Misfit City

November 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Daylight Music & WIAIWYA’s James Bond special; classical fusion saxtronica with Alistair Penman; tech metal at the Facemelter with Krysthla, Colours to Shame and Zephyr

Pausing only to remind you that the last week of October includes two of the Pierre Bensusan acoustic gigs at the Half Moon in Putney (which I mentioned in the previous post), here are the last of my selected London gigs for the month, plus one for the start of November.

As ever, this is just a small sampling of what’s on in town, but it’s what’s caught my attention. Actually, there are some more concerts in the week which I’m also wanting to mention – Holly Herndon, Jenny Hval, Laura Moody – but those are for a subsequent post. Let’s start clearing these other ones first.

Alastair Penman album launch @ The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Monday 2nd November 2015, 8.00pm) – £5.00 to £15.00

British saxophonist Alastair Penman is rapidly emerging as a dynamic and versatile performer and composer, presenting contemporary music in new and exciting ways. He is soprano saxophonist with the award-winning Borealis Saxophone Quartet, who released their debut album ‘The North’ in 2014 and are Park Lane Group Young Artists 2014/15. In an orchestral setting, Alastair has had the pleasure of working with conductors including Sir Roger Norrington, Dimitry Sitkovetsky, Baldur Bronnimann, David Hill and Stephen Cleobury, and in the jazz arena he has performed with Mike Gibbs, Clare Teal, Steve Waterman, Mark Nightingale, Gareth Lockrane, Julian Arguelles, Liane Carroll, Issie Barratt and John Helliwell.

Although classically trained, Alastair enjoys exploring many musical worlds; such influences can be heard in both his compositions and performances, which often transcend genre definition. Having obtained masters’ degrees in both Information and Computer Engineering (University of Cambridge) and Saxophone Performance (Royal Northern College of Music), Alastair has a strong interest in the fusion of live saxophone performance with electronic effects, backings, and enhancements to create often previously undiscovered sound-worlds. He will be performing at the RNCM Saxophone Day in November 2015, presenting new works for saxophone and electronics.

At this concert, Alastair is launching his debut album ‘Electric Dawn’, which continues his exploration of the fusion of saxophone and electronics, creating rich soundscapes and haunting melodies as well as showcasing his explosive technique. Produced by legendary saxophonist and producer John Harle, ‘Electric Dawn’ features commissions from Jenni Watson, Geoff Sheil and Dan Harle, new arrangements of works by Graham Fitkin and Marius Neset, and several of Alastair’s own compositions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw2F-w1fkxQ

Several of the ticket deals for the evening include a copy of the album. More information and tickets are here.

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The Facemelter is back with some more heavy noise for metal fans…

Krysthla + Colours To Shame + Darkeye (The Facemelter @ The Black Heart, 2-3 Greenland Place, Camden Town, London, NW1 0AP, UK, Friday 6 November 2015, 7.30pm) – £6.00-£8.00

A night of schizophrenic tech metal and brutal groove, barely staying still for a second, with a lineup of some absolute beasts from all over the country.

Forged into being in 2012, Krysthla are a five-piece from Northamptonshire proudly boasts four of the original members of UK metal legends Gutworm and influential frontman Adi Mayes of metal heavyweights Deadeye. After spending over two years writing and perfecting a new sound and crafting tracks worthy of taking on the music world once again, Krysthla are without a doubt already stamping their mark on the UK metal scene, with the release of their debut album ‘A War Of Souls And Desires’. With multiple tours and major festival appearances across Europe and the USA, including Hellfest Open Air Festival and Bloodstock Open Air and gigs with Soulfly, SikTh, Napalm Death, American Head Charge and Amen, plus label releases with Europewide distribution through Plastic Head and music videos on MTV, ‘Scuzz’ and ‘Kerrang!’ under their collective belts, they know how to lay down truly crushing performances.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwWui3DHz-s

Glaswegian four-piece Colours To Shame are also bringing their furiously unique sounds to London. Taking an all-encompassing, no-holds-barred approach to creating heavy music, the band have been setting themselves apart from their peers since forming in 2010. A schizophrenic blend of heavy music, these guys don’t quite sit in any one genre, which we love as it keeps us on our toes. This show will be in support of their most recent release; ‘Who Is The Fifth?’, self-released digitally in November 2014. Mixed and mastered by Justin Hill (SikTh) it has been awarded the track of the week by ‘The Guardian’ and ‘Team Rock Online’.

Replacing the previously-scheduled Darkeye as second support is Zephyr, a London-based progressive metalcore band who’ve formed, written and recorded a debut EP, ‘An Odyssey For The Living’ – and received rave reviews for it – all in the space of nine months. This is an outfit that’s turning heads with their visceral intensity combined with surreal grandeur; a combination of the ferocious and the sublime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p5vID761gI

More information is here, and tickets here.

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Finally, here’s the slightly topical Saturday afternoon show from Daylight Music. Familiar songs this time, but a mystery lineup.

Daylight Music 205 – A Girl and a Gun: James Bond Special (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK, Saturday 7th November 2015, 12.00pm – 2.00pm) – free (£5.00 donation encouraged)

Everyone knows the iconic music of James Bond, and record label Where It’s At Is Where You Are love it so much that they’ve created ‘A Girl and A Gun‘, an excellent online album of covers of Bond themes. Since 25^th March this year, WIAIWYA has released one new track for the project every week, aiming to end up (on 7^th November) with Ed Dowie rolling off a version of the Bond theme straight from the Union Chapel’s organ.

This week, Daylight Music is hosting a special 007 show celebrating the album, featuring many of the bands on the compilation. Grab your black tie for the occasion, and expect some rather special surprises.

More information on the concert is here, with up-to-date information on the ‘Girl And A Gun’ project here. (They’re keeping quiet on who’s actually performing, but if you want to make some educated guesses, here’s who played on the album – Jack Hayter, Robert Rotifer, The Weisstronauts, World Of Fox, Michaelmas, Sly And Unseen, Darren Hayman, Citizen Helene, Deerful, The Great Electric, Crock Oss, Papernut Cambridge, The Elderly, Seks Bomba, Jeff Mellin, Picturebox, Ralegh Long, Glass, DJ Downfall feat. Theoretical Girl, The Left Outsides, Pam Berry, Charm Bracelet & Ramesh, Maija Sofia, Snow Leopard Brotherhood, Tim The Mute, Keiron Phelan with Drita Kotaji, Rory McVicar, Ms Goodnight, Rebecca Jade aka Lady Lowrey, The Fenestration, The Vatican Cellars, Cee Bee Beaumont and the Leaf Library.)

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More November gig previews shortly…

Tags: Alastair Penman, Arctic Circle (promoter), Borealis Saxophone Quartet, Cee Bee Beaumont, Charm Bracelet & Ramesh, Citizen Helene, Colours To Shame, Crock Oss, Dan Harle, Darren Hayman, Daylight Music (event), Deerful, DJ Downfall, Geoff Sheil, Glasgow (Scotland), Glass, Graham Fitkin, Hastings (England), Jack Hayter, James Blackshaw, James Bond, Jeff Mellin, Jenni Watson, John Harle, Kamilya Jubran, Keiron Phelan with Drita Kotaji, Krysthla, Lady Lowrey, Maija Sofia, Marius Neset, Michaelmas, Ms Goodnight, oud music, Palestine, Pam Berry, Papernut Cambridge, Picturebox, Ralegh Long, Rebecca Jade, Robert Rotifer, Rory McVicar, Sarah Murcia, saxophone music, Seks Bomba, Sly And Unseen, Snow Leopard Brotherhood, The Elderly, The Facemelter (event), The Fenestration, The Great Electric, The Leaf Library, The Left Outsides, The Vatican Cellars, The Weisstronauts, Theoretical Girl, Tim The Mute, Ukraine, World Of Fox, Zephyr

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – gamelan/dance fusion with My Tricksy Spirit, Wax Wings and Segara Madu; Nordic pop at Ja Ja Ja (Kill J, Loveless and Maasai); anarchistwood’s Samhain/NYE party (with Rude Mechanicals, Jane Ruby and more)

23 Oct

More concerts for the end of October…

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As the opening concert of the South East Asian Festival 2015, there’s a performance at the Forge by My Tricksy Spirit, a new musical project which fuses the shimmering sounds of gendér wayang – Balinese gamelan instruments – with dub, electronic, ambient, trip-hop, and psychedelic rock. The Forge’s writeup is below (tweaked a little by me).

My Tricksy Spirit (The Forge , 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Monday 26th October 2015, ) – £10.00

Performed on the bronze-and-bamboo “gendér” metallophones which gives the music its name – and featuring intricate, interlocking melodies played with mallets and damped with the wrists – gendér wayang is a subset of Balinese gamelan music. Involving between two and four players (a small number for a gamelan ensemble) it is used in the island’s Hindu rituals including life-cycle ceremonies, temple festivals, purification rituals and cremations (as well as in the sacred wayang kulit shadow-puppet dramas, based on ancient Indian epics).

The My Tricksy Spirit project was started by Nick Gray, who teaches south-east Asian music at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London, and who runs the gendér group that forms the basis of the band. Using Ableton Live, several synths and effects, guitar, bass and drums, the music is played through a mixing desk – much like dub – to create an intense psychedelic journey through sound.

Tonight’s band features Nick Gray (violin and vocal), Paula Friar and Rachel Wilcox (gendérs) and four other musicians: Tomoya Forster of Pumarosa (bass guitar, effects, mixing desk), Julian Vickary of General Skank (synthesizer and effects), Charlie Cawood of Knifeworld (bass guitar, sitar, guitar) and Rob Shipster of Buttress Root Drumming (electronics, drums), who also produced My Tricksy Spirit’s upcoming album.

Support comes from electronica/world-house act Wax Wings and from another of Nick Gray’s SOAS gendér wayang ensembles, Segara Madu (who mostly play repertoire pieces from the Balinese village of Sukawati, as taught by the late I Wayan Loceng). More information and gig tickets are here, with the Facebook event page here.

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Arguably, there’s not been enough pop or R&B in here recently. Let’s set that straight.

Kill J + Loveless + Maasai (Ja Ja Ja @ The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, UK, Thursday 29^th October 2015,) – £5.00/£7.00

Straight from the publicity:

Founded in 2009, Ja Ja Ja is the definitive Nordic website and club night celebrating the very best new music emerging from Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Denmark. Each month at London’s The Lexington, Ja Ja Ja hand-picks the finest emerging talent from the Nordic countries, making sure that only the best music is filtered through to your ears.

KIll J (a.k.a. Julie Aagaard) has been turning heads the past two years with her signature blend of dark experimental pop. A devastating one-two-punch with debut singles Phoenix and Bullet set the blogosphere buzzing, also catching the keen eye of ‘The Guardian’, ‘Indie ‘, ‘Stereogum’, ‘Pigeons and Planes’ and landing airplay on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 6music. Deliciously diverse, the sugary sweet Cold Stone revealed a more innocent and naive side of KIll J, whilst Propaganda burst forth as “a bombastic, fangs-bared snarl at sexism” (‘Stereogum’). There’s more to come too, with an EP promised this fall.

Prominent identities in their own right, Eirik Tillerli and Filip Kollsete teamed up late 2013 to form Norwegian beat crooners Loveless. Following back-to-back remixes, debut single How To Love You was instantly added to national radio. Clocking in excess of 500K streams last year, their music has picked up attention from blogs, magazines and DJs all over the world; also landing them on some of the biggest festivals in Norway, not to mention their own club night in Oslo, Klubb Loveless (where guests include Artful/Artful Dodger and NVOY). New single They Don’t Know was recently hailed Record of the Week on BBC Radio 1xtra, serving the first taste of upcoming project ‘Relationships’.

Maasai is a Stockholm-based duo consisting of Dominique Teymouri and Zackarias Ekelund. Together they create soulful sound landscapes with a cinematic touch and lyrical depths. The pair broke on to the scene with debut single Memories, pulling inspiration from varied and abstract constructs – places, people, surroundings and everywhere in between. Follow-up tracks The Healer and Forgive Me have since held a captive audience; also hinting to the fearless, fragile and all-the-while dreamy atmosphere inhabited by MAASAI’s upcoming debut album – set for release later this year.

Resident DJs Project Fresh Socks are along for the ride in October; having also spun up a storm at Ja Ja Ja’s first club night of the season last week at The Lexington with CHINAH (Denmark), The Fjords (Norway) and Axel Flovent (Iceland).

Up to date information for this particular Ja Ja Ja night is here and tickets are here.

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Flapping-in-the-wind time… here’s what looks like a very interesting gig, but the colourful cloud of information around it keeps changing shape. Here we go..

Subterfuge presents Samhain Special/Labiatory New Year’s Eve Party with Rude Mechanicals + NiMBUL + Bad Suburban Nightmare + We Are A Communist + Jane Ruby + Milky Sugar (Subterfuge @ The Others, 6-8 Manor Road, Stoke Newington, London, N16 5SA, UK, Friday 30th October 2015, 7.00pm) – £3.00 to £6.00 and upwards

Run by arch, arty but heartful prank-rockers anarchistwood (whose own ingredients span post-punk cantatas, skeletal lo-fi garage pop, silly voices and quickfire sampler collages), this is the last Subterfuge club night of the year (hence the split between a Halloween/Samhain night and a New Year’s Eve shindig) and promises a fabulous musical sprawl – a right old grab-bag of this and that, in the best way. anarchistwood themselves are playing, though at the moment it’s unclear whether or not they’re teaming up with dysfunctional Chatham polymath and Stuckist art brute Sexton Ming (as the anti-supergroup called Nimbul), or playing as themselves. I guess that whichever way it goes you could expect a roughly equal mix of distracted behaviour, political protest, self-absorbed memory jigsaws and détournements with echoes of Beefheart, Crass, The Raincoats and the high point of a Pride parade. But that’s all it is – a guess.

Compared to Earth and Neil Young at their most dogged and noisy, Dan Hrekow – a.k.a Bad Suburban Nightmare – plays “impossibly slow and melancholic” grunge-drone instrumentals on a minimal setup of distorted guitar and pedals. In violent contrast, Rude Mechanicals play party music for paranoid schizophrenics, fronted by the peroxide-beehive rantings of Miss Roberts (who looks like a doubled-back-drag-queen version of Patsy Stone, and speak-sings like a collision between Dagmar Krause and Holly Penfield), Their songs are rattling hallucinatory-jam sandwiches about sinister neighbours, stand-up arguments and alien mice on the Tube, mixing jazz, punk and cabaret together in equal measures and played with both needle-sharp precision and full glamour oomph.

Of the rest, We Are A Communist provide “trashy guitar-laden sci-fi surf music, with stylophones to boot – a must for Man or Astroman? fans”; onetime Naked Ruby frontwoman (and current Deptford Beach Babes member) Jane Ruby turns up to sing her solo mixture of torch, garage rock’n’roll, flamenco and blues songs with twists of Spanish & Arabic flavours; and Milky Sugar performs “punk go go”… but that’s where I run out of information.

I’ve no actual idea about the order in which everyone’s going on, as the various info and flyers seem to contradict each other: either that or the whole event is morphing too fast for me to keep up with it. Presumably they’re working to some functional anarchist or I Ching method to establish it, or you just turn up and see what happens. Perhaps that’s what they’re doing. Either/and/or DJ Sugarlump SS, DJ KG Lumphead and MC Sadogasm provide some extra noises, punkvertery & Kodek provide visuals, and they’ve got a proactive but generous door price policy – three quid if you’re unwaged, four quid if you’re a student with an NUS card, and six quid if you’re neither but have shown enough commitment to arrive before 9pm. After that, they charge more. More information is here; keep track of developments as best you can on Facebook here; and there’s the usual array of tasters below.

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More shortly…

Tags: anarchistwood, Buttress Root Drumming, Charlie Cawood, Cornwall, Denmark, DJ KG Lumphead, Eirik Tillerli, Filip Kollsete, Fragments Trio, General Skank, intriguingly mixed bags, Ja Ja Ja (event), Jane Ruby, Julian Vickary, Julie Aagaard, Kill J, Knifeworld, Leeds (England), London (England), Loveless, Maasai, Metamorphic, Milky Sugar, Miss Roberts & Rude Mechanicals, My Tricksy Spirit, Nick Gray, NiMBUL, Norway, Nut Club, Paula Friar, Project Fresh Socks, Pumarosa, Rachel Wilcox, Rob Shipster, Segara Madu, Sexton Ming, Subterfuge (event), Sweden, Tokyo, Tomoya Forster, We are a Communist

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Categories 2015, alternative pop, alternative rock, art rock, cabaret, cabaret rock, ceremonial music, chamber jazz, chamber music, chaos music, club music, cross-cultural music, crossover, dance music, dance pop, devotional music, DIY music, drone music, dub, electro-acoustic music, electro-pop, electronic, electronica, experimental music, experimental pop, experimental/avant-garde rock, free jazz, gamelan, garage rock, gendér wayang, heavy metal, house music, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, loop music, noise, noise rock, plunderphonics, political music, pop, post-bop, post-hardcore, post-progressive rock, previews, process music, progressive metal, progressive rock, protest songs, psychedelic rock, punk jazz, punk rock, punk-blues, R&B, rock, sacred music, singer-songwriter, sound collage, space rock, surf rock, synth pop, world & indigenous music, worldbeat

October/November 2015 – upcoming London gigs – intercontinental psych & noise with Baba Yaga (Bitchin’ Bajas, Tomaga and Demian Castellanos, Acid Mothers Temple and Zeni Geva); and more LUME jazz with Tom Taylor/Rob Luft and Cath Roberts/Seth Bennett/Andrew Lisle

23 Oct

Pausing only to remind you that the last week of October includes two of the Pierre Bensusan acoustic gigs at the Half Moon in Putney (which I mentioned in the previous post), here come the last of my selected London gigs for the month, and the first for the start of November. As ever, it’s just a small sampling of what’s on in town, but it’s what’s caught my attention.

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Bitchin’ Bajas + Tomaga + Demian Castellanos (Baba Yaga’s Hut & Hands in the Dark @ Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, UK, Monday 26^th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £9.00

I’ve heard Chicago trio Bitchin’ Bajas described as “psychedelic easy listening” – presumably by someone who insists on being shouted at in conversation. Despite that swaggering faux-dumb name (the one that makes them sound as if they play manic Tejano to be drowned out by fist-fighting oil workers) they’re more ‘Bitches Brew’ than cathouse. They spin out protracted rhapsodic instrumentals drawing on a variety of introspective, mindful influences and parallels, looking back to the hallowed bucolic trance of Harmonia and Cluster, the ecstatic modular pulses of Terry Riley, the breezy but depthless Pacific cool of West Coast jazz, and perhaps the dissolving pastoralism of Talk Talk. Though they’re multi-instrumentalists, they wear their skills lightly, working wind instruments and mallet percussion into their mists of keyboard and workhorse organ and their landscape of lively rolling, rilling glissandi and drone chords. Sometimes overlapping into ambient electronica, they’re never quite dilute enough to fit into it: even at their most vaporous and transparent, they’re the smoke that never quite fades, the tang that holds your attention. As the clip below shows, they’re perhaps a little too diffuse to work at an open air festival: embraced by the Oto space, they should do just fine.

Synth/sounds looper Tom Relleen and drummer Valentina Magaletti keep in step – just about – as Tomaga, an impressionistic improvising duo drawing on drone music, free jazz and modular synth work hanging off the edge of rock. Simple oscillating melodies percolate loosely over a syncopated jazz lope with hanging coffee-can taps and rattles and shortwave radio whines; sometimes a synth organ hangs by itself, burbling, while the percussion sways and alarms like an approaching freight train. It’s music of preoccupation, with brief flashes of bright sunlight through the pressing focus.

Best known as the figure behind London psychedelic/kosmische projects The Orichalc Phase and The Oscillation, Cornish-born loop guitarist Demian Castellanos steps out under his own name for his most personal work so far. Like Fred Frith or G.P. Hall, Demian’s had a history of playing guitar with implements – paper, cutlery or whatever else came to hand – and feeding the sounds through volume swells and sundry pedals: like Hall, he’s also possessed of a nature-inspired, painterly view of music. For this current work, he’s going back to his formative years of woodshedding as a cottage-bound teenager at the isolated southernmost tip of the British coast; creating rich, portentous and melodious sound layers drawing on early-‘90s shoegaze, on raga and drone, and on echoing, guttering British, Indian, American and German psychedelic influences.

More gig info is here, and tickets are available here.

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On the first day of November, there’s a double bill of Japanese heaviness at Corsica Studios.

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO + Zeni Geva (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, London, SE17 1LB, UK, Sunday 1^st November 2015, 7.30pm) – £14.00

Zeni Geva (or Zeni Gaiva, depending on how you translate the phonetics – conceptually, it translates as “money violence”) have been around since 1987. Led by guitarist/singer/noise-chopper KK Null, and currently backed up solely by drummer Tatsuya Yoshida to make a quake-strength power duo, they have initial links to legendary noise-Dadaists The Boredoms (and even the venue-destroying pre-Boredoms chaos act Hanatarash, which featured Mitsuru Tabata, until relatively recently Zeni Geva’s second guitarist). You’d expect them to have an abrasive side, and you’d be right. Their default musical setting is one of boiling, barking aggression, with tight and furious knots of threshing machine guitar; their records have savage, sadistic titles like ‘Total Castration’ and ‘Desire For Agony’; their progressive hardcore approach takes assorted forms hostage (aside from the obvious, there’s math and noise rock, psychedelia and death metal in the tangle) and makes them jump like puppets.

And yet, in spite of this, there’s a world of difference between Zeni Geva and your average long-lived heavy-thunderfuck band. It’s mostly in the way they use calm – little, perfectly-formed lacunae of space in between the blurs and blows, bringing their bursts of frenzy into focus (Steve Albini is both fan and sometime collaborator, and you can see why). It’s a terrible cliché to compare Japanese musicians to martial artists, but in this case there’s some substance to it. The brutality is sheer craft rather than an end in itself, every movement seems considered and purely executed; and live, in between each flurry of songblows and each ugly song name, they seem enormously humble, friendly and pleased to be there.

Acid Mothers Temple have taken twenty years to set themselves up as a revered psychedelic institution, but it seems as if they’ve been doing it for much longer, such is leader Makoto Kawabata’s talent for back-engineering himself into the culture. Part of this is down to the way he and his cohorts have mastered the ingredients, including the tearing metallic squalls, mellow blues tracery and starry smears of Hendrixian guitar, the whispering lapping Gong synths, the Pink Floyd mantra riffs and Zappa-esque air sculpture solos, and the zoned-out post-James Brown grooves (with the addition of Japanese chanting and noise-squalls). Much of the rest of it is to do with AMT’s open, overlapping community approach. Their musical impetus has utilised multiple faces and names, from their own simpler reconfigurations (the heavier trippier playing of Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno, the Sabbath-y sludge of Acid Mothers Temple & Space Paranoid) to the friendly absorption or co-opting of contemporaries (Acid Mothers Temple SWR, with Ruins, and Acid Mothers Afrirampo) and of heroes from the original psychedelic generation (the team-up with Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth as Acid Mothers Gong, and with Mani Neumeier as Acid Mothers Guru Guru). If old heroes are unavailable or disinclined to pool resources, AMT have simply shrugged and continued anyway (such as when they took up hurdy-gurdys and acid folk and briefly became Acid Mothers Temple & the Incredible Strange Band).

If this makes Kawabata and co sound like slick chancers (and even if AMT album titles like ‘Starless and Bible Black Sabbath’ do suggest both avid, nerdy fandom and piss-taking on a Julian Cope level), I’m selling them short. Acid Mothers Temple might be a brand as much as an ethos, but that hasn‘t stopped their project and record-releasing ethics being continually dedicated to possibilities and continuance,rather than simply banking a following (or colonizing someone else’s). Their communal origins may have been two decades behind those of their inspiration but were hardly any less sincere; and their exploration of less obvious musical areas en route (including opera, Terry Riley minimalism, Nepalese folk and southern European Occitan culture) have led them into interesting places and opened further doors to anyone following them.

First and foremost, anyone who’s seen AMT play will vouch to their talent of both mastering their sources and creating music which lives, thrills and involves in the moment. This week’s London concert features the more space-rock inclined Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. lineup – probably the easiest entry point to an increasingly rewarding musical world. See below for a full-length concert clip of the band in action.

More gig info is here, and tickets are available here.

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Also on the Sunday, it’s time for the monthly LUME gig: more jazz in Dalston…

Tom Taylor/Rob Luft and Cath Roberts/Seth Bennett/Andrew Lisle (LUME @ The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8JH, UK, Sunday 1st November 2015, 7.30pm) – £10.00

For our November Vortex gig, we welcome a duo and a trio to the stage, for a night of improvised music.

Tonight sees the first meeting of a new improvising trio featuring LUME’s co-director Cath Roberts (baritone saxophone), Seth Bennett (double bass) and Andrew Lisle (drums). Andrew is known for being one of the drummers in heavyweight Leeds anarcho-sextet Shatner’s Bassoon, and as a prolific improviser working with a multitude of musicians on the free scene (Colin Webster, Alex Ward, Daniel Thompson, Tom Wheatley and more). Seth leads his own ensembles Nut Club and En Bas Quartet, as well as being involved in many other projects across musical styles including Fragments Trio, Metamorphic and The Horse Loom. He and Cath play together as a duo, as well as in Word of Moth and Cath’s quintet Sloth Racket. In addition to this and her LUME work, Cath also leads Quadraceratops (a septet) and has a duo with guitarist Anton Hunter, Ripsaw Catfish.

The new duo featuring Tom Taylor and Rob Luft is a recent collaboration borne out of a mutual love of improvised music. The music draws attention to the many common features of the two instruments, and mixes high-intensity improvisation with more tender and reflective textures.

A former award-winning classical piano graduate at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Tom is now a rising British jazz star, having transferred to London in 2009 to pursue a Masters in jazz piano at Trinity College of Music (studying with Simon Purcell, Liam Noble and Nick Weldon). Since then he’s played the main jazz festivals in Manchester and London and Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway. He’s a member of the Jack Davies Big Band and of Southbound (both of whom have recorded for V&V Records) and also plays in the collaborative electro-acoustic trio duck-rabbit with saxophonist Joe Wright and double bass player James Opstad. Rob began his career as a jazz guitarist in Sevenoaks, where he took lessons from Mike Outram and turned professional at 15. He has been a mainstay of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra for many years, having been its guitarist since 2010 and having played in the associated NYJO Nonet. He currently co-leads the band Organism and plays with various groups on the London jazz circuit; including positions with Nigel Hitchcock, Gareth Lockrane and the Callum Au Big Band.

More information here, and tickets here.

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More imminent gig previews shortly…

Tags: Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO, Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Bitchin' Bajas, Cath Roberts, Chicago (USA), Demian Castellanos, intriguingly mixed bags, London (England), LUME (event), Seth Bennett, Shatner's Bassoon, The Orichalc Phase, Tomaga, Zeni Geva

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Categories 2015, alternative pop, alternative rock, art rock, cabaret rock, ceremonial music, chamber jazz, chaos music, cross-cultural music, crossover, dance pop, devotional music, DIY music, drone music, dub, electro-acoustic music, electro-pop, experimental music, experimental pop, experimental/avant-garde rock, free jazz, gamelan, garage rock, gendér wayang, heavy metal, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, loop music, noise, noise rock, plunderphonics, political music, pop, post-bop, post-hardcore, post-progressive rock, previews, process music, progressive metal, progressive rock, protest songs, psychedelic rock, punk jazz, punk rock, punk-blues, R&B, rock, sacred music, singer-songwriter, sound collage, space rock, surf rock, synth pop, world & indigenous music, worldbeat

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Nonclassical rework Bohuslav Martinů; Iskra String Quartet, Minotaur Shock, Isobel Waller-Bridge and Angus Macrae meet at Daylight Music; acoustic guitar shows for Pierre Bensusan

16 Oct

A few posts ago, I covered Nonclassical and their various post-classical mashups. I’ve just cottoned on to the fact that they’re back with another one.

Inspired by Martinů (Czech Centre London + Nonclassical @ The Forge , 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Wednesday 21st October 2015, 7.30pm) – £10.00/£12.00

‘Inspired by Martinů’ juxtaposes selected parts of the oeuvre of 20th century Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů (whose 125th birth anniversary we’ll celebrate in December this year), with London’s contemporary classical scene as represented by artists around the acclaimed Nonclassical label.

For this concert, Nonclassical founder, composer and DJ Gabriel Prokofiev (on laptop) will be joined onstage by piano virtuoso Lada Valešová, violin wunderkind Tereza Anna Přívratská (of Jubilee Quartet) and vibrant mezzo-soprano Lucie Špičková. They will be carrying out a unique attempt to reimagine Martinů’s most influential chamber pieces by creating real-time improvised soundtracks, avant-garde audiovisual installations and once-in-a-lifetime musical reworks.

Full details on and tickets for the event are here, with the Facebook page here. Nonclassical have been kind enough to point us towards a Martinů cheat sheet. I’ve probably plugged this a little too late for anybody else to enter the Martinů remix competition, but here’s the information on that if you’re interested. Here too is a video clip in which Nonclassical’s Eleanor Ward explaining some of the ideas behind both Nonclassical itself and the remix project.

As a fuller taste of Martinů, here are clips of part of one of his violin sonatas and a live performance of his Fantasie for theremin, oboe, string quartet and piano.

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Meanwhile, Daylight Music are setting aside the acoustic rock’n’folk songwriters for a week in order to take one of their occasional forays into contemporary classical fusion. Read on…

Daylight Music 204

Daylight Music 204: Iskra String Quartet with Minotaur Shock + Isobel Waller-Bridge, (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK, Saturday 24th October 2015, 12.00pm-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £5.00

The Iskra String Quartet (their name meaning “a spark” – to ignite) is a London-based collaborative group of string players who enjoy making music together regardless of genre. The quartet has had a particularly strong relationship with Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, whose music they’ve toured extensively across Europe: a particular highlight being a set of performances of Johannsson’s ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ in collaboration with American artist film maker Bill Morrison.

As sometime pop performers, Iskra has worked closely with pianist/composer Olafur Arnalds, with The xx (on the ‘Coexist’ album and on Jamie xx ‘s score for the ‘Tree Of Codes’ ballet) and with Radiohead (creating a string quartet remix of The Reckoner from ‘In Rainbows’) as well as with Vampire Weekend, Sufjan Stevens, Benjamin Francis Leftwich, Katie Melua, Duke Special and My Brightest Diamond. Recently they performed as a trio alongside The Lone Bellow on ‘Later…with Jools Holland’. Within the world of film and theatre soundtracks, Iskra have collaborated with composers Dustin O’Halloran, David Julyan (with whom they performed for the 177th Daylight Music concert in November 2014) and Alex Baranowski (on the twice-BAFTA- nominated film ‘McCullin’ and for Sir Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of ‘Hamlet’ starring Rory Kinnear).

Iskra’s first release was the three-track ‘Discoveries & Inventions’ EP in 2010. Their forthcoming album, ‘Iskra’ (1613 Recordings, October 2015) celebrates their tenth anniversary and features contributions from composers previously linked with the group (Johann Johannsson, Olafur Arnalds, Alex Baranowski, David Julyan) as well as new composer collaborators (Peter Gregson, Luke Anthony, Paul Frith and Isobel Waller-Bridge).

Working as Minotaur Shock, Bristol-based David Edwards first made a name for himself nearly fifteen years ago via albums and EPs of wide-screen pastoral folk-tinged electronica incorporating field recordings and other instances of nature-love (he once released an EP with a title that might have been lifted from a birdwatching manual.) Of his five albums since 2001, the most recent is 2012’s ‘Orchard’ for which he returned to his original record label Melodic following a two-album stint with 4AD. ‘Orchard’ also saw him returning to the use of acoustic instrumentation (strings, flutes, clarinets) in addition to his own electronics, drums and “weedy acoustic guitar”. He has a previous connection with Iskra – his 2008 composition ‘Accelerated Footage At Night’ (originally released on the ‘Amateur Dramatics’ album) was rearranged and performed by the quartet on ‘Discoveries & Inventions’.

As a composer, Isobel Waller-Bridge has worked primarily in television and theatre and film (she won the Best Composer award at 2014’s Underwire Film Festival for her score for Claire Oakley’s film ‘James’, and has scored multiple plays performed in venues across the UK). Her work spans a wide range from large scale orchestral music to experimental to folk, and has been performed in concert halls across Europe, USA and the UK (sometimes by a mixed ensemble of her own combining acoustic strings with piano, minimal sounds and electronics).

Her ‘Music For Strings‘ album, featuring six symphonic works for large string orchestra (including Untouched By A Storm, during which the orchestra divides into twenty separate string parts), was released in April this year. Isobel has recently been commissioned to write a ten-minute “cosmological” work to score projection-mapping of the story of the universe onto Durham Cathedral as part of the Lumiere Festival in November.

A special additional guest, Angus Macrae, will be playing piano at points during the afternoon. These will be in a similar vein to the pieces found on ‘Awake’, the debut EP released by Angus this year, which featured intimate piano improvisations with a backdrop of spiralling tape delays, distant voices and deep analog synthesisers.

Like Isobel, Angus is a composer-musician best known for his soundtrack and theatre work, having composed for a wide range of productions at venues in London and Edinburgh; for short films including this year’s ‘Interlude’ (winner of the 2015 Sci-Fi London 48 hour film challenge), ‘The Listener’, ‘Way Out’ and the documentary ‘On Guardian Mountain’; and for dance works including Wayne Parsons’ ‘Meeting’ and Tamsin Fitzgerald’s ‘Lucid Grounds’ (the latter in collaboration with Alex Baranowski.) A follow up to ‘Awake’ is currently in development with a planned release in late 2015.

Up-to-date info on this particular Daylight Music afternoon is here.

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I first saw Pierre Bensusan many years ago at the Union Chapel. Although he was supporting fellow guitarist Antonio Forcione (who’s a master not only in terms of staggering technique but also in terms of showmanship), he more than held his own against the headliner’s prowess. Bensunan didn’t and doesn’t play with that hand-spinning percussive flash that’s in vogue with many acoustic fingerstyle guitarists, then and now (including Forcione and Jon Gomm, above). He didn’t need to. Instead he offered a deep, communicatory and involved playing style with a depth and complexity all of its own, drawing from his own French-Algerian-Sephardic background and broad listening, interweaving a host of simultaneous techniques from traditional to jazz to neo-acoustic, and spinning out polyphonic melodies as sun-warmed and vivid as a Mediterranean afternoon. He was a pleasure to hear.. and he’s back in London for three dates this coming week.

Pierre Bensusan (The Half Moon, 93 Lower Richmond Rd, Putney, London SW15 1EU, London, UK, Sunday 25th to Tuesday 27th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £10.00/£12.00

Here’s the tour blurb…

The “Mozart of Guitar” is back in the UK. Over the past forty years, fingerstyle acoustic guitar virtuoso Pierre Bensusan has taken his unique blend of world, Celtic, jazz and folk inspired music to all corners of the globe. Winner of the 2014 Independent Music Award in the Live Performance Album category for his triple live album ‘Ecore’ Pierre is recognized as one of the great guitar players of the 21st century. Described as a “genius” by the likes of Jon Gomm and ‘Melody Maker’, immortalised by the tune ‘Bensusan’ written in tribute by the late Michael Hedges, and referenced as an important inspiration to many other great musicians, Pierre Bensusan is a one-of-a-kind artist whose music transcends genre and time.

“How the guitar would want to sound if it could play itself” … in Pierre’s music there is an uninhibited sense of musical freedom and expression, a sense of something both playful and serious, otherworldly yet right here right now. His “manner” of playing defies classification – crossing world, classical, jazz, traditional, folk and more. None can be isolated as simply “world music”, “Celtic”, “Arabic” or “French”; rather, they represent our world in its current state, a world sharing itself, fusing cultures together in ways we have never experienced. Not to be missed!

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The final October gig previews are coming up shortly, plus the first November ones…

Tags: acoustic guitar music, Angus Macrae, Arctic Circle (promoter), Bohuslav Martinů, Bristol (England), Daylight Music (event), Gabriel Prokofiev, Iskra String Quartet, Isobel Waller-Bridge, Jubilee Quartet, Lada Valešová, London (England), Lucie Špičková, Minotaur Shock, Nonclassical (event/promoter/record label), Paris (France), piano music, Pierre Bensusan, premieres, Tereza Anna Přívratská, violin music

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Workin’ Man Noise Unit, Casual Nun and Knifedoutofexistence bawl for Baba Yaga; an acoustic guitar show for Jon Gomm and Matt Stevens; Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufield (plus Klavikon) rumble the Dome

15 Oct

It’s a good week for acoustic guitar. It’s a good week for interfacing modern classical and electronica; or for catching some Montreal drama from a couple of Arcade Fire alumni. But first of all…

Workin’ Man Noise Unit + Casual Nun + Knifedoutofexistence (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Birthdays, 33-35 Stoke Newington Road, Dalston, London N16 8BJ Monday 19th October 2015, 7.30pm) – free

Three grimy, wirey helpings of noise rock.

Rolling out of Reading in a skewed spray of Stella lager and caffeine headaches, headliners Workin’ Man Noise Unit have been hailed as the closest thing that England will ever come up with as an answer to Rocket From the Tombs. I’d hoped that whoever said that actually meant Peter Laughner’s Pere Ubu-spawning proto-punks (rather than making a Rocket From The Crypt typo) and to be fair, it’s near enough: while much of it is base-level punk/trash-blues rammed ’til it bleeds with blue-collar howling, the band’s nightmarish conviction and their overlaid sweep of jet-engine and sawmill-shear noise guitar is a little Tombs-esque, and pretty impressive.

Credit where it’s due – they’ve impressed noise-shaman Julian Cope enough to get a slot playing at one of his book launches, they’ve turned out a mean Black Sabbath cover EP, and their logo is an incontinent, blind-drunk logger-turned-chainsaw-murderer. Berkshire might not be where you’d usually go to pick up a raw chunk of backwoods ire, but the Unit are looking to change all of that.

Second on the bill, Casual Nun are a more spaced-out alternative to the Unit’s sonic savagery, offer something less straightforwardly brutal and a little more mysterious. The Londoners’ songs are looser-limbed, smudged with an echoing grind, concrete-blues riffs full of muscle-ache, and hallucinating echo-vocals. The result sounds like a kind of psychedelic hard labour: a tripping chain gang wearing to skin and bone. You could imagine men made up entirely of skinny elbow-and-knee joints, all linked together by bruises.

If one-man agony factory Dean Robinson-Saunders – a.k.a. Knifedoutofexistence – doesn’t end up onstage under a horrible, guttering post-supernova bloodlight, then something’s gone wrong. Merging the burnt-out ends of power electronics and sparse slow-motion grindcore to worrying effect, his songs sounds like a man bent under jet-black clouds, shouldering a sledgehammer and a headful of horrors and slowly, painfully demolishing the ruined hovel he’s hiding in. Compelling anti-heroics.

Up-to-date event information is here, and tickets are here – though, just to reiterate, this is a free gig. You can come and damage yourself gratis.

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Here’s information on the first of the week’s acoustic guitar gigs:

Jon Gomm & Matt Stevens (The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, UK, Wednesday 21st October 2015) – £15.00

Born in Blackpool and now based in Leeds, Jon Gomm is one of Britain’s top percussive-fingerstyle guitarists, creating drum sounds, basslines and twisting melodies all at the same time from a single acoustic guitar. He’s also one of the few such guitarists worldwide who primarily applies those polyphonic skip, tap and slap skills to songwriting rather than to pure instrumental pieces, drawing his inspiration from assorted sources from Robert Johnson to Radiohead.

Born to a family deeply involved in music, Jon grew up in a household where touring musicians lodged on the understanding that Jon would get a guitar lesson out of the arrangement, meaning he received one-to-one instruction from the likes of BB King and Jack Bruce. A player since two and a songwriter since six, Jon’s been releasing records since 2003’s ‘Hypertension’ but is best known for Passionflower, a song which went viral on YouTube three years ago. It’s still a great showcase for what he does, so here it is again:

Though he doesn’t seem to have been formally credited yet, Matt Stevens is playing support. Increasingly a ‘Misfit City’ regular, Matt is a critically acclaimed guitarist and composer from North London. For his solo gigs, he uses a battered acoustic guitar and multiple layered lines of texture and counterpoint achieved via a loop pedal, plus variety of propulsive playing techniques and a fervent omnivorous musical mind steeped in everything from folk music to progressive rock to punk and process music (I wrote about one such performance here). Following three self-released albums (and a number of EPs and live recordings), Matt signed with Esoteric/Cherry Red Records to deliver his fourth album, 2014’s well-received ‘Lucid’ (which featured expanded instrumentation from members of King Crimson, Knifeworld, Chrome Hoof and Frost*).

Matt is also one-quarter of the acclaimed garage/prog/punk collective quartet The Fierce & The Dead, who are now two albums into their career and increasingly gaining attention across a broadening fanbase. Perhaps it’s partially due to this band’s success that Matt has announced that his next few acoustic gigs will be his last for the foreseeable future. In that case, this is the second-to-last gig (the other, in Rotherham, has already sold out) so this is your last chance – for now – to see the original Stevens method live. There’s a taste of it below…

Gig information is here, and tickets are here.

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Speaking of last-chance-to-see…

Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufield + Klavikon (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ The Dome, 2A Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park, London N19 5QQ, UK, Thursday 22nd October 2015, 7.30pm) – £15.00

Catch it while you can – Montreal instrumentalists Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufield are playing what may well be one of their last duo gigs for a while before each returns to solo work. Best known to the general public via their contributions to Arcade Fire (and, to a lesser extent, Bell Orchestre), Colin and Sarah have been collaborating as a separate act for three years; culminating in this year’s ‘Never Were The Way She Was’, an instrumental concept album loosely based on “the life of a girl who ages slow as mountains”.

Eschewing looping and overdubs (though not timbral processing), both their studio recordings and live performances rely on carefully textured and timed interactions between Colin’s saxophones and Sarah’s violin (with assorted clarinets, cornet, French horn, flute and vocalisations also available as part of the palette plus Colin’s repertoire of breath-and-key noise, multiphonics, circular breathing and pitching tricks) If this sounds like familiar free improvisation territory – esoteric squeaks and clacks, mostly of interest to other improvising musicians – believe me, it isn’t. Colin and Sarah’s shared musical sense and composing chemistry is dramatic, tuneful and thoroughly accessible – a quest inside a pair of instrument cases and through a batch of effects pedals, ranging around the world and stewing together a thrilling mixture of elements from Arabic to Australian, Appalachian to Balkan via electricity, wood, cane and weather.

The results have thrilled avant-rock fans, jazz aficionados and more casual listeners alike. Delivered with majestic gusto, conviction and wit, a glittering, brooding spectrum of melodies, timbres and vivid musical associations emerge from the duo’s creative chemistry. Bass and tenor saxophones rendering chopped and screwed club sub-bass, skirling smokewalls and Chicago jazz inventions; the ghosts and progeny of old folk airs called up by bow and string; frowning, intricate dark-toned instrumental builds recalling Godspeed, King Crimson or The Dirty Three; and as an annealing factor, some of that Montreal dusk (ominous, hinting at past or future breakdown, but so fertle for inducing mood and edge). It’s a real pleasure to see two musicians walk shoulder-to-shoulder into the deeps and return with something so right.

Playing in support is Klavikon – Leon Michener’s one-man project which applies higher technology to the Cowell/Cage tradition of prepared-piano, amplifying and treating the signal via various pickups and real time analogue processing, and involving both serious and tongue-in-cheek playing-mechanism inventions which include a robot dog. Aleatoric ideas from Stockhausen and Cage fuse with electronic dancefloor work including “cascading batteries of percussion, sub-basses and abstract soundscapes” – see below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS8E5dGXE_

Up-to-date gig information is here, and tickets are here.

Tags: acoustic guitar music, Arcade Fire, Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Bell Orchestre, Bristol (England), Casual Nun, Colin Stetson, Jon Gomm, Klavikon, Knifedoutofexistence, Leeds (England), Leon Michener, London (England), Matt Stevens, Montréal (Canada), Reading (England), Sarah Neufield, Workin' Man Noise Unit

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs (12th to 18th) – new classical music with Darragh Morgan & Mary Dullea; William D. Drake, Bill Pritchard and Bill Botting make a trio of songwriting Bills for Daylight Music; Laura Moody and a host of others play at Match&Fuse

8 Oct

During the middle of next week, there’s a set of new or rare contemporary classical pieces being performed in Camden Town.

Picking Up The Pieces: Darragh Morgan & Mary Dullea (The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Wednesday 14^th October 2015, 7.30pm) – £10.00/£12.00

Here’s what the Forge has to say about it:

Described by BBC Music Magazine as ‘agile, incisive and impassioned’ violinist Darragh Morgan and pianist Mary Dullea are renowned soloists of new music as well as members of The Fidelio Trio, one of the UK’s leading chamber ensembles. ‘Picking up the Pieces’ explores new and recent repertoire, much of it written for this duo, by a diverse selection of composers. Among the program items, Richard Causton’s ‘Seven States of Rain’ (dedicated to Mary and Darragh) won the first ever British Composers’ Award; while Gerald Barry’s ‘Midday’ receives its world premiere alongside other London premieres from Camden Reeves and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly.

Programme:

Richard Causton – Seven States of Rain
Gerald Barry – Midday (world premiere)
Benedict Schlepper-Connolly – Ekstase I (UK premiere)
Dobrinka Tabakova – Through the Cold Smoke
Kate Whitley – Three Pieces for violin and piano
Sam Hayden – Picking up the Pieces
Camden Reeves – Gorgon’s Head (London premiere)

Here’s the original premiere recording of Darragh and Mary playing ‘Seven States of Rain’.

Tickets and up-to-date information are here. This concert is being recorded by BBC Radio for future transmission on Hear & Now.

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On the Saturday following, there’s a triple bill of Bills at Daylight Music. Now that’s cute, even for them. Here are the words, direct from the top…

Daylight Music 203: William D. Drake + Bill Pritchard + Bill Botting (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 17^th October 2015, 12.00pm-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £5.00

For his fifth solo excursion, former Cardiacs keysmith William D Drake takes us on a serpentine path through the inner regions of ‘Revere Reach’, a part-imagined landscape composed of memory and fantasy. At once heart-felt, hearty and absurd, its heady reveries blend ancient-seeming modal folk melody with an obliquely-slanted rock thrust.

Bill Pritchard is a beloved cult British-born singer/songwriter. You may remember. You may not. He started writing songs for various bands at school but it wasn’t until he spent time in Bordeaux as part of a college degree that his style flourished. He did a weekly show with two friends on the radio station La Vie au Grand Hertz (part of the burgeoning ‘radio libre’ movement) and was introduced to a lot of French artists from Antoine to Taxi Girl. In 2014 Bill released – Trip to the Coast (Tapeste Records). He’s recently resurfaced with a cracking new album, the songs of which are classic Bill Pritchard. Guitar pop, hooky chorus’, melodic ballads and personal everyday lyrics about love, loss, and Stoke-On-Trent.

Our final Bill is Bill Botting – best known as the bass player from Allo Darlin with the encouraging face, or as one half of indie electro wierdos Moustache of Insanity. Bill returned to playing his own music sometime in 2014. What started as a solo act has now grown into a complete band featuring members of Owl and Mouse, Allo Darlin and The Wave Pictures. A 7-inch single out later in the year on the wiaiwya label has a country slant but an indie heart.

https://youtu.be/tROCvuxnke4

Up-to-date info on this particular Daylight Music afternoon is here.

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Laura Moody’s captivating cello-and-voice songcraft (which edges along the boundary lines of avant-garde classical, art pop and heart-on-sleeve folk music, while demonstrating a daunting mastery of both vocal and instrument) has been a favourite of mine for a while. On this particular week, she’s performing as part of the Match&Fuse Festival in London on 17th October, which I’d have made more of a noise about had I cottoned on to it earlier. She’ll be following up her London show with a date on 20th October at Leeds College of Music: unfortunately, this concert (which also features a talk) is only for LCM students/staff, but if you happen to be attending the college, grab the chance to go along.

There’ll be more on Laura shortly, as she’s embarking on a brief British tour next month which dovetails quite neatly with some other brief tours I’d like to tie together in a post. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, I might as well provide a quick rundown of the Match&Fuse events. This will be a short and scrappy cut’n’paste’n’link, since I’m honouring my own last-minute pickup (and, to be honest, because I exhausted myself listing out all the details of the Manchester Jazz Festival events earlier in the year).

By the sound of it, though, the festival deserves more attention than I’m providing. Even just on spec, it’s a delightful bursting suitcase of British and European music; much of which consists of various forms of jazz and improvisation, but which also takes in electronica, math rock, accordion-driven Tyrolean folk-rap, vocalese, glam punk, the aforementioned Ms. Moody and what appears to be a huge scratch ensemble closing the events each night. It’s spread over three days including a wild triple event on the Saturday. Tickets are starting to sell out; so if you want to attend, be quick.

Committed to the composers and bands who propel, compel and challenge, Match&Fuse turns it on and ignites the 4th London festival in October. Dissolving barriers between genres and countries, it’s a rare chance to hear a spectrum of sounds from underground European and UK artists. On Saturday 17th October our popular wristband event will give you access to three Dalston venues and about thirteen artists and bands. Strike a match…

The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London, N16 8AZ, UK, Thursday 15th October 2015, 7.30pm – £9.90

7.30pm – Blue-Eyed Hawk (UK)
8.30pm – J=J (Joanna Duda & Jan Emil Młynarsk – Poland)
9.30pm – Mopo (Finland)
10.30pm – JÜ meets Kjetil Møster (Hungary/Norway)

Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, London E1 6LA, UK, Friday 16th October 2015, 7.30pm – £13.20

7.30pm – Snack Family + Natali Abrahamsen Garner (UK/Norway)
8.30pm – Attwenger (Austria)
9.30pm – Alfie Ryner (France)
10.30pm – Get the Blessing (UK)

The Vortex/Café Oto/Oto Project Space/ Servant Jazz Quarters simultaneous event, Saturday 17th October 2015, 8.00pm – £11.00/£16.50

Café Oto/Oto Project Space, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, UK

8.00pm – The Jist (Norway) + Rachel Musson (UK)
9.00pm – Laura Moody (UK)
9.30pm – Alexander Hawkins (UK)
10.00pm – How Town (Belgium/Luxembourg)
11.00pm – Leafcutter John + Isabel Sörling (UK/Sweden)
Midnight – The Eirik Tofte Match&Fuse Orchestra (Europe – all acts playing together as one ensemble)

Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, UK

8.00pm – Brass Mask (UK)
9.00pm – Interstatic (Norway)
10.00pm – Henning (Switzerland)
11.00pm – Alice Zawadzki + Kalevi Louhivuori (Finland) + Alex Roth (UK)
Midnight – The Eirik Tofte Match&Fuse Orchestra (Europe)

The Vortex Jazz Club/Vortex Downstairs, 11 Gillett Square, London, N16 8AZ, UK

8.00pm – Kaja Draksler (Slovenia)
9.00pm – The Great Harry Hillman (Switzerland)
10.00pm – Magnus Loom (UK)
10.30pm – Alarmist (Ireland)
11.15pm – Strobes (UK)
Midnight – The Eirik Tofte Match&Fuse Orchestra (Europe)
00.30am – Soccer 96 (UK) party – stripped-down, amped-up analogue synth vs. live drum assault

Full details of Match&Fuse London 2015 are here and here, with tickets (including wristbands) available here. There’s also a playlist available – see below.

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More October gig previews coming up shortly, plus some more for November…

Tags: Alarmist, Alex Roth, Alexander Hawkins, Alfie Ryner, Alice Zawadzki, Amsterdam (Netherlands), Attwenger, Belgium, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, Bill Botting, Bill Pritchard, Blue-Eyed Hawk, Brass Mask, Brighton (England), Camden Reeves, Cardiacs, Colin Webster, Dan Nicholls, Darragh Morgan, Dobrinka Tabakova, Dublin (Ireland), duo music, Eirik Tofte, Gerald Barry, Get The Blessing, Henning, How Town, Interstatic, Isabel Sorling, J=J, Jan Emil Młynarski, JÜ, Joanna Duda, Joshua Blackmore, Kaja Draksler, Kalevi Louhivouri, Kate Whitley, Kranj (Slovenia), Laura Moody, Leafcutter John, Leeds (England), Linz (Austria), London (England), Magnus Loom, Manchester (England), Mary Dullea, Match&Fuse (event), Matt Calvert, Mopo, Moster, Nagoya (Japan), Natali Abrahamsen Garner, Orivesi (Finland), Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Point X, premieres, Rachel Musson, Richard Causton, Sam Hayden, Snack Family, Strobes, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, The Great Harry Hillman, The Jist, Three Trapped Tigers, Tom Challenger, Toulouse, Troyka, William D. Drake

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs (12th to 18th) – Baba Yaga’s Hut – an art rock blitz with Sax Ruins and Richard Pinhas; Sex Swing, Early Mammal and Casual Sect make a racket

7 Oct

And October rushes on, with a couple of Baba Yaga’s Hut shows…

Sax Ruins + Richard Pinhas (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, London, SE17 1LB, UK, Monday 12^th October 2015, 7.30pm) – £11.00

Ruins (in both their original configuration and their various spinoffs) are among the best-known and most influential of Japanese experimental rock bands, with their complex rhythmic ideas and expression stretching across progressive rock, Rock in Opposition, jazz and punk. Founded in 1985, their stretchy, power-flurried drums-and-voice/bass guitar/nothing else approach has been described as “a palace revolt against the established role of the rhythm section” and set the initial format for any number of loud-bastard bass-and-drums duos.

Since 1994 they’ve also run assorted noise-rock and improv collaborations including Ronruins (a romping trio alliance with multi-instrumentalist Ron Anderson) and longstanding hook-ups with Derek Bailey, Kazuhisa Uchihashi and Keiji Haino. Post-2004, Ruins has given way to Ruins-alone: a solo project in both practical and actual terms, with Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins’ drummer, jabberer, main composer and only consistent member) opting to tour and record solo as a drums-and-tapes act.

Active since 2006, Sax Ruins is yet another iteration of the Ruins concept – a musical tag team in which Yoshida spars happily with Nagoya-based saxophonist Ryoko Ono of Ryorchestra (an all-round improviser steeped in jazz, rock, funk, rhythm & blues classical and hip hop. Their recordings are “extremely complex with irregular beats, frequent excessive overdubbing, and restructured orchestration. The result sounds like a big band playing progressive jazz hardcore. For live performance of Sax Ruins they make hardcore sound like a huge band by full use of effects, also incorporating improvisation. Their shows unfold as a vehement drama.” For further evidence, see below.

Composer, guitarist and synthesizer player Richard Pinhas has often laboured under the reductive tag of “the French Robert Fripp”. This is unfair to him; he may have begun as an admirer of both Fripp and Brian Eno, but whatever he’s learned from them he took in his own direction. Starting out in the early ‘70s with a Sorbonne philosophy doctorate, a keen interest in speculative science fiction and a brief stint heading the post-Hawkwind psych outfit Schizo, Pinhas went on to lead the second-generation progressive rock band Heldon for four years between 1974 and 1978.

Geographically and conceptually, Heldon sat bang in the ‘70s midpoint between the artier end of British prog, the proggier end of British art-pop and the chilly sequenced robo-mantras of German electronics. Initially inspired by King Crimson, Eno and Tangerine Dream, they also shared both musicians and ideas with Magma, and at times squinted over the Atlantic towards Zappa and Utopia: no passive followers, they always brought their own assertive, inquiring spin to the party. (A late ‘90s revival version of the band brought in the psychedelic punk and techno imperatives of the dance movement).

Since Heldon, Pinhas has pursued an ongoing and diverse solo career. It’s taken in collaborations with Scanner, Peter Frohmader, Merzbow, Råd Kjetil Senza Testa, Wolf Eyes and Pascal Fromade, plus assorted words-and music projects involving speculative writers and philosophers such as Maurice Dantec, Philip K. Dick, Gilles Deleuze, Norman Spinrad and Chloe Delaume (these include the cyberpunk-inspired Schizotrope). When performing solo, Pinhas uses a loops-layers-and-textures guitar approach which parallels (and to some ears, surpasses) the densely processed and layered Soundscapes work of his original inspiration Fripp. I guess it’s most likely that he’ll employ this at Corsica Studios on the 12th (although as Tatsuya Yoshida has been another of Pinhas’ collaborators over the years, perhaps you might expect another spontaneous team-up…)

Up-to-date info on the concert is here, with tickets available here.

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On the Saturday evening, Baba Yaga’s Hut is running another gig, much of it apparently based around the noise-and-sludge projects which record at south London’s Dropout Studio in Camberwell. I’ve got to admit that I’m quite ambivalent about the hit-and-miss nature of noise-rock – I suspect that it’s too much of a haven for charlatans, and if I can’t drag out anything interesting to say about the noise they produce bar a slew of reference points, then what am I doing if not reviewing my own boredom? – but I like BYH’s omnivorous, ambitious and sharing attitude as promoters, so I’m happy to boost the signal on this one.

Sex Swing + Early Mammal + Casual Sect (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, UK, Saturday 17^th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £7.00

Sex Swing are “a drone supergroup” featuring South London noisenik Tim Cedar (one of Dropout Studio’s owner/producers, previously a member of both Ligament and Part Chimp), Dethscalator’s Dan Chandler and Stuart Bell, Jason Stoll (bass player with Liverpool kraut-psych band Mugstar) and skronkophonist Colin Webster. On aural evidence, they inhabit a post-Can, post-Suicide hinterland of hell, spring-echoed and tannoy-vocaled – a sinister quotidian landscape of blank anomie and oppression; a Los Alamos penal colony haunted by uranium ghosts, ancient Morse telegraphs, metal fatigue and the zombie husks of Albert Ayler and Ian Curtis. (Well, that’s certainly someone’s perfect birthday present.)

Described variously as raw power, psych-blues, primitive lysergia and threatening backwoods jams, Early Mammal are another Dropout-affiliated Camberwell band. They’re a stoner rock three-piece who’ve drawn further comparisons not just to latterday stoner crews like White Hills or Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, or to predictable perennial touchstones like Captain Beefheart and Hawkwind parallels; but also to broody Harvest Records psych (Edgar Broughton and the ‘Obscured by Clouds’ Pink Floyd), Irmin Schmidt and (a rare and welcome cite, this) the grand dramatics of Aphrodite’s Child (the late-‘60s Greek prog band which skirted the 1966 Paris riots and served as an unlikely launch pad for both Vangelis and Demis Roussos).

Past incarnations have seen Early Mammal stir in some “Turkish-flavoured synth”, but the current lineup is a power trio of ex-Elks guitarist Rob Herian and 85bear’s Ben Tat and Ben Davis, adding baritone guitar and drone box to the usual guitar/bass/drums array.

I’m less sure about the south London/Dropout associations as regards Casual Sect, who seem to be north-of-the-river people; but, armed with their own hardcore noise-punk, they’ll either clatter away like wind-up toys or belly-sprawl on great bluffs of surly noise. They seem to love both citing and mocking conspiracy theory, so I’ll let them yell away on their own behalf – see below…

Up-to-date info on this gig is here, and tickets are available from here.

Tags: 85bear, Ben Davis, Ben Tat, Casual Sect, Colin Webster, Dan Chandler, Dethscalator, duo music, Elks, Heldon, Jason Stoll, Leeds (England), Ligament, Liverpool (England), London (England), Magnus Loom, Mugstar, Nagoya (Japan), Neuilly-sur-Seine (France), Part Chimp, Richard Pinhas, Rob Herian, Ruins, Ryoko Ono, Sax Ruins, Sex Swing, Strobes, Stuart Bell, Tatsuya Yoshida, Tim Cedar

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – acoustic/alt.country at Daylight Music (Applewood Road, Holly Macve, Arborist) and the Fidelio Trio with Beethoven, Ravel and a Benjamin Dwyer premiere

5 Oct

And, finally for this week, from all of that noise to something acoustic for a Saturday noontime…

Daylight Music 202: Applewood Road, Holly Macve + Arborist (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 10^th October 2015, 12.00pm-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £5.00

An early afternoon of songwriter-folk, America and alternative country from one of ‘Misfit City’s favourite free/pay-what-you-like events:

Applewood Road is an Australian/American alliance of three solo songwriters – Amy Speace, Amber Rubarth (also known as one half of The Paper Raincoat) and Emily Barker (also known for her work with the-low-country and The Red Clay Halo). In September 2014, they all met for the first time in a cafe in East Nashville. Two hours later they had written the song they called Applewood Road. They booked studio time at Nashville’s super-cool analogue studio Welcome To 1979, and the following week recorded the song live to tape, with just double bass as accompaniment. So excited were they by the song, they decided to expand the idea in to a whole album. Six months later they reconvened in Nashville to write, rehearse and record songs to make up a full album, with the project and album all called ‘Applewood Road’. This is their first show in the UK, with the debut Applewood Road album due for an early 2016 release on Gearbox Records.

Bella Union label boss Simon Raymonde says, of Holly Macve, “little is known of Holly other than she is a 20 year old from Yorkshire who appeared out of nowhere in Brighton late last year. I had a tip-off to go to a basement bar where she was playing. In a room full of beery boys chatting across all the music beforehand, the minute Holly opened her mouth the room fell silent. Hers is a rare gift.” Simon signed her shortly afterwards. The label has yet to release anything formally, but Holly herself has posted a demo track onto Soundcloud (see below), and she’s already won support slots with Ben Howard and Mercury Rev on the strength of what she’s offering.

Having previously worked as a songwriter around France, London and Dublin, Mark McCambridge played his first show as Arborist in February 2013, opening for James Yorkston in Belfast. A solo tour of Ireland followed before impressive performances led to notable support slots alongside Low, Cat Power, Echo & The Bunnymen and Alasdair Roberts. In May 2015 Arborist released the country-tinged ‘Twisted Arrow’. Recorded during dark winter nights in Belfast and in Dayton, Ohio (and featuring vocal harmonies by Kim Deal). A debut album is due this coming winter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SJkVQX3VUE

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Not finally, in fact. There’s a chance to squeeze in a last-minute classical addition, since it’s always a shame to miss a premiere.

The Fidelio Trio @ The London Chamber Music Series (Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, UK, Sunday 11th October 2015, 6.30pm) – £9.50 to £29.50

The celebrated Fidelio Trio – Mary Dullea (piano), Adi Tal (cello), Darragh Morgan (violin) – perform Beethoven’s hugely popular ‘Ghost Trio’, with its iconic eerie slow movement, and also Ravel’s remarkably imaginative and colourful ‘Piano Trio’, premiered 100 years ago this year in Paris in 1915.

In between comes the premiere of Irish composer Benjamin Dwyer‘s ‘Nocturnal’, inspired by Benjamin Britten’s famous own ‘Nocturnal after John Dowland (for solo guitar)’, and drawing upon a theme from Britten’s opera ‘Gloriana’, as well as a madrigal by English early seventeenth-century composer Thomas Wilbye. There will be a free pre-concert talk at 5.15pm in the St Pancras Room at Kings Place, in which composer and LCM Series director Peter Fribbins interviews Benjamin Dwyer about his new work and his interest in the music of Benjamin Britten.

More information here and tickets here.

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More October gig previews coming up shortly…

Tags: Adi Tal, Amber Rubarth, Amy Speace, Applewood Road, Arborist, Arctic Circle (promoter), Benjamin Britten, Benjamin Dwyer, Darragh Morgan, Daylight Music (event), Emily Barker, Holly Macve, listening to women, London (England), Ludwig van Beethoven, Mary Dullea, Maurice Ravel, Nashville (USA), Peter Fribbins, The Fidelio Trio, The Paper Raincoat, The Red Clay Halo, Thomas Wilbye

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Categories 2015, 21st century classical music, acoustic pop, alternative country, alternative folk, alternative pop, Americana, chamber pop, classical (Western art music), Classical music, country-and-western, folk music, folk-pop, instrumental music, previews, Romantic music, singer-songwriter

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – fringe jazz (The Geordie Approach and A Sweet Niche) and noise-rock (Hey Colossus, Lower Slaughter and Kogumaza)

4 Oct

“More accomplished musicians have a loud argument about what ‘jazz’ even is these days,” say Chaos Theory Promotions. Their Jazz Market evenings continue to provide space for such arguments, and here’s another one…

The Geordie Approach + A Sweet Niche (Chaos Theory Promotions present The Jazz Market @ The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, London, E2 9AG, UK, Friday 9^th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £5.00/£7.00

The Geordie Approach is possibly the oldest secret from three internationally renowned musicians who’ve been working together for over ten years. It features acclaimed Leeds guitarist and producer Chris Sharkey (Acoustic Ladyland/Shiver/TrioVD), and Norwegian musicians Petter Frost Fadnes and Ståle Birkeland, best known for playing sax and bass respectively in Stavanger Kitchen Orchestra. This uncompromising and experimental trio pursues music within loose improvisational structures, adding a surprisingly broad range of flavours to their overall sound world.

The trio has a reputation for adapting and utilizing their performance space in an extremely effective and engaging manner. Birkeland, Frost Fadnes and Sharkey produce musical elements that often are contradictory in shape, moving between melody and noise, ambient grooves and abstract textures. They have performed across Europe, Japan and the UK in churches, art galleries, improvisation clubs, squats, abandoned tobacco houses, jazz festivals, concert halls and flamenco clubs. Each performance is a unique experience.

We hail the return of jazz punk trio A Sweet Niche to The Jazz Market after a seriously impressive performance in 2013. Band composers Keir Cooper and Oliver Sellwood (on guitar and saxophone respectively) explore an aesthetic of intricate rhythms & song-structures within a punchy energetic rock band format.

The nature of their collaboration is unique; Keir is an award-winning non-academy artist and Oliver is an award-winning PhD composer and academic. Despite their two tangential angles of experience, they have a shared musical vocabulary honed over nearly two decades. With new album ‘EJECT’ on the way in 2016 (and the recent addition of Big Beat Manifesto drummer Tim Doyle to the band), it’s high time we pulled these performers out of the murky underworld they reside in.

https://vimeo.com/138210244

Tickets are available from here, and up-to-date information is here.

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There’s another Baba Yaga’s Hut evening on the same night as the Oto gig, this time concentrating on various noise-rock angles (from the reformatting of classic rock to the restructuring of sound to the straightforward joy of a gibbering hardcore racket.) See below.

Hey Colossus + Lower Slaughter + Kogumaza (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Electrowerkz, The Islington Metal Works, 7 Torrens Street, Angel, Islington, London, EC1V 1NQ, UK, 9^th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £9.00

Variously from Somerset, Watford and London, six-piece Hey Colossus https://www.facebook.com/heycolossus have spent a decade gradually becoming alt.rock darlings thanks to their journey through assorted doomy noise rock avenues. Their current recipe involves slowing down and narcotising their alleged classic rock influences (Fleetwood Mac is one of those cited) via psychedelic echo and a certain post-rock dourness. It works well too – much of the time they sound like a guttering Led Zeppelin on strong cough mixture, or feed crunching brass-riff processionals and Stooge-esque whomps through an amber-toned ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ filter.

I suspect that the concept of supergroups doesn’t fit into noise-rock and post-hardcore. Nonetheless, Brighton’s Lower Slaughter does sort of fit into that category, uniting people better known for other bands (bass player Barney Wakefield for Shudder Pulps, guitarist Jon Wood for “harsh party music” outfit Fat Bicth, Max Levy for vertiginously nervy singing in King Of Cats) and welding them together into a noisy, queasy-confident, raw-scream whole.

Creating hypnotic drones and grooves via two guitars and tom-centric drumming, Nottingham quartet Kogumaza have their feet in sludge metal and in post-rock; but while the latter’s become an increasing predictable and conservative genre Kogumaza have set out to reclaim some of its earlier, more inventive ideas (such as the lapping sonics of Seefeel) via their fourth member, live sound mixer Mark Spivey, who brings in dub-inspired approaches and old tape-looping techology to further manipulate and displace the band’s sound both live and on record. Fond of collaborations and split releases, they’ve also been known to bring in an unexpected banjo (although they probably won’t tonight).

Up-to-date info here, tickets here.

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More gig news shortly…

Tags: A Sweet Niche, Acoustic Ladyland, Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Barney Wakefield, Big Beat Manifesto, Brighton (England), Chaos Theory (event/promoter), Chris Sharkey, Electrowerkz (event), Fat Bicth, Hey Colossus, Jon Wood, Keir Cooper, King Of Cats, Kogumaza, London (England), Lower Slaughter, Mark Spivey, Max Levy, Nottingham (England), Oliver Sellwood, Petter Frost Fadnes, Shiver, Shudder Pulps, Stavanger (Norway), Stavanger Kitchen Orchestra, Ståle Birkeland, The Jazz Market (event), Tim Doyle, Watford (England)

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Categories 2015, 21st century classical music, acoustic pop, alternative country, alternative folk, alternative pop, alternative rock, ambient music, Americana, chamber pop, circuit bending, classical (Western art music), Classical music, country-and-western, cross-cultural music, crossover, darkwave, drone music, dub, dubstep, electro-acoustic music, electronic, electronica, experimental music, experimental/avant-garde rock, folk music, folk-pop, free jazz, garage rock, hardcore, IDM, improvisation, industrial music, industrial rock, instrumental music, jazz, jazz fusion, jazz punk, musique concrete, noise, noise rock, post-hardcore, power electronics, previews, psychedelic rock, punk jazz, punk rock, rock, Romantic music, sampledelia, singer-songwriter, sound collage, soundscapes, space rock, turntablism

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – electro-industrial at Corsica Studios (Necro Deathmort, DeadFader and Cementimental), and intercontinental at Café Oto (Maurice Louca, John Bence and Sam Shalabi)

4 Oct

More gigs for the coming week…

Firstly, Baba Yaga’s Hut are running an evening at Corsica Studios, which takes in the London date of an electro-industrial tour.

Necro Deathmort + Deadfader + Cementimental (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, London, SE17 1LB, UK, Monday 5^th October 2015, 8.00pm) – £6.00

As if Necro Deathmort‘s name didn’t tell you enough about them, over an eight year career they’ve released albums called ‘This Beat Is Necrotronic’ and ‘Music Of Bleak Origin’ (although more recent albums have seen a shift towards a less morbid and more science-fictional outlook. Dark electronica festival veterans with a drone, doom and noise approach, the project entangles electronic instrumentalist AJ Cookson (The Montauk Project, Medes, Sol Invicto) with Matthew Rozeik (guitarist from post-metal/post-prog band Astrohenge). Their music rises from gurgling boneyard beats, medical-equipment breakdowns, squishy miasmas and faux-sax drones towards something ruined and regal – a grand deathbed vision.

Sharing Necro Deathmort’s current tour is Berlin-based dubstep/noise/electro fusilladeer DeadFader – memorably described as “chainsaw-step” by Baked Goods Distribution (who went on to rave about how the project coughs up “the most seismic grooves imaginable” and that the music “sinks its teeth into your arm and refuses to let go”). I can’t top that as a description right now – have a listen below and see if you agree with it.

Joining Necro Deathmort and DeadFader for the London date are Cementimental. Everything I can dig up about these guys is a barking blur of ludicrous disinformation: almost the only lucid facts coughed up from their promotional flotsam is that they’re led by a “noisician” called Dr. Age (or Tim Drage, who may or may not have a daytime/surface job in cute Lego animations) and have been doing “harsh noise, circuit-bending, rough music since 2000AD”. The Dr. is supported by a cast of obscure and possibly imaginary characters – a guitarist called Toru, a part-time turntablist, a man called Mrs Columbo (who handles the incoherent screaming), and “additionalists” called Murray the Eel and Sir Concord Discount (the latter’s a “rock goblin”). Maybe this makes Centimental sound like the joke band on the bill, and there’s plenty of humour in what they do (a couple of early tracks were called Too Long and Merzbow It Ain’t, while a more recent one’s called Commendable Amputation of an Excessive Gargoyle), but the fact remains that they’ve been going for nearly half again as long as their gigmates. Draw your own conclusions.

Up-to-date info here, tickets here.

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On the Thursday, there’s a Cafe Oto convening of music from Cairo, Bristol and Montreal, running in parallel to events in Egypt and Lebanon and covering a broad variety of influences and outcomes.

Maurice Louca + John Bence + Sam Shalabi (Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, UK, October 8th 2015, 8.00pm) – £12.00/£14.00

Cafe Oto, in collaboration with Thirtythree Thirtythree and Nawa Recordings, bring you the second edition of the five-part event series entitled ‘Labyrinths’ (or ‘Mātāhāt’ in Arabic) and based in London, Cairo and Beirut over October and November.

Maurice Louca is an Egyptian musician and composer born in Cairo where he lives and works. As well as being the co-founder of the bands Bikya, Alif and Dwarves of East Agouza, he lends his sound to numerous projects, composing for theatre, film and contemporary art. Inspired by many influences, from psychedelic to Egyptian shaabi, his second album ‘Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot)’, released on Nawa Recordings in November 2014, shattered the confines of musical and cultural labelling and was dubbed by many as a game-changer for the region’s bustling independent music scene. Amidst his collaborations and inconspicuous touring across Europe and the Arab world in the last few years, Louca has sought a richer and much more complex sound. ‘Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan’, the fruit of such intense reinvention and a departure from his first solo album ‘Garraya’, is a work that leaves ample space for fluidity and improvisation, paving the way for unique live renderings.

From a family background rich in classical pedigree and firmly embedded in Bristol’s forward-facing electronic music culture, John Bence has pooled a breadth of influence scarcely credible for a composer only entering his second decade, and now he is starting to put his inspiration into live and recorded motion. As a producer he is already thinking ten steps ahead, often incorporating voice or home recorded percussion into his cyclical technique of scoring, recording, manipulating, re-scoring and re-recording in waves, creating heady, intoxicating ripples of harmony and noise. An obscure snippet of dub-plate drone under a previous moniker was enough for Nicolas Jaar, who instantly approached him about a release on his Other People label. Six months on, ‘Disquiet’ was released – a masterful hybrid of classical and electronic clocking in at a tantalising ten minutes. More, much more, is coming. Mercurial, elusive and of seemingly limitless imagination, John Bence is rising to the surface.

Sam Shalabi is an Egyptian-Canadian composer and improviser living between Montreal, Quebec and Cairo, Egypt. Beginning in punk rock in the late 70s, his work has evolved into a fusion of experimental, modern Arabic music that incorporates traditional Arabic, shaabi, noise, classical, text, free improvisation and jazz. He has released five solo albums (including ‘On Hashish’- a musical mediation on German writer Walter Benjamin; ‘Osama’, an audio collage on Arabophobia in the wake of 9/11; and his most recent ‘Music for Arabs’), five albums with Shalabi Effect (a free improvisation quartet that bridges western psychedelic music and Arabic Maqam scales) and three albums with Land of Kush (an experimental 30-member orchestra for which he composes). He has appeared on over sixty albums and toured Europe, North America and North Africa. Recent projects include the release of the sixth Shalabi Effect album, a duo album with Stefan Christoff, two albums on the Italian label Sagittarius with Beirut, Turkish and Egyptian musicians and a tour in the eastern U.S with Alvarius B (playing solo oud). He is also releasing ‘Isis and Osiris’ (a new composition for oud and electronics) on Nashazphone as well as releasing an album with The Dwarves of East Agouza (a Cairo based trio with Maurice Louca and Alan Bishop) while currently working on his sixth solo album.

Tickets and up-to-date information are here and here.

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More noise rock and fringe jazz shortly…

Tags: AJ Cookson, Astrohenge, Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Berlin (Germany), Bristol (England), Cairo (Egypt), Cementimental, DeadFader, Electrowerkz (event), John Bence, London (England), Matthew Rozeik, Maurice Louca, Medes, Montreal (Canada), Necro Deathmort, Sam Shalabi, Sol Invicto, The Montauk Project, TrioVD

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Arch Garrison & Lisa Doscher, October 3rd

29 Sep

…and this would have been in the previous post about first-week-of-October gigs had I found out about it sooner. For a while now, I’ve been a fan of Tigmus‘ portable crowdfunding formula for making gigs happen, so it’s good to be spurred into plugging one such gig – especially since it features Arch Garrison (whose wonderful second album gained an extensive ‘Misfit City’ review last year) and takes place in such an unusual location…

Arch Garrison + Lisa Doscher (Tigmus @ Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, Hampton Court Road, Hampton, London, TW12 2EN, UK, Saturday 3rd October 2015, 7.00pm) – £10.00

Over to Tigmus:

The second concert in our autumn series at the Garrick Temple to Shakespeare features the beautiful sounds of Arch Garrison and Lisa Doscher.

Having garnered much critical acclaim for his larger-scale compositions and songs with North Sea Radio Orchestra, Craig Fortnam also writes and performs in singer-songwriter mode, alongside James Larcombe (NSRO/Stars in Battledress/William D. Drake) on keyboards as Arch Garrison, who have released two albums; ‘King of the Down’ (2010) and the latest work ‘I Will Be A Pilgrim’ (2014).

‘…Pilgrim…’ details Fortnam’s attachment to the chalk downland of Southern England; a landscape criss-crossed with ancient trackways, droves and green lanes, and dotted with Neolithic mounds and barrows, evidence of the Great Stone Culture – all calling him to pull on his walking boots, whistle for the dogs and hit the road, to undertake a pilgrimage to nowhere. He walks the ancient paths as an act of connecting to something intangible but present in the marks left by man, be they burial mounds or pylons – it’s all the same really – all grist to the songwriting mill – walk walk hum sing walk…

Originally from New Hampshire, USA, but now settled in Oxfordshire, England, Lisa Doscher creates soulful vocals with lovely cosy harmonies. Indie-folk peppered with gospel, Americana and urban rhythms; uplifting songs from the heart and soul-powered rhythms for sharing around the campfire and joining in. In her first full-length album, aptly titled ‘Return Home’, she charts her last ten years of diverse musical experience with introspective songwriting and her atmospheric alt-folk sound. The songs each provide a landscape for some discovery that is essential for understanding one’s place in the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE4DpY56IeI

Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare is a small garden folly erected in 1756 on the north bank of the River Thames at Hampton, London. It was built by the actor David Garrick to honour the playwright William Shakespeare, whose plays Garrick performed to great acclaim throughout his career. After a campaign supported by distinguished actors and donations from the National Lottery’s “good causes” fund, it was restored in the late 1990s and reopened to the public as a museum and memorial to the life and career of Garrick. It is reputedly the world’s only shrine to Shakespeare.

Up-to-date info on the gig is here, and tickets are available here.

Tags: almost acoustic, Arch Garrison, Craig Fortnam, James Larcombe, Lisa Doscher, listening to women, London (England), New Hampshire (USA), North Sea Radio Orchestra, Oxford (England), Stars in Battledress, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, Tigmus (event/promoter), travelling hopefully, William D. Drake, Wiltshire (England), women of heart and mind

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Categories 2015, acoustic music, acoustic pop, alternative folk, Americana, baroque pop, chamber pop, folk baroque, folk music, folk-pop, gospel, pop, previews, psychedelic folk, singer-songwriter, soul

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – folk supergroup The Furrow Collective at Kings Place on the 1st; Mary Hampton, Nadine Khouri and Daudi Matsiko at Daylight Music; Alexander Hacke, Danielle de Picciotto and Thomas Ragsdale at the Hackney Attic on the 3rd; Andre Canniere at the Vortex on the 4th

26 Sep

A look forward to the first week of the coming month, with plenty of alternative folk, acoustic singer-songwriters and some multi-media music from a couple of former Berlin arts-scene linchpins, ending up with some jazz…

The Furrow Collective (Hall Two @ Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, UK, Thursday, 1 October 2015 – 8:00pm) – £9.50/£14.50

The Furrow Collective brings together four of the finest, award winning musicians on the UK folk scene – Rachel Newton, Lucy Farrell, Emily Portman and Alasdair Roberts – and delves into the obscure world of balladry at its darkest and quirkiest.

Each singer airs lesser-known gems from their traditional repertoire with an eclectic backing of harp, guitar, viola, concertina, banjo, musical saw and rousing harmonies. With a bold, improvisatory approach, their common focus is to capture the raw edges and fleeting magic of ballads, with storytelling taking centre stage. Emily and Alasdair are both known for their original, folklore-influenced songwriting, and, often finding themselves on the same bills they struck up a musical friendship, sharing stages and collaborating on each others albums. Lucy and Rachel are both bewitching solo artists in their own right as well as being sought-after session players and long-time collaborators with Emily Portman in her trio.

The Furrow Collective’s 2014 debut release, ‘At Our Next Meeting’ received widespread critical acclaim, as well as a BBC Radio Two Folk Award for Best Group and a Best Traditional Track nomination this year. A new EP is currently being recorded for release in autumn 2015, followed by an album in early 2016.

Tickets available here.

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More people singing at the weekend…

Daylight Music 201: Mary Hampton, Nadine Khouri + Daudi Matsiko (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 3rd October 2015, 12.00pm-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £5.00

Inspired by a passion for the winding road of the oral tradition from Homer onwards, Brighton-based songwriter Mary Hampton‘s songs possess an unusual transportive energy, moving her listeners through a sequence of shimmering landscapes that belong to past and present simultaneously. Accompanying herself on tenor guitar, and sometimes with members of her band Cotillion, she interprets material gathered from a wide range of sources, performing traditional songs alongside original work and settings of literary prose and poetry.

Nadine Khouri is a singer-songwriter currently based in London. A guitar-wielding folkie, with a love for shoegaze, moody soundtracks and spoken-word, Khouri’s music has been described by Rough Trade as a “music born of perennial outsider-status.” Her last release ‘A Song to the City’ was co-produced with Ryan Alfred (Calexico.) The EP also caught the attention of producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, This is the Kit) who invited her to guest on a song for his ‘Screenplay’ LP and subsequently to record her first album in his hometown of Bristol. Recorded live in a Georgian basement with a band assembled by Khouri, the resulting album ‘Lost Continents’ is a raw, atmospheric collection of meditations on loss and transformation, held within the hushed intimacy of Khouri’s voice. The first single from the album, You Got A Fire, is due for release in late October 2015.

Huntingdon is not famous for much. It was the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell and its local MP for many years was former Prime Minister John Major. Unlikelier still that the extraordinary songwriting talents of Daudi Matsiko (his name is pronounced “dowdy”) were nurtured in nearby Ramsey. Yet Daudi’s roots were somewhat further than Ramsey, his parents moving over from Uganda in the early 1980s. Daudi has been playing music since he was eight years old and writing songs since he was a teenager: although he’s still young, they speak of experience and trauma and gathered wisdom. Having suffered mental health problems in the past, he has used his music as a crucial salve in times of strife and stress. Daudi was lucky to grow up among a strong community of musicians – many of his Cambridgeshire buddies played on his breakthrough EP ‘A Brief Introduction To Failure’, which was supported by Gilles Peterson and helped bring him to a wider audience. His influences run the gamut, from The Mars Volta to Jeff Buckley, Beach Boys to Nick Drake. Plans are afoot for a new EP (working title: ‘The Lingering Effects Of Disconnection’).

More information on the concert is here.

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On the evening of the same day, Chaos Theory Promotions are back, displaying a continued knack for landing substantial art-music names…

Alexander Hacke & Danielle de Picciotto + Thomas Ragsdale (Chaos Theory @ The Hackney Attic, Hackney Picturehouse, 270 Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 1HE, UK, Saturday 3rd October 2015, 8.00pm) – £14.00/£18.00

Chaos Theory enthuse:

We cannot wait to share this.

After watching the onset of gentrification filling their previous creative oasis in Berlin, the extraordinary duo of multi-instrumentalist/producer Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) & multimedia artist-musician Danielle de Picciotto (of Berlin club culture, Pop Surrealism and Love Parade fame, as well as being a member of the latest Crime & The City Solution lineup alongside Alexander) have been nomadic since 2010.

Giving up their home and most of their possessions, Danielle and Alexander have been touring the world, performing in Australia, doing residencies in Prague, Canada and Ireland, working in New York and recording in the Mojave Desert. (You may have seen them performing at Café Oto earlier this year, alongside Jarboe and Helen Money, as part of our 5 Years Of Chaos celebrations.)

This is the only UK show in their ongoing ‘We Are Gypsies Now’ tour, in which they will present music from Danielle’s new solo album ‘Tacoma’ (which speaks of leaving everything behind and trusting destiny to lead one’s way) and from their communal album ‘Perseverantia’ (which speaks of the strength and persistence necessary to survive outside of the grid) as well as material from their graphic diary ‘We Are Gypsies Now’ (which tells of how they gradually chose to become nomads) via glorious cinematic visuals. Here’s a small excerpt of their performance of ‘Perseverantia’ in February:

Thomas Ragsdale – best known as half of Manchester techno duo Ghosting Season and ambient duo worriedaboutsatan, as well as for his solo project Winter Son), also works as a film composer. He released his new album ‘Bait’ at the end of August via This Is It Forever, to coincide with the screening of Dominic Brunt’s film of the same name at Film4 Frightfest.

The album started life as a film score to the UK thriller; but rather than just release the various background drones and atmospheres, Ragsdale re-opened the files he’d given Brunt and started to re-imagine the whole thing as one complete album, as opposed to merely a soundtrack. Thomas adds “after carefully editing the original soundtrack by expanding on some parts, and cutting back on others, ‘Bait’ was sequenced to take you down a similar path to the movie: at once beautiful as it is beguiling, intense as it is disturbing – shimmering drones give way to gnarled bass, refracting synth lines clatter over arctic atmospheres.” This night we’ll see the full fruits of his labours in a multi-media performance.

Tickets are available here.

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And finally…

Andre Canniere (LUME @ The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London, N16 8AZ, UK, Sunday 4th October 2015, 7.30pm) – £8.00/£10.00

LUME pitch in with some words:

For our October gig at the Vortex, we are pleased to welcome the fantastic trumpet player and LUME On Tour survivor Andre Canniere!

Andre Canniere is an acclaimed trumpet player, composer and educator. Originally from rural Pennsylvania (USA), he spent the first five years of his career in New York City where he worked with artists such as Maria Schneider, Bjorkestra, Kate McGarry, Ingrid Jensen, Donny McCaslin and Darcy James Argue. He has toured widely throughout the United States and Europe with performances at Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, Birdland, the London Jazz Festival, The Hague Jazz Festival and the Rochester International Jazz Festival.

Since his arrival in the UK, Canniere’s profile has been steadily rising, both as a solo artist and a collaborator. ‘Coalescence’ (defined as “the union of diverse things into one body or form”) is his second release for Whirlwind Recordings and follows the critically acclaimed debut ‘Forward Space’, which Jazzwise Magazine hailed as “one of the best recordings in a long time” and included in their Albums of the Year list. Tonight Canniere presents his exciting new band – himself on trumpet plus Brigitte Beraha (voice), Tori Freestone (tenor saxophone), John Turville (piano), Dave Manington (bass), Tim Giles (drums) – performing new music inspired by the poetry of Charles Bukowski and Rainer Maria Rilke.

More on upcoming October gigs shortly, as I take a look at the second week…

…oh, hold on, here’s one more…

Tags: Alasdair Roberts, Alexander Hacke, Andre Canniere, Arctic Circle (promoter), Berlin (Germany), Brighton (England), Brigitte Beraha, Chaos Theory (event/promoter), Charles Bukowski, Crime & The City Solution, Danielle de Picciotto, Daudi Matsiko, Dave Manington, Daylight Music (event), Einstürzende Neubauten, Emily Portman, Ghosting Season, Huntingdon (England), John Turville, London (England), Lucy Farrell, LUME (event/promoter), Manchester (England), Mary Hampton, Nadine Khouri, Nottingham (England), Rachel Newton, Rainer Maria Rilke, The Furrow Collective, Thomas Ragsdale, Tim Giles, Tori Freestone, Winter Son, worriedaboutsatan

September 2015 to January 2016 various – upcoming gigs – Theo Travis Double Talk tour, Death & Vanilla/LUST in London

24 Sep

While I’m not particularly happy with the fact that time and concentration opportunities are mainly restricting me to posting up gig news at present, there are side benefits. One of these is to go on virtual tours of my own, finding out (via tour schedules) where music is still happening in this time of chopped budgets and closed venues. If I’m covering musicians who play in out of the way places, or out-of-the-way venues, I get to find out even more – drawing myself out of my London-centric knowledge or a focus on big-gig places. I get to discover pubs, restaurants or found spaces in which people are still fanning musical sparks or maintaining a tradition instead of just selling up for luxury flats. I find this heartening.

Theo Travis

Theo Travis has just announced an English tour for his Double Talk quartet, promoting their new album ‘Transgression’. Over the past decade, Theo’s made a name for himself as a musician who slips particularly easily and unfussily between genres. While he’s become the go-to saxophonist for British progressive and psychedelic rock and legacy fusion as well as for assorted ambient projects, he’s also achieved this without denting his impressive if understated jazz credentials. Double Talk – Theo on saxophones/flutes/ambitronics loops, plus Mike Outram (guitar), Pete Whittaker (Hammond organ) and Nic France (drums) – puts him together with three similarly flexible, fuss-free musicians.

Between them, the four can collectively boast involvement with some heavy-duty transatlantic jazz names (Nucleus, Loose Tubes, Tim Garland, Norma Winstone, Herbie Mann, John Etheridge, Slim Gaillard, Martin Speake), but also some serious engagements with rock (David Gilmour, Steven Wilson, The Wonder Stuff, Catherine Wheel), soul and dance (Bill Withers, Working Week), loop work with Robert Fripp and Steve Lawson, drum-and-bass with Photek, contemporary classical with Harvey Brough, and excursions into country and kids’ music. Having straddling all of these approaches via the application of talent and open-mindedness (and, crucially, a lack of preciousness), all four bring the same qualities and the lessons learned to Double Talk’s music – an airy English merge of fast-moving quizzical tunes, omnivorous jazz vocabulary and breezy humour bouncing on a solid chassis, but with the ability to move purposefully into open meditational territory and to stop and smell the fresh air whenever necessary.

The new tour starts on Saturday and crops up hither-and-yon until January next year – and here are the dates:

Jazzlive @ The Crypt, St. Giles Church, Camberwell Church Street, Camberwell, London, SE5 8JB, UK – Saturday 26th September 2015
The Eagle Tavern, 24 High Street, Rochester, Kent, ME1 1JT, UK (afternoon performance at 1.00pm) – Sunday 4th October 2015
Restormel Arts @ Bosun’s Charlestown, Quay Road, Charlestown, St Austell, Cornwall, PL25 3NJ, UK – Wednesday 21st October 2015 –
Jazz Steps @ Bonington Theatre, Front Street, Arnold, Nottingham, NG5 7EE, UK – Thursday 22nd October 2015 –
The Bear, Mill Yard, 24a Guildford Street, Luton LU1 2NR, UK – Friday 23rd October 2015 –
The Oval Tavern, 131 Oval Road, Croydon, CR0 6BR, UK – Sunday 1st November 2015 (afternoon performance at 1.00pm)
Sound Cellar @ The Blue Boar, 29 Market Close, Poole, Dorset, BH15 1NE, UK – Thursday 5th November 2015
International Guitar Festival of Great Britain @ Floral Pavilion Theatre, Marine Promenade, New Brighton, Wirral, CH45 2JS, UK – Thursday 12th November 2015
St Ives Jazz Club @ The Western Hotel, Royal Square, St Ives, Cornwall, TR26 2ND, UK – Tuesday 17th November 2015
Fringe Jazz @ The Mall, 25 Union Gallery, Clifton Village, Bristol, BS8 4JG, UK – Wednesday 18th November 2015
Fleece Jazz @ Stoke by Nayland Hotel, Keepers Lane, Leavenheath, Colchester, Essex, CO6 4PZ, UK – Friday 15th January 2016
Arts Depot, 5 Nether Street, North Finchley, London, N12 0GA, UK – Saturday 30th January 2016

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Closer to home for me, there’s the opportunity to discover a new set of promoters and their club nights. On this occasion it’s Baba Yaga’s Hut, who’ve been ferreting away for years on the fringes of some of the (once) cheaper, artier and edgier London districts without me hearing about them before. I think I’ll be mentioning them again, as their mashed-up roster of latterday hard-psychedelia, noise bands, alternative pop and assorted fence-vaulters certainly interest me. For now, here’s just one of their upcoming gigs, which is happening this coming Tuesday:

Death & Vanilla + Lust + T.Edwards (DJ) (Baba Yaga’s Hut @ Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, London, SE17 1LB, UK, Tuesday 29th September 2015, 7.30pm) – £9.00/£10.00

Swedish dream-poppers Death & Vanilla have moved some way away from the psychedelic lounge-pop of their debut releases (in which they had a similar sepia-sampler sound to ’90s British post-rockers such as Broadcast and Pram, or even the cunning rush of Laika). These days they’re a tad more musically pointed and direct – positioning themselves straight in front of you, catching your eye and flipping open little musical doors as if they were some kind of musical advent calendar. In some respects, they sound like a more relaxed version of The United States Of America, the late ’60s experimentalists (part distracted folk carnival, part avant-garde tape effects) who arguably grandfathered and grandmothered the likes of Broadcast in the first place, albeit a little more smoothed out and hazy. They themselves offer “hands in the dark” and “Kraut-lullabies” as other labels which we can use. Check out a couple of their more recent songs below.

In support are multinational London-based quintet Lust, who’ve evidently looked back to those mid-’90s dream pop ideals of girl-group coos and quilted waves of balmlike guitar noise and decided, perhaps, to try to do it all better. With a sixty/forty girl/boy split, the instrumentation shared across genders, and Anna Haara Kristoferson, Moa Papillon and Andrea Muller singing in a creamy and hypnagogic triple-blend as they play, you can indulge happy memories of Lush (just one consonant shift away), Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. You can also note that Lust seem a little cannier and calculated than Kevin Shields, Emma Anderson and co – not contrived as such, but perhaps a little more on-the-ball as regards their sense of pop music. The rills of ‘Loveless’ might never be far away, but neither is the songwriting suss of ‘Rumours’ and the directness of The Shirelles… or the option to go all gloriously New Romantic in a video. Take a look and a listen…

One “T. Edwards” is listed as playing as DJ for the night – I suppose that there’s a reasonable chance that this is man-of-all-seasons-and-many-instruments Terry Edwards, but you’ll have to find this out by yourselves.

Tickets available here, while up-to-date information is here.

Coming up – October events. It’s damn well snowballing…

Tags: Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Bristol (England), Death & Vanilla, Double Talk, Fleece Jazz (event), Fringe Jazz (event), International Guitar Festival of Great Britain (event), Jazzlive (event), Leavenheath (England), live concerts, London (England), Lust, Luton (England), Mike Outram, Nic France, Nottingham (England), Pete Whittaker, Poole (England), Restormel Arts (event/promoter), Rochester – England, SoundCellar (event), St Austell (England), St Ives (England), St Ives Jazz Club (event), Theo Travis, Wallesey (England)

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Categories 2015, 2016, alternative rock, dream pop, experimental/avant-garde rock, instrumental music, jazz, previews, progressive rock, rock

September 2015 – upcoming gigs – Gong’s Dave Sturt and friends travel the world from Derbyshire on the 23rd; London gets more Daylight Music eclectica plus a Blacklisters/Joeyfat/Himself jabber-rock summit on the 26th

17 Sep

Here are details on some more interesting concerts coming up later this month. These run the gamut from soft psychedelic world-folk atmospherics to jabbering electric art-punk noise and sprechtstimme via dream-folk, caustic love songs and extended-technique art-rock instrumentals. (It was a shame to hear about the cancellation of the Charles Hayward gig in London on the 23rd – taking its ANTA, Gnob and Kavus Torabi support slots with it – but I’m sure that something similar will be rescheduled for anyone in need of their art-mash/stoner/prog/psych/metal salad…)

Dave Sturt presents An Evening of Dreams & Absurdities (Upstairs @ The Red Lion, Market Place, Wirksworth, Matlock, Derbyshire, DE4 4ET, UK, 23rd September 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00

As part of the Wirksworth Festival Fringe, Dave Sturt (bass guitarist with Gong, Bill Nelson, Steve Hillage and Jade Warrior, as well as being half of Cipher) showcases tracks from his forthcoming solo album ‘Dreams & Absurdities’ in an evening of world-class all-instrumental musicianship featuring beautiful eclectic music, soundscapes and various field recordings from Gong tours and elsewhere. The music is “mostly mellow and ambient – somewhere between melancholy and elation.”

For the performance, Dave will be accompanied by three guests. Chris Ellis (guitar and piano) is a multi-instrumentalist/singer-songwriter/actor, an ex-member of Anglesey band Ghostriders, and an award-winning soundtrack composer – he’s also a collaborator with Dave on the Past Lives Project (which recreates the recent ancestral histories of British communities by resurrecting their old cinefilm recordings and setting them to new music). Brian Boothby (low whistle, djembe) is an acclaimed folk musician, dramatist and writer and a member of the Derbyshire mixed-arts collective Genius Loci. Jeff Davenport (drums, percussion, HandSonic pad) has worked with jazz musicians Andy Sheppard and Phil Robson, pop artists James Morrison and Laura Mayne, and currently collaborates regularly with “Silent Pianist” Neil Brand providing soundracks to silent films, as well as working in Europe and the Far East on various projects with all manner of musicians.

Up-to-date details here and here, with tickets available online from here or available from Traid Links via email enquiry.

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On the last post, I plugged a London double event on the 19th – a day with a Daylight Music concert at midday and a noisier rock gig in the evening (both events which are still about to happen as I post this). In another week’s time, history’s repeating (fortunately not as farce, though anyone familiar with the bands in the evening show can expect some twists and jabs of humour) so here’s what’s coming up on September 26th…

Daylight Music 200: Ex-Easter Island Head + French For Rabbits + Louis Barabbas, plus a photo exhibition (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 26th September 2015, 12.00pm-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £5.00

An extra special event to celebrate the 200th Daylight Music, featuring some of the most popular acts from the last six years (643 performances by 530 different acts; 15,254 cups of tea or coffee drunk; 9,863 slices of cake scoffed; 5,003 pieces of quiche devoured) and during which we’ll be raising funds for Daylight Music in 2016.

Ex-Easter Island Head are a Liverpool based musical collective composing and performing music for solid-body electric guitar, percussion and other instruments. They have performed their original compositions solo, as a duo, trio, quartet and as a large ensemble across a wide variety of events from site-specific installation works to live film scores. They create a sensation whenever they play. If you’ve never seen musicians hitting electric guitars with mallets before, then cancel all other plans for the day and head down.

French For Rabbits hail from the remote natural setting of Waikuku Beach, in New Zealand’s South Island. Vocalist Brooke Singer expresses intimate narratives against the cast of the damp colonial cold; her voice delicately steeled against winsome guitar lines and the eerie instrumentation of her bandmates. It’s a weather-beaten dreamscape, nostalgic for warmth and hopefully lilting towards sunnier climes.

Louis Barabbas is a writer, performer and label director, best known for caustic love songs and energetic stage shows that leave you pumped up and breathless.

The icing on the cake this week is an instrumental soundscape provided by Irish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Crowley, who (over his six-album career) has been described by the Independent as “a master of understatement” and cited by Ryan Adams as the answer to the question “who’s the best songwriter that no one’s heard of?”

To celebrate the fantastic photography taken throughout the lifespan of Daylight Music by a very talented bunch of volunteer photographers, there will be a lo-fi photo exhibition consisting of 200 postcards on the pews of the chapel for people to take away; plus there will be a limited numbers of brochures to buy featuring all of the photographs.

More information on the concert is here.

In the evening, there’s a change of pace and milieu over in Hackney as post-hardcore rubs up against a bit of playful English Dada. I’ve got a liking for those occasions when rock music drives itself up against persistent, wayward speech and stubs its toes on it; and this gig will offer plenty of opportunities for that…

Blacklisters + Joeyfat + Himself (Pink Mist @ The Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EB, UK, Saturday 26th September 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00

Blacklisters’ aggressive, confrontational and darkly humorous performances have earned them a reputation as one of the best acts on the UK underground, drawing comparisons to the likes of The Jesus Lizard and Pissed Jeans. Their debut album ‘BLKLSTRS’ was released in 2012 to critical acclaim, landing them supports with Scratch Acid, Pig Destroyer, Future of the Left and Big Business, as well as a live session at Maida Vale studios for the Radio 1 Rock Show. Tonight’s special show is in support of their fearsome new record ‘Adult’ on Smalltown America. Produced by Matt Johnson (aka MJ of Hookworms) the album is a clear progression for the band and sees them fuse abstract art-noise with the brutally minimalist riffs that first put them on the radar.

Also playing are amorphous cult stalwarts Joeyfat, a band who’ve been defying conventions of “band logic” longer than most of us have been able to get into shows at all. Their sinewy math-inspired spoken-word has seen them share stages with the likes of Bilge Pump, S*M*A*S*H, Clearlake, Lords, Dartz, Art Brut, Trencher and Green Day, obviously. Catch them at this rare London show.

Direct from Leeds (unless they stopped off some place on the way), Himself’s shouty/talky interactive noise rock has been winning them plaudits up and down the company, including from Radio’s Daniel P. Carter who invited them to record a live session for the Radio 1 Rock Show earlier this year.

Tickets for the Shacklewell Arms gig are available here and here. Note that this is an 18+ event.

Tags: abrasion, ANTA, Arctic Circle (promoter), Bill Nelson, Blacklisters, Brian Boothby, Charles Hayward, Chris Ellis, Dave Sturt, Daylight Music (event), deconstruction, drift and float, Ex-Easter Island Head, feral snarl, free events, French For Rabbits, Ghostriders, Gnob, Gong, Himself, Hookworms, humour in music, intriguingly mixed bags, Ireland, Jade Warrior, Jeff Davenport, Joeyfat, Kavus Torabi, Leeds (England), listening to women, live concerts, Liverpool (England), London (England), Louis Barabbas, Manchester (England), men and women singing together, New Zealand, Past Lives Project, Pink Mist (event), rattlebag, screeching vocals, sprechstimme, Steve Hillage, stormy weather, the text is important, Tunbridge Wells (England), whisper to scream, Wirksworth (England), Wirksworth Festival (event)

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – experimental pop in Brixton on the 9th, folk and darkwave in Bethnal Green on the 11th, a Daylight Music melange and a Tim Smith garage-fizz fundraiser on the 19th

9 Sep

More upcoming September gigs, from tomorrow through to Saturday 19^th…

a.P.A.t.T. + Tom O.C. Wilson Ensemble + 4tRECk + Some of My Best Friends (The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, UK, Thursday 9th September 2015, 8.00pm) – £6.00/£7.00

a.P.A.t.T. , 2015

A Brixton evening of skewed and experimental pop, shading off into other directions including R’n’B, improvised instrumentals and assorted prankery. (Age restriction – 18 years minimum)

The a.P.A.t.T. of today take a skilled yet cheeky approach to playing progressive pop that owes as much to Kurt Schwitters and the Chapman Brothers as it does to ABBA and Zappa. In touring new album ‘Fun With Music’, a.P.A.t.T. have condensed their vision-quest into forty-five minutes of hooky, style-busting live band material, evading capture at every turn. This is the band that swaps instruments live mid-track and has even run its own small country for an evening: it’s a restless and relentless take on 21st century music and performance through a lens of knowing, winking, quintessentially British humour.

The Tom O.C Wilson Ensemble offers forward thinking pop music that combines classic songwriting values with boundless musical curiosity. Wilson describes himself as “a composer and performer driven by the desire to create music that doesn’t exist but should”, and his work (ranging from experimental pop albums to concert pieces for amateur orchestras) has won praise from Field Music, Michael Finnissy and Devendra Banhart among others.

The USSB of Hamburg-based Some Of My Best Friends is a Unit of Science, Socialism and Booty. Some Of My Best Friends use tunes and words. Some Of My Best Friends don’t approve of unnecessary effort. Some Of My Best Friends never travel with more than one case. Think psycho dub, garage soul, trap, and Karl Marx’s booty in sequin overalls.

In existence for years and years, Sam Callow’s 4tRECk project makes music based around spontaneous improvisation, chance, using various instruments (piano, guitar, violin, accordion, home-made stringed instruments, percussion, voice) the “wrong” way, ideas, and detailed composition. The results are broad, with a melancholic side.

More info here, and tickets here.

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Friday 11th sees the launch of a “new regular night, bringing you new sounds and non-traditional world music, folk, contemporary classical, trip hop and downtempo music. We start with some truly breathtaking bands…” This kind of blarney could be an attempt to heat up some very thin and bland material indeed, but the people behind Whispers & Hurricanes are Chaos Theory, who already sweat bullets to bring interesting jazz, post-prog, metal and post-hardcore into and out of London, so I think we can trust them. Here’s the bill:

Mishaped Pearls + Seventh Harmonic + TEYR (Whispers & Hurricanes @ The Sebright Arms,, Friday 11th September 2015, 7.30pm) – £6.00/£8.00

Seven-piece band Mishaped Pearls are at the forefront of a very exciting new wave of UK folk. Their adventurous song combination of the ancient and the new finds an echo in their musical make up – banjo, saz baglama, bodhran, violin and mandolin mix with acoustic guitar, keyboards, electric bass and drums, all led by the mezzo-soprano voice of Manuela Schuette. Their music’s roots in tradition expand into progressive folk and rock, eastern modal music and shows elements of contemporary classical influence. Their most recent album ‘Thamesis’ has received outstanding reviews across the media.

Consisting of multi-instrumentalist and composer Caroline Jago and drummer Lesley Malone (both also of Sol Invictus) plus singing violinist Éilish McCracken, Seventh Harmonic are a neoclassical darkwave ensemble creating sensual euphoric epics that draw on a great diversity of influences. The music blends an intoxicating kaleidoscope of rhythmic intensity and soaring vocals with ethno-symphonic overtures, defying categorisation yet always beating with a dark romantic heart.

Forged amongst the hustle and bustle of North London’s folk scene, TEYR (“3” in the Cornish language) are a trio of formidable musicians who showcase the many sounds of the British Isles. With roots running from Ireland to Wales to Cornwall, James Gavin (guitar and fiddle), Dominic Henderson (uilleann pipes and whistles) and Tommie Black-Roff (accordion), the players thrive on close interplay and pushing the possibilities of acoustic music. Having met on the traditional music scene through late night sessions, each performer holds an intuitive sense of folk music, evident in their deft arrangements and compositions. The trio draws influence from neo-folk groups such as Lau, Kan and Lúnasa, whilst harnessing an innovative combination of strings, reeds and voices. With this distinct mix, TEYR strike an enigmatic path through the current folk wave.

Tickets from here – note that this is another 18-and-over event.

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Admittedly the following is late rather than early September, but if you look forward to Saturday 19^th you can anticipate spending from noon until early afternoon admiring architecture to a soundtrack of chamber classical, contemporary folk and experimental pop, and then head into the fringes of south-west London for something a little scruffier and garage-friendly.

In conjunction with the Open House London Weekend (which takes in their home venue of the Union Chapel as well as a wealth of other fantastic London architecture – check it out), Daylight Music are doing a special double-length all-ages Saturday session. Details below…

Daylight Music 199: Sean O’Hagan, Ellie Lovegrove/Illumina, Pip Mountjoy + Elephant (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 19th September 2015, 10.00am-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £3.50

Sean O’Hagan is a legend of the indie scene, initially from his work in Microdisney and latterly from his time in The High Llamas who have been following their own lights for the past eighteen years, making records and essentially occupying their own genre in doing so. Their music is timeless; elements of retro and modern share the space, creating a unique time and place that is outside the lines of history as we experience it. Today Sean will be providing a solo performance.

Consisting of Ellie Lovegrove (trumpets) and Richard Moore (church organ), classical chamber music duo Illumina were formed in 2012 for a bespoke private recital and enjoy performing a wide variety of music, including works by Handel, Bach, Purcell, Stanley, Elgar, Damase, Takemitzu, and Eben.

Up-and-coming singer-songwriter Pip Mountjoy has been championed by BBC Introducing. She has toured the UK extensively, supporting the likes of Ryan Adams, John Smith, Slow Club, playing festivals such as Glastonbury, Isle of Wight and Cambridge Folk, and leaving audiences “simultaneously entertained, depressed, amused, bemused and delighted.”

Elephant is an intriguing creature hand reared by Lymington-based Alex Hall. Armed with a laptop and a modest collection of instruments, he set forth in piecing together and recording a collection of material inspired by his love of experimental indie, ’60s surf pop and more contemporary lo-fi electronic music. This is the result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euCkWGAKNTg&feature=youtu.be

Approximate timings:

10.00am Doors

10.30am Elephant

11.30am Illumina

12.30pm Pip Mountgrove

1.30pm Sean O’Hagan

In between, there are musical interludes by unsigned indie-folk duo Swallow & The Wolf (about whom there’s an ever-growing buzz) and by Jack Hayter (the multi-instrumentalist perhaps best known for work with Darren Hayman and Hefner, and on this occasion providing pedal steel improvisations similar to his Dollboy work plus “the odd jazz standard” though his solo performances of his own engagingly battered folk songs are also well worth seeing).

More information on the concert is here https://www.facebook.com/events/446360282212545/

In the evening, in Kingston-upon-Thames, there’s a benefit gig: another in the ongoing series of support fundraisers for the cruelly-stricken Tim Smith of Cardiacs. Even if Cardiacs in the raw, uncompromising original isn’t quite your thing, if you’ve got any interest in slightly complicated, roughened pop and garage-band grit, go along anyway. These are among the warmest of gigs…

From The Pond: a benefit for Tim Smith featuring Redbus Noface + 7shades + Sterbus + t.b.c. (The Fighting Cocks, 56 Old London Road, Kingston-upon-Thames, London, KT2 6QA, UK, Saturday 19th September 2015, 7.00pm) – £10.00

“A multi-faceted psychedelic pop-punk benefit gig… four extraordinary bands (all Cardiacs-y), beautiful and exclusive merchandise… every penny raised goes to Tim.”

Redbus Noface is the band project from latterday recording engineer and long-ago Cardiac Mark Cawthra. The first Redbus Noface album, ‘#1 If It Fights The Hammer, It Will Fight The Knife’, was released in 2011 and represents many years of Cawthra songwriting and musical ideas – a sturdy, beautifully crafted art-pop gem in the tradition of assorted English mavericks such as XTC.

Led by Neil Spragg, 7shades are a musical project which “pays tribute to the music of Tim Smith and Cardiacs – but with all original music” – a sometimes-nine-piece band delivering vigorously convoluted pop and blurts of punky, proggy, psychedelic noise, all equipped with a fantastical and humorous edge and no fear of either looking or sounding ridiculous.

Sterbus is from Rome, but his musical heart is in the shaggier, dreamier end of 1990s Britpop and American indie rock (Blur and Cardiacs, Elliott Smith and Nirvana, Supergrass and Pavement) and also delves happily into prime prog (with King Crimson, Zappa, Porcupine Tree and the fuzzier rockier chunks of the Canterbury scene). Self-releasing – and working mainly solo – he’s mixed this menu into a series of albums of warm double-jointed oddpop. Returning to the Fighting Cocks for his second Smith benefit gig, he’s performing in duet with his regular band foil Dominique D’Avanzo (him on guitar, her on clarinet, recorder and mouth harp, and both of them singing) for what he describes as “something very Sea Nymph-y and full of chords that Tim would love.”

Sadly, one of the scheduled bands has had to pull out… but if you’re still interested in the garage-rocker sounds of The Spencers (who “make noises. Loud noises. Noises that make you all happy and sad and angry… and sometimes, all at the same time” via a grime of guitars, low-budget organs and rock-siren vocals, plus distinctly Cardiacs twists of wandering harmonies and attention-deficit mood‘n’pace changes) here’s a taste of them anyway.

The event will be compered by writer and comedian Robin Ince (he of ‘The Infinite Monkey Cage‘) who’s apparently “bringing a friend. And may be doing a little music.” There will also be visuals by South Coast animator Cyriak Harris, whose hilarious, playful and slightly disturbing videos have been a YouTube staple ever since he delivered a monster-movie ‘EastEnders’ tribute to the BBC nearly a decade ago…

Ongoing news regarding From The Pond (including any last-minute substitutes for The Spencers) is here and tickets are here.

More September gigs shortly, plus a look at October and further on.

Tags: 4tRECk, 7shades, a.P.A.t.T., Arctic Circle (promoter), Éilish McCracken, Caroline Jago, Chaos Theory (event/promoter), Darren Hayman, Daylight Music (event), Dollboy, Elephant (Alex Hall), Ellie Lovegrove, free events, Hefner, Illumina, Jack Hayter, Lesley Malone, listening to women, live concerts, London (England), men and women singing together, Microdisney, Mishaped Pearls, music tied in knots, Pip Mountjoy, Redbus Noface, Richard Moore, Sean O'Hagan, Seventh Harmonic, Sol Invictus, Sterbus, Swallow & The Wolf, TEYR, The High Llamas, The Spencers, Tom O.C. Wilson Ensemble, Whispers & Hurricanes (event)

October 2015 – upcoming gigs – Jonas Hellborg & Steve Lawson in Birmingham, London & Leeds; Tim Bowness, Peter Chilvers, David Rhodes, Theo Travis quartet gig in Cardiff

7 Sep

Although there are still some September gigs to flag up, here’s advance notice of four interesting concerts in early October for those of you who are interested in the amorphous terrain between jazz, balladry, art pop and ambient electronica. (Just straight press release stuff – the analysis will have to wait for another time, although I’ve also stuck a few review links in where I’ve covered these musicians before…)

Two of the world’s leading solo bass guitarists together on one stage.

Crossing musical boundaries and blowing listeners’ minds for over thirty years, Jonas Hellborg is one of the great innovators of the bass guitar. From the pyrotechnic flamboyance of his early solo electric albums, to his unique exploration of the richness and depth of the acoustic bass guitar, Jonas has changed the way people think about – and play – the bass. Whether as a solo artist, or collaborating with many of the most respected names in music, from John McLaughlin to PiL, Ginger Baker to Shawn Lane, Jonas’ signature sound and uncompromising creative philosophy have produced an unparalleled body of work, mostly on his own Bardo label. Lauded by press and public alike, this is a rare opportunity to hear Jonas up close in the UK.

Steve Lawson is one of the most celebrated solo bassists in British music history – early in his career, he opened for Level 42 on their first Greatest Hits comeback tour, placing his unique take on melodic looping-based live performance in front of tens of thousands of bass aficionados. Fifteen years of regular gigging across the UK, Europe and the US have solidified his place as a leading exponent of solo bass. Steve’s sound-world borrows liberally from electronica, jazz, pop, rock, ambient and experimental music, to form a sonic fingerprint as compelling as it is unique. Following on from two years of wide-ranging collaboration, playing alongside musicians as diverse as Reeves Gabrels and Beardyman, Andy Gangadeen and Divinity, (and with the imminent release of his twelfth and thirteenth all-solo albums – on the same day!) Steve is back with fresh explorations pushing the notion of what the bass can be in the twenty-first century. (Here are a couple of ‘Misfit City’ reviews of earlier Steve Lawson records for those who’ve not read/heard them -‘Not Dancing For Chicken‘ and ‘Conversations‘).

Full dates, details and links:

Tower of Song, 107 Pershore Rd South, Cotteridge, Birmingham, B30 3EL, UK, Sunday 4th October 2015 – £10.00, tickets here.
The Vortex Jazz Bar, 11 Gillett Street, Dalston, London, N16 8AZ, UK, Monday 5th October 2015 – price t.b.c. – contact venue for tickets.
Left Bank Leeds, The former St Margaret of Antioch Church, Cardigan Road, Hyde Park, Leeds, LS6 1LJ, UK, Tuesday 6th October 2015 – £10.00, tickets here.

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Tim Bowness/Peter Chilvers/David Rhodes/Theo Travis (Chapter in association with Burning Shed @ Chapter, Market Road, Canton, Cardiff, Wales, CF5 1QE, UK, Saturday 3rd October 2015, 7.00pm) – £15.00

A unique combination of atmospheric music and songs performed by the following four British art-pop, jazz and textural music mainstays:

Tim Bowness is vocalist/co-writer with the band no-man, a long-running collaboration with Steven Wilson. He has also worked with Richard Barbieri (Porcupine Tree, Japan), Peter Hammill, Judy Dyble (ex-Fairport Convention), Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera and others. He has released three solo albums – ‘My Hotel Year’ (2004), ‘Abandoned Dancehall Dreams’ (2014) and ‘Stupid Things That Mean The World‘ (2015).

Peter Chilvers is a frequent collaborator with Brian Eno (including co-creating the hugely successful app Bloom), Underworld’s Karl Hyde and Tim Bowness, Chilvers has become known for his innovative work with generative apps and imaginative use of electronic textures. (Here’s a review of ‘Thin Air‘, an album Peter did with Michael Bearpark many years ago).

David Rhodes is one of the world’s most respected and inventive guitarists, having worked extensively with Peter Gabriel as well as with Kate Bush, Talk Talk, Scott Walker, Japan, New Order, Paul McCartney and Blancmange, amongst many others. David has also released two solo albums (2010’s ‘Bittersweet’ and 2014’s ‘The David Rhodes Band’) and was a founding member of the influential post-punk band Random Hold.

Saxophonist and flautist Theo Travis (making his Chapter return after performing with the cinematic/musical crossover project Cipher) has an international reputation as one of the stars of the contemporary UK jazz scene. Travis has more recently emerged as a key figure in the progressive and art rock sphere, working with David Gilmour, Robert Fripp, David Sylvian, Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, Bill Nelson, Gong, Soft Machine Legacy, Bill Bruford, Harold Budd and more. He has recently released his ninth solo album ‘Transgression’ (and here’s a review of an earlier one).

The evening is presented by Burning Shed, the online label and store founded by Bowness and Chilvers with Pete Morgan that has become a global specialist in progressive, ambient/electronica and art rock music. As well as releasing works on its own imprint, amongst others, Burning Shed hosts the official online stores for Panegyric (King Crimson, Yes), Ape (Andy Partridge, XTC, The Milk & Honey Band), Jethro Tull, Kscope (Porcupine Tree, Sweet Billy Pilgrim), Thomas Dolby, All Saints (Brian Eno), Medium Productions (Jansen, Barbieri and Karn), Gentle Giant and Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera. The label has recently expanded into book publishing, and at this concert musician and author Anthony Reynolds (perhaps best known as the former frontman of Jack) will be signing copies of his Burning Shed Publishing book, ‘Japan – A Foreign Place (The Biography 1974-1984)’.

More information here, and tickets available here.

Tags: almost acoustic, Birmingham (England), Cardiff (Wales), David Rhodes, Jonas Hellborg, kinda blue, Leeds (England), live concerts, London (England), No-Man, Peter Chilvers, Steve Lawson, Theo Travis, Tim Bowness

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Saturday 5th & Sunday 6th: post-classical at the Royal Opera House, brainy prog’n’noise in Bethnal Green, art pop in Brixton, a garage band jamboree in Hackney, chamber jazz in Dalston

5 Sep

Here’s the second of two previews for the first week of September, this one covering the weekend which has just arrived. Four gigs on Saturday (from post-classical to garage rock, from Afrobeat and kosmiche-influenced art pop to Canterbury-inspired lo-fi, from witty post-prog to Southern rock) and a chamber jazz gig on Sunday.

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After ten years of putting on post-classical club nights in east London, some way outside the heart of the British classical establishment, the Nonclassical organisation gets to play in the centre – a festival role, a high-profile corporate sponsorship, ads on the Tube and all. Come and judge whether they’re changing the game or being absorbed (beneficially or otherwise) into the belly of the beast. Whichever way this is going, the concert itself looks fascinating.

Nonclassical Club Night (Deloitte Ignite Festival @ Paul Hamlyn Hall, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, WC2E 9DD, UK, Saturday 5th September 2015, 8.00pm) – £10.00

Nonclassical label leader Gabriel Prokofiev (a polystylist composer with a background in electroacoustic work whose works include a Concerto for Turntables & Orchestra, an “orchestral remix” of Beethoven’s Ninth and production work on hip hop, grime, and electro records) will be performing at the event, as will five-string-electric-cellist/composer/technologist Peter Gregson (whose adventures in sound include film soundtracking, multiple premieres of newly composed work plus three albums of original compositions, and a “data sonification” of Twitter).

Also performing will be the amplified prepared-piano artist Klavikon (a.k.a. Leon Michener, who uses various pickups, real time analogue processing and playing-mechanism inventions including a robot dog to fuse aleatoric ideas from Stockhausen and Cage with electronic dancefloor work including “cascading batteries of percussion, sub-basses and abstract soundscapes”); the “post-a-cappella” group Juice Vocal Ensemble (whose voicework encompasses everything from classical sources to hip hop, Irish folk, close-harmony vocal jazz and the experimental approaches of Meredith Monk and of Björk’s ‘Medúlla’), and Gabriel’s DJ collaborator Mr Switch.

There will also be a collaboration between classical soprano Sarah Dacey and the “Tendons” music theatre project initiated earlier this year by Holly Lowe and Nwando Ebizie. Based around harp, spoken word, performance art and electronics while mingling repertoire work with improvisation, this draws on and expands two modern classical pieces (Salvatore Sciarrino’s ‘L’addio a Trachis’ and John Cage’s ‘Dream’) plus the ‘Siciliano’ from Bach’s ‘Sonata in E flat’ and was premiered in June at the Nonclassical Downtown Loft Concert at The Russet in Shacklewell – one of the label’s ongoing attempts to encourage a London equivalent of the New York loft-music scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

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If you prefer to have your brain tickled by other means, Group Therapy are presenting what they call a night of “good ol’-fashioned noise rock” down at an east London art-rock stronghold.

Trojan Horse + Thumpermonkey + Godzilla Black (Group Therapy @ The Sebright Arms, 33-35 Coate Street, London, E2 9AG, United Kingdom, Saturday 5^th September 2015, 8.00pm) Entry £7 otd £5.50 advance

What this actually seems to be is a night mixing a sharp-minded self-aware take on post-progressive rock and a rollicking contemporary version of what my local library used to call “popular instrumental”, and would stick in a rack alongside James Last and The Shadows (from which, long ago, in the early days of my musical education, I’d pull out the likes of Mike Oldfield, Sky and Vangelis’ ‘Heaven and Hell’, and later the raging electric jazz raga of David Torn’s ‘Cloud About Mercury‘ – ten years later, I’d might been using it to catch the Deodato lounge revival). But if my comment makes the gig sound as if it’s in any way mild or lounge-friendly or mild, think again. This is very much a rock evening and it’s explicitly clear that this night’s crop of bands have soaked up Boredoms, Swans, Big Black, Sonic Youth and The Melvins alongside any Genesis or King Crimson which they might have imbibed. It’s just that it’s refreshing to be able to go along to one of those gigs, with that label, and not encounter yet another bunch of predictable art-punks posing with their distortion pedals and their feedback zones while reheating old daydreams about free jazz and No Wave…

I’m bitching. I don’t like doing that. Let’s have a look at the bands on the bill.

Manchester’s Trojan Horse are post-prog omnivores with tuneful hearts and a refreshing lack of shame. While their records pillage, digest and absorb a wide diet from Pink Floyd to James Brown to The Kinks to the 13th Floor Elevators, they also use their appetites to build their own muscle and identity – one through which they filter a broad, contemplative awareness of British and Mancunian history and how it soaks through into the lives of present-day people (although you don’t need to analyse that in order to enjoy one of their rambunctious gigs).

Simultaneously theatrical and punk-lean, Thumpermonkey can stake a claim to being one of the smartest British bands this side of Everything Everything (with whom they share a geeky brainiac quality driven home by vigorous, tuneful force). Couched in a crunching but colourful hard-rock vein with big pinches of post-hardcore and prog, their dramatic convoluted stalk-and-punch compositions are playful but melodious and rewarding. You can bang your head to a Thumpermonkey song, but you can also think to it. In Michael Woodman (a man like a knowing fusion of Peter Hammill, Nick Cave and Peter Blegvad) they’ve also got a frontman who’s one of the best singers and cleverest current lyricists in rock, delivering allusive and elusive barrages of sly wordplay in a resonant rock-operatic voice.

Finally, the big, bold, brazen sound of Godzilla Black lands precisely midway between No Wave and pin-sharp easy-listening film themes, or between James Black and the John Barry Seven, with rollicking drums, tight stunt brass (and yes, all right, distortion and computer sleet). They also play at a blistering, speaker-pummelling volume, so maybe there’s something in that noise rock description).

In case you needed any more wheedling, here’s a typically effusive pre-gig write-up from ‘Organ’.

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An alternative is this friendly North/South art pop nudge down in Brixton.

Canteloupe + Barringtone + Gurglez + tbc (The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, UK, Saturday 5^th September 2015, 8.00pm) – price tbc

Headlining, Nottingham’s Canteloupe offer an omnivorous mix of pop, Krautrock, Afrobeat and disco. London’s Barringtone (featuring former Clor frontman Barry Dobbin) continue to pursue their motoric English art pop in the wake of the ‘Fever Head’ single. From Bradford, Gurglez blend what their neighbours Jumbo Records call “the power of prog, the drama of opera and the AOR grooves of the 70’s… poetic moments à la Terry Durham and free-jazz à la Nice” and “(turn) them on their head with a kind of left of field madness that Zappa would be proud of” (which, to these ears. also makes them sound more than a little like Sleepy People…) There should also be one more act to be added, which you can find out about in due course with the other gig information here and here.

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If you’d prefer something a little looser (or, as a clincher, something that was free to get into) for Saturday night, there’s this literally free-for-all concert taking place in the middle of Hackney and hosted by Sound Events Solutions, who have also provided the summary…

The Little Things + Alkatraz + Picturebox + Marianne Hyatt + Pit Ponies (Sound Events Solutions @ Bohemia Hackney, Unit 2, Bohemia Place, Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 1DU, United Kingdom, Saturday 5th September 2015, 7.45pm) – free

With The Little Things it’s funk, and then it’s 70s New York new wave alt-rock, and then it’s pop, but it’s all seamless and it’s funky and cool as fuck – an uncanny indie-ish dance party band that just never suck no matter how much they flirt with mass appeal.

Alkatraz provide the psychotic reactions and spontaneous psychedelic combustions of trippin’ psychedelic garage rock.

Picturebox (centred around home-recordist Robert Halcrow) are leading lights (and probably the main constituents) of Canterbury Lo-Fi, a new clandestine pop movement encapsulating all the charm but none of the noodling of the legendary old Canterbury Scene. When Halcrow sings a song like Ruth Bakes A Cake, he is neither being ironic nor twee nor coquettishly kitchen-sink. There is a light-hearted, profoundly uncynical love for humanity running through his lyrics that can sometimes remind you of the way Syd Barrett used to sing about the lost idea of simple kindness. Special things don’t always hit you over the head with a mallet, and neither will Picturebox. But you just never know, sometimes a movement can start with an instrumental named in allusion to a little hi-fi shop next to a supermarket car-park in Canterbury, some heartfelt tributes to pop stars, and lots of tea and cake.

Frontwoman of (variously) Dragstripper, Temple of Sound, Anarchistwood and Country Dirt, Marianne Hyatt is a London-based deep southern songstress from Austin Texas. She’s equal parts Patsy Cline, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, has sung with The Frogs at ATP, with Bill Callahan at Meltdown Festival and played a late-night pickup in Richard Linklater’s ‘Slacker’. She writes and plays platonic lovesongs to sexworkers, country reggae odes to schizophrenic madames and protest tunes to natural disasters… a walking triumph of lost causes and no-longer living legends.

Pit Ponies are renegades from Naughties rockney/post-punk/knees-up beer boys Corporal Machine & The Bombers, fusing ‘90s indie with pissed pub fights and ‘70s pub-rock. (In spite of this preamble, they’ll actually be playing an acoustic set.)

Up-to-date gig info here, some tasters here:

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After all of this, on Sunday, there’s jazz via the return of the LUME evenings via the Vortex. Blurb for the first evening is below.

Mark Pringle’s A Moveable Feast & Rebecca Nash (LUME @ The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, Dalston, London, N16 8AZ, UK, Sunday 6th September 2015, 7.30pm – £10.00

A Moveable Feast is a group led by jazz pianist Mark Pringle (a Peter Whittingham Award winner for the year 2015, following in the footsteps of previous recipients Gwilym Simcock, Trish Clowes and Elliot Galvin). Heavily inspired by time spent studying in Paris in 2013, the music draws on multiple cultural influences, containing themes of nature, wildlife, literature, the chaos of cities, the lives of people who inhabit them, woodland creatures and strange beasts… This autumn sees the group undertaking a national tour to promote the release of their album, ‘A Moveable Feast’, on Stoney Lane Records.

Featuring a twelvetet line up of strings, horns and rhythm section, the group explore Mark’s music with great freedom of approach, resulting in music that is eclectic, adventurous and highly unique. The band are Mark Pringle (piano), Percy Pursglove (trumpet), Chris Young (alto saxophone), Dan Searjeant (tenor and alto saxophones, flute), Alicia Gardener-Trejo (bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, alto flute), Ben Lee (electric guitar), James Banner (double bass) and Euan Palmer (drums), plus a string quartet of Christine Cornwell, Sarah Farmer, Megan Jowett and Lucy French.

Rebecca Nash‘s music, written with the intention of creating a new cohesive sound, blends together all the things she loves about music. Most important is a sense of purpose, identity and beauty. It is inspired by many musical influences which primarily include jazz musicians such as Pat Metheny and Wayne Shorter but also other styles too, such as electronica and folk music. Rebecca’s own style, rooted in the contemporary jazz genre, blends acoustic and electronic elements with strong melodies, underpinned by dense harmonies and unusual grooves with the aim of creating one overall soundscape.

This latest project is Rebecca’s first as a bandleader, and all of the music performed is original material from her forthcoming album, due to be recorded later this year. Tonight she leads a small group with herself on piano, Percy Pursglove on trumpet, Matt Fisher on drums, and Chris Mapp on bass guitar.

More information on the event is here, with tickets available here.

Tags: A Moveable Feast, Alicia Gardener-Trejo, Alkatraz, Barringtone, Ben Lee (jazz musician), Canteloupe, Canterbury scene, Chris Mapp, Chris Young, Christine Cornwell, Corporal Machine & The Bombers, Country Dirt, Dan Searjeant, DJ Mr Switch, duo music, Euan Palmer, Gabriel Prokofiev, Godzilla Black, Group Therapy (event), Gurglez, Holly Lowe, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Cage, Juice Vocal Ensemble, Klavikon, lo-fi, London (England), Lucy French, LUME (event), Marianne Hyatt, Mark Pringle, Matt Fisher, Megan Jowett, Nonclassical (event/promoter/record label), Nwando Ebizie, Percy Pursglove, Peter Gregson, Picturebox, Rebecca Nash, Salvatore Sciarrino, Sarah Dacey, Sarah Farmer, Sound Events Solutions (event), Tendons, The Little Things, Thumpermonkey, Trojan Horse

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Categories 2015, 20th century classical music, 21st century classical music, Afrobeat, alternative rock, art rock, Baroque music, chamber jazz, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, country reggae, crossover, dance music, disco, electronica, experimental music, experimental/avant-garde rock, folk music, folk-jazz, freak-folk, funk, garage punk, garage rock, hard rock, heavy metal, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, jazz fusion, jazz rock, kosmische & Krautrock, math rock, New Wave rock, noise rock, political music, pop, post-hardcore, post-metal, post-progressive rock, post-punk, previews, progressive metal, progressive pop, progressive rock, psychedelic pop, psychedelic rock, pub rock, punk rock, reggae, rhythm'n'blues, RIO (Rock In Opposition), rock, singer-songwriter, skronk, techno, Zeuhl

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Darkroom gently mess with our minds at Hubbub Late Spectacular, Friday 4th September

3 Sep

Just quickly plugging this event, as I unintentionally left it off the early-September preview from Tuesday. While I was initially drawn to it by the musical involvement of textural loop duo )and longtime ‘Misfit City’ favourites) Darkroom, there’s plenty here to interest anyone with curiosity about the workings of the mind. It’s free, although the scheduled talks and some larger activities are ticketed (you’ll need to get tickets for those from the Wellcome Collection on the night, from 6.30pm onwards).

Hubbub Late Spectacular @ The Hub, The Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK, Friday 4th September 2015, 7.00pm) – free entry

A night to explore rest… and its opposites. What does “rest” mean to you? Join the Hubbub team to investigate rest and its opposites: from daydreaming and doodling, to fidgeting and lullabies. Catch a talk on the latest discoveries about what your brain’s up to when you’re doing nothing, or experience a live stream of sound from around Heathrow airport. From a documentary about an ape retirement home, to a workshop where you can try out historical relaxation techniques, this is an evening that will transform how you understand rest.

Activities – hear contemporary lullabies and add to a collaborative collection; learn about mapping alertness and environment through self-tracking; experience variations of relaxation and cacophony with a brand new audio piece from radio collective In The Dark; put rest to the test as you investigate some of the methods used by scientists to measure rest and its opposites; join the debate on “what’s wrong with work?”

Talks – “Fantasy and Fiction” with social scientist Felicity Callard and poet James Wilkes; “Free Time and Mindwandering” with psychologists and authors Claudia Hammond and Charles Fernyhough; “Mapping Rest” with neuroscientist Daniel Margulies and anthropologist Josh Berson.

Some comments from Hubbub investigator Charles Ferneyhough (the whole blog post is here):

The research project in Hubbub is investigating topics such the relation between the shifting periodicities of ambient music and the changing rhythms of conscious experience, and how and in what contexts these can have restful and restorative effects. We plan to extend these investigations into studies of neural connectivity in the “resting state”: the dynamic, fearsomely complex and increasingly well-studied patterns of activation shown by a brain that is not performing any specific task. We are employing new methodologies for assessing these nuances of subjective experience (both for audience and performers) in a scientifically rigorous manner, as well as exploring implications for clinical interventions… Darkroom are interrupting a tour promoting their new album ‘The Rest is Noise’ to perform with me in a sequence of three extended sets at the Hubbub Late Spectacular. Come and hear the sounds of improvised ambient music, and get a chance to give your feedback on the psychological and emotional effects of listening to this kind of music.

…plus some from Darkroom themselves:

Darkroom will play three sets, with unpredictably different shades and contrasts. It’s a free event (apart from the drinks) at this spectacular venue, and there’s an opportunity to take part in the experiment, as well as take in other talks and exhibitions on the night, and meet some of the other investigators and our collaborators.

Reposted here is a Soundcloud recording of Darkroom and Charles Fernyhough collaborating on a half-hour long track recorded at The Hub earlier this year.

Full event details are here and here.

Tags: Andrew Ostler (Os), anthropology, Charles Fernyhough, Claudia Hammond, Daniel Margulies, Darkroom, Felicity Callard, free events, James Wilkes, Josh Berson, Letchworth (England), live concerts, London (England), Michael Bearpark, neuroscience, psychology, Royston (England), science and music

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Wednesday 3rd to Friday 5th: orchestral-pop croons in Kings Cross, psychedelic grandeur in Pentonville, and a post-metal mash-up in Camden Town versus a grand Curved Air event in Fulham

1 Sep

There’s a wealth of new gigs coming up in London in the first week of September – here’s the first of a couple of whistle-stop preview for some of the ones which caught my interest. I’ve missed Monday and Tuesday. Starting with some relative softness on Wednesday…

Ralegh Long + The Left Outsides (Parallel Lines @ St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, Kings Cross, London, NW1 1UL, UK, Wednesday 2nd September 2015, 7.30pm) – £8.25

A piano balladeer with soft rich baroque pop tendencies, Ralegh Long’s been compared to Alex Chilton, Todd Rundgren, Laura Nyro and Nick Drake… and not without cause. His debut album ‘Hoverance’ was released earlier this year, and at this concert he’ll be joined not only by his usual band but by the strings, horns and whatnot of A Little Orchestra. In support, there’s the acid-folk duo The Left Outsides, affiliated to both The Eighteenth Day Of May and Of Arrowe Hill. To find out what both acts sound like, see below.

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On Thursday, things are louder…

Guapo + Hirvikolari (The Quietus @ The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, London, N1 9JB, UK, Thursday 3rd September 2015, 7.00pm) £8.00

Over a twenty-year career experimental rockers Guapo have explored their own open-ended, constantly-altering takes on noise/jazz/psychedelic rock, Magma-esque Zeuhl and Rock In Opposition (via several roiling and transformative line-up changes attracting, turn by turn, some of the most talented London players). The latest version of the band – perennial Guapo drummer Dave Smith, guitarist Kavus Torabi and keyboard player Emmett Elvin (both also of Knifeworld) and new bass guitarist Sam Warren (also of Thumpermonkey, more of whom tomorrow) – will be launching and performing an extended version of their new album ‘Obscure Knowledge’. On this occasion Guapo will be augmented to a quartet by guest woodwind player Michael York.

Playing support are trumpet-and-modular-synth duo Hirvikolari, a spinoff project from psychedelic rockers Teeth Of The Sea featuring Sam Barton and Mike Bourne. They were recently hailed by Luke Turner (of event promoters/multi-media…. ‘The Quietus’) as “a gorgeous, transportive wander across a luminous veldt, taking in grubby techno and hinting at Coil’s ‘Musick To Play In The Dark’ via a tripping colliery band, falling down an unguarded shaft after being led astray by Jon Hassell.”

Up-to-date gig information is here, and some soundclips are below – also courtesy of ‘The Quietus’ is the Hirvikolari set recording, taken from their summer appearance at the Raw Power festival in Tufnell Park earlier this year.

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On Friday, Facemelter are presenting a triple-feature heavy evening in Camden, while progressive rock veterans Curved Air are playing a special gig in Fulham.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster + Opensight + Sumer, (The Facemelter @ The Black Heart, 2-3 Greenland Place, Camden, London, NW1 0AP, United Kingdom, Friday 4th September, 7.30pm) – £6.00 advance, £8.00 on the door

Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster are a brilliant atmospheric post-metal band who’ve risen early in the UK’s underground scene and with an audience spanning the edges of metal, prog and post-rock. Now back with the original lineup that won them their international audience (and fresh from performing at ArcTanGent) they launch their third album ‘Wires/Dream\Wires’, three years after releasing the hugely acclaimed ‘Exegesis’. Originally from Colombia, Opensight are an ambitious band fusing metal with the vintage, grainy feel of 70s prog. Their launch of their new EP ‘Ulterior Motives’ will appeal to fans of all genres. Gig openers Sumer are a self-styled post-prog band with interesting riffs, soaring vocal melodies and catchy hooks. They have risen with seemingly unstoppable force and with every reason, as anyone who attended the packed launch of their album ‘The Animal You Are’ last September will remember.

All of the above is a slightly-tweaked Facemelter summary: some album tasters are below, and tickets are available here.

Curved Air (Under The Bridge, Stamford Bridge, Fulham Road, Chelsea, London, SW6 1HS, UK, 4th September 2015, 7.00pm) – £18.00

Though they’re best known for a single classic rock radio staple – Back Street Luv, which might suggest to the casual listener that they were briefly a British Jefferson Airplane – Curved Air began life as a genuinely innovative band. While the presence and tone of singer Sonja Kristina (the band’s only constant member) has always tied the band in with folk music and the rock siren tradition, founder members and key composers Darryl Way and Francis Monkman were classically-trained enthusiasts of psychedelia and the ecstatic minimalism of Terry Riley – hence the cascading Hendrix-and-microtones violin roar of Vivaldi on the band’s first album ‘Air Conditioning’.

Despite a remarkable start, differences of opinion, susceptibility to fluctuating musical styles and plain bad luck meant that Curved Air subsequently staggered from lineup to lineup and from image to image. With Way slipping in and out of the band over the years, and Monkman a relatively early casualty of disagreements (though a frequent if brief returnee), many the original ideas were lost in transit. Nonetheless, versions of the band have existed on and off ever since, with Curved Air currently anchored by Kristina, original drummer Florian Pilkington-Miksa and guitarist Kirby Gregory (from the second main lineup).

For this particular gig, Darryl Way will be making an appearance on violin and the band will – for the first time ever – be playing early masterpiece ‘Air Conditioning’ in its entirety, although they’ve also promised to perform from their entire repertoire up until the present day. The concert will be recorded and filmed for a commemorative DVD release. Tickets available here.

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Tomorrow, more on Saturday’s stretch of gigs, from garage bands to chamber jazz to art-pop to post-classical…

Tags: A Little Orchestra, Curved Air, duo music, Emmett Elvin, Guapo, Hirvikolari, Kavus Torabi, Knifeworld, London (England), Mike Bourne, Opensight, Ralegh Long, Sam Barton, Sumer, Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster, Teeth Of The Sea, The Facemelter (event), The Left Outsides, The Quietus (publication/event/label)

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – the K-Music Festival – a month’s worth of Korean music

29 Aug

I got this through my feed this week – a Beach Boys cover done as Korean doo-wop.

This is The Barberettes, who’ve been singing together for three years and are in town next week, making their London debut. It’s also an audio visual flyer, of sorts, for this year’s London K-Music Festival. Presented by Serious (in association with the Korean Cultural Institute) this is a celebration of Korean music from “dynamic and energy-filled contemporary bands to eloquent and dignified traditional music” spread across some of the capital’s best venues during the course of September. Full details are below. (From here on down, it’s all press release.)

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SU:M + Arthur Jeffes (Purcell Room @ Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, Waterloo, London, SE1 8XX, UK, Tuesday 1st September 2015, 7:45pm) – £15 + booking fee

SU:M‘s name (pronounced “soom”) translates as “breath” and it expresses the physical connection of these two women to the music they create – sometimes a soft sigh, sometimes a cry, sometimes a silent holding of breath. Jungmin Seo plays the gayageum (a massive twenty-five-string zither) and Jiha Park plays wind instruments including the saenghwang (imagine the subtlest mouth organ, with seventeen bamboo pipes). They are an astonishing experience live – they’ve played Womex Cardiff and were seen at WOMAD last year. This opening concert of the K-Music festival of Korean music is their first London concert.

The evening will begin with a short solo set by Arthur Jeffes, leader of Penguin Cafe, who will play music by himself and his father Simon Jeffes inspired by their travels in Asia – and it will end with a short collaboration between Arthur and SU:M. Tickets available here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGCn0ttX_AY

The Barberettes (The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, UK, Friday 4^th & Saturday 5th September 2015, 8:00PM) – £16.00

Formed for fun in 2012, The Barberettes are a spectacular vocal harmony trio, a timeslip girl group who turn classics of the ‘50s and ‘60s inside out as well as creating their own theatrical music with their close harmony covers and cute costumes. Singing doo-wop in Korean and English, they made their first album last year (in a retro homage to their inspirations, they called it The Barberettes Vol 1). This year they’ve already stormed SXSW in Texas and the K-Pop Night Out concert at Midem in Cannes – and now they’re bringing their unique style to the UK for the very first time. Tickets available here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8vvpczEhSk

No Brain + support t.b.c. (Scala, 275 Pentonville Road, Kings Cross, London, N1 9NL, UK, Friday 11^th September, 7:30pm) – £10.00 + booking fee

In England, we know a bit about Korean art music and hold some preconceptions about K-Pop – but we don’t know much about Korean rock music, and that’s where Seoul’s finest, No Brain, have built a huge following, playing over three thousand gigs across Korea in the last 15 years. Powered by raw vocals (Bull is the lead singer), razor guitars (Vovo plays guitar), sharp suits (Bogle plays bass) and a drummer called Dolly, they’ve won lots of Korean Music Awards, but never played London before. They’re playing an early set – support hits at 7.30, they play at 8.30pm. This is a standing show – tickets available here.

Jambinai (Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, London, E1 6LA, UK, Wednesday 16th September, 8:00pm) – £10.00 + booking fee

Jambinai are the next thrilling instalment in the tale of new Korean music. They sculpt sound in a way that’s drawn comparisons to Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, Sonic Youth and the crystalline power of Sigur Ros – but they draw deep on Korean traditions. It’s not just a stage full of amazing instruments – Korean fiddles, massive zithers blended with glorious lyrical guitars – but also a conscious sense of using the tradition to create something thrillingly new. They’ve been seen at Womad and Glastonbury, but this is their first London show – catch them as Jambinai step out onto a world stage. Tickets available here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ABpjyc1Gs

Noreum Machi (Kings Place (Hall Two), 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, UK, Sunday 20th September, 8:00pm) – £10.00 + booking fee

There’s a theatrical strand to a lot of Korean music and, for more than twenty years, Noreum Machi have been creating a thrilling spectacle from virtuosic percussion, shamanic vocals and acrobatic dance. Powered by gongs, Samul Nori drums and wind instruments, they work within the framework of Korean traditional performance, with a commitment to communicate their music to audiences worldwide. Tickets available here.

The Pansori Night: Sang-il Nam + Aeri Park + ‘Poppin’ Hyunjoon + Bae Reon + Kye-youl Jun + Ji-sun Choi (Cadogan Hall, 5 Sloane Terrace, Belgravia, London, SW1X 9DQ, UK, Wednesday 23rd September 2015, 7:30pm) – free ticketed event

The Pansori Night will bring together six talented performers for an evening of music, dance and song with a contemporary twist. Pansori is a form of vocal story-telling that reaches back centuries — the stories sung are often comic, with a Chaucerian comedy to them, but they are also more than just bawdiness, and can be romantic, sad and emotional to boot.

Rising Pansori talent Sang-il Nam will be joined by Aeri Park, one of Korea’s leading female pansori performers. Aeri Park will also perform with ‘Poppin’ Hyunjoon, who takes breakdance moves and blends them with traditional rhythms. Our three stars will also be joined by Bae Reon, playing the ajaeng – a seven-stringed instrument, percussionist Kye-youl Jun accompanying the pansori with the janggu (Korean drum) and traditional dancer Ji-sun Choi. This event is free but ticketed. Click here for more information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU0mewGnTQQ

Korean National Gugak Centre (Lilian Baylis Studio @ Sadler’s Wells, Rosebery Avenue, London, EC1R 4TN, UK, Wednesday 30th September 2015, 7:30pm) – £15 + booking fee

The Korean National Gugak Centre is one of the great arts companies of Korea, and this performance concentrates on Sanjo – that’s a style of instrumental music accompanied by a drum and sometimes by dancers, starting slowly and gathering speed, with a structure that allows for virtuosic improvisation. This evening shows off some of the great traditional instruments of Korean traditional music such as the geomungo (large zither), daegeum (transverse flute) and haegeum (Korean fiddle). This is the last date on the group’s European tour, and provides a fitting conclusion to the K-Music Festival. More information here.

Tickets for all events can also be obtained from Serious.

Tags: Aeri Park, Arthur Jeffes, ‘Poppin’ Hyunjoon, Bae Reon, Jambinai, Ji-sun Choi, Jiha Park, Jungmin Seo, K-Music Festival (event), Korea, Korean National Gugak Centre, Kye-youl Jun, live concerts, London (England), No Brain, Noreum Machi, Penguin Cafe Orchestra (Penguin Cafe), Sang-il Nam, SU:M, The Barberettes

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Categories alternative rock, doo-wop, K-Rock, Korean traditional music, live/concert reviews, pansori, post-rock, punk rock, rock, sanjo

November 2015 – upcoming gigs – Mutations Festival in Brighton, 28th & 29th November 2015

24 Aug

Here’s a quick signal booster (or, perhaps more accurately, noise booster) for the debut Mutations festival coming up in Brighton at the end of November. (The press release just came in from Stereo Sanctity today). Note that tickets go on sale in the middle of this week, and that there’s only a thousand tickets. I’ve just seen a Facebook counter suggesting that 330 people have already committed themselves to tickets. Move fast.

Mutations is a new multi-venue inner city festival in Brighton, England, born out of last years acclaimed DRILL:BRIGHTON. With Wire’s touring project moving onto the next urban sonic assault, co-curators One Inch Badge decided the time was right for a forward thinking, annual, artist-lead festival that would be static to Brighton on the last weekend of November

Spanning two days and nights on the 28th and 29th November with an incredibly intimate capacity of just 1,000, Mutations is a music-lover’s event. Alongside the music you can also expect pop-up record fairs, poster art exhibitions, photography and more.

Mutations is a creative mass of genre hybrids and expression, delivering some of the most inspiring, creative and interesting music the world has to offer; a host of other national and international acts including genuinely alternative rock, aggressive noise, experimental house, singer-songwriters, doom metal, electronica, drone, experimental folk and various other experimental sounds.

Acts confirmed so far are Lightning Bolt, METZ, John Talabot, Josh T. Pearson, Tourist, OM, Chelsea Wolfe, Willis Earl Beal, Ought, Jane Weaver, Natalie Prass, BRNS, Kagoule, Vision Fortune, Blaenavon, All Tvvins, Lowly, Plastic Mermaids, Chastity, Mount Bank, Abi Wade, Sea Bastard, Blacklisters, Foreign Skin and Nature Channel.

Venues will include Concorde 2, All Saint’s Church, The Arch, The Old Market, The Haunt, Patterns, Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Green Door Store, The Prince Albert, The Hope And Ruin and The Bee’s Mouth, with more to be confirmed.

Pre-sale launches this Wednesday 26th August at 9.00am (exclusively via See Tickets) with general sale following on Friday 28th August at 9.00am.

Mutations Festival online:

Tags: Abi Wade, All Tvvins, Blacklisters, Blaenavon (band), Brighton (England), BRNS, Chastity, Chelsea Wolfe, festival previews, Foreign Skin, Hove (England), intriguingly mixed bags, Jane Weaver, John Talabot, Josh T. Pearson, Kagoule, Lightning Bolt, live concerts, Lowly, METZ, Mount Bank, Mutations Festival (event), Natalie Prass, Nature Channel, OM, One Inch Badge (promoter), Ought, Plastic Mermaids, Sea Bastard, Tourist, Vision Fortune, Willis Earl Beal

August 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Prescott, A Sweet Niche and V A L V E @ The Harrison, August 26th; the welcome return of Daylight Music (with Pete Astor, TEYR and The Left Outsides), August 29th

22 Aug

Coming to a Kings Cross cellar next week…

Prescott – as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella…

Prescott + A Sweet Niche + V A L V E (The Harrison, 28 Harrison Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8JF, UK, Wednesday 26th August, 7.00pm) – £5.00

Prescott are a percolating musical alliance between Kev Hopper (who once played elasticated bass guitar for Stump and went on to participate in offbeat experimental projects from laptop improv to pocket pop), veteran avant-indie/improvising drummer Frank Byng (of Crackle, Snorkel and the Slowfoot label) and polymath keyboard player Rhodri Marsden, whose curiosity, industry and dry wit has drawn him through a patchwork career of interesting music (including The Keatons, Zuno Men, The Free French, Gag and Scritti Politti) and deft, wry journalism on everything from drum machines to dating disasters.

According to the Harrison’s blurb, the band deliver “a curious mix of the melodic and discordant with syncopated funky, skewed beats and lopsided, sometimes jabbing riffs that emerge from a complex web of musical interactions and expand or contract like sections of a stuck record.” The band themselves talk about “jabbing heteroclite riffs, circular rhythmic patterns, vibrating harmonic clashes, irregular note intervals, all contrasted with pockets of beautiful melody” and their trick of “microriffing” – repeating the same tiny melodic segment for “as long as they can hold their nerve” (out of a sense of persistence, a zest for irritancy or a desire to pay homage to loop culture) .

I’ll add that while these descriptions make Prescott sound like a set of ticks on a battered art-music bingo card, they’re actually one of the most entertaining and even danceable bands I’ve seen in recent years; pumping out a surprisingly melodious batch of hiccups, peculiar grooves and inventive colours, and sometimes seeming to plug into a monstrous late-Miles Davis synth-fusion groove (entirely by mistake).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjONfqQiaSs

I’ve written about A Sweet Niche before, having encountered them a few years ago when they were roaring the roof of a cellar off in Spitalfields. Between them, guitarist Keir Cooper, baritone saxophonist Oliver Sellwood and drummer Tim Doyle have an intimidating list of project credits. In this band, however, they make a brinksman’s racket of free-form punk-jazz, bringing in whatever else they’ve learned from excursions into rock, theatre work and the thornier ends of contemporary classical.

Making the most of their disparate backgrounds (Oliver is a qualified musical academian, Keir more of a non-institutional outsider, newer boy Tim somewhere in between) they’ll attack their musical ideas at full blurt and with plenty of noise, like angry men stripping the wreck of a ca. They’ll toss disparate fragments up into the air and rant about them, but then sideswipe expectations with a run at a cute theme. Last time I described them as “if Bagpuss had joined Slayer”, and they seemed to like it. See what you think.

https://vimeo.com/103617646

V A L V E is the solo project of Chlöe Herington – reedswoman, experimenter and Magma/Zappa/Peter Maxwell Davies fan. She’s best known for blowing taut, assertive bassoon and saxophone parts in Knifeworld and Chrome Hoof, but has also worked with lo-fi art-rockers Jowe Head & The Demi Monde and elusive psycho-lounge band Made By Monsters, as well as a clutch of contemporary classical projects. V A L V E places the bassoon to centre stage, surrounded by Chlöe’s clusters of technology and (when required) selected guests. At the Harrison, the project will be appearing in “its first non-gallery show ever”, which might either involve letting it off the leash or playing a little more safe. (Come and find out.)

Dotted around Chlöe’s other band commitments, V A L V E releases have been sparse so far – odd fits and starts on Soundcloud or YouTube plus a couple of Bandcamp tracks. Here are a few tasters, including the soundtrack to a dinosaur battle, something which Chlöe developed from a piece of music found in a skip, and a more sombre contemporary classical effort.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpne86ZSx5k

Up-to-date gig information available here and here. (Or, if none of this really floats your boat and you’d prefer some lustrous art-rock croon, here’s one last linking plug for the Tim Bowness/Improvizone gig at the Boston Music Room on the same night.)

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On the Saturday, it’s time to welcome back Daylight Music, who are starting up a new series of free midday gigs (and are still writing their own promo blurb, which makes things a little easier for me).

Daylight Music 198: Pete Astor + TEYR + The Left Outsides (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 29th August, 12pm to 2pm)

Ex-leader of The Loft, The Weather Prophets and numerous other esteemed acts, Pete Astor creates timeless chamber-pop, brimming with wry lyrical insight and haunting melodic hooks. Now recording for Fortuna POP!, he has his first full length album for four years ready for release. This has been made with Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls and Proper Ornaments main man James Hoare along with Pam Berry (Black Tambourine, Withered Hand) on vocals, Alison Cotton (The Left Outsides) on viola, Jack Hayter (Hefner) on pedal steel and guitar, Emma Winston on synth bass (Darren Hayman’s Long Parliament, Owl & Mouse) and Susan Milanovic (Feathers) on drums. The recent single, ‘Mr Music’ has been very warmly received with Astor and band recording sessions for Marc Riley and headlining the Church stage at this years’ Indie Tracks festival among many other recent live outings. For the Daylight Music show Astor will be joined onstage by James, Pam, Alison, Jack, Emma and Susan making a seven-piece group playing Astor’s songs, old and new, for an edifying and nutritious lunchtime performance.

https://youtu.be/2Ihym05obto

Forged amongst the hustle and bustle of North London’s folk scene, TEYR (“3” in the Cornish language) are a trio of formidable musicians who showcase the many sounds of the British Isles. With roots running from Ireland to Wales to Cornwall, James Gavin (guitar and fiddle), Dominic Henderson (uilleann pipes and whistles) and Tommie Black-Roff (accordion), the players thrive on close interplay and pushing the possibilities of acoustic music. Having met on the traditional music scene through late night sessions, each performer holds an intuitive sense of folk music, evident in their deft arrangements and compositions. The trio draws influence from neo-folk groups such as Lau, Kan and Lúnasa, whilst harnessing an innovative combination of strings, reeds and voices. With this distinct mix, TEYR strike an enigmatic path through the current folk wave.

The Left Outsides are Mark Nicholas and Alison Cotton, a London-based husband and wife duo whose atmospheric, hypnotic songs echo Nico’s icy European folk, pastoral psychedelia and chilly English fields at dawn. Their second album ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ has just received a welcome and much-praised vinyl release on Dawn Bird Records and an album of new material is currently being recorded. The duo have played across the UK, France, Germany and in the USA; and have recorded radio sessions for Stuart Maconie’s Freakzone, Tom Robinson’s show on BBC6 Music, Pete Paphides show for Soho Radio and Tom Cox’s radio show.

As ever, Daylight Music is free, although you’ll have to pay for your tea and cake, and further donations are encouraged. Full up-to-date information is available here.

Tags: A Sweet Niche, abrasion, apocalyptic roars, Arctic Circle (promoter), bassoon music, Black Tambourine, Chloe Herington, Chrome Hoof, Darren Hayman, Daylight Music (event), Dominic Henderson, Feathers, Frank Byng, free events, Gag, Hefner, Improvizone, Jack Hayter, James Gavin, James Hoare, Keir Cooper, Kev Hopper, Knifeworld, listening to women, live concerts, London (England), men and women singing together, music tied in knots, Oliver Sellwood, Pete Astor, Prescott, Rhodri Marsden, Scritti Politti, Snorkel, Stump, Susan Milanovic, TEYR, The Free French, The Keatons, The Left Outsides, The Loft, The Proper Ornaments, The Weather Prophets, Ticklish, Tim Bowness, Tim Doyle, Tommie Black-Roff, Ultimate Painting, V A L V E, Veronica Falls, Withered Hand, Zuno Men

August 2015 – tonight in Brooklyn – Michael Chinworth & The Rudder Group perform Trevor Wilson (with Will Stratton and Jonah Parzen-Johnson)

21 Aug

I’m sorry that this is another last-minute posting, but if you’re reading this in or around New York, there might be some tickets left for this concert.

Michael Chinworth & The Rudder Band + Will Stratton + Jonah Parzen-Johnson (Union Hall, 702 Union Street, Brooklyn, New York, NY, USA, Friday August 21st 2015, 7.30pm) – $10.00

Part of the generation from the liberal arts Bennington College which also fostered Trevor Wilson (Anawan, Vocal Ensemble), Tavo Carbone (Horse’s Mouth) and J.J. Beck, Michael Chinworth maintains that group’s indifference to musical boundaries, keeping up a New York tradition of playing (like latterday Arthur Russells) across genres. Exploring his Bandcamp page throws up assorted experiments in cut’n’paste electro-acoustic collages and vocalese plus assorted various college-classical chamber pieces in various contemporary Romantic, minimalist or post-Ligeti forms. On this occasion, he’s following his well-established alternative pop side, performing his own lustrously tuneful take on a Trevor Wilson song cycle – 2013’s ‘Rudder Songs’ – which he’s due to release on album the following day.

‘Rudder Songs’ is in keeping with much of Trevor’s work – simultaneously vague and pointed, obscure and lovely, and often subtly provocative. While never being so obvious as to make a straightforward point, it suggests a unsettled fluidity of sexual identity and choices of vision; providing off-kilter, stream-of-consciousness hymns to unorthodox friendships and the possibilities of city life that nonetheless wilfully and regularly flees to open countryside or the solitary road life. Familiar elements from folk, torch song, soul jazz and psychedelia float alongside each other, recombining at odd intoxicated angles; or explode from straightforward beginnings into thought patterns too complicated for a simple frame to contain.

If you want to compare the Chinworth versions to the Wilson originals (sung and recorded solo at Meredith Monk’s piano, no less) you can find the latter above. Michael’s smooth, Wurlitzer-tickled blue-eyed soul approach might initially seem miles away from Trevor’s wayward and uninhibited performances and whisper-to-caterwaul vocalising (in some respects, it’s like Frank Ocean covering Kevin Coyne or John Cale at their most frothing). Still, if you’re familiar with Michael’s work on Trevor’s songs elsewhere, both the link and the sympathy are clearly intact; and it’s clear that their work together in Anawan (in which both Michael’s voice and Wurlitzer play a key role) paves a way towards Michael’s slant on the Rudder material. Check out his performance in the video for Anawan’s ‘Breaded Me’, below, and then compare it to his versions of a pair of Rudder Songs underneath (one exploring an unusual fissile threesome, the other obliquely fishing in a friend’s thoughts).

In addition to Michael the Rudder Band lineup includes guitar visionary Ben Seretan and fellow Benningtonians J.J. Beck and Matt Scott, plus Trevor Wilson himself on additional keyboards. Re the collaboration, Trevor comments “In many more ways than one, this is a repeat of a much-admired album from 1970, ‘Nilsson Sings Newman’. Harry Nilsson, inspired by the odd, rude composition style of Randy Newman, wanted to take the songs and re-imagine them with his signature vocal layering and general studio beautifying. These two songwriters, equal but so different in their contribution to musical history, united to create this album together without ego, without agenda. (Maybe. I hope.) As I will do (at the concert), Newman plays and sings on Nilsson’s adaptation of his own songs… with another bandleader.

“I think everyone should have the opportunity to do this with their form of expression. Not to get too 3rd-grade-after-school-assignment-y, but seriously, try it out. Ask one of your contemporaries, friends, colleagues if you can ‘cover’ their thing, and have them sit in the passenger seat somewhere during the process. Or the other way around. You’ll both learn a thousand things. Michael has a rare gift of seeing music on its own terms- terms that don’t exist within human realities- and he has certainly shown me things about my compositions that has changed my whole process. The band is sounding great, and I am so happy to be a part of it.”

There are two support acts. Folk songwriter Will Stratton will be playing songs drawn from his five full-length albums; while Jonah Parzen-Johnson (frequently seen as part of New York afrobeat ensemble Zongo Junction) will be bringing his lo-fi music for solo circular-breathing saxophone and analogue synthesizer, described as follows – “Imagine the raw energy of an Appalachian Folk choir, tempered by a lofi, minimal aesthetic inspired by the music of Bill Callahan… (Jonah) has meticulously constructed a world of warm memories remembered in a cold present, as he melds the evocative nature of folk music with the chilling power of experimentalism.” Judge for yourselves at the gig, or via the previews below.

Up-to-date information and tickets for the gig are available here – and if you can’t make it, you can view in on video stream here.

Tags: Anawan, Ben Seretan, Bennington College alumni, Harry Nilsson, J.J. Beck, Jonah Parzen-Johnson, Matt Scott, Michael Chinworth, New York City (USA), Pat Hull., Randy Newman, Trevor Wilson, Will Stratton, Zongo Junction

August/September 2015 – an American summer/fall tour for The Collection and Lowland Hum

20 Aug

the Collection tune up…

Today the Collection begin a two-month American tour. Veering mostly around the South, the Midwest, the West Coast and the Pacific North-Western states, it takes in (bar a mid-tour rendezvous with the Viper Room in Los Angeles) the kind of intimate, audience-engaging venues I’d love to discover on an American road trip of my own – assorted music bars, small theatres, coffee shops. This is in keeping with the band’s stated ethos – based in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Collection describe themselves less as a band and more of “a community of artists, nurses, farmers, students, and everyone in between doing life together.” According to bandleader David Wimbish, “we don’t want fans, we want family. It’s incredible to us that people would even listen to our music, and it’s so much more important for us to connect with those people than to figure out how to get fans.”

The second Collection album, ‘Ars Moriendi’, was released last summer but only crossed my ears recently via a brief and now-expired Noisetrade offer (you can still go there and pick up a free sampler if you want to). I love discovering inspiring records by accident, and ‘Ars Moriendi’ is one of the more emotionally commanding works I’ve heard for a good while. Swelling up from a core of seven people to as many as twenty-five on record, the Collection dip into rock, folk, gospel, barndance, bluegrass, soul and mariachi. Adding banjo, brass, strings, reeds, autoharps, and didgeridoos to the usual pianos, guitar and drums results in a heady grand-medicine-show of a sound.

This in itself isn’t new. There are plenty of expansive Americana folk-rock ensembles peppered with diverse instrumentation; and (either by coincidence, intent or just common feeling) the Collection echo strains of music which we’ve already heard via The Polyphonic Spree, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens and Guillemots; not to mention The Band and Mercury Rev, or the reedy, distracted, keening tones David shares with Damien Rice. What gives them the Collection their particular edge is the driving verve and commitment with which they play. Despite their hollering utopian tendencies of their singalongs they’re unconcerned with party robes or cute, culty psychedelic trappings. Instead, their music is imbued with communitarian impulses and a fumbling, ever-hopeful sense of personal connections.

Integral to this is the band’s Christianity. Almost every one of David Wimbish’s songs is studded and seeded with Biblical allusions and resonances, yet he’s never rendered complacent and conformist by his faith. Rather, he’s caught up in it – a tender-hearted radical questioning and examining his beliefs, challenging his own conscience and the orthodoxy, compelled to decry the church’s seams of bigotry and exceptionalism whenever he stumbles over them. At the same time, David is clearly fascinated by the church’s central mystery of life renewed, setting it (with some pain and trepidation) against the deaths of friends and family that cut grief-lines into his songs and filter both darkness and weight into the Collection’s music. Like me, you don’t have to actually be a believer to be moved by David’s explorations and exhortations as he travels from exuberance to despair, from buoyant encouragement to audible tear-swallowing. After all, the best Christian music is always a little wracked and cracked: something in which their faith reveals people to themselves, and perhaps a little more of their humanity to others.

On this tour, the Collection will be accompanied by two of their Greensboro compatriots – husband-and-wife duo Daniel and Lauren Goans, a.k.a. Lowland Hum. Fond of the intimacy of house concerts, they ought to make a good foil and complement to the Collection’s inclusive spirit. Hopefully Daniel and Lauren will get the chance to carry out their usual immersive, synaesthesic gig experience – staging and dressing the playing environment with props and essential oil burners, passing out hand-bound lyric books to their audience, and generally eliding the boundaries between the many ways a person can experience a concert.

Lowland Hum get immersed (photo by Griffin Hart Davis)

Even if not, there’s still the music from their eponymous debut album (released in April this year) to consider. ‘Lowland Hum’ is an enthrallingly American art-pop record in which country-duo harmonies and Atlantic folk guitar intertwines with multi-instrumental Portishead/Mandalay trip hop, and in which songs flick unsettlingly between sports arena scale and backyard porch intimacy in the space of a breath. Lyrical preoccupations (fragmented but lucid) span ageing, the shifting internal perspective of growing and growth, or suburban disassociations; or cover the life of Toulouse-Lautrec in ten short scattered lines.

Sharing voices, instrumentation and production between them, Lauren and Dan sometimes seem to phase in and out of each other (as on Rolling And Rolling, a touching first-person meditation on a boy’s budding adolescence on which both singers take turns to voice his slipping thoughts). Similarly, they move through genres like purposeful ghosts. A song like Jack Of Hearts (a study of the dangers of power and charisma) can begin as a country cautionary, fray into psychedelic folk, clatters its sticks into complications and end up as a layered ambient march.

On a couple of dates the Collection and Lowland Hum will be joined by other performers. In Birmingham, Alabama, they’ll be playing with folk-rock trio War Jacket (who describe themselves as both warm and haunted, like their hometown); in San Francisco by Gothic-tinged chamber-pop crooner (and Stephen Merritt collaborator) Jon DeRosa; and in Greely, Colorado by both the Denver art-and-music collective Giants & Pilgrims and the outlaw-country cowpunker Matt Davis.

Full tour dates below:

Ashland Coffee and Tea, 100 North Railroad Avenue, Ashland, Virginia, USA, Thursday 20th August 2015
Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E Main St, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, Friday 21st August 2015
Hanesbrands Theater @ Milton Rhodes Centre for the Arts, 251 Spruce Street North, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, Saturday 22nd August 2015
Local 506, 506 West Franklin St, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA, Sunday 23rd August 2015
The Pour House, 1977 Maybank Highway, Charleston, South Carolina, USA, Monday 24th August 2015
The Camp House, 832 Georgia Avenue, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, Wednesday 26th August 2015
Eddie’s Attic, 515 North McDonough Street, Decatur, Georgia, USA, Thursday 27th August 2015
The Nick, 2514 10th Avenue South, Birmingham, Alabama, USA,
Friday 28th August 2015 (supported by War Jacket)
The Beatnik, 615 Toulouse Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, Saturday 29th August 2015
Common Grounds, 1123 South 8th Street, Waco, Texas, USA, Sunday 30th August 2015
(House Show), 407 Mignon Lane, Houston, Texas, USA, Monday 31st August 2015 (ticketed – apply via link)
Mohawk, 912 Red River Street, Austin, Texas, USA, Wednesday 2nd September 2015
The Viper Room, 8852 West Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA, Sunday 6th September 2015
Hotel Utah, 500 4th Street, San Francisco, California, USA, Wednesday 9th September 2015 (supported by Jon DeRosa)
Fremont Abbey, 4272 Fremont Avenue North, Seattle, Washington, USA, Friday 11th September 2015
Kelly’s Olympian, 426 SW Washington Street, Portland, Oregon, USA, Sunday 13th September 2015
Old Nick’s Pub , 211 Washington Street, Eugene, Oregon, USA, Tuesday 15th September 2015
Reef, 105 South 6th Street, Boise, Idaho, USA, Thursday 17th September 2015
The Dawg Pound, 3550 South State Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Saturday 19th September 2015
Moxi Theatre, 802 9th Street, Greeley, Colorado, USA, Monday 21st September 2015 (supported by Giants & Pilgrims, Matt Davis)
Downtown Artery, 252 Linden Street, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA, Tuesday 22nd September 2015
Hi-Dive, 7 South Broadway, Denver, Colorado, USA, Wednesday 23rd September 2015
The Tank Room, 1813 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri, USA, Thursday 24th September 2015

Woven in and out of this tour, Lowland Hum will be playing some separate headlining dates of their own (shared, on one North Carolinan occasion, by church-and-country songwriter Josiah Early).

Horizon Records, 2-A West Stone Avenue, Greenville, South Carolina, USA, Tuesday 25th August 2015
Westmont College, 955 La Paz Road, Santa Barbara, California, Saturday 5th September 2015
Old Orchard Church, 640 Amelia Avenue, Webster Groves, St Louis, Missouri, USA, Saturday 26th September 2015
The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Avenue, Asheville, North Carolina, USA, Sunday 25th October 2015 (supported by Josiah Early)

Tags: Birmingham (Alabama - USA), Denver (Colorado - USA), Giants & Pilgrims, Greenboro (North Carolina - USA), intriguingly mixed bags, Jon DeRosa, Josiah Early, Linville (Virginia - USA), live concerts, Los Angeles (USA), Louisville (Kentucky - USA), Lowland Hum, Matt Davis, men and women singing together, The Collection, War Jacket

August/November 2015 – upcoming gigs – Lite, Knifeworld and Axes in London, August 19th; Vennart in Leicester and Colchester, August 19th & 20th; Vennart, Knifeworld and Cleft UK tour in November

13 Aug

My part of London’s being gradually gentrified. I’m noting the warning signs – the launderettes being replaced by redundant fresh-fruit emporiums, estate agents proliferating even as the street drinkers melt away; the rough-and-ready Irish pub that’s suddenly been boarded up and now waits to became a sandwich outlet. Even the looming black tower block which dominates the district and which once housed the capital’s most brutal social security offices (leading to it being roundly cursed in song by New Model Army) is being stripped down to white bone and built up into luxury homes, yesterday’s painful memories now smothered under today’s property bubble.

Waiting for the next rent rise – the one which might well bump me out of the neighbourhood in search of new roots – I guess that I can console myself with what seems to be a coincidental side effect. The neighbourhood’s also hosting more interesting gigs, with an influx of art rock, post-progressive and psychedelic evenings nudging aside the garage bands. If this is gentrification, I can at least live with that side of it: Tim Bowness playing down the road at the end of the month, and fresh bursts of tone-colour lighting up Tufnell Park junction on a regular basis. Which leads me to the following…

LITE + Knifeworld + Axes (Pink Mist @ The Dome, 2a Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park, London, NW5 1HL UK, Wednesday 19th August 2015, 7.00pm) – £12.00

On August 19th Tokyo instrumental math heroes LITE return to London for a special one-off show at The Dome. A mainstay in the Japanese charts and something of an institution in their homeland, LITE released ‘Approaches 4‘ – six new live recordings including a new track called Balloon – for free download on May 19th. They’ll be joined by shape-shifting psych impresarios Knifeworld. Led by former Monsoon Bassoon/Cardiacs man Kavus Torabi, the London based octet have been hailed by everyone from ‘The Guardian’ to ‘Rock Sound’ to ‘The Line Of Best Fit’ to ‘Drowned In Sound’ and back again. And then there’s Axes, who in ‘Glory’ released one of the best math rock records of the last ten years. All three bands are on the same bill, for £12, which is pretty damned amazing.

Please note that there are age restrictions on this gig – there’s a lower age limit of fourteen, and under-sixteens must be accompanied by an adult, so trainee adolescent psychonauts should take note (or take a fake ID). Up-to-date information on the gig is available here, while tickets are available here.

(UPDATE – whoops. I only posted this twelve hours ago, and suddenly the whole gig has been transferred to The Lexington instead – up-to-date and ongoing details here – though hopefully not because some moneyed flashmob’s now opening a craft brewery on the site of the luckless Dome…)

More British psychedelic/post-progressive rock is out on the road at the same time, since former Oceansize and current British Theatre frontman Mike Vennart (also known for putting extra guitar flail into the live lineup of Biffy Clyro) is playing a couple of warm-up gigs for his appearance at the ArcTanGent Festival with music from his solo album ‘The Demon Joke’. ArcTangent has nearly sold out now (though you might still be able to grab one of the last tickets if you head over to the website now) but I’m plugging the other gigs now for the benefit of anyone within running distance.

The Vennart live band features two other former Oceansizers (Richard “Gambler” Ingram and Steve DuRose) plus drummer Denzel Pearson. Support comes, variously, from Mike and Gambler themselves (as British Theatre, who’ve just released their first new music in three years – a free download single called ‘Cross The Swords‘ which I’ll be reviewing shortly), Colchester alt.rock songwriter Christie Isaac and assorted last-minute Leicestrians (ask the promoter).

Vennart + British Theatre + guests (Robot Needs Home @ Firebug Bar, 25 Millstone Lane, Leicester, UK, Wednesday 19th August 2015 – 7:00pm) £10 – info and tickets here.

Vennart + Christie Isaac (Colchester Arts Centre, Church Street, Colchester, Essex, CO1 1NF, UK, Thursday 20th August 2015 – 7.30pm) £11 – info and tickets here.

You could also set aside some time in the autumn to catch Vennart’s week-long British tour in November, apparently the last of their gigs for some time (after this, Mike and Gambler will immerse themselves in recording a full album as British Theatre). Knifeworld will return as support on this tour, with the third act on the bill being Mancunian “turbo-prog” duo Cleft who encourage you to think of them as “a machine that compresses fourteen minute songs down to three minutes.”

Bodega Social Club, 23 Pelham Street, Nottingham. NG1 2ED, UK, Monday 23rd November 2015
Bush Hall, 310 Uxbridge Rd, London, W12 7LJ, UK, Tuesday 24th November 2015
The Deaf Institute, 135 Grosvenor Street, Manchester, M1 7HE, Wednesday 25th November 2015
King Tut’s, 272a St Vincent St, Glasgow G2 5RL, UK, Thursday 26th November 2015
The Hop, 19 Bank Street, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF1 1EH, UK, Friday 27th November 2015

A couple of tastes of Knifeworld and Cleft follow. If I’m going to be fiddling while Rome burns, I can’t imagine better company.

Tags: Axes, Biffy Clyro, British Theatre, Cleft, Colchester (England), Glasgow (Scotland), Kavus Torabi, Knifeworld, Leicester (England), Lite, live concerts, London (England), Manchester (England), Mike Vennart, New Model Army, Nottingham (England), Oceansize, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, Tim Bowness, Tokyo (Japan), Vennart, Wakefield (England), wretched self-justification

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Categories 2015, alternative rock, cross-cultural music, experimental/avant-garde rock, hard rock, heavy metal, instrumental music, math rock, post-progressive rock, previews, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, singer-songwriter

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Misfit City

November 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Daylight Music & WIAIWYA’s James Bond special; classical fusion saxtronica with Alistair Penman; tech metal at the Facemelter with Krysthla, Colours to Shame and Zephyr

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – gamelan/dance fusion with My Tricksy Spirit, Wax Wings and Segara Madu; Nordic pop at Ja Ja Ja (Kill J, Loveless and Maasai); anarchistwood’s Samhain/NYE party (with Rude Mechanicals, Jane Ruby and more)

October/November 2015 – upcoming London gigs – intercontinental psych & noise with Baba Yaga (Bitchin’ Bajas, Tomaga and Demian Castellanos, Acid Mothers Temple and Zeni Geva); and more LUME jazz with Tom Taylor/Rob Luft and Cath Roberts/Seth Bennett/Andrew Lisle

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Nonclassical rework Bohuslav Martinů; Iskra String Quartet, Minotaur Shock, Isobel Waller-Bridge and Angus Macrae meet at Daylight Music; acoustic guitar shows for Pierre Bensusan

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Workin’ Man Noise Unit, Casual Nun and Knifedoutofexistence bawl for Baba Yaga; an acoustic guitar show for Jon Gomm and Matt Stevens; Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufield (plus Klavikon) rumble the Dome

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs (12th to 18th) – new classical music with Darragh Morgan & Mary Dullea; William D. Drake, Bill Pritchard and Bill Botting make a trio of songwriting Bills for Daylight Music; Laura Moody and a host of others play at Match&Fuse

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs (12th to 18th) – Baba Yaga’s Hut – an art rock blitz with Sax Ruins and Richard Pinhas; Sex Swing, Early Mammal and Casual Sect make a racket

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – acoustic/alt.country at Daylight Music (Applewood Road, Holly Macve, Arborist) and the Fidelio Trio with Beethoven, Ravel and a Benjamin Dwyer premiere

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – fringe jazz (The Geordie Approach and A Sweet Niche) and noise-rock (Hey Colossus, Lower Slaughter and Kogumaza)

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – electro-industrial at Corsica Studios (Necro Deathmort, DeadFader and Cementimental), and intercontinental at Café Oto (Maurice Louca, John Bence and Sam Shalabi)

October 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Arch Garrison & Lisa Doscher, October 3rd

September 2015 to January 2016 various – upcoming gigs – Theo Travis Double Talk tour, Death & Vanilla/LUST in London

September 2015 – upcoming gigs – Gong’s Dave Sturt and friends travel the world from Derbyshire on the 23rd; London gets more Daylight Music eclectica plus a Blacklisters/Joeyfat/Himself jabber-rock summit on the 26th

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – experimental pop in Brixton on the 9th, folk and darkwave in Bethnal Green on the 11th, a Daylight Music melange and a Tim Smith garage-fizz fundraiser on the 19th

October 2015 – upcoming gigs – Jonas Hellborg & Steve Lawson in Birmingham, London & Leeds; Tim Bowness, Peter Chilvers, David Rhodes, Theo Travis quartet gig in Cardiff

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Darkroom gently mess with our minds at Hubbub Late Spectacular, Friday 4th September

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Wednesday 3rd to Friday 5th: orchestral-pop croons in Kings Cross, psychedelic grandeur in Pentonville, and a post-metal mash-up in Camden Town versus a grand Curved Air event in Fulham

September 2015 – upcoming London gigs – the K-Music Festival – a month’s worth of Korean music

November 2015 – upcoming gigs – Mutations Festival in Brighton, 28th & 29th November 2015

August 2015 – upcoming London gigs – Prescott, A Sweet Niche and V A L V E @ The Harrison, August 26th; the welcome return of Daylight Music (with Pete Astor, TEYR and The Left Outsides), August 29th

August 2015 – tonight in Brooklyn – Michael Chinworth & The Rudder Group perform Trevor Wilson (with Will Stratton and Jonah Parzen-Johnson)

August/September 2015 – an American summer/fall tour for The Collection and Lowland Hum

August/November 2015 – upcoming gigs – Lite, Knifeworld and Axes in London, August 19th; Vennart in Leicester and Colchester, August 19th & 20th; Vennart, Knifeworld and Cleft UK tour in November

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