Tre Voci presents:
‘Auro’ (with Tre Voci + Kit Downes + Southbank Gamelan Players + Nonclassical DJ set) Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Wednesday 7th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Classical/experimental cello trio Tre Voci (who, back in December, were integrating and sparring with an Iranian hand-drummer and a Norwegian soprano, continue their tradition of cross-pollinating musical events by collaborating with jazz pianist/organist Kit Downes and four players from London-based Indonesian percussion ensemble the Southbank Gamelan Players at a pre-launch event for their upcoming EP ‘Auro’ (released on 25th February).
The gig’s being done in cahoots with Nonclassical, who are releasing the EP, performing (via head honcho Gabriel Prokofiev) a DJ set embracing and challenging western classical traditions, and hosting this interview in which Tre Voci’s Torun Stavseng and Gregor Riddell expound on the EP and on what they’re hoping to achieve with the concert. The interview reveals that not only will there be a extra guest appearance from cellist and singer Laura Moody, but that in an attempt to emphasise “the transcendental qualities of Gamelan music (which) lend (themselves) well to an innovative use of light and space” they’ll attempt to use the Chapel’s architecture to transport the audience into a “kaleidoscopic, illusory realm playing with their sense of space, time, light and sound. We will position the Gamelan players on the main stage whilst Kit will be hidden behind the organ and the cellos symmetrically dispersed in the corners of the chapel, with the aim to create an interplay with the sound reflections against the stone walls.”
The collective piece being performed and premiered here is ‘To Shadow’, composed by Bryn Harrison, which he describes as consisting of “rising lines in which the parts ghost each other… An idea I’ve been working with in this piece and other recent projects has been to increase the levels of repetition as the piece continues to create the feeling of being inside the music. I like to resist change when I working, trying to think into an idea rather than out of or away from it. There’s a different kind of musical development at play, where the act of listening changes rather than from specifically what happens in the music. I’m interested to see how this work with this particular combination of instruments and with the freer elements that Kit brings to the piece.”
Kit’s own recent ‘Obsidian’ album featured him playing various structured improvisations on a variety of church organ, so it looks as if the Chapel’s resident Willis organ will also be taking a jazz hammering. In addition, Kit has written a quartet piece for the ‘Auro’ EP (‘The Cult of John Frum’) which features himself on Hammond organ and will be performed at the concert. Depending on various sources, the concert will also feature fifteenth century music rearranged for cello trio (probably the Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem pieces featured on ‘Auro’), various group improvisations and a performance of John Cage’s ‘The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs’.
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Psappha presents:
‘Caught In Treetops’
St Michael’s Church, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 5DG, England
Thursday 15th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Mancunian classical ensemble Psappha are performing a showcase of emerging composers at a mid-month concert in their main Manchester home.
‘Caught In Treetops’ is centred around Charlotte Bray’s piece of the same title, a work for solo violin and ensemble which responds to two contrasting lunar poems (“A Match with the Moon” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and “The Moon Sails Out” by Federico García Lorca). For this concert, it will features guest appearances by violinist Benedict Holland and conductor Mark Heron. Here’s an earlier performance of the piece by Neue Musik and Wibert Aerts:
The concert also showcases a selection of pieces from Psappha’s own emerging composer schemes. Robert Reid Allan‘s ‘The Palace Of Light’ is a sympathetic piano tribute to a notorious Glasgow cottaging location, musically characterised by tinkling water-dripping notes and an apprehensive, fractured romanticism, while Anna Clyne’s ‘Paintbox’ is “an immersive soundscape which combines recorded voice, breathing and other sound loops with a sonorous cello line” exploring “the life-changing effects of the atomic bomb.”James Williamson‘s ‘Fault-Klang’ equates extended clarinet techniques with geologic upheaval; Michael Cryne‘s flute-and-pedal-electronics piece ‘In Cloud Light’ takes its inspiration from the kinetic wind sculptures of American artist Anthony Howe. Will Frampton‘s ‘The Greening Variations’ is a violin/cello/piano trio in which each successive variation refreshes – or “greens” the previous one on an instrument-by-instrument journey “commencing…in an extreme register before narrating its way to a climatic melody accompanied by distinctive trill figures.” Written for mixed-percussion soloist, Lucy Armstrong‘s ‘Space Adventure’ works from a pulp science fiction scenario of hapless human explorers being obliterated by merciless aliens. Inspired by “an experience of being trapped in a place that is usually bustling with life, but is now deserted”, Bethan Morgan-Williams‘s ‘In Kenopsia’ is a unsettling, deceptive duet between a trombonist and a violinist (the first a live performer, the second only a strange mnemonic presence on electronic samples pieced together, warped and reshaped as a phantom accompanist).
Bar the Clyne, all of these pieces are already well-established in the Psappha repertoire, and you can watch and listen to previous performance of them below. In addition, if you turn up with your ticket at 6.40pm before the concert, there’ll be a “Demystifying New Music” talk introducing you to the composers and expanding upon their ideas.
Tomorrow, London’s Union Chapel begins a celebration of a number of things (its performance acoustic, its appeal to a diverse body of musicians and audiences, its innovative cultural spirit, and not least its grand 1877 pipe organ) via the ‘Organ Reframed’ mini-festival. A three-day four-concert occasion, it “release(s the organ) from its traditional roots with a varied programme of film, intimate solo sets, ensemble improvisations and large scale commissions. This festival of experimental music will challenge perceptions and show this extraordinary instrument in a new light.”
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Organ Reframed: James McVinnie/Irene Buckley/Robert Ames/Laura Moody perform new live score for ‘Nosferatu’ Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Friday 7th October 2016, 7.00pm – information
Her latest such commission is for ‘Organ Reframed’ – a new score for F. W. Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu (A Symphony of Horror)‘ – “an iconic film of the German expressionist cinema, and one of the most famous of all silent movies (which) continues to haunt — and, indeed, terrify — modern audiences with the unshakable power of its images. By teasing a host of occult atmospherics out of dilapidated set-pieces and innocuous real-world locations alike, Murnau captured on celluloid the deeply-rooted elements of a waking nightmare, and launched the signature ‘Murnau-style’ that would change cinema history forever.”
The film will be screened with a live performance of the score carried out by a quartet ensemble: leading New Music pipe organist James McVinnie, viola player Robert Ames (co-artistic director and conductor of the LCO), polystylistic cellist Laura Moody (see multiple past ‘Misfit City’ posts for more on her), and Irene herself contributing live electronics. To give you a hint of what it might be like, here’s an excerpt from Irene’s ‘…Joan Of Arc’ score, back in 2012:
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Daylight Music 235: Organ Reframed – Lætitia Sadier + Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch + Kieran Brunt + Angèle David-Guillou + Adrian Crowley + Gill Sandell + Ed Dowie + William D. Drake Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 8th October 2016, 12.00pm free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information
The second concert in the series is a free (or donation-based) lunchtime show run in conjunction with Union Chapel regulars Daylight Music, offering “a stripped-down approach… eight sets of artists and accompanists across different genres and styles. These musicians, singers and composers — who are at various stages of their careers — will explore the very physical relationship between voice and pipes: in many cases, for the first time.”
Performers will include three Franco-London women who specialise in avant-pop/dream-pop/classical crossovers of one kind or another – Stereolab/Monade’s Lætitia Sadier (who, four days earlier, will have been part of Miles Cooper Seaton’s ‘Transient Music’ ensemble at Café Oto), Angèle David-Guillou (of Klima and Piano Magic), and electro-acoustic film soundtracker Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. Also involved is frequent Daylight guester Ed Dowie (usually a purveyor of genteel avant-parlour-pop, having passed through Brothers in Sound, Redarthur and The Paper Cinema).
The Daylighters specialise in late and interstitial additions to already interesting bills. This concert is no exception, with a bumper set of extra guests signing up and recently being unveiled. Joining in alongside the people I’ve already mentioned are Irish singer-songwriter Adrian Crowley (who specializes in what might be described as a baroque-minimal pop style), singer Kieran Brunt (who divides time between classical choral and solo projects and his pop band Strange Boy), multi-instrumental folk singer Gill Sandell (previously of Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo) and singer-songwriter/general keyboard magician William D. Drake (once a Cardiac, now a baroque-pop solo artist with his own cross-era style – as with Laura Moody, see plenty of previous posts…).
Given the varied pop, folk, rock and classical stylings involved (and some of the signature tones of the musicians involved) it’s not clear whether there are going to be specific collaborations or mashups involved, or whether everyone’s playing solo/bringing their own backup. It’s also unclear as to whether the pop culture/pop music side of things will be honoured by Farfisa, Hammond or even Lowrey organs onstage to share musical space with the grand pipe organ; although given the emphasis on “the very physical relationship between voice and pipes”, I’m guessing perhaps not. (NOTE – since I posted that, I’ve found out that Angèle David-Guillou will be playing a new organ-and-voiceloops composition called ‘Too Much Violence’; that there will be at least one duet from Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch and Kieran Brunt; that Ed Dowie has a couple of covers and one new piece; and that the Daylighters are scouring the Twittersphere looking for a last-minute pump organist. Knowing them, they’ll find one…)
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Organ Reframed: ‘Spire’ featuring Charles Matthews + Fennesz + Philip Jeck + Simon Scott + Claire M. Singer + John Beaumont + The Eternal Chord Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 8th October 2016, 6.00pm – information
Spire is an ongoing concert series for organ and electronics, curated by Mike Harding (creative producer of the Touch organisation (which covers musician promotions, licensing, mentoring and everything but the business of being a record company association) and by dedicated organist and keyboardist Charles Matthews (one of those exemplary musicians whose work spans everything from church services and teaching to a globetrotting concert schedule and advanced curatorship). Now into its twelfth year, and with sixteen concerts plus four CD recordings behind it, Spire returns to Union Chapel to link up with ‘Organ Reframed’.
Music played at previous Spire events has included the ancient, salvaged fourteenth-century organ manuscript The Robertsbridge Codex (the oldest surving keyboard score in the world) and twentieth-century pieces such as ‘In Nomine Lucis’ (by the pioneering and mystic single-pitch/multiple-approach composer Giacinto Scelsi), Henryk Gorécki’s ‘Kantata’, Liana Alexandra’s ‘Consonances III’ and André Jolivet’s ‘Hymne à l’Universe’. The series has also premiered new works by resident Spire composer Marcus Davidson (such as ‘Opposites Attract’ and ‘Standing Wave’), as well as improvisations and collaborations by its associated musicians.
Spire also takes into account the architectural qualities of the church organ: how our perception and experience of it is coloured by its monolithic size, volume and presence compared to other instruments. As Mike and Charles put it, “the organ has the greatest frequency range of any acoustic instrument, but this is rarely exploited; the unique sound of the mechanical organ has often been limited and controlled and Spire aims to liberate it from its history without denying that history… combining organ works ancient and modern (while) other performers use the organ and organ works as a basis for their own compositions, using piano, voice, record players, samplers and other electronic devices.”
Past Spire performers have included laptop-and-guitar noisescaper Fennesz and turntablist/electronicist Philip Jeck, both of whom are joining Charles Matthews for performances this time round. Also joining in are newer Spire associates – Simon Scott (Slowdive drummer, multi-instrumentalist, sound ecologist and deep listener) and John Beaumont (whose life within Anglican church and choral music has seen him rise from treble chorister at Wakefield to tenor songman at York Minster and continuing work in London’s great cathedrals and abbeys, alongside his current work as a “story tenor” mingling classical repertoire with a bardic sensibility). Also joining in is Union Chapel’s organ director and artistic director of ‘Organ Reframed’, Claire M. Singer – a musician, composer and cross-media artist whose work extends from composition to installation via live performance, mostly based around organ, cello and electronics.
Among other pieces, the programme will feature a performance of Spire mainstay ‘The Eternal Chord‘, a Mike Harding-originated conceptual and improvised organ piece which “can take anything from eight minutes to eternity” and which is open to any number of players from a duo upwards. There have been eleven iterations of the piece so far, of which two can be heard below, including one from last year at the Union Chapel.
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Organ Reframed: Five new commissions for James McVinnie & the London Contemporary Orchestra Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Sunday 9th October 2016, 6.30pm – information
Having already helped to open the festival (via their contribution to the ‘Nosferatu’ live score), James McVinnie and Robert Ames return for the final concert in which James joins forces with the London Contemporary Orchestra (conducted/facilitated by Robert) to premiere five new contemporary classical or classical fusion works.
There’s not much information on the new piece by Mark Fell although it’s likely that it’ll be droning, mathematical and algorithmic (in keeping with his existing work, which is infused with electronica and club music ideas and further informed by his extension into the worlds of moving image, dance, text and son-et-lumiere). Similarly, all I can tell you about acoustic/electronic/theatrical composer Alex Groves‘ piece is that it’s called ‘On Colour’ and is six minutes long. Some pointers towards what to expect might come from Alex’s previous piece ‘Patience’ (for viola da gamba and organ), premièred as part of the Daylight Music series at the Union Chapel back in December 2014. (There’s some footage of that show below. I’m hoping that it’s Alex’s piece…)
There’s no doubt that one composer who’ll have no problems filling the Chapel with grand sound is Craig Armstrong, whose music has been well known to a popular audience since the 1990s thanks to his use of luscious, near-decadent massed strings and club beats (as well as his work on hefty-selling records by Massive Attack. Madonna and U2 plus film soundtracks including ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’, ‘Plunkett & Macleane’ and Baz Luhrman’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’).
Almost at the other end of the spectrum is collagist-composer, cultural commentator and musical wit Caroline Haines, who records (as Chaines) for the small Berlin arts label Slip Imprint and has put out a series of restless, splice-styled, information-packed music packages in which everything from sound sources to manufacturing materials has an integral significance. When she chooses to be, Catherine is also a spirited piss-taker, using her existing methods of collagery and radio broadcast (up to and including the comedy sketch show). For evidence, see ‘WUB’, her quick and merciless takedown of pretentious, dishonest conservatoire slummers who parasitize other more media-friendly musical forms without comprehension, respect or indeed much genuine interest.
Dropped hints suggests that Caroline will be performing alongside the orchestra herself: other hints suggest that her contribution is a version of ‘OST‘ (last years’ hallucinogenic audio portrait of the north-east English industrial imprint). I’m guessing that for her second large-scale premiere with LCO (following August’s Curtain Call concert) her restless mind will have come up with something else.
American-born/Berlin-based composer and violist Catherine Lamb has a taste for adding liminal electronics and an interest in “exploring the interaction of elemental tonal material and the variations in presence between shades and beings in a room.” Her approach is inspired by Hindustani classical music and the just intonation system (with added influences from her studies with James Tenney and Michael Pisaro). Catherine’s ‘Organ Reframed’ piece is ‘Cumulus Totalitas’ – possibly a sister piece to ‘Curvo Totalis’, her “meditation on sound” premiered last month in New York by percussion-and-piano quartet Yarn/Wire.
Although the evening’s billed as five pieces, it seems that there’ll be a bonus from the LCO’s recent repertoire in the shape of the thirteen-minute string orchestra piece ‘Between Rain’. Composed by Edmund Finnis (whose work flows from the luminously minimal to frenetically eerie orchestral jousts) this will be being performed for the first time since the LCO premiered it at Imogen Heap’s 2014 Reverb festival at the Roundhouse, although it’s not clear whether Edmund’s tweaked it since then to include an organ part.
At each event, you’ll also be able to hear sound artist Bill Thompson’s installation ‘A Knowing Space’, which “explores the idea of resonance using durations and timings derived from prime numbers as well as the pitches of organ pipes. The installation is played through seven organ pipes, using transducers that vibrate and fill the space.” Here’s an early taste:
You can also catch ongoing discussion about the whole ‘Organ Reframed’ event at the Facebook page…
A couple of interesting (and very different) elisions between music and theatre, plus a solo gig…
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Currently engaged in providing live cello for Jocelyn Pook‘s score to the current Globe Theatre production of ‘Macbeth’, audaciously accomplished cellist and singer-songwriter Laura Moody (see passim) is also doubling down at Waterloo to perform in BAZ Productions‘ performance piece ‘dreamplay’.
BAZ Productions present:
‘dreamplay’ The Vaults Theatre @ The Vaults, Arch 236 Leake Street, London SE1 7NN, England (use the Launcelot Street entrance off Lower Marsh)
Saturday 10th September 2016 to Saturday 1st October 2016 (Tuesday to Saturday 7.30pm; Saturday matinees 3pm; BSL Performance on Saturday 24th September) – information here
A reworking of and response to August Strindberg’s classic proto-expressionist work of the same name (and scripted by BAZ director Sarah Bedi and the performers), the piece features “a mysterious woman (who) arrives on Earth, intent on uncovering the truth about human suffering. Her dream-like quest leads her through shifting landscapes and into contact with a host of disturbing characters as she searches for the ever elusive Door, behind which she is certain the answer lies … Can she discover the unconscious truth and return home?” (Sadly, ‘dreamplay’ is already halfway through its run – if I’d known about it earlier myself I’d have posted about it sooner…)
Direct from Laura: “I appear as a variety of characters, as part of a wonderful cast of five, performing all the music I’ve created for the show live. I also give my acting debut! I’m really delighted that just a few days into opening my music/soundscape for ‘dreamplay’ has been nominated for an Off West End Theatre Award for best sound design.
“Played out in the tunnels underneath Waterloo Station, ‘dreamplay’ is an immersive, challenging piece that casts you, the audience, as the dreamer and leads you through a labyrinth of scenes, images and situations prompting fundamental questions about humanity. I, for example, finished opening night contemplating how exactly I had managed to acquire quite so many inexplicable bruises on my limbs and HP sauce on my bow. Such are the mysteries that await you, and many more…”
Once ‘dreamplay’ is finished, Laura will be performing one of her intermittent London solo gigs – an hour-long song set with no support act – at City University..
City University presents:
Laura Moody
Music Department @ City University, Northampton Square, Finsbury, London, EC1V 0HB, England
Tuesday 11th October 2016, 7.00pm -free event requiring ticket reservations – information here
To whet the appetite for this, here are a couple of videos shot back in June at the Dartington Estate during Laura’s gig there, in which she duets with Adem on a version of her song We Are Waiting (and on Adem’s own Love And Other Planets).
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Earlier in the year, Keir Cooper (who’s previously graced this blog as guitarist and composer for noisy experimental jazz-rockers A Sweet Niche) teamed up with fellow theatremaker and physical performer Rose Biggin to create the performance piece ‘Badass Grammar’, in which Keir’s blistering guitar is paired with Rose’s dynamic pole dancing in an hour-long dialogue of ideas.
Rose and Keir describe ‘Badass Grammar’ as “sexy, smart, witty as houses and obviously featur(ing) big bold dance and electric guitar duets.” A longer description suggests “a theatrical collaboration between a pole dancer and a guitarist, a composition in exploded view. With a mischievous agenda, the performance invites in the mucky subjects of shame, power and privilege. And takes them dancing. Peering down at the nuts and bolts, the muscle and bone. The pole dislocated, the guitar unfretted. Sparkling, witty, savage, fabulous: we draw on the invisible histories of our disciplines and are building a new one. Starting now. Come with us.”
Following its initial performances at The Yard, ‘Badass Grammar’ is being revived for Camden People’s Theatre as part of the annual Calm Down Dear festival of feminist performance.
Calm Down Dear #4 presents:
‘Badass Grammar: A Pole/Guitar Composition in Exploded View’ Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, Euston, London, NW1 2PY, England
Wednesday 5th & Thursday 6th October 2016, 9.00pm – information(presented in a double bill with ‘40 Days Of Rain‘ on the 5th)
Below, there’s a brief and tintinnabulating minute-and-a-half-long excerpt from Keir’s score – spilling, mercurially elusive guitar-noise shapes passing through hard rock distortion and riffing, and refracted as if glancing off the chromed mirrors of the pole podium. Some of the music from this and other theatre work should eventually surface on his proposed ‘Bodies‘ album, which will incorporate Keir’s guitar-and-effects-pedal contributions to collaborations with assorted artists across a variety of live dance and performance disciplines (including “strip punk” and flamenco).
In an expositionary piece written for Bellyflop Magazine back in May (and which you can read in full here) Rose and Kier present and explore some of the implications of their show; not ducking around the “massive inflatable grey elephant that comes tied to every pole” in the form’s inescapable ties to sex work, but raising other questions in response, including “are women to be judged harder if you don’t like their job?… What if I’m actually one of many feminists on the pole? Does that mean I can be listened to yet? Or still spoken for?”
As they state, “we’re making a show. It’s pole dance, which is sometimes sexy, and came from strip clubs. It’s also live electric guitar, which is often a lot of willy-waggling. It’s a show about shame, power and privilege. Let’s see what happens.
“Pole is a very visible arena for tensions around women’s bodies, women’s work, shame, power and privilege. Far from a casual choice – it is impossible not to be political when near this object… When we discuss our performance with folks, somebody will ask if Keir is pole dancing and Rose is playing the guitar. Sometimes this is asked as a joke – when it’s a joke, it’s always asked by a man. But sometimes it’s a genuine artistic question, and as such it’s a valid one.
“The short answer is no, because artistically, we’ve decided it would be pretty boring to watch people doing something they’re terrible at. (For an hour.) But the longer answer is no, because we think it is more interesting to utilise the forms from where we are and examine how it came to be that we got here. And what we will do now…”
I’ll just pinch from one more source to add a bit of extra colour. Here’s Rose’s irreverent, practical list from her ‘Badass Grammar’ article in ‘Standard Issue’ magazine, detailing what she’s learnt from the form…
At short notice, here’s some quick news of a London jazz gig:
Jazz Nursery presents:
Dave Storey Trio + Rob Barron Trio IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 28th July 2016, 7.30pm – information
Pianist Rob Barron specializes in piano-led hard bop in the Wynton Kelly, Cedar Walton and George Shearing tradition. On this occasion, his trio is completed by double bass player Calum Gourlay and drummer Joshua Morrison: while I’ve not got anything by the trio which I can play you, here’s the showreel for Rob’s quartet (featuring himself and Joshua).
The other trio on the bill is headed by dynamic, constantly occupied London drummer Dave Storey, whose busy CV includes work with Ivo Neame, Chris Batchelor, Hannes Riepler and Mike Outram (plus, oddly enough, a stint with symphonic proggers The Enid). He leads the psychedelic-leaning woodwind player James Allsopp (Fraud, Golden Age of Steam) and the nimble young bass guitarist Conor Chaplin through a wide repertoire of jazz from ballads to driven up-tempo pieces, with an emphasis on “interaction, intensity and playfulness”. Here’s a clip of them running their way through Giant Steps.
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Last year I did a fairly exhaustive (and exhausting rundown) of the Manchester Jazz Festival. This year I didn’t (there wasn’t enough time available, and not enough people read the last post to make it worthwhile – this blog seems to work better if I’m writing about smaller events with less existing promotional push behind them). However, I thought I’d mention that a particular ‘Misfit City’ favourite is playing the festival early on Thursday afternoon.
Despite her deft improvising skills, Laura Moody‘s dynamic voice-and-cello songs don’t exactly count as jazz – they’re more of a bridge between folk music, 20th century classical technique and the complex, experimental baroque pop exemplified by other hugely talented women such as Joanna Newsom or Kate Bush. However, her inventiveness, musical excellence and sense of adventure make her a prime fit for the fringes of the festival: a sometimes vigorous, sometimes agonizingly soulful performer. Her MJF appearance is an hour-long set in the open air in the middle of town, which will at least give her the opportunity to shake the chamber out of her chamber pop. (For what it’s worth, Laura’s also playing at Wilderness Festival on Saturday 5th August, but unless you’ve already bought the package deal for that one, you’ll not get to see her, so pull a sickie and head into Manchester this week instead…)
Manchester Jazz Festival presents:
Laura Moody
Hobgoblin Festival Pavilion, Albert Square, Manchester, M2 5DB
Thursday 28th July 2016, 2.30pm – information
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Lastly, here’s me taking a moment to sidestep away from plugging gigs so that I can forward a plea on behalf of the kind of place that puts them on. A great venue, or even just a good one, isn’t necessarily the making of a town or a neighbourhood, but they make profound contributions to the fabric of a place: the sense that there’s life there instead of just grind and torpor (or, in “nicer” neighbourhoods, just a vacuous gentility). There are plenty of potential threats to places like this, many of them stemming from the fact that many of them don’t fit developers’ idea of an economic footprint (and gentrification/profiteering doesn’t only crush arts venues – see the recent righteous ‘Organ’ blast about the predatory-rent-rise-backed eviction of repair shops from the London Fields railway arches) but sometimes it’s just damn bad luck and unfriendly weather.
Arch1, a beacon of arts endeavour and local involvement in the unloved and sidelined London district of Canning Town, fell victim to the latter last month. Thankfully the venue is down rather than out – and here’s someone running a crowdfunder to help it get back up:
“Arch1 is one of the few small independent arts venues left in London and for eight years it has been nurturing new talent in music, comedy, film and theatre. We were saddened to hear that on the 22nd June this year the club was decimated by the floods, forcing this cherished venue to close its doors and depriving London of this champion of independence.
A crowdfunder campaign has been set up to raise the £20,000 needed to completely refurbish and refit Arch1. Please support new talent in the arts by contributing to this appeal, and help save one of London’s most unique and irreplaceable venues. For more information and how to donate, please click here.”
(Update, later in the day)
Ah. Um.
The bad news…
I’m late in picking up on and posting this. The crowdfunder closed on Friday last week. Embarrassing for me, but…
The good news…
They made the funding target. The venue’s been saved. Well, that’s a sparkle in the darkness.
I didn’t catch up with this next tour until a couple of its January dates had gone by, but it’s still worth catching up with the rest of it:
“Yorkston/Thorne/Khan are an experimental group that includes James Yorkston (hailed as one of the most “influential singer/songwriters on the Scottish folk scene”), Suhail Yusuf Khan (award winning sarangi player and classical singer from New Delhi) and Jon Thorne (best known as jazz double bass player with electro outfit Lamb). The trio are currently touring to support their collaborative debut album ‘Everything Sacred’, which was released in mid-January 2016.
This is Scottish-Irish-Indian-English music in the raw – Yorkston’s familiar steel guitar strings pulled, pushed and bent into more unfamiliar acoustic drones, the bass dropping anchors through the floor. Rather than world music per se, this sounds more idiosyncratic, a temporary structure bivouacking by the side of the indie-folk, art music tradition, while its widening horizons extend back to the Sixties heyday of the Incredible String Band, and forward to this singular album’s satellite orbit over the folk music, Indian classical and indie music of today – all these musical ley lines threaded into a new kind of eclectic, domestic setting.
James: “Playing together as Yorkston/Thorne/Khan, we tackle a wide array of different sounds and songs. Alongside pieces of our own, there’s a fair chunk of improvisation, plus covers of Ivor Cutler’s Little Black Buzzer and Lal Waterson’s Song For Thirza. Jon’s jazz background definitely comes to the fore, as does Suhail’s devotional singing and outstanding sarangi playing. I just do my best to keep up…”
Canton St John Music @ St John the Evangelist Church, St John’s Crescent, Canton, Cardiff, CF5 1NX, Wales, Saturday 27th February 2016(with Laura Moody + Toby Hay/Jim Ghedi) – more information
Komedia, 22-23 Westgate Street, Bath, BA1 1EP, England, Saturday 28th February 2016(with Laura Moody) – more information
Exeter Phoenix, Bradninch Place, Gandy Street, Exeter, EX4 3LS, England, Sunday 29th February 2016(with Laura Moody) – more information
Playing support on all of the dates apart from Norwich (and joining in for a few songs in the headlining set) is singer-songwriter and cellist extraordinaire Laura Moody, whose songs sometimes touch on the same areas of kinetic fantasy as Kate Bush, Tori Amos or Joanna Newsom, sometimes dip into the cool small details of a Julia Holter or Anja Garbarek, and sometimes summon up the haunting folk-contralto reveries of Kathleen Ferrier. Just before the tour starts, Laura will be playing her own London solo show, as follows:
Laura: “I’ve seen so many amazing performers at Pizza Express Jazz over the years – Kurt Elling, Ian Shaw, Gwyneth Herbert (and just one jazz/rock gig that I went to in terrible error and possibly may have feigned illness at so I could leave) – so I’m both excited and honoured to have been invited by music journalist and broadcaster Tina Edwards to play my music on that stage. It’s my first truly central London gig for a little while and as well as playing a load of tunes I will also be having an onstage chat with Tina, so you can get to hear some hilarious anecdotes about how some of these songs came about. But most importantly you can listen to a woman hitting herself with her own cello bow while you eat an American Romana with extra mozzarella.”
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In addition, the Sheffield and Cardiff gigs on the Yorkston Thorne Khan tour (21st and 27th February respectively) features extra support by Toby Hay and Jim Ghedi, following their appearance at Daylight Music earlier in the month. These shows, and more, dovetail into a Hay and Ghedi tour over the whole of February and the beginning of March.
From Sheffield and Rhayader respectively, Jim and Toby are young (yet assured and accomplished) masters of both fingerstyle acoustic guitar and the resurgent, omnivorous stylings of folk baroque. Both are seasoned performers and collaborators. During years of travelling, Jim has appeared on bills or in ensembles with James Blackshaw, Richard Dawson, Dead Rat Orchestra, Cam Deas, C Joynes, Stephanie Hladowski, Alasdair Roberts, Alex Nelson’s Death Shanties, The Big Eyes Family Players and Trembling Bells. While less widely travelled than Jim, Toby is rapidly becoming a British folk festival veteran and has taken support slots to Ryley Walker, Songhoy Blues and Marika Hackman.
Playing as a duo, they collectively draw sonic and compositional inspiration from African music (particularly kora music), Bert Jansch, jazz, Indian ragas, ancient Welsh harp music, Eastern European folklore, the Beat writers and John Fahey’s American Primitivism. For more details on how some of this turns out, there’s a ‘Misfit City’ review of Toby’s first EP here, plus a couple of videos below.
One of the main follows up to that Daylight Music appearance is a west Yorkshire show alongside two other formidable local talents:
Toby Hay/Jim Ghedi Duo + Dean McPhee + Saif Mode Fuse Art Space, 5-7 Rawson Place, Bradford, BD1 3QQ, England
Wednesday 17th February 2016 – more information
You’ve already read about Jim and Toby, so here’s the information on the other two performers:
“Dean McPhee is a West Yorkshire-based solo electric guitarist who plays a Fender Telecaster through a valve amp and effects pedals. Dean is a self-taught guitarist and has developed a unique style of playing over years of improvisation and experimentation. His influences include British folk, dub, Krautrock, post-rock, Moroccan trance and modal jazz. “The hallmark of McPhee’s style is a picked bassline and free-ranging variations on melodic ideas via a mesmerising progression of harmonics, cleanly picked notes, full chords and string-bending arabesques.” (‘The Wire’)
Saif Mode is the moniker of Ben Hunter. He improvises with modular synths to create dense sonic landscapes that are unique to each performance “marry(ing) meditative drones and techno improvisations, recalling the utopian dreams of the Atomic Age and the simple piety of the early church… equally at home on bills with improvised analogue electronica and raw black metal…” (Sheffield Anti Fascist Network).
The remaining dates of the Hay & Ghedi tour (including the Daylight Music appearance and their Yorkston Thorn Khan support slots) are below:
JT Soar, 2 Aberdeen St, Nottingham, NG3 1JB, England, Thursday 11th February 2016 – more information
Daylight Music @ Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England, Saturday 13th February 2016(free/pay-what-you-like event with Paperface + Dearbhla Minogue + The Leaf Library) – more information
House show, Leeds, England, Thursday 18th February 2016 – more information
Opus presents Gadabout @ Yellow Arch Studios, 30-26 Burton Road, Sheffield, S3 8BX, England, Sunday 21st February 2016(supporting Yorkston Thorne Khan + Laura Moody) – more information
Canton St John Music @ St John the Evangelist Church, St John’s Crescent, Canton, Cardiff, CF5 1NX, Wales, Saturday 27th February 2016(supporting Yorkston Thorne Khan + Laura Moody) – more information
“Come on a journey inside an old cabinet to discover what forgotten objects remain….Stories unravel to reveal a beautifully vulgar and woeful celebration of the macabre…. Told through live shadow puppetry and music, ‘The Death Curiosities’ is a beautiful and mesmerising story exploring the unquestionable trimmings of death. Live musical accompaniment by Jim Ghedi, Toby Hay and Josh Kelson.”
More gig news shortly, including William D. Drake in Italy and a look at various upcoming classical music events…
Some more concert dates for the current week. If you’re thinking that these have a definite female slant to them, you’re right. I’m indulging my latent X as well as stretching my perspective.
Holly Herndon expanded A/V show (featuring Mat Dryhurst and Colin Self)+ Jam City + Claire Tolan (Barbican & Rockfeedback present Illuminations @ Oval Space,29-32 The Oval, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9DT, UK, Wednesday 4th November 2015, 7:30pm) – £15.00
Having already made a showing at Liverpool and Bristol during October, peripatetic techno-pop/IDM composer Holly Herndon brings her expanded show to London. This is a full multi-media experience including the usual music, visuals and dance elements but with an interactive component that goes far beyond Holly’s onstage collaborations with programmer/life partner Mat Dryhurst and with interpretative dancer/additional singer Colin Self. In particular, Mat’s adaptive and conceptual SAGA software reaches out beyond the stage to work – consensually – with the audience members’ own browser histories and Facebook content; mixing it all into the visuals (and, potentially, the sounds) as a communal mashup, both representational and communicatory.
Intriguing as this factor is, it’s an adjunct to Holly’s music; which remains the core material of the show. Continually glitched, tweaked and deconstructed, her compositions are a cool, complex, thoughtful and exhilarating mixture. They’re informed by post-classical forms, dance techno, and anthemic synth pop; they utilize experimental textures and broad vocal stylings (from standard singing to semi-voluntary sounds) and they bury philosophical queries deep within their tunes. Holly’s soundwork is as immersive as her stagings, full of implied questions and reflections regarding our access to and immersion in technology and how this affects the way in which we think and express ourselves, leaving comet-trails of information, interaction and yearnings.
All of these additional subtexts and pointers are there if you want them, but Holly is first and foremost a communicating musician, and her pieces are as melodious and accessible as they are multi-layered. Drawing on her ongoing music studies (doctorate level at Stanford) , her time as a precocious and enquiring teenager steeped in the heat and fun of the Berlin club scene, and her work with everything from choirs to customised laptop software, they sometimes sound like particularly complicated pop songs, stuttering their way through myriad changes of attention and focus. Sometimes they sound like accelerated dream-state dances; sometimes like madrigals sung during earthquakes (see Unequal, below). At other times, they’re like the chatter of path-switching in a circuit; or like carefully-directed cultural channel-surfings which quick-step deftly back and forth across a breadth of urban art and experience (from grand opera house to downloads in cramped bedsits). Brain food which encourages you to wander.
Also on the bill are Jam City and Claire Tolan, both of whom share Holly’s interest in interactions and in the results of our being embedded within a dense informational culture, although each has their own way of approaching the situation.
Jam City is the alias of dance-electronica producer and deconstructionist Jack Latham. Though Jack’s background in fashion and “corporate espionage” sounds almost too good to be true, as if it’s been dream-tailored for counter-cultural media discussions and for high-end elitist posing, he doesn’t use it that way. As a musician, he’s evolved from collaging various dubstep tropes towards using his work to develop and express questioning, outright political critiques of neoliberal capitalism (such as the Unhappy single, which explores the dulled angst of online porn consumers while juxtaposing it with riot footage). In the process, Jack’s also developed as a performer – backgrounding the laptops and the passive role of the standard electronica performer in order to retake the stage as guitarist and singer, and delivering a new phase of material described as sounding like “a Prince record constructed from cold, chunky industrial sounds”.
Claire Tolan is an artist, programmer, sampler, writer and soundscaper specializing in autonomous sensory meridian r – a psychological process in which carefully-arranged sound and speech – usually a blend of themed, targeted whispers and quiet diegetic noises (scratches, scuffs, intimate room sounds) – triggers euphoric physical and mental reactions in the listener. With sharp wit, Claire links all of this to new developments in programming and acoustic surveillance technologies, exploring the question of how it might be applied: from simple mood enhancements and healing systems through to neurolinguistics and perception and to the potential manipulation and control of people. Her recent Holly Herndon collaboration Lonely At The Top (see below) might give some clues as to her concert performance. A cosseting monologue, coffee-pot dribbles and the close-up noises of small rooms are interspersed with the rubs and slaps of massage, fingernails ticking on keyboards and screens, and increasingly intimate sounds of hand and mouth: the language, desires and end results of relaxation tapes, executive relief, socially-reinforced senses of entitlement and prostitution blend and overlap to sardonic, disturbing effect.
Information and tickets for the concert are here while the Facebook event page is here. At the end of the month, Holly will also be appearing at All Tomorrow’s Parties at Prestatyn.
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There are some similarities between Holly Herndon and Laura Moody – not least an overlap with classical music and a sense of being on the outcrops of songcraft, delving up malleable truths and questions. Yet whereas Holly’s a post-classical theoretician (reconciling her education with her human instincts, and with life outside the college bubble) and works primarily on computer, Laura comes from older and more familiar traditions, and is almost exclusively an acoustic performer. Possessing outstanding talent both as a singer and as a cellist – and able to cover both fields simultaneously, as well as beatboxing and cello-drumming – she pounces into her own music with the terrifying, exhilarating technical skills of a top-drawer classical soloist.
Laura’s songwriting instinct, meanwhile, seem to come from multiple directions at once. Tense twentieth-century string figures (from her earlier years playing avant-garde pieces with the Meredith Monk Ensemble, and her current work with the Elysian Quartet); ancient, eerie folk airs; expressionist opera; P.J. Harvey’s cleaver intensity; the clever, idiosyncratic and individual art pop of a Kate Bush, a Tom Waits or a Bjork. Everything that she delivers sounds immediate, whether it’s the savagely equivocal hormonal take-down of an older man on Creeping Alopecia, the raindrop attenuations of Call This Time Love, or the stormy dissections of love-gone-wrong and betrayal on Turn Away and We Are Waiting.
The live gigs are enthralling wonders: supple switchings between Laura’s own welcoming personality and the performance persona which handles the songs, blurring the line of physicality which separates woman and cello. She’s out on a brief tour now, playing outside London for a few events. Go see for yourselves.
Laura Moody:
The Four Bars, 15 Castle Street, Cardiff, CF10 1BS Wales, UK, Friday 6th November 2015, 8.30pm) – £5.50 –information – tickets
99 Mary Street, Hawk Works, 99 Mary Street, Sheffield, England, UK, Saturday 7th November 2015, 7.30pm) – £4.00-£6.00 – information – tickets
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For many female pop musicians, an increasingly outright or explicit public sexuality is both a marketing point and the prime hook. To an extent, this is also true of Jenny Hval. Many people will have initially heard about her thanks to what seemed to be a head-turningly saucy lyric:“I arrived in town with an electric toothbrush pressed against my clitoris.” Curious (and possibly a little numbed by Rihanna, plus memories of lubricious Prince party-funk), many of us will have followed this expecting a licentious slow jam, only to find something very different – the opening line of a mirror-calm songscape of hovering bells, limpid murmurs and breathed-on acoustic guitars which dealt with the secret worlds of strangers within cities and, in particular, their self-reliance.
A polymath whose methods blur as artfully as her perspectives, Jenny doesn’t write songs so much as drop carefully-charged texts and pointers, and then explore and adorn these recitatives with chantlike melodies and poised minimal instrumental textures, pulling them apart and working in and out of the word-rhythms. Her guitars, keyboards and samplers (as well as her heavy-lashed, light-tongued vocals) work like soft-edged sculpting tools. Her lyrics are the lines of resistance.
For both new listeners and previous converts, sexuality remains a prime Hval hook. It’s what we expect to hear from her, although we’ve quickly learnt to appreciate that she turns the expected approaches on their heads and back-to-front. She revels in the unfixed: in the course of a single song, lovers will pass fluidly from mysterious passion to friendship to absence, and between gender, ages, species or state. Even when singing of cupping her own cunt (while cupping the blunt, unadorned and troublesome word itself, delivered throughout her songbook without a hint of shame, taboo or aggression and with a succinct matter-of-fact poise) she’ll let the action lead her somewhere that doesn’t fit the usual expectations and commodities – appreciating its centrality at her body’s core; being inspired to cup in turn a lover’s “soft dick… accepting restlessness, accepting no direction, accepting this fearful wanting that isn’t desire… can we just lie here being?”; or imagining a world of peaceful masturbators (“a million bedrooms with hands softly lulling… without telling anyone, a million ships come alone out on the calmest seas”) while asking, with a sense of disquiet “are we loving ourselves now? Are we mothering ourselves?”
Also running through Jenny’s work (whether entwined with or separate from the sexual themes), are ambiguous accounts of bodily disintegration. Opening her second album ‘Innocence Is Kinky’ with an account of watching online porn, she moves from commodified enervation into an eerie and exultant dream of escape, relinquishing her own body and its passive needs, and finally symbolically destroying the eyes with which she consumes the images. Yet this song and its sisters aren’t quite nightmares. Sometimes they’re triumphs – disassociative fantasies of freedom in which the wrack and ruin seem to be the natural rites of passage of a cool mind walking free, unconcerned, its passions become processes.
Jenny’s writing casts a wide net – violent upsets echoing classic French surrealism; deep-running strands of myth both classical and original (from the “Oslo Oedipus” of Innocence Is Kinky to the dark, quasi-pagan tree-figure in Amphibious, Androgynous that stands as lover, doppelganger and the next phase of self); and musings on the ambiguous trap of language (“the tongue is upon for the restless /An indecipherable alphabet / Each word an island less… And we speak in tongues from part to parts, broke all to parts / From invisible state, to invisible state…”). Most recently, on her latest album ‘Apocalypse, Girl’ the political subtexts have broken cover to become direct challenges (“You say I’m free now, that battle is over, / and feminism is over and socialism’s over. / Yeah, I say, I can consume what I want now..”). So too have preoccupations with ageing and survival (in the breathless narrative of Heaven, surrounded by loops and fractures of cemeteries and childhood choirs, Jenny wrestles with the pull of memory and the drag of mortality) and a increasingly solid approach to identity. “What is it to take care of yourself? Getting paid? Getting laid? Getting married? Getting pregnant? Fighting for visibility in your market? Realizing your potential? Being healthy, being clean, not making a fool of yourself, not hurting yourself? Shaving in all the right places?”
All of the above – the obliqueness and the rapier hits – makes listening to Jenny’s records akin to haunting her apartment at 2am (or some similar time when manners and manneredness come unstuck and the shapes of other truths come walking). I’ve not been fortunate enough to see what her music is like live – though I know that past concert showings have seen her play bolstered with guests or simply alone, surrounded by laptops, devices and ideas. On the five quick dates of her current UK tour, you’ll be able to see for yourselves.
On the Glasgow, Manchester and Bristol dates, Jenny will be joined by her on-off tourmate Briana Marela, a singer-songwriter from the Pacific North-West who’s currently working a string of European tour dates in support of her second album ‘All Around Us’. As you might expect from something recorded in Iceland and co-produced with Sigur Rós associate Alex Somers, ‘All Around Us’ is ghosted and garnished with touches of Hopelandic enchantment (with beautiful smeared, paper-thin sounds intruding on the edge of the mix, like lost amnesiac ghosts or distant pipes), but it’s very much Briana’s inspiration – a luminous, thoughtful work blending layered melodic sample-patches and banking her petal-delicate vocals into choirs and a capella counterpoint.
Though Briana cites Björk, Laura Veirs, Vashti Bunyan and Meredith Monk as influences (she has something in common with Laura Moody, then), I can also hear the same kind of all-round sound-mastery that’s on display and working away in the songs of Imogen Heap; deep-level sonic exploration and sound curation tied to the urge to tell you a story and sing you a straight earworm. In the album’s lead single Surrender I can even hear something of the pure pop of ABBA, while the midnight lushness of the follow-up, Dani, recalls a Julee Cruise ‘Twin Peaks’ ballad.
Though Briana’s voice is soft, it’s never wispy – never insubstantial. If there’s a hint of girl-next-door to what she does, she’s the quiet, observant girl full of thoughts, going her own way but ready to let you walk alongside. Like Jenny, though less explicitly, she explores possibilities of intimacy. Her songs hover carefully on the borderline between selfhood and loneliness, a delicate staking out of possible togetherness, subtly resisting the pressures to put out or submit, to be deformed by needs and expectations (“What does love mean in this day and age? / To me it’s a moment where we resonate at two frequencies close in phase… / It’s not a competition / Everyone has music within them.” ). Meanwhile, the perfectly-pitched American-visionary tone of the album (its hallucinatory fairy-tale sonics, leaflike piano falls and misty country swells) suggests that there’s common ground between Briana’s dream pop and the ostensibly cleaner work of breakthrough CCM-pop singers like Lexi Elisha, which in turn suggests that there’ll be a lot of people who’ll end up liking this.
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In between dates with Jenny Hval, Briana Marela will also be joining the bill at another Illuminations concert in London, this one a stew of assorted flavours which also includes the battered Americana of Lift To Experience frontman Josh T. Pearsonand the skewed Tyneside noise-troubadour work of Richard Dawson.
Probably because of the female orientation of this particular post, I’ve got to admit that I’m more intrigued by the youngest act on the bill, and the only other female one. It’s difficult to work out just how tongue-in-cheek the “psychedelic rag-doll sludge-pop” duo Let’s Eat Grandma are, assuming that they’re joking at all. Eyes down, singing from beneath and behind tumbling pre-Raphaelite locks, and tucked into stolen Stevie Nicks dresses, Rosa and Jenny rummage with various instruments like toybox-divers and play songs as if it’s only occurred to them to do so. Two Norwich teenagers who’ve known each other since childhood, they’ve sustained, into near adulthood, that mysterious blankness of two little girls who are ignoring your interruptions to their game. The songs themselves are tangled musical fairy stories, or (as with ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms Into Chocolate Sludge Cake’) extended wooden-legged instrumental mantras owing more to Faust or Beefheart: spontaneous-seeming, utterly absorbed in themselves. The band feels like a musical chrysalis twitching what might become an astounding breadth of wing. It’s all to discover.
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 14th 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.
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 17th 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.
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
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…
Another crowdfunding request arrived in one of my inboxes yesterday (I have multiple identities and secret lives, but there’s no escape from news). This one was from Laura Moody, whom regular and assiduous ‘Misfit City’ readers might remember from her low-key guest appearance at the Liam Singer/Foxout!!! gig which I reviewed in summer 2013.
As well as being a superb cellist (with fistfuls of classical and extended techniques) Laura’s also an extremely good singer-songwriter responsible for a self-titled three-track EP released back in 2009 and which I really ought to review sometime. It showed her sweeping her multi-textured cello playing and her stunt-kite vocals into the service of some extraordinary songs. Complicated, tuneful and wood-noisy, they quivered with a thoroughly female complexity dealing mostly with the passage through womanhood (brains tussling with sexuality, daughterly angst, the farcical behaviour of older men) and brimming with an exuberant, theatrical wit. Here’s what ‘The Irish Times‘ said about Laura some time ago:
“…for enjoyable astonishment, nothing quite beats the singer-cellist Laura Moody. She plays lyrically; then as if it was a box for sound effects. She sings her own almost-pop songs, gurgles, hoots, wails, taps her throat with the bow. Yet it’s all seamless, as if she, the cello and the music are a single organism.”
I can second that, and here’s some more evidence.
While I’m dragging my feet about reviewing that EP properly, you can listen to it here. Meanwhile, there’s a follow-up coming soon, and here is Laura’s crowdfunding request:
“Dear Friends,
Well, it seems spring has sprung in more ways than one for me and I have really exciting developments to report! My debut album is very very nearly finished and I have a launch date for your diaries – 26th June this year at Wiltons Music Hall! I can’t wait to welcome you all there for what I think is going to be a magical evening at the most beautiful venue in London. But before I can do any of that I’m afraid I need to ask for your help…
I have launched a crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo to help me raise the money I need for the final stages of production and release. I really hope you’ll take a look at the video, the rewards on offer and consider getting involved. I am going to be releasing on my own label – the newly christened Surbiton Lagoon Records – but what this campaign really means is that you wonderful people will essentially be becoming my record label, the force that makes getting my music out into the world possible.
Some of you might have noticed on Facebook or Twitter that I rather nervously launched the campaign late on Friday afternoon. I figured that not much would happen until this week when I would have a chance to contact all of you properly about it. However… things kind of went a bit bananas with people pitching in to get me to 10% of my target by the end of the day and 30% by the end of the weekend. I am completely stunned and deeply moved by the enthusiasm and generosity everyone has shown. If you have already contributed to the campaign I really must thank you so, so much.
Thank you again for your time, support, encouragement and patience with getting this album out. It’s so close now and I’ll be keeping you updated as to how this all goes.
More soon
Laura xx
PS I will be supporting my friends Dollyman at the Hackney Attic in London this Friday. If you’re free please do come along for some songs and a drink to celebrate a great first week for my campaign!”
While I know Laura, I don’t know Dollyman, but for what it’s worth ‘Time Out’ described them as “fractious Mingus-informed punky jazz quartet offers broken themes full of menace and mischief. Possibly what Tom Waits’ band might sound like after he’s popped out for a smoke,” – all of which sounds promising.
As I get off the bus in Clapton, the midsummer evening sun is giving the neighbourhood a lingering kiss. It brushes across the Clapton Portico (a bewildered, disinherited classical remnant, grafted onto a school at the end of an abbreviated road), takes away its sadness and helps it in its lonely loom. It limns the shopfronts of convenience stores and barbers and closed-down shops, and perks them up. It lends soft glows and sends little licks of shadow chasing around the stonework of the Round Chapel, and it brings out the last sleepy cheeps of the day from the local sparrows as I head down Glenarm Road towards Homerton.
Waiting for someone to sing..
Thirteen years ago – when I was living a lengthy stone’s-throw to the west, over in Stoke Newington – this part of east London was a soured inner suburb with a brooding, bullet-ridden reputation. The length of Clapton Road was tagged as Murder Mile – an edgy and angry place beset by resentments, drive-by shootings and unprovoked beatings. Flickers of anger sometimes still plague it. Almost two years ago, the second night of the 2011 London riots kicked off just a few minutes walk from here: a churn of flames, looting and outright war between police and estate kids. Barely a block away in Clarence Road, Pauline Pearce delivered the impassioned harangue which would establish her as a Hackney heroine. Now though, all is peaceful: and it gives me the chance to reflect that, as with people, the hair-raising reputations of many places come only from their occasional spasms.
The biggest fuck-you I get tonight comes from a house painted in a shocking purple and gesturing out from an otherwise cream-and-beige Victorian terrace, like some kind of bolshy architectural remix. As I’ve come to know in recent years, this part of London is a place where a very diverse set of people get on with living: it’s also the kind of area where people get out of doors not to go hunting but to break that pesky London reserve and meet their neighbours. Pubs become sitting rooms; sitting rooms and armchairs spill onto streets – another embedded global village. While people are a little thin on the ground tonight, this late-June evening (just beginning to show the mottlings of dusk) is suffused with an easy warmth. Later in the evening, Liam Singer will chuckle from behind his keyboard and gift the neighbourhood with a more welcome tag than it’s had in years. “It’s like Brooklyn, but if everyone was really friendly.”
Lampshading.
Sitting on the border of Clapton and Homerton, The Dentist is nothing if not hopeful. A former drop-in surgery a little north of the hospital, it’s a genial wreck of a building. Crumbled, scarified and grime-smeared, it stands like a worn, chewed tooth in a shopping parade halfway between old London main drag and international souk. An enterprising guy called Phil calls the upstairs home, while using the downstairs for pop-up gigs, shoestring theatre, and scratch-and-strike art gallery exhibits. The back garden is full of splintered wood and earth hummocks, plus a makeshift tabletop bar. The wine is rolled up from the cellar via a scary ravine. The whole place thrums with friendliness.
Inside, crowded into the front room and sharing its atmosphere of ravage and reclaim, we’re part of a show. In a place this small, within breathing or patting range of the musicians, it’s hard not to feel that way. Behind the players, the curving plate-glass façade of the old shopfront runs across and around: over their shoulders, we look out at the street life. It looks right back at us, sometimes with suspicious flicks of the eyes (a man in a shalwar kameez, hurrying past to the makeshift mosque next door), sometimes with a bemused acceptance (a local geezer ambling along to the chippy) and sometimes with outright delight (younger locals on a stroll, pointing and celebrating on their way to and from the Hackney bars further into town).
Sealionwoman – Tye and Kitty as the daylight fades.
To them, this must look like a gig in a bottle – the audience in full view, the musicians upfront but backs turned, the music bleeding out in faint enticing vapours. Speaking of which… cue musicians.
Tye McGivern slumps over a double bass, plucking, bowing and sometimes wrenching his notes: a man with strong, thoughtful butchers hands and the face of a weary rabbi. To his right, Kitty Whitelaw sways barefoot – grubby toes, blue nails, a jazz pulse, a little black dress and a feel for the taut sinews of a song. There’s no-one else. About five years ago Tye and Kitty were two-thirds of Kitty & The Drowning Bag, were a lot noisier, and had a drummer. For the couple of years that they’ve been Sealionwoman they’ve been drummer-less and bring their own extra noise in their pockets.
Sealionwoman deal in blurred versions of jazz and torch, and they’re perfectly suited to the smear of dusk that’s coming on as they begin to play. As influences, they’ll cite the crepuscular – Nick Cave and Morphine – but also cite the vivid, iconoclastic enactments and reinterpretations of jazz songs as carried off by Mina Agossi. There’s something in that. While they deal with plenty of old jazz standards – passed from hand to hand, worn smooth like wooden heirlooms – Sealionwoman share a trace of that Agossi rebellion against jazz performance manners and form, preferring to draw out song essence and perhaps a thread of history along with it.
Sealionwoman – Kitty Whitelaw possesses another standard.
However, what I’m hearing is something which shades Peggy Lee with Patti Smith. It’s partially that everything they do sounds a little bit like Fever – songs carried entirely and by necessity on the honk, creak and slide of Tye’s bass and the teasing dance-around of Kitty’s voice. It’s partly the lazily assured flutter of Kitty’s demeanour, and the way that it can quickly shift and escalate to an incantatory yell.
What they do has little to do with straightforward theatrics, and still less to do with diva drama. In his hands and on her lips, the songs turn as wayward as blown smoke: dip in and out of ritual; become stretched-out, yammering versions of themselves; go from breezy cool to swimming, waking dream. Sometimes Tye leans over to prod at a laptop or a fuzz pedal, furring up those woody bass notes to turn them into air-horns, or a sweep across concrete. Sometimes he drums with a pair of brushes on boxes and chairs. At other times his hands drum vigorously on the wood of the bass, booming out ritual and conversation, a vigorous and physical lover teetering on the border of tenderness and violence. Kitty sways, stands on tiptoe; brushes against the songs as if stretching for a passing kiss. Her voice folds around the melody line and uses it as a jumping off point, springing into the air, hanging, returning. Every so often a familiar tune and lyric slides through the circling murk. I spot Night And Day.
Mostly, though, it’s all about mood. Strangely blissful, narcoleptic – although by the end of the set and the dip of the late sunset they’ve risen in a slow heat, culminating in a Dionysiac frenzy of bass-drumming and banshee wails. It’s probably enough to put the wind up the Muslim congregation next door, praying their way through Asr. If they’re as Hackneyfied as everyone else around here, though, they’ll just shrug it off.
Foxout! ‘s Daniel Merrill, bowing against the dusk.
The gloaming has well and truly arrived as Foxout! settle down and begin. Perched opposite each other on a couple of stools, Daniel Merrill and Jeremy Young hunch over a network of effects pedals and rummage through what looks like a box of yellowed prehistoric teeth: these they mouth and mumble, blowing into a microphone to build up a warm, rambling noisescape of notes, feedback and harmonic buzz before they even pick up an instrument.
In fact, the teeth are reed tubes gutted from an old harmonium. Foxout! enjoy rejigging bits and pieces of antique musicality, and they’re extraordinarily good at it. Some more history might be useful, before we go any further. Essex-raised but with feet made for journeying, Daniel is the fiddler in Dead Rat Orchestra. Despite his youthful looks, he already has a decade of improvised folk music behind him, plus tours all over the globe (some of which were in the company of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (from whom he may have filched Foxout!’s abrupt exclamation mark). Another young veteran, Jeremy’s from Brooklyn music – he once played bleakly beautiful post-Godspeed chamber music with [the] slowest runner [in all the world] and limpid post-rock atmospherics with Sontag Shogun before moving on to solo experimental tonescapes and spoken word as szilárd. Both men wander; both men curate the work of others. Both men mingle.
Foxout! – Jeremy Young.
Right now, both men are studying here in London. As their orbits have converged, Foxout! has emerged – immersed in the tributaries of Celtic folk but flowing through some crafty filters as it contributes to the journey. Certainly the prime stamp and weft of the music is Celtic – reels and pibrochs; plangent, sad melodies. Yet it’s Celtic music folded back over itself, cross-cut with experimental sounds and processing, and by strands of improvisation from elsewhere.
Daniel is one of those musicians who looks extraordinarily sad while he plays. Concentration renders his long, bearded face into a subtle mask of tragedy until you expect lock-gates to burst and for three hundred years of folk laments to come pouring out of him. His fiddle is the main melodic phrasing voice, with Jeremy’s acoustic guitar serving as a taut, bounding dodging rhythm source. Jeremy himself is constantly watchful and supportive, his eyes fixed on Daniel, holding up his partner’s passionate forays.
Speaker.
What emerges is remarkable, not least for the way in which it shape-shifts between different disciplines, experiments and sound-art tricks with neither seam nor strain. At times Foxout! broil with a heated minimalism or take on a grain of compulsive, systematic Futurist patterning. At others, a flexing bough or current of history catches at them and pulls them back to direct expression. One piece is a sensitive plucked-and-bowed air-ballad played (for half its length), over the sound of a draining straw, but with neither bathos nor disruption. Strips of noise sometimes bluster through the wood and strings, like another conversation passing through. Another gorgeous ballad tune sounds as if it could have be minted yesterday, simultaneously fresh and ancient. In the latter, there’s a moment of perfect meshing as Daniel and Jeremy briefly sweep into lockstep, rolling out a near-telepathic unison of notes before dancing away from each other again.
Night begins to settle in properly. Shades of indigo, of dulled London brick and of gaudy shop-front neon sift in through the window. The Dentist’s front room starts to take on something of the air of an Irish lock-in – nothing rowdy, but with the same sense of deep involvement in the music. As Daniel announces “a new ditty”, a couple of guests step up. Usually, Laura Moody’s a mischievous classical renegade or an acrobatic singer-songwriter when she’s not a fizzing cocktail of both. Right now, though, she and her cello are demure and thoughtful – the sober and quiet accompanist providing deep, cloudy strings while Liam Singer (just a few minutes away from his headlining set), sits in to sing.
Foxout! – strings against the dying light.
The song all four share with us in semi-darkness- which may or may not be called As The Wind Turns Away – is a perfect closer. Sombre and gripping, there may not be too much too it (certainly Liam’s softly yearning tenor seem to be making much with fragmentary, cycling sentences) but they make a virtue of that.The song builds softly and inexorably with the dying of the light: a folky threnody for something a little out of focus, something over your shoulder, waiting to be picked up on. Listening to Foxout! gives you the dreamy and welcome impression that if you didn’t have roots before, you’re growing some now.
Liam Singer – songs against the sirens.
Sat behind a borrowed piano, and minus the sophisticated ornamentations that colour his chamber pop and detailed modern-classical minatures on record (those strings, mandolins and marimbas; those sundry twists and shifts of sound), Liam Singer runs his own set on a shoestring, and runs it well. As the delicate instrumental fantasia of On Earth A Wandering Stranger Was I Born unspools itself, it’s tenebrous but increasingly shot with hopeful illumination. While Liam performs, police cars occasionally sail up Chatworth Road in search of trouble, passing behind him in a quick welter of blue-and-red lights and siren-wail. They rock his soft resilient bubble of song, but don’t burst it.
Easygoing and enthusiastic in person, Liam ripples his own depths when he sits down to sing. Even when stripped down to piano-and-voice, his songs grow their own bosky Edenic atmosphere, filling out his excursions into classical minimalism with deeper shadings. I’ve noticed, previously, how he dips into American antiquity and draws it up up like well-water. His high, open tenor brings freshness and a glow of innocence, but older things lie in wait in the shade to snatch that away. At times, Liam’s like a young scholar running assured, fascinated fingers over the scuffed and scraped covers of ancient leather-bound books; but when the mood deepens and takes him, he sings like the man who’s been spat back out of the faery mound – fully aware and alive, but displaced, crucially out-of-joint with his times.
Still life at The Dentist – mixing desk, lollipops and scarification.
This is not just down to the tinge of Edwardian parlour song within Liam’s work, nor yet the occasional antiquarian “thou” or “thee” in his lyrics. There’s a mildly febrile quality to his songwriting, a flicker of Blakeian hallucination to add to the forays into classical piano and the Tennyson tint of mediaeval inflections. His song world is notable for its permeability – the mythic or the supernatural soak through into it, adding piquancy to his sharply edged portraits of involvement and solitude. On The Brief Encounter, Liam can bump into swarms of gentle slacker ghosts, massing there to comfort him as he heads up the coastal road. In the middle of Oh Endless Storm he can cite a rock-chained Andromeda, looming spectrally above him and disdaining rescue as he veers towards a break-up.
Liam immerses himself in the story-swirls, homing in on the core as he sings, “Love is a wind, rips through our hearts, that takes control / We long for a language to lose ourselves, / or for a way to let go.” Later on – as his piano notes spiral in a stately, panicking dance on One Breath Out – he’ll clutch after disappearing chances. “Never could I know as each one passed, / that the last would be the last… / Just one breath out and the world grows colder; / fight the war, but not the soldier. / And one hand moves to protect the other now – / but we’re falling anyhow.” Yet none of this is mawkish or precious – in between songs, Liam is relaxed, gently self-mocking and friendly. Two songs played with Laura Moody on cello (a snatched opportunity before she catches the train back to West London) become affectionate tickles and tussles, ranging from childlike warmth to a rousing gamelan jig.
Liam Singer
Even his solo piano miniatures, potentially an excuse for indulgence, carefully balance their romantic invention with a pucker of thoughtful modesty. The Dance of Cupid and Psyche pays subtle passing visits to Chopin, Satie and Air On The G-String, flushing its economy with a dash of vigour. On Hannah’s Dance (a lone flash from his decade-old debut, ‘The Empty Heart Of The Chameleon’) Liam displays a Tori Amos drive and fluidity but rounds it off within a single minute. The sweet cascading single, Stranger I Know, slips out of its crafty Shaker-gamelan arrangement and breathes easier, now less of a revelation than a relaxed celebration: “suckers, speeches, they can keep ’em all.”
In one week’s time, Liam’s new album – ‘Arc Iris‘ – is released, yet already he’s moving on from it. Half of the set is songs so new that they’re not on any record, and at least one of them – Three Songs – is fresh out of the notebook. “I’ll fuck it up tastefully,” promises Liam, shuffling his sheet music into place.
What emerges suggests that the drift away from Liam’s earlier experimentalism into fully-fledged romance (as promised by much of ‘Arc Iris’) is accelerating. Here is a beautiful but unnerving love-song, holding strong on the edge of wreck; swimming with gas-masks and cruelty and an unsettling Saint Sebastian gasp. “Someday I’ll see you sideways, / your pretty words are opening like arrows in the middle of my chest / ’til petals fall from my mouth / and I, I gasp for air / ‘cos something inside is pressurized… / When you feel it, you will know / that I was not crazy when I had to let it go.” Running through the words are hints of fairytale transmogrifications; always restlessness. Liam’s heading east after this concert, travelling over to play more gigs in France and Belgium. In another new song, with a vocal line like a perilous descent down crags and scree, he muses “from one skin to another we slide endlessly.” Perhaps he’d like to keep wandering on, heading to the edge of the world.
Ceiling.
Sitting beside the mixing desk is a jar of lollipops. By now, the contents are making the rounds among the audience and consequently Liam’s playing is being punctuated by furtive, respectful cellophane rustles, which he takes in good heart. Someone else is passing around a copy of ‘Paradise Lost’, which seems more appropriate, as the prowling monsters name-checked back in Oh Endless Storm are resurfacing in Love Me Today (“”There are dark things in the earth / soon they’ll be twisted / up for air /… as the ground gives way.”) Maybe I’m a being little suggestible, but it seems to me that there are also shadings of the twenty-first century ghosts which haunt Liam’s adopted hometown of New York. For over a decade the city’s romantic signifiers, once brash and confident, have been haunted by the shock of sudden and brutal dissolution. While Liam’s not one for hammer-blow songcraft, much of what he sings enfolds an onset of loss, from the counting to (ominously) the banking aircraft. “In the shadow of the moon, as our planes spin away / You know my eyes may tell you lies, but love me today.”
Under the cheerful coloured bulbs strung across The Dentist’s battered ceiling, he offers us a last dance. This’ll be to Unhand Me (You Horrid Thing), from ‘Arc Iris’, a brief, deliciously rueful song which sketches out the mixture of hope, awkward embarrassment and careful blundering steps that make up an ordinary, flakey relationship – prickles and all. “They’re playing our favourite song, the one that makes us both dance for a dare / ’til our feet turn to air / and our hands come apart, / as the guitar solo starts. / And that is the part / that breaks my heart.” It’s a different, generous note to end on, for a gig that’s felt like a cosy but inspiring house party. As I say my goodbyes and slip out of The Dentist, it looks as if the party will be going on for a while longer. Not only sound carries. Warmth does, too.
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Mancunian classical ensemble Psappha are performing a showcase of emerging composers at a mid-month concert in their main Manchester home. 
Misfit City 