Crushing Death & Grief

ROB ST. JOHN + DEAN MCPHEE + C JOYNES

Mon 29th Apr @ CB2 basement, Norfolk St
Doors 8pm, £6 adv from here

ROB ST. JOHN

Rob St John’s debut album, Weald, came out in 2011. Ostensibly a melodic folk album full of gentle guitar figures over bowed strings, it had about it a cold gothic splendour and a throbbing heart of granite and limestone. What it also had was a kind of questing, abstract wisdom – wisdom channelled from the muted voices of landscape and history. It grew on the listener like lichen. Before and after Weald, across a variety of projects – musical and otherwise – St John has revealed himself to be a keen observer of place and landscape, bringing back chunks of the places he’s visited - in flowing prose pieces and open-hearted songs. His new album is a lighter affair, more concerned with the coming of spring than the pooled shadows of winter. Come, call forth the spirits…
http://robstjohn.tumblr.com/

DEAN MCPHEE

There’s an elemental purity to Dean McPhee’s signature guitar sound, a kind of trilled silvery quality, part birdsong, part finely worked metal. His two releases to date, the Brown Bear 12” and his debut album Son of the Black Peace, have featured long melodic guitar explorations, based around simple thumb-struck basslines and intricate, bright clusters of notes, spiralling outwards in melodic progressions. These spirals seem to create space around themselves as they wind outwards from his guitar, and his use of delay and reverb increases this sense of temporal and spatial expansion. McPhee also has an implicit understanding of the the power of silence, and live, the overall effect is mesmeric and captivating. 
http://www.deanmcphee.com/

C JOYNES

England’s most vital of the post-Takoma guitarists. The modern-day Histon giant. The man with the golden fingers.
http://www.boweavilrecordings.com/joynes.html

HIGH WOLF + KELVOX1

Mon 4th Feb @ The Corner House, Newmarket Rd
Doors 8pm, £5 adv from here

HIGH WOLF

French space-raga master, High Wolf, assures all that he possesses a natural-born ability to zero in on the tones most conducive to inducing transcendental states. What is sure is that he takes much of the familiar language of the bedroom psychedelist - synth washes, wahtar, sparse delayed vocals - and adds to it flavours of Eastern righteousness and ritualistic rhythms with an unusual degree of focus and clarity, creating some kind of hi-fi mixture of Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sun Araw. His increasingly mystic records have come out on some of the best labels out there, including Not Not Fun and The Great Pop Supplement.

http://highwolf.wordpress.com/
http://highwolf.bandcamp.com/

KELVOX1

http://kelvox1.tumblr.com/
http://kelvox1.bandcamp.com/

PETE SWANSON + BEN NASH + GRIEF ATHLETES

Tuesday 15th January @ The Portland Arms

Doors 8pm, £7 adv from here

PETE SWANSON

Once a member of the Yellow Swans, who focused on guitar based noise and drones, Pete Swanson has carved out his own particular niche since going solo. His debut album A Man With Potential focused on a peculiar junction between noise and techno, creating a wall of sound that borrowed heavily from both genres but actually, in the end, created its own unnameable bastard. His most recent work continues to develop this child, taking it to unexplored reaches resulting in something truly unique that attacks every one of your senses.
http://typerecords.com/artists/pete-swanson

BEN NASH

Natural Snow Buildings collaborator and sometime member of Chora, Ben Nash produces all manner of expansive sounds from celestial drones and shimmering ragas to lacerating scrapes. After experimenting with Tenori-On emulators he’s just produced a record of gyrating psyche for Blackest Rainbow.
https://soundcloud.com/ben-nash

GRIEF ATHLETES

Bleak and lonely sounds produced by lo-tech means.
http://griefathletes.bandcamp.com/

P JØRGENSEN + SIMON SCOTT + HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

Wednesday 14th November @ CB2 basement, Norfolk St

Doors 8pm, £5 adv from here

P JØRGENSEN

Copenhagen resident P Jørgensen is a follower of a Cageian school of thought that values equally structured composition and chance. His latest record - a split LP with Gareth Hardwick on Low Point - continues to blur the boundaries between the genres of neo-classical, ambient and drone. The music is exquisitely composed with delicate strings weaving through an array of found sounds at a slow and delicate pace. The pieces are full of wonderful textures and sounds and Jørgensen dramatically uses space and silence to give the music added weight.

http://clangtint.net/

SIMON SCOTT

Scott’s latest LP, Below Sea Level (12K) has captured the audio essence of the countryside closest to our dear Cambridge: The Fens. Over a years worth of field recordings were taken, manipulated and blended with an array of instruments to create a soundscape that sounds so familiar and yet completely new - as if Scott has discovered the life that lies beneath the much maligned “pallid fenlands”.

http://www.simonscott.org/

HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

A Cambridge duo carefully crafting their own take on the post-Eno world of treated “live” instruments and quiet electronica. Their latest EP release saw them continue their development, adding additional layers to create a rich and complex sound.

http://wearehollowmountain.co.uk/

COLD PUMAS + SAUNA YOUTH + FOREST

Mon 29th Oct @ The Corner House, Newmarket Rd.

Doors 8pm, £5 adv from here

COLD PUMAS

Relentless psychedelic punx from Brighton making highly repetitive mega-jerko tunes. Three men recreate the sound of playing the most scratched ever copy of Degüello at 78rpm.

http://coldpumas.tumblr.com/

SAUNA YOUTH

Sauna Youth are a four piece punk rock band from London, England. They pose the question “why can’t you be the Ramones and Steve Reich?” in much the same way Kurt Cobain once asked “why can’t you be Black Sabbath and the Beatles?”Album out soon on the always-excellent Gringo Records.

http://lostinidea.blogspot.co.uk/

FOREST

Cambridge lads playing technicolour new-wave.

http://forestband.bandcamp.com/

JAMES BLACKSHAW + C JOYNES vs. 23 HANGING TREES + HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

Wed 9th May @ Cambridge Unitarian Church

Doors 7:30pm, tickets £8 advance from here

JAMES BLACKSHAW

James Blackshaw performs celestial and spirit-lifting guitar-led compositions. Meditative in quality, cinematic in scope, his music spirals gracefully across complex patterns, motifs and harmonics. He made his name as a 12-string acoustic guitarist, and his relationship with the instrument is near perfect. With an extensive back catalogue to his name on labels like Young God Records, Tompkins Square and Important, he has developed a unique playing style that takes Takoma school finger-picking into an entirely new place. Swirling overtones, cascading notes and a thousand points of light cascade from his guitar and create ever-shifting textures that bear the influence of contemporary classical composition, post-rock dynamics and invisible soundtracks as much as the American folk guitar tradition.

Despite his transcendent state music he is a grounded and earthly fellow who has been written about with reverence and has played churches, festivals, folk clubs and large concert halls on his many travels in the US, Europe and Japan. These have included extensive touring with the reformed Swans, as well as collaborative performances with Hauschka and Nancy Elizabeth. He performs and records as a member of Current 93 and with Jozef Van Wissem as Brethren of The Free Spirit.

New album “Love is The Plan, The Plan Is Death” is released on Important Records in April 2012. Written at a time of great emotional disquiet, it’s a beautiful and bittersweet new chamber work containing six original pieces whose titles are lovingly misappropriated from those of short stories by the great science fiction author James Tiptree Jr AKA Alice B. Sheldon. The instrumentation is more stripped back and integrated than on recentalbums, allowing his impeccable nylon-string classical guitar playing to come tothe fore, with small details like the scraping of his fingers on the strings and breathing patterns adding to the emotional honesty of the mix. Grand piano, vibraphone and B3 fill out the tracks, with Geneviève Beaulieu’s stunning vocals featuring on the track “And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways”.

http://jamesblackshaw.tumblr.com

C JOYNES vs. 23 HANGING TREES

Our local chordophone maestro C Joynes challenges 23 Hanging Trees (aka Fuzzy Lights’ guitarist, Xavier Watkins) to an exchange of dissonant chanting, clanky guitars, off-key electric organ, distorted violin, and looped tapes. Joynes’ fingerpicked resonances will be deconstructed by Watkins, obscuring the tunes’ Rebetiko and Tango origins.

www.boweavilrecordings.com/joynes.html
http://hangingtrees.tumblr.com

HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

Hollow Mountain is a set of thoughts and atmospheres put together by Rhys Copeland (Line Spectra, City Seventeen) and Tom Adams (Toma, TMCO). Using a generative looping system the duo create organic and constantly evolving textures that draw on their combined interest in ambient, glitch and drone music in equal measure.

http://hollowmountain.bandcamp.com/

LAST HARBOUR + THE DOOMED BIRD OF PROVIDENCE + VIOLET WOODS

Sunday 25th March @ The Portland Arms

www.lastharbour.com/

THE DOOMED BIRD OF PROVIDENCE

Aggressive and disturbing tales of the early years of the country of Australia, drawn from texts recounting colonial degeneracy. All set to music heavily indebted to Jacques Brel, Scott Walker and the English Folk Revival, with terrifying results. www.doomedbird.com

VIOLET WOODS

12-string twang, Moe Tucker beats and echoplex vocals from Cambridge folks otherwise seen in The Puncture Repair Kit, Bouvier, Fuzzy Lights, etc.
http://violetwoods.tumblr.com  

PATTEN + THE SOFT

Thursday 1st March @ The Portland Arms
Doors 8pm, £5 adv from here

PATTEN

With a debut LP at the sharp-end of many Album of 2011 lists, the elusive Patten is coming to Cambridge, crafting something fresh and new out of the debris of falling genres. Sketches of dirty electronica blend with industrial beats and dance floor breaks, but all heard through the post-dubstep industrial greyness of inner city life. It’s not exclusively dark though. There’s optimism at work here and a joyful blend of noise that brings to mind gloriously Technicolor environments. Influenced by a heady brew of Tricky, Massive Attack and the IDM of late 90’s Warp, there’s no need to classify this – there are echoes of the past, but this is the sound of the future.

www.patttten.com

THE SOFT

Finally a local band to get excited about, Bury St Edmunds’ The Soft have escaped the confines of Suffolk, their music finding influence on both sides of the Atlantic and championed by the likes of No Fear of Pop, Largehearted Boy and The Line of Best Fit. There’s a hint of the xx in their swirling and ambient electro-pop that flirts with darkness and light. There’s an experimental heart to their music, but that doesn’t mean they’ve ignored their obvious love of pop music. Having floored the crowd at last year’s Wish You Were Here festival, the future is very bright for this group of youngsters.

http://thesoft.bandcamp.com/

STANDARD FARE + TIGERCATS + MODEL VILLAGE

Friday 20th January at The Portland Arms
Doors 8pm, £5 adv from here

STANDARD FARE

Originally from England’s highest town, Buxton, the three members of Standard Fare are now based around the North, from where they produce freewheeling, autobiographical indiepop (though never twee) music. Jangly, Lemonheads-esque guitars, bittersweet, swooping twin vocals, and Orange Juice rhythms all came together on 2010’s ‘The Noyelle Beat’ to make make one of the freshest, most unadulterated bits of British guitar music of the last few years. New record ‘Out Of Sight, Out Of Town’ should be out just in time for this gig, and is informed by the escapism induced by their their semi-rural origins, but translated into the elusion of conflict, the complications of relationships, bitterness, that kind of thing. Loved by the kids and by us too.

www.standardfare.co.uk

TIGERCATS

Frenetic indiepop-come-post punk from East London with people who were/are in Esiotrot and Hexicon. A bit like Elvis Costello & The Attractions when they were good.

http://haircutrecords.co.uk/site/tigercats/

MODEL VILLAGE

Humane adult-orientated pop music, recently described as “among the bright and beautiful things the world has to offer.”

http://modelvillagethepopgroup.tumblr.com/

C JOYNES + ALAN WILKINSON + PADANG FOOD TIGERS

Wednesday 7th December at The Portland Arms
Doors 8pm, £5 on the door 

C JOYNES

The well-travelled Master Musician of Histon, C Joynes, has been the most enthralling and consistently excellent creator of leftfield music in the Cambridge area for a number of years. His considered and very English take on that whole post-Fahey Tacoma guitar thing is difficult to pin down without sounding trite or contrived. Highly influenced by his frequent trips to the further corners of the globe his combination of technique with a lack of reverance for the self same allows Joynes to eke out a unique facet of authentic folk music, without all of the bullshit trappings of “authenticity”. As we shall be toasting its recent release, it seems likely that he will play selections from his latest offering for the esteemed Bo’ Weavil Recordings, “Congo”.

www.myspace.com/cjoynes

ALAN WILKINSON

A fellow Bo’ Weavil Recordings artist, Alan Wilkinson is one of England’s fieriest improvising saxophonists. First coming to notice through Leeds’ Termite Club, which he was a founding member of, Wilkinson has been a mainstay of London’s free improv scene from the ’90s onwards. As well as working with many of the great modern improvisers - Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Sunny Murray, Eddie Prévost - he is equally at home with some serious names outside of jazz, such as Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Spring Heel Jack and Talibam! Wilkinson will be playing by himself, in support of his new solo CD “Practice”.

http://www.boweavilrecordings.com/wilkinson.html

PADANG FOOD TIGERS

Highly nuanced ambient hissing, elegant sparse banjo, field recordings and mournful open guitar from two of Rameses III.

www.myspace.com/padangfoodtigers