ‘The Great Bailout’. What there is lays the ground for performances of “a free-verse poem that acts as a non-linear word map about colonialism, slavery and commerce in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.” Given that Moor Mother’s previous work has consistently exploded conceptual/emotional bombs underneath the economic, social and psychic legacy of slavery and racism in America, you can expect her to have come up with something ferociously critical of the cherished white-British myths and veilings around the history and repercussions of Empire. As the organisers put it, “we can’t help but expect the first few rows… to leave this performance with singed eyebrows and melted glasses at the very least.”
I’m guessing that the project title refers to one of the most miserable semi-secrets of the eventual abolition of British slavery – this being the handsome payoffs eventually delivered (post-emancipation) not to the freed slaves themselves as backpay, apology or recompense, but to their indignant and haughtily entitled British former owners as property compensation. This kind of withering, righteous black interrogation invading white concert halls (in fact, being invited in) is in keeping with the necessary re-examinations of the roots of modern Western culture. I’m reminded of Doris Salcedo’s colossal ‘Shibboleth’ installation at the Tate Modern, in which she slashed the gallery floor with an ever-widening crack standing for the original Tate sugar money, its dirty roots in plantation slavery, and the consequent ethical undermining of the gallery and its history – a microcosm of white Western culture and wealth and the exploitation underneath.
It’s also in keeping with the ongoing rumblings and debate regarding the slave-trading roots of Bristol, the strategic heartland of the Middle Passage’s triangular trade – with the slave trader imprints on the names of its great buildings and statuary (some of which were recently and pointedly encircled with diagrammatics of slave ships and their suffering human cargo). You can’t help thinking that the organisers of ‘The Great Bailout’ really missed a trick by not scheduling a Bristol date, and perhaps a Liverpool one, alongside the London one. Gateshead – which does get a ‘Bailout’ date – has less of a stained history in this matter, along with its sister city Newcastle: distanced from the heart of the trade, and with the Tyneside anti-slavery movement being an early starter. London, though, grew fat on the profits, with its own triangular trade bigger than anywhere else in Britain.
There may be different resonances associated with the two continental European venues on the tour. Kraków is a little detached from diasporan agony, its own kind of historic slavery having been in the form of homegrown serfdom (Poland’s class savagery was traditionally applied to its own peasants, and its colonialist oppressions visited on the nearby Ukraine rather than on Africa). Ghent, on the other hand, hosted and shaped the 1814 treaty in which, in part, Britain and Belgium applied themselves to ending African slavery and the Middle Passage trade (albeit on their own terms, part of the strategic power-plays of the age as much as it was through any humane impulses).
It’ll be interesting to see if Moor Mother will have taken note of these things, dredged up these uncomfortable stains and compromised atonements and woven them in too. Whether each city on the tour route is given its own case to answer – hidden bones coming to light after two-and-a-half centuries of obscuring and snowjobbing.
There will be extras at the London show. Experimental violinist and London Contemporary Orchestra member Galya Bisengalieva will be performing an opening set of her own electroacoustic chamber music, duetting live violin with cunningly sculpted electronic sound-shaping. What I’ve heard so far is elegant and highly dramatic: sonic booms, string drones, eerie hard-eyed processional melodies against harshly majestic electronic architecture and steppe-scapes reflecting Galya’s own Kazakh background.
A second opening set is being provided by British-Nigerian south London glitch artiste Klein. An abstractioneer for three years, she started out being hailed as a kind of reinventor of gospel. Certainly her early recordings dipped into the form and she’s admitted that for many years it was her only reference point. It didn’t take her long, however, to move far beyond it. Other early tracks came across as a collagist log of the sounds of her community: not straightforward field recordings, but crafted patchworks of impressions and implicit meaning, finding vocal and musical fragments as important, in themselves, as actual complete sentences and phrases. Her ‘Tommy’ album, in 2017, was a kind of vaporously dissolved Afro-London laptop opera.
These days, memories of black church music continue to drift and prowl through Klein’s increasingly adventurous recordings, but they’re only part of her palette. While she keeps a toehold on more mainstream black musical ideas (a track like Changes sidles up to drill music, a shuffling slide of plate over plate, of violent masculine monologue recounted), most latterday Kleinwork is miasmic re-sortings of black vocal fragments over dark ambient dreamquakes and feathertwig beats: sometimes sobs or dramatic breaths, or slivers of story (somehow bigger than they appear, the way that individual black stories so often seem to trail implication entire cultural histories). Either that or they’re ribbons of dirty noise, swirls of demonstration with strange vocal glitches playing across them – gasps, lip noises, inchoate expressiveness.
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Moor Mother’s own roots are in gospel too, although she’s previously qualified that “my family used to listen to scary gospel—Mahalia Jackson, people who were not just waiting for Jesus to come, but being like, “This is what we’re living with, we’re going to push through. I’m climbing up the rough side of the mountain, and we’re going to get into this chariot and go to a better place”…” There’ll be more evidence of “negro spirituals flipped, remixed, and recaptured” on the second full Moor Mother album, ‘Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes’, which is emerging on 8th November. In keeping with her work so far, the record will cover the themes of “myth, black mothers, vodun, quantum futurism and post-colonial street narratives.”
I’m guessing that this material, or spins on it, will be in strong evidence in the three further European dates Moor Mother will be playing in November following the ‘Great Bailout’ events. The first of these will be in Utrecht, as part of the Le Guess Who? Festival. Here, she’ll be rejoining Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick‘s “smacked-out hip hop” project Zonal (as one of two featured vocalists, alongside “fire-and-brimstone dub poet”Nazamba).
The second event is her headlining show in Helsinki. There, she’ll be supported by Alex Drewchin – a.k.a. non-binary multi-media art’n’music hopper Eartheater: who, over a five-year span in New York, has graduated from straightforward, deliquescing dreampop covers of Kate Bush songs to flittering unorthodox trance pop and sprawling, deconstructed anti-manifestos of collaged noise and brain-jumps. Beyond the electronics, current Eartheater work reflects the idea of body as instrument, psyche as testbed, ears and memory as record-and-playback devices.
The most recent Eartheater album, ‘IRISIRI‘, is a simultaneous explosion and dismantling of sonic and conceptual ideas across the spectrum. Plunderphonic chamber music samples, scraping noise effects, dance beats and thoroughly masticated chunks of ruined pop spat out and left on New York lamp posts, in apartment stairwells and practise spaces, leaving a scattering of recombinable fragments for other people to get stuck on and to mull over; flitting word associations and deconstructions of gender, of memories, of momentary definitions. There’s even the occasional joke (“I have no metaphor for you today – I’m off work…”). It’s both impersonal and entirely personal in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em running of personal insights and questions through a mill of big city information overload. Yes, it raises more questions than it provides coherent answers, but at least it’s intent on chopping out a space of possibilities in the first place.
Moor Mother’s other headliner is in Madrid, where she’ll be supported by emerging Spanish eclectician Cruhda. The latter’s work is softer and in some ways more accessible than that of most of the other people covered in this post, but that’s selling it short. It’s disruptive, just in a subtler way.
Crudha’s debut EP ‘Íbera Morte‘ is founded on selections and deliberate echoes of Spanish folk music, refracted through any number of home-studio cut-up-and-stick-in methods and stylings – musical box clinkings, Dead Can Dance Gothicity; Autotune and didgeridoo buzzes; structural interruptions and glitchtronics. Sylvan organ-drone folk gets carved into by straying intrusive beats like a prowling beast on a campside sortie; by warping bass synth growls; and by vocal cut-ups and lead lines from raw railing roars to dovelike sighs and monastic harmonies. It’d be crass simply to call Crudha a Spanish Björk, but there’s a similar breadth of imagination and reconstructive willpower here, as well as a similar reluctance to abandon melody.
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Dates:
Moor Mother v London Contemporary Orchestra: ‘The Great Bailout’
Unsound Festival, (location t.b.c), Krakow, Poland – Sunday 6th October 2019, time t.b.c. – information here, here and here
Tusk Festival @ Sage Gateshead, St Mary’s Square, Gateshead Quays, Gateshead, NE8 2JR, England – Saturday 12th October 2019, 9.30pm – information here
Milton Court Concert Hall @ Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 1 Milton Street, Barbican, London, EC2Y 9BH, England – Wednesday 23rd October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Zonal feat. Moor Mother & Nazamba; Le Guess Who? 2019 @ TivoliVredenburg, Vredenburgkade 11, 3511 WC, Utrecht, Netherlands – Thursday 7th November 2019, time t.b.c. – information here, here and here
Moor Mother + Eartheater Tavastia Klubi, Urho Kekkosen katu, 6 Helsinki, Finland – Monday 11th November 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Moor Mother + Cruhda Siroco, Calle de San Dimas 3, 28015 Madrid, Spain – Friday 15th November 2019, 9.30pm – information here and here
In the last post, I covered this month’s Octobear tour of assorted post-hardcore sproutings, plus the Portals All-Dayer of math rock, post-rock and similar.
At around the same time, London post-Zappa/post-Cardiacs jitterbugs The Display Team will be embarking on a brief east-to-west English tour of their own, delivering densely-written, yelling wrangles and conniptions of guitars, drums and heavy brass to various appreciative audiences.
At both of their East Anglian dates in Cambridge and Ipswich, The Display Team are playing with the same backup. One of the two bands in tow are Norwich-based Project Mork, who juggle a spasming, shape-shifting pulp-culture impasto of sung comic-book catchphrases, thrash-riffs, ska bumps, and stunt-metal guitars. The other are crunchy Warrington art punk/ska cabaret rockers The Mighty Bossmags, monster-mask-clad theatricals with leering “cirque du punk” stances and a taste for macabre chanson and heavy bursts.
There’s something of a different support set up in Bristol, where sleek proggy art rockers Mutant-Thoughts provide their glistening, synth-heavy groove explorations, and where Flag Fen provide psychogeographic drone. The latter is a “bio-electrical resistance project” developed by Adam Burrows and Keith Hall, featuring noise guitars atop a dirty flag of drone and rattling drums, with bits of folky recitation pulled through like a flaxen thread. There’s a backstory in there somewhere about a possibly occulted, potentially dangerous Bronze Age archaeological site with a tendency to firebug any situations connected to it. What’s less uncertain is that Adam and Keith are both former members of Bristol noise-beat outfit Big Joan, and pull in collaborators such as Mancunian industrial poet-rapper and Gnod associate Michael O’Neill, Steve James (from screeching Bristol flailers Geisha Noise Research Group) and My
Octopus Mind frontman Liam O’Connell.
In Oxford, support comes from post/tech metal act Masiro whom I’ve previously referred to as “a melange of prog, metal and funk grooves… if that makes them sound like early ’90s macho blokes in shorts, imagine a trio who went the other way, reframing and reappraising those elements from a confusing refracted perspective. As a listener, they make you work to get back to the sources, but it’s a compelling game of reconstruction.”. Also present are local rhythm-warping “twinkly emo-punk” trio Spank Hair. In Southampton, the support acts are straightforward London/Hampshire hard rockers Lonely Dakota and the rather more-difficult to track down Alter Ego: I’ve got something swaggering from the former, but sadly nothing from the latter.
In London, urban-baroque pop trio Barringtone open the show (plenty more on them, their Clor heritage and their journey from motoric cool to increasingly proggy enthusiasm is here), while Memory Of Elephants bring a multi-decker pink noise sandwich of joyous experimental metal along with them. While I can still get away with requoting myself, I’ve called them “a restless, conspiratorial mask-dance of a band” and as playing “a welter of restless multipolar mood changes and psych-cyclones with a bewildering delightful stockpile of guitar tones; from mechanistic hissing growls, fire-ribbon swishes and sudden injections of Detroit proto-punk to great woozy carousing fuzzwalls of MBV dreampop, Chinese orchestras and – at one point – what sounds like a gnarly old organ playing itself.”
In the late-nighter at Gloucester, support is by sharp Hereford-&-Worcester mutant-power-pop band Vonhorn. While drummer Dominic Luckman brings cult value (and a stylish precision) from his years in Cardiacs, frontman Adam Daffurn has been boinking around the Hereford scene for ages, previously leading Noughties-wave Britpop act The Dandelion Killers, who betrayed many of the same aspects as Vonhorn does: crunchy crisp pop with unexpected chords, rhythmic flicks and spiked-cream harmonies. Consider XTC and the more circus-y moments of The Beatles; consider latter-day clever-classic underground guitar pop acts like Flipron and The Downing Poole.
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Towards the end of their tour, The Display Team are also headlining Fresh Lenin’s Jazz From Hell night in Brighton, an “autumnal commie cocktail of jazz, prog, ska, punk, rock and psychedelia made with the help of trombone, sousaphone, bagpipes, saxophones, multiple pedals and all of the less weird instruments.”
Plenty of Brighton musical fringery is springing into the spotlight for the occasion. The aforementioned bagpipes and sousaphone (stirred with a drumkit) come courtesy of pranky, deliberately obscure psychedelic wind trio BallPointKen (who are playing two sets). “Cinematic weirdcore” quintet Son Of Ugly are instrumentalists and Secret Chiefs 3 fans who’ve gobbled up and regurgitate “elements of 60’s and 70’s cartoons, spy action, noir jazz, surf and world music, sometimes in the same song.” In fact they’re less frenetic and Zorn-y than such a summary would suggest, being drawn more to the driving drama of theme songs and the glitter of exotica, thereby turning Brighton’s Lanes into swerving Prague alleyways and glittering dream-souks.
That just leaves Fukushima Dolphin – a full band last year, but now a drums-and-guitar loop duo fronted by the irrepressible Josh Butler (who stretches them toward a kind of energised, tuneful pure pop, whatever else happens or whatever tools they need to employ. In the current incarnation, Josh sometimes sounds surprisingly like a junior Mike Scott trying to sing his way out of a post-shoegazer’s cocoon of ‘90s indie-dance beats and dreampop echo. Earlier this year, Fukushima Dolphin were bulking up their setlist with an interleaved cover-version set, with textural art-rock versions of MGMT and Nirvana songs coming to the forefront alongside the band’s own urgent originals.
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For five or six years now, the various members of Kentish psychedelic troupe The Hare And Hoofe have incubated various tunes down in Folkestone, with an album finally bulging out last year. In the last week of October, they’ll be splurging it all over Islington in a London gig with fellow spirits The Galileo 7 and Ulysses.
What unites all three bands, I guess, is that they’re a collective love-letter to the glitter and stubble and mind-bubbles of a particularly British corner of ‘60s and ‘70s British rock – the clank and rough brinksmanship of garage bands, the rustle of the dressing-up box, the brickie harmonies of power-pop, the quivering flush of freakbeat. Various common enthusiasms loom large: Syd Barrett, Question Mark & The Mysterians, fuzz pedals. It’s all going to be pretty old-school, but expect enough of a surging, hairy, enthusiastic evening that nobody will mind about that.
Given their leader Allan Crockford’s lengthy background with those crowd-pleasing Medway garage-psych and mod-friendly bands who swirl, in a familial cloud around, The Prisoners and The James Taylor Quartet, The Galileo 7 are the least likely of the three bands to be caught fannying around dressed up as knights in armour, as wizards or Roxy Music’s vampire doppelgangers. Instead they deal in familiar bucketing Prisoners-esque ’60s musical purity: creaky electric organ swerves, fuzz pedals, tambourines and ooh-oohs. In contrast, brash Bathonians Ulysses swagger into view like the second coming of Roy Wood being cheered on by Slade (and are cute enough to confess to a liking for Wings and The Cars). They do like dressing up, and they bring with them hooky, stomping songs like rocking wooden cabinets buffed to a mighty sheen with golden syrup and sandpaper.
It’s got to be said that The Hare And Hoofe are the most outrightly magical and theatrical of the three, though – a kind of amicable collision of most of the above ingredients, topped by a meeting between Hawkwind, ‘Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ and Steeleye Span (or, to pick a more recent example, Circulus on fizzing monkey drugs). If they’re garage, they’re the garage that gets transformed into Santa’s den. They’re all about jolly singalongs in which all manner of additions and interjections are poking through or going on behind. Lysergic guitar and spurting proggy keyboard figures crash around dopey harmonies, delirous mistrals of solo flute wind their way through folk singalongs; as psychedelic mixing and screeching echo froth is boosted to the max, the music changes shape and speed as if jerked into form by a solid brass gearshift. They’ll play heavy rhythm-and-blues version of eighteenth century English myths, and the second half of their debut album is a full-blown pocket rock opera of time-travelling scientists and giant laser-eyed robots. It’s called The Terror Of Melton.
Admittedly in magical terms all of this isn’t exactly cabalistic frenzy or New Weird hauntology. It’s more about capering blokes in pointy paper hats with moons-and-stars on. But The Hare And Hoofe are clearly enjoying the party too much to worry about this, and we sometimes need the kind of silliness which makes us nine years old again, happy, and laughing ourselves well.
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Dates:
The Display Team on tour:
The Stage Door, 78 West Marlands Road, Southampton, SO14 7FW, England – – Friday 18th October 2019, 7.30pm(with Lonely Dakota + Alter Ego) – information here and here
The Blue Moon, 2 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, CB1 2LF, England – – Saturday 19th October 2019, 8.00pm(with Project Mork + The Mighty Bossmags) – information here and here
The Steamboat Tavern, 78 New Cut West, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP2 8HW, England – Sunday 20th October 2019, 8.00pm(with Project Mork + The Mighty Bossmags) – information here
Port Mahon, 82 St Clement’s Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX4 1AW, England – Sunday 20th October 2019, 8.00pm(with Masiro + Spank Hair) – information here and here
The Crofters Rights, 117-119 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3RW, England – Tuesday 22nd October 2019, 7.30pm(with Mutant-Thoughts + Flag Fen) – information here, here and here
Paper Dress Vintage Bar & Boutique,, 352a Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 1HR, England – Thursday 24th October 2019, 8.00pm(with Memory Of Elephants + Barringtone) – information here and here
Café René, 31 Southgate Street, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, GL1 1TP, England – Friday 25th October 2019, 11.00pm(with Vonhorn) – information here
Fresh Lenins presents:
Jazz from Hell (featuring The Display Team + Son Of Ugly + Fukushima Dolphin + BallPointKen) The Green Door Store, 2-4 Trafalgar Arches, Lower Goods Yard, Brighton Train Station, Brighton, BN1 4FQ, England
Wednesday 23rd October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
The Hare And Hoofe + The Galileo 7 + Ulysses The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Saturday 26th October 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
The upcoming Octobear tour is a loose alliance between three British post-hardcore bands – Civil Villains, Goldblume and Bisch Nadar – in which they twitch around a number of southern and middle England’s more oddness-friendly rock venues, in search of wall-bars to hang off and people to charm.
London-to-Brighton art-punks Civil Villains aren’t necessarily the tour owners, but they are the only one of the bands who are playing all seven dates. They have a yen for “math-tinged post-hardcore”, but play it with a bit of fucking swing – such a relief after the frozen miserly jerking you get from too many acts in the same ballpark. With two American tours under their collective belt to date, Civil Villains also sport a profound love of sonic details from the flappery drums to the interest in static and noise or the precise gronk of a bass string. Right from their debut single Fallow/Pale Horse, they’ve also had an lyrical interest in the preoccupations of American Gothic, barking out tough gritted scenarios which, over time, have become more playful, surreal, sophisticated and critical as the band’s songs grow closer to their onstage banter.
Cambridge adepts Goldblume describe themselves as “math-grunge-wizards” in the Pulled Apart By Horses vein, pumping out what they claim is a “cathartic truce (of) math-rock, post-rock, grunge, punk and prog.” In practise, though, they’re as spacious and punchy as The Clash. Like Civil Villains, they’ve got an ear and a feel for hot space and anticipation. Goldblume’s own sound and approach, however, is more of a clattering pop journey, with last year’s ‘Husk’ album focusing on tales of mental health and self-help. Set against the mathy area’s usual clanging certainties, they’re an opportunity for conversation.
“Pummeling, playful” Liverpudlians Bisch Nadar are a winning blend of melodic rock and post-hardcore snap. Their riffs trigger busy little sub-riff reels, as if they were growing auxiliary tentacles: a concise melodic rock vocal and power-pop harmonies tie in with shredding screams. Instrumentally, they sound like someone falling down the stairs but with a stuntman’s precision; vocally, they lean more towards John Lennon, The Milk & Honey Band or indeed any bunch of boys with a taste for chorus singing, but with disruptive punk screams sometimes scissoring through the honey slides. The overall impression’s as if you’d picked up a really good mug of tea, only for an affectionate cuttlefish to pounce out of it and smooch you.
Playing at the Southsea date (before Bisch Nadar joins the tour), are Pompey trio Web (who have a demo of lean smoker-stoner rock available). In Leicester, also without Bisch Nadar, the bill gap’s filled by a pair of promising new-ish psychedelic grunge acts – Ashby de la Zouch trio Günk, (with their spacey country/desert trappings of keyboards and echo) and Smack Jack. In Brighton, local post-progressive heroes Quiet Lions headline the show as special tour guests. Unveiling rapid, cascading strafes of ever-complicating rock drama, they’re following in the wake of Mike Vennart and Oceansize.
The Oxford show sees Civil Villains minus both of their two usual tour partners and wiggling into the middle of a baffling inconsistent show between the bouncing big-beat dance-pop of Pandapopalypse and what’s probably going to be spindly thrumming and pallet-dragging heaviness from the brand-new Edward Fox (Welsh-born Goth-pop songwriter D. Gwalia teaming up with former members of sludge/doom metal act Undersmile – previous examples of both below).
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The London tour date (which Goldblume are sitting out) actually stands on its own: it’s a Portals All-Dayer in which Civil Villains and Bisch Nadar join a lineup of noise, math and post-rock outfits.
The day is headed up by a couple of well-established acts – Leeds metalcore stalwarts Hawk Eyes and London post-progressive riffmongers Lost In The Riots. Also on hand are the playful/serious Irish math-loopers Bicurious (who season their gleaming musical pinwork with politically-minded radio cutups), the carefully-controlled math-pop twitch of Watford’s Lakes (who take the dividing line between complex structure and unfettered pop song and dance delightfully along it, scuffing it out as they go), and Cody Noon (who initially seem to be holding up the inevitable post-Mogwai tradition of clunk-and-downstroke-frenzy, but actually work within a much greater sparseness and post-punk death-pulsery, hinting at the storm rather than always calling it down).
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More, shortly, on the Display Team tour happening at around the same time, and on The Hare and Hoofe’s upcoming London shindig…
Meanwhile, dates:
Octobear tour:
The Wave Maiden, 36 Osborne Road, Southsea, Portsmouth, Hampshire, PO5 3LT, England – Saturday 12th October 2019, 7.30pm(Goldblume + Civil Villains + Web) – information here and here
The Blue Moon, 2 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, CB1 2LF, England – Sunday 13th October 2019, 7.30pm(Goldblume + Civil Villains + Bisch Nadar) – information here and here
The Chameleon, 17 Angel Row, Nottingham, NG1 6HL, England – Monday 14th October 2019, 7.30pm(Goldblume + Civil Villains + Bisch Nadar) – information here and here
The Shed, 5 Yeoman Street, Leicester, LE1 1UT, England – Thursday 18th October 2019, 7.00pm(Goldblume + Smack Jack + Civil Villains + Günk) – information here and here
The Pipeline, 6 Little East Street, Brighton, BN1 1HT, England – Friday 18th October 2019, 7.00pm(Quiet Lions + Goldblume + Civil Villains + Bisch Nadar) – information here and here
The Wheatsheaf, 129 High Street, Oxford, OX1 4DF, England – Saturday 26th October 2019, 8.15pm(Edward Fox + Civil Villains + Pandapopalypse) – information here and here
Portals All-Dayer (featuring Hawk Eyes + Lost in the Riots + Bicurious + Lakes + Bisch Nadar + Civil Villains + Cody Noon) The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, Hackney, London, E8 3AS, England
Saturday 19th October 2019, 4.00pm– information here and here
At the start of the month, a Women In Jazz summit in London brings Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dreams, the Rosie Turton Quintet and Alina Bzhezhinska to the Jazz Café.
Trumpeter/flugelhorn player Yazz Ahmed has been covered in here before (thanks to Polar Union’s Jazz Herstory series) – a young British-Bahraini already being dubbed “the high priestess of psychedelic Arabic jazz” thanks to her exploration (across two previous albums) of her mixed cultural heritage, and via the use of a custom quarter-tone flugelhorn which enables her to explore the microtonal pitching within Arabic music. Electric Dreams is her electrophonic/acoustic multi-textural tie-up with drummer Rod Youngs, guitarist Samuel Hällkvist and “vocal sculptor”Jason Singh. Emerging from Yazz’ interest in spontaneous composition, “these free-flowing and conversational improvisations make use of electronic effects, sound design, live looping and sampling, in an exploration of contemporary jazz from a different angle.”
Trombonist Rosie Turton is usually to be found as part of all-female Tomorrow’s Warriors-linked octet Nérija alongside other expanding-profile bandmates including Nubya Garcia, Cassie Kinoshi, Zoe Rahman and Shirley Tetteh (the latter of whom, not content with being a jazz guitar name to watch, also operates as one-woman pop project Nardeydey). As I’ve noted before, Rosie’s own leanings are towards Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, with digressions via hip hop and Himalayan ragas; and her quintet (sometimes known as 5ive) “works around a sensually airy intertwining of Indian violin (played by Johanna Burnheart), trombone and electric piano (from Maria Chiara Argirò), in which adventurous tunes effloresce and sway around light-on-their-feet rhythm grooves: a clever, flowing, flowery architecture.” The quintet’s completed by drummer Jake Long and bassist Twm Dylan.
The orchestral harp is always a potentially explosive instrument. Particularly so when it’s under the fingers of Alina Bzhezhinska – a soulful beast of a player who steps easily between classical demands and jazz immediacy. She’ll be playing a solo jazz set to open the evening.
Yazz and Electric Dreams will also be playing – on their own, this time – up in Newcastle the day after the London gig.
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At the end of the month, New York new-school jazz rock quartet Forq also play the Jazz Café. Fluid, grooving and highly accessible improvisers, they’re strongly Snarky Puppy-affiliated. Two of the current Forq-ers, plus the band’s departed co-leader Michael League, also play in the celebrated Brooklyn jam family, while keyboard-playing Forq leader Henry Hey is even something of a Big Apple mentor to League, having first convinced the Snarky Puppy leader to move and set up shop there.
As originally conceived by Hey and League, Forq’s music doesn’t stray too far from the Snarky blueprint (dextrous young super-sidemen put together a fizzy stew of everything they’ve learned from playing jazz, blues, rock, funk, etc), but according to League“we had the idea to start a band that was bi-i-i-i-i-ig on groove and sonic exploration, without getting caught in the snags of the modern jazz world. We want to play shit with personality, character, and not nerdy, brainy stuff. Also, we want people to shake their asses. I think the band has a very hard, NYC-style sound that is industrial but also innovative, but also has some serious Texas flavour…” League moved on a couple of years ago, replaced on bass by Kevin Scott, but the band, currently completed by Snarky guitarist Chris McQueen and drummer JT Thomas, continue the initial work.
In support is London trio SEN3: in some respects, a transatlantic Forq mirror image. They’re another grouping of top-notch overtrained pop and rock sidemen who fancied doing something fun, immersive and different. Citing “Pink Floyd’s ethereal epic-ness, Thundercat’s psychedelic soul-funk, a touch of J-Dilla/Madlib beat conducting with a twist of Led Zeppelin riffs” as inspiration and aims. Max O’Donnell (on guitars, synths and assorted tuned percussives), Dan Gulino (on bass guitar and synths) and Saleem Raman (on drums) put together something jazzy, dubby, reverb-y and floaty: very much a product of the London melting pot they’re proud of.
SEN3 are also playing two dates of their own earlier in the month – at Kansas Smitty’s in London on 1st October, and at The Mesmerist in Brighton on 8th October.
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French horn virtuoso and bandleader Jim Rattigan continues to step up activity with his Pavillon twelvetet, currently featuring Martin Speake, Andy Panayi and Mick Foster on saxophones, Percy Pursglove, Steve Fishwick and Robbie Robson on trumpets, Mark Nightingale and Sarah Williams on trombones, and a rhythm section of Hans Koller (piano), Dave Whitford (double bass) and Martin France (drums).
Pavillon’s new album ‘The Freedom Of Movement’ comes out in mid-October, featuring more of Jim’s original tunes (which have been compared to Charles Mingus, Gil Evans and Duke Ellington). To help it on its way, he’s taking Pavillon out extensively (around southern England and the Midlands) on assorted dates over the next four months, between early October and mid-January.
Previous Pavillon commentary from me – “confident, breezy, swing-happy music seamlessly blending inspirations from different times and places; beery, wise and cosmopolitan but also very English. It’s the sort of sound you’d expect to hear currently curving its way around London’s seawall, if such a thing existed.”
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Dates:
Women In Jazz presents:
Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dream + Rosie Turton Quintet + Alina Bzhezhinska The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Thursday 3rd October 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Jazz North East presents:
Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dreams Gosforth Civic Theatre, 125 Regent Farm Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE3 3HD, England
Friday 4th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
SEN3:
Kansas Smitty’s, 63-65 Broadway Market, Dalston, London, E8 4PH, England – Monday 1st October 2019, 7.00pm – information here
The Mesmerist, 1-3 Prince Albert Street, Brighton, West Sussex, BN1 1HE, England – Monday 8th October 2019, 8.00pm – information here and here
Forq + SEN3 The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Wednesday 30th October 2019, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
Norwich Jazz Club @ Bedfords Bar, 1 Old Post Office Yard, Bedford Street, Norwich, NR2 1SL, England – Tuesday 15th October 2019, 8.30pm – information here and here
Jazz Cafe Posk, 238-246 King Street, Hammersmith, London, W6 0RF, England – Saturday 19th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
As part of London ambient sound festival MODE 2019, Japanese sound/drone artist Asuna will bring the occasional travelling installation in which he arranges a hundred battery-powered budget (or toy) analogue keyboards in concentric circles within a studio space (in this case, South London Gallery’s Clore Studio) and plays, sets up or alters single notes or clusters off each of them (usually sticking keys down with Sellotape) to produce “waves of overlapping sound”.
The results are a chorused spatial drone which you can wander through, in which the intention is to “generat(e) an undulating sonic harmony both mesmerising and mysterious. Sound waves on the same frequency multiply and bounce off in myriad directions, creating a complex sonic field of interference and reverberation that swells and changes over time. Subtle acoustic variations emerge, hover and retreat based on your location in the performance space.” The cheapness of the technology, the variability of battery performance and other factors will also provide additional variations to the setup. The three-minute excerpt below gives an idea of its grating shimmer.
On 5th October, psychedelic trio UnicaZürn (uniting members of Coil, Cyclobe, Guapo and Shock Headed Peters) will be playing at Bloomsbury avant-garde stronghold The Horse Hospital, showcasing music from their recent ‘Sensudestricto’ album plus brand new pieces created especially for the concert.
I’ve previously described their work as a “scenic but chilly slow-evolving boil of waterside atmospherics and psychedelic sound-painting”. ‘Sensudestricto’, explicitly based around situational revolt (“has there ever been a better time to fuck off to the stars? Is a prison breakout “escapism”? Crisis carve some wound-space to let the dreams back in…” ) continues to build on that promise, evoking late ’60s oil projections and space rock, ’70s synth patterning and occult counterculture, and various subsequent shades of psych revolt, dark folk and hauntological weirdness.
The Horse Hospital itself (a twist of history, art and countercultural resistance lurking like a bold and salty tattoo in the heart of one of London’s plushest districts) is once again under threat of being priced out of existence via a rent increase demand of over three hundred per cent, plus other bullying gentrification pressures, so this is a benefit gig. Attend, talk, add some cash to the Kickstarter, etc.
Having been releasing ambient/drone/experimental atmospheric music for a little under two years now from its Farnham base, not-for-profit independent tape label Rusted Tone Recordings is starting off a live season at IKLEKTIK with a concert by Aqueous keyboard player/piano minimalist Andrew Heath and Dutch ambient bowed-guitarist/slowcore escapee Anne Chris Bakker.
The duo have recently collaborated on an upcoming RTR release (the north-Netherlands-recorded ‘A Gift for the Ephemerist’) which blends both men’s interest in space, sparseness and field recordings into a record which “is overwhelmingly informed both by an open, minimal landscape and a love of process, allowing lower case sounds to form as you would unfold a map – each section revealing a new and uncharted vista…suspended in time and place, are modulating drones, fragile notes, texture and immersive driftscapes which shimmer and pulse with half-glimpsed melodies that seem to hang in the air.”
Support slots come from fellow ambientarians and experimentalists Matthew Atkins, Andrew Sherwell, and Kevin Buckland. Although he’s sometimes a drummer for assorted projects he’s encountered or helped form via the London Improviser’s Workshop, Matthew spends most of his time on sound and visual art. When performing his own music he uses percussion, assorted objects, cassettes and laptop for sound collaging which pursues (or more properly, accepts) elements of “reductionism, chance, repetition and texture.” (Usually he’s working in collaboration with someone else; usually, it also seems, he’s providing the odder or more exploratory parts.) Similarly, Kevin is sometimes a solo bassist, but spends more time outdoors as a traveller, photographer and field recordist intrigued by “the underlying intrinsic musical character that I believe is present within the everyday soundscape; whether rural or urban, indoors or outside.” This in turn takes him back to slow-evolving electronic music of his own, often released on his own Quietest Records label and playing dusky subliminal spells with sound he’s captured along his voyages.
As for Andrew, he’s found a niche of his own, and sticks to it; but it’s a particularly cavernous, ecclesiastical niche. He marries field recordings from churches and cathedrals from across Britain and Europe with existing choral recordings, plunderphonicised from random choir albums found in charity shops or, when he can, recording the genuine article first-hand. The results are a devotional post-Christian drone, heavily processed from its source material, flooding through an imaginary nave like a ghostly draught.
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Dates:
South London Gallery/Thirty Three Thirty Three/Laurel Halo/The Japan Foundation present:
MODE 2019: Asuna presents ‘100 Keyboards’ South London Gallery, 65-67 Peckham Road, Camberwell, London, SE5 8UH, England
Wednesday 2nd October 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
UnicaZürn – A benefit gig in support of the Horse Hospital The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Saturday 5th October, 2019, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Rusted Tone Recordings presents:
Rusted Tone RecordingsLive #1: Andrew Heath & Anne Chris Bakker + Matt Atkins + Andrew Sherwell + Kevin Buckland IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Sunday 6th October 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Following its folk-tinged September concerts, Daylight Music’s autumn 2019 season continues with four October concerts including a piano event, a reinvention of the music of Japanese ambient composer Susumu Yokota and a couple of sustained, themed but accessible dips into post-classical sound art.
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“For ‘Space In This Place’ (on 5th October), get ready to really experience the chapel and engage with the space in new ways as it resonates and reverberates through the transmission of radios, the pounding of bass drums or the rumble in your belly of the chapel own in-built synthesizer – the Henry Willis organ.
“Sound artist, entertainer, and professor Janek Schaefer trained as an architect at the Royal College of Art, where he fell in love with exploring the relationship between sound, space and place. He has exhibited and performed in over thirty countries worldwide, from The Tate Modern to The Sydney Opera House, and has released thirty-four albums, including collaborations with Charlemagne Palestine, Philip Jeck, Robert Hampson, and Stephan Mathieu.
“Watching violinist Anna Phoebe and pianist Aisling Brouwer of AVA interact on stage is always a mesmerising experience – and it will be enhanced by the Chapel’s acoustics. Rooted in cinematic narratives, AVA’s music unfolds around the relationship between violin and piano, evoking emotional journeys that never conform to expectations and yet are instantly accessible. The duo has recently released their debut album, ‘Waves’, on One Little Indian Records.
“One of Britain’s most diverse percussionists, Joby Burgess can often be heard on major film and TV scores, notably leading the percussion on ‘Black Panther’, ‘The Darkest Hour’, ‘Paddington 2’, ‘Trolls’, ‘The Last Kingdom’ and ‘Taboo’. He was featured on the score to Alex Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’. His recent highlights include extensive tours with Peter Gabriel’s New Blood Orchestra, PUNKIT (an adventurous participatory project for massed percussion ensemble by Stephen Deazley), and ‘Pioneers of Percussion’, a solo recital programme featuring new work by Nicol Lizée, Linda Buckley and Rebecca Dale.
Joby will perform ‘Qilyaun’ (for solo bass drum & electronics) by John Luther Adams and ‘Can’t Sleep’ (for vibraphone & electronics) by Rebecca Dale.
“Joining the dots this week will be computer musician, digital choir boy, and algorithmic composer, Daniel James Ross (a PhD student and associate lecturer at Goldsmiths). Dan will be live-sampling the main performers and running the recordings through his brand new, custom-made, algorithmic composition machine, playing back whatever weirdness it produces whilst you eat your quiche.”
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The 12th October Daylight is a piano event presented in association with Sound UK and the Unpredictable Series concert series, criss-crossing British jazz, contemporary classical and spontaneous music:
“Witness two of Britain’s most adventurous jazz pianists join forces this October. A seminal figure in the evolution of UK jazz since the 1960s, Keith Tippett has forged his own ever-evolving sound as both composer and improviser. Thirty years his junior, Matthew Bourne has similarly explored the horizons of jazz and contemporary music, on both analogue synths and the acoustic piano. Inspired by Tippett’s suggestion to ‘do some playing together,’ in late 2016 this new and exciting musical partnership between two maverick pianists, a generation apart, is a meeting of like-minded but distinct individuals. Both are mesmerising live performers, famous for their idiosyncrasy, virtuosity, and non-conformity. Marking a key point in Tippett and Bourne’s simpatico relationship, which has spanned some twenty years already, they are finally joining forces to make new music together.
“Special guests this afternoon will be Steve Beresford and Tania Caroline Chen. Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over forty years, freely improvising on the piano, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn: he has an extensive discography as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer and producer, and was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012. Tania Caroline Chen is a pianist, sound artist and free improviser, who draws her inspiration from the New York, British and European schools of 20th century experimental composition: she has performed and recorded the works of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Cornelius Cardew as well as compositions by Andrew Poppy, Michael Parsons, Luc Ferrari, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Eric Satie and Alexander Scriabin.”
This event will also feature a duet performance from pianists Cameron Ward (a mainstay of north English jazz bands such as Racoon Dog Soup) and Glen Leach (an improviser who also plays hip hop with NixNorthWest and adds a jazz-fusion aspect to grime act Project Hilts).
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The Daylight on the 19th is “dedicated to sonic landscapes and instrumental explorations through electronic and piano music with Berlin based label Sonic Pieces, who also mark ten years since their first release.
“We Like We – the duo of Katrine Grarup Elbo (violin) and Katinka Fogh Vindelev (voice) – perform a version of ‘Time is Local’, a work co-created by the ensemble and sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard. Originally this was a twelve-hour multichannel performance, based on a live installation in twelve different chambers of a museum. This afternoon’s performance will bring a version of this new project to the chapel, continuing their mission to express sound beyond the grid of genres.
“Minimalistic, melodic, visual, and calming, Otto A. Totland‘s music reflects both his early interest in computers, sequencers and synths and his subsequent departure from them to focus on piano composition. He has released two solo piano albums, ‘Pinô’ and ‘the Lost’, on Sonic Pieces. Otto is also a member of the duo Deaf Center with Erik K Skodvin.
“Known for his constant musical evolution, Rauelsson’s musical journey has transitioned from lo-fi, intimate compositions of delicate folk to a more contemplative, experimental, and dense sound. His latest release, ‘Mirall’, is an eclectic collection of compositions that celebrate electronic exploration while maintaining a focus on classical instrumentation. In addition to his main discography, Rauelsson has also released music for film, documentary and photographic projects.
“Frank Schültge is a German author, musician, and producer, working under the pseudonym F.S. Blumm. He has recorded many collaborations but is perhaps best known on Sonic Pieces for the album of unconditional spontaneity with Nils Frahm. Based in Berlin, Frank absorbs everything and takes it with him, weaving it into his instrumental portraits. “The man makes some damn charming music.” (‘Pitchfork’).”
This is another extended Daylight event, running on until 2.15pm.
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The last of the October Daylights is a tribute to the late Susumu Yokota, curated by Lo Recordings – “a suitably diverse and esoteric collection of musicians to perform compositions from his catalogue. This event also marks the release of ‘Cloud Hidden,’ an album of previously unreleased music by the producer.
“Antony Ryan and Robin Saville have been making music as Isan for over twenty years. Their music takes threads from early electronic experimentalism, blurry dream-pop, motorik rhythms and diverse modern modular sounds, weaving them into a confection which is entirely their own. Sweet but rarely without a melancholy edge, they have been described as making “difficult music easy to listen to”. Onstage, Isan fill the space with beautiful washes of noise and rhythm. They will be taking Yokota’s compositions as starting points and augmenting them with improvised beats, pulsing melodies and rippling loveliness.
“Seaming To has been described as “the voice of the twenty-first century” (‘BBC Radio 1’), and an artist that is truly “avant-garde” (Robert Wyatt). Her experimental ethos and mastery across a variety of instruments has enabled her to collaborate with some of the most respected and radical artists of this decade, particularly in electronic, classical and experimental genres. Expect a uniquely engaging take on Yokota’s work.
“The Imperfect Orchestra have been writing and performing since 2013. They specialise in working with amateur and non-musicians to produce live performance soundtracks for moving image and contemporary art events. For this commission, Imperfect Orchestra will be taking specific elements from the work of Susumu Yokota and developing it into an eclectic live performance that creates a narrative exploring some of the themes that were important to his life and his work, including sampling and resampling audio, found sounds and field recordings, and spirituality and electronica.
“George Crowley is a saxophonist, clarinettist, composer and promoter based in London. As a performer he is active across a range of styles; whether infusing melodic through-composed writing with open, searching improv in his own Can Of Worms, channelling fiery avant-parade ghosts in Brass Mask, weaving through the polyrhythmic Ghanaian trance of Vula Viel or exploring more traditional repertoire, He can also be found playing with bands and musicians such as Melt Yourself Down, Yazz Ahmed, Red Snapper, the Olie Brice Quartet featuring Jeff Williams.”
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All gigs are at Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England, with a suggested donation of five pounds. Dates below:
Daylight Music 316: ‘Space In This Place’ (featuring Janek Schaefer + Joby Burgess + AVA) – Saturday 5th October 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 317: Keith Tippett & Matthew Bourne with Tania Chen & Steve Beresford – Saturday 12th October 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 318: ‘Time Is Local’ (featuring We Like We + Otto A Totland + Rauelsson + F.S. Blumm) – Saturday 19th October 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Daylight Music 319: ‘Interpretations: The Music Of Susumu Yokota’ (featuring Isan + Seaming To + The Imperfect Orchestra) – Saturday 26th October 2019, 12.00pm – information here and here
Details on November’s Daylight concerts to follow in due course…
I should also mention that Aga Ujma is also playing a couple of other London gigs in February. One is a LaLa Records’ Pin Drop Sessions in Peckham where she’s in a double bill with double bass player singer-songwriter Nina Harries.
