Morning everyone!
Upset The Rhythm have three (yes, count them) outstanding shows coming
up in the next week for you, so here’s a timely aide-mémoire. This Tuesday we’re
at Dalston Victoria with a stellar line-up including Downtown Boys, Trash Kit
and Ultimate Guitar Tabs. Whilst
next Friday at The Old Baths we have Karen
Gwyer, Container and Giant Swan all performing. If that
wasn’t already ample, we also have Darren
Hayman as the proverbial cherry on the top, presenting his ‘Thankful
Villages’ project at Café OTO one week today with July Skies in support. A full run down of all of those live events
can be found be reading onwards, along with our full program of upcoming
concerts.
In record label news, yesterday we announced our fondness for August 5th
as that’s when we’ll be releasing Nottingham drum/voice duo Rattle’s self-titled debut album. In
collaboration with our friends at I Own You, the beautifully minimal and
hypnotic suite of songs will be appearing on LP (including some limited number
on transparent vinyl), CD and digitally. Formed by
Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley, Rattle began as an experiment in
crafting rich songs and melody using drums and voice alone. Their music weaves
and intertwines post-punk, minimalism and experimental rock, through off-kilter
rhythms, patterns and counter melodies. Often starting by picking out the ghost notes
from the drums to develop a melody, their songs often reveal themselves in
rounds and harmonies with layer upon layer of rhythm and vocal, lending an entrancing
choral impression. Rattle are at once magnetic, monastic and
danceable, but don’t take our word for it, check out the first track from the
album, ‘Stringer Bell’ now:
\\\\\ TUESDAY
/////
DOWNTOWN BOYS
TRASH KIT
ULTIMATE GUITAR TABS
Tuesday 31
May
The Victoria,
451 Queensbridge Rd, Dalston, E8 3AS
DOWNTOWN BOYS are a bilingual political sax punk
party from Providence, RI. Comprised of a formidable voice, two saxophones,
guitar, bass and drums, their scathing energy is palpable in every room they
take hold of. Shifting from English to Spanish, punk to rock to jazz to pure
fun, they open eyes, rattle ribs and bring dance floors to their knees. They released
a 7" on Sister Polygon records in February 2014 and last year released
their debut album on Don Giovanni. ‘Full Communism’ is a thrashing record of
songs about smashing the prison-industrial complex, racism, queerphobia,
capitalism, fascism, boredom, and all things people use to try to close our
minds and hearts. ‘Full Communism’ comes at a current critical moment in the
struggle for justice being fought in the US and throughout the world. It is set
to a commanding tempo programmed make you move regardless of whether singer
Victoria Ruiz is singing or shouting. “Wave Of History” opens with the ominous
funk of a horn line, deciding this generation has the power to create change,
“Break A Few Eggs,” opens with punk-infused guitars and saxophones and only two
lines of lyrics that need little interpretation. “Monstro” is a feminist
anthem, in your face in the best way with an incredibly infectious sax line.
https://downtownboys.bandcamp.com/
TRASH KIT have a wild feel for melody, writing
songs that pull at the reins with a spontaneous charm. Having formed the band
in 2009, Rachel Aggs, Rachel Horwood have since become the glowing core of
London’s DIY underground. Their music is primal yet thoughtful, affirming yet
sincere, drawing on the potential of post-punk and the naturalism of an
internal folk music. Although Trash Kit have their forebears in bands like
X-Ray Spex, The Ex and The Raincoats, their sound is very much their own take
on facing forwards. Galloping polyrhythms, overlapping sung-spoke lyrics and
entwining guitars are all drawn together into a taut unity, sounding willfully
alive. Both Rachels tangle their vocals with each other whilst expressive
drumbeats and restless guitar flurries provide the rhythmic drive. Aggs’ guitar
playing is as much informed by African fingerstyle patterns as the percussive
attitude of various no wave shredders. Horwood approaches her drum kit with an
untamable freedom, pushing it into the realm of a vivid lead instrument. Trash
Kit's music is full of pauses, woven silence and punctuation too and this is
where Gill Partington and her resonant, soulful bass work finds a perfect
home. Check out their self-titled debut album and ‘Confidence’, its excellent
follow up, out now on Upset The Rhythm.
http://trashkitrules.blogspot.co.uk/
ULTIMATE GUITAR TABS deploy synth, drum machine, astute
vocals and costumes to make some of the most decidedly non-guitar-based music
around! Being new kids on the block, Ultimate Guitar Tabs leave us pregnant
with anticipation!
https://vine.co/v/iTnaeYiA0ql
\\\\\ FRIDAY /////
KAREN GWYER
CONTAINER
GIANT SWAN
ROUGH FIELDS (DJ SET)
Friday 3 June
The Old Baths, 80 Eastway, Hackney Wick, London, E9 5JH
KAREN GWYER was born in the southern US and raised
in the north. Now based in London, she shifts between hypnotic, thickly
melodic, bass-laden tumbling left-of-techno dancefloor vibes and diversionary
acidic psychedelia in her expansive largely analogue live electronic
performances. Her music is bathed in immersive atmospheres, hewn in layers of
thick, gauzey synth and drums that are itchy and fractious, straining to pull
out of the confines of regular patterns. Her tracks now mostly work in
long-form, stretching out to around the 15-minute mark allowing motifs to seep
in and take shape before dissipating into gradual decay, embedding the listener
in a hinterland soundscape. Her last record was released on Nous Disques last
Summer, entitled ‘Bouloman’. ‘Bouloman’ is hectic, unpredictable and delirious,
but crucially, it's also propulsive. There's no shortage of murk on the record,
it's just that Gwyer's clever arrangements blow right through it. To date, she
has also released a handful of recordings on Kaleidoscope, No Pain In Pop and
Opal tapes, for which she has toured twice and continues to appear occasionally
as part of the ongoing Opal Tapes showcases. She has produced remixes for
labels such as Nous, Software, Public Information, Domino, Kaleidoscope and
Different Fountains Editions, and created a number of commissioned pieces for
Open Music Archive.
https://soundcloud.com/karengwyer
CONTAINER is the stripped-down, beat-oriented electronic project of Providence, RI’s Ren Schofield, who somehow sculpts vicious punk sonics into raw jackhammer rhythms that groove in the most relentless, hypnotic, unstoppable and psychedelic ways currently working the grid. This lo-fi mesh of maxed-out drum patterns, spiralling loops and mesmerising arrangements makes for live music of serious weight and function, capable of both rushing the high-end dancefloors of Unsound, Donau and Berghain, and banging the below-stairs basements of Europe into submission. Started in 2009 in response to his discovery of nineties minimal techno, Container combined elements from his background in noise and cassette collage music with a new found interest in repetitive beats to create this raw and damaged rhythmic sound. After a string of various cassette releases, the debut full length “LP” was released by Editions Mego sub-label Spectrum Spools in 2011, and has since been followed up by a second Spools “LP” and the “Treatment” 12” on the Morphine label…a steaming new 12” pulled in earlier this year on Liberation Technologies (see track ‘Glaze’ below) as well as the thrillingly violent mauling of Four Tet’s ‘Kool FM’. Container’s new record came out on Spectrum Spools in June 2015 to much acclaim.
CONTAINER is the stripped-down, beat-oriented electronic project of Providence, RI’s Ren Schofield, who somehow sculpts vicious punk sonics into raw jackhammer rhythms that groove in the most relentless, hypnotic, unstoppable and psychedelic ways currently working the grid. This lo-fi mesh of maxed-out drum patterns, spiralling loops and mesmerising arrangements makes for live music of serious weight and function, capable of both rushing the high-end dancefloors of Unsound, Donau and Berghain, and banging the below-stairs basements of Europe into submission. Started in 2009 in response to his discovery of nineties minimal techno, Container combined elements from his background in noise and cassette collage music with a new found interest in repetitive beats to create this raw and damaged rhythmic sound. After a string of various cassette releases, the debut full length “LP” was released by Editions Mego sub-label Spectrum Spools in 2011, and has since been followed up by a second Spools “LP” and the “Treatment” 12” on the Morphine label…a steaming new 12” pulled in earlier this year on Liberation Technologies (see track ‘Glaze’ below) as well as the thrillingly violent mauling of Four Tet’s ‘Kool FM’. Container’s new record came out on Spectrum Spools in June 2015 to much acclaim.
https://soundcloud.com/gentledefect
GIANT SWAN are an embryonic, shapeshifting duo who press repeat and take aim at the sun. Grabbing the necessary sounds from guitars, pedals and their own throats, Robin Stewart and Harry Wright coax raw-hearted live experiences that are constantly shifting in their stillness, bleeding between several sonic movements that both obliterate and invigorate and find them drifting away, serene and discordant, from the noise-techno bevy. Vital players within Bristol’s Howling Owl collective and with strong ties to Young Echo, Stewart and Wright formed a preteen musical alliance as part of psych guitar miscreants The Naturals: Giant Swan sees them go feral, a cross-breed of hypnotic bass, industrial percussion and disorientating noise delivered with telepathic intricacy.
GIANT SWAN are an embryonic, shapeshifting duo who press repeat and take aim at the sun. Grabbing the necessary sounds from guitars, pedals and their own throats, Robin Stewart and Harry Wright coax raw-hearted live experiences that are constantly shifting in their stillness, bleeding between several sonic movements that both obliterate and invigorate and find them drifting away, serene and discordant, from the noise-techno bevy. Vital players within Bristol’s Howling Owl collective and with strong ties to Young Echo, Stewart and Wright formed a preteen musical alliance as part of psych guitar miscreants The Naturals: Giant Swan sees them go feral, a cross-breed of hypnotic bass, industrial percussion and disorientating noise delivered with telepathic intricacy.
https://www.facebook.com/giantswanmusic?fref=ts
\\\\\ SATURDAY /////
In collaboration with Caught by the River…
DARREN
HAYMAN & BAND performing ‘Thankful Villages’
JULY
SKIES
Plus
Spoken Word & Nature Disco
Saturday 4 June
Cafe OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston,
E8 3DL
DARREN HAYMAN is a prolific singer-songwriter,
intrigued by our relationships with places and armed with the idiosyncratic eye
of a Shell Guide. Recently he’s stepped outside for rural jaunt through
Britain’s 54 Thankful Villages and this concert sees him share the fruits of
these labours in a live setting, making full use of both a band and
projections. A Thankful Village is a village in Britain where every soldier
returned alive from World War I. The writer, journalist and educator Arthur Mee
coined the term ‘Thankful Village’ in his series of guidebooks, ‘The King’s
England’ in the 1930s. Darren Hayman has visited each of the villages and,
focussing on local life, has made a piece of music and a short film for each
one. Some take the form of instrumentals inspired by the location, some are
interviews with village residents set to music, others are new songs with
lyrics or found local traditional songs. ‘Thankful Villages Volume 1’ (released
by Rivertones on June 3rd) is the first album of a three volume study from this
project and contains the first 18 villages that Darren visited during 2014/15.
The pieces do not necessarily refer to the Great War, rather they portray the
village and it’s communities at many points in history. In ‘Stocklinch’ Ros
tells a story of a painting of the old church changing hands through the
village, whilst in ‘Strethall’ Darren sings a story of infidelity from the
parish records from 1607 and in ‘St Michael, South Elmham’ Dolly tells the
story of her melodeon playing father and his adventures in Salonika. ‘Thankful
Villages’ is a collage of Britain’s hidden places. Rich in history and
community, ‘Thankful Villages’ is a further enthralling chapter in Darren’s
journey through the country’s underbelly.
http://thankfulvillages.co.uk/
JULY SKIES is a West Midlands based recording
project begun by Antony Harding in 1997. In 2008 the band released their
gorgeous British landscape LP from 2008 entitled ‘The Weather Clock’. A lost
guitar–led, harmonic-ambient gem, it’s less a hauntological delve into the
British psyche and more a bleached out mid-summer’s daydream much like Felt’s
‘Train Above The City’ – something akin to a transportational meditation on the
British countryside soundtracked by Vini Reilly and viewed from a perfect
horizontal hillside vantage point. This April, Rivertones (the phonographic arm
of Nature and culture website Caught by the River) will be reissuing ‘The
weather Clock’ for the first time on vinyl. Since the release of The Weather
Clock, July Skies has regrouped as a five-piece band and have been spending
time recording the fifth LP ‘A Day In The Country’. July Skies is: Orford Ness,
lost youth, Henry Moore, pylons across fields, abandoned airfields, Avebury,
endless childhood summers, forgotten England, the romance of the heavens well
after closing time, Super8, countryside, mornings in May, ruins, faded
innocence, post-war Britain, skies of all seasons, trudging coastlines,
Festival of Britain 1951, memories made with a Polaroid Landcam 103, overgrown
follies, East Anglia, concrete precincts and tower blocks, suburbia, old
Ordnance Survey maps, lost airmen, rustic charm, John Nash, poppy day, a half
remembered smile, BST, municipal parks at dusk, love, infatuation and loss.
http://www.julyskies.com/wordpress2/
One last thing before we head off,
Sauna Youth began their European tour last night in Paris, here’s their tour
poster, whilst full tour dates for them can be found here ( http://www.upsettherhythm.co.uk/tours.html
), go check them out, you’d be downright wrong not to, you hear me Dresden?
Groningen, I’m looking at you!
Thanks so much for your time and
effort in reading this swift missive, and thank you for attending in abundance
our Nots show earlier this week, have a great long weekend this Bank Holiday!
UPSET
THE RHYTHM
x
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UPSET THE RHYTHM /////
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UPCOMING SHOWS
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DOWNTOWN BOYS
TRASH KIT
ULTIMATE GUITAR TABS
Tuesday 31
May
The Victoria,
451 Queensbridge Rd, Dalston, E8 3AS
KAREN GWYER
CONTAINER
GIANT SWAN
ROUGH FIELDS (DJ SET)
Friday 3 June
The Old Baths, 80 Eastway, Hackney Wick, London, E9 5JH
In collaboration with Caught by the River…
DARREN HAYMAN & BAND performing ‘Thankful
Villages’
JULY SKIES
Plus Spoken Word & Nature Disco
Saturday 4
June
Cafe OTO, 22
Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
GENEVA JACUZZI
LIBERATION
MOONBOW
Tuesday
7 June
Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 44 Pollard
Row, Bethnal Green, E2 6NB
7:30pm | £7 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/353484
JOE
& RICK POTTS
POTTS
VETZA POTTS TRIO
VETZA
LAFMS documentary - ‘how low can you go?’
Tuesday 14 June
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10A Bradbury Street, Dalston,
London N16 8JN
7.30pm
| £6 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/358852
COLIN SELF
LIBEREZ
I KNOW I’M AN ALIEN
Thursday 16 June
Courtyard Theatre, 40
Pitfield Street, Shoreditch, N1 6EU
8pm | £8 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/361432
In collaboration
with Cafe OTO…
JOSHUA ABRAMS - NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY
w/ EVAN PARKER
JOSHUA ABRAMS / EVAN PARKER DUO
Friday 17 June
Cafe OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
CC DUST
STATIC PALM
STATIC PALM
BADABOUM
Thursday 23 June
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10A Bradbury Street, Dalston, N16 8JN
8pm | £5 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/359147
Thursday 23 June
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10A Bradbury Street, Dalston, N16 8JN
8pm | £5 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/359147
TY SEGALL &
THE MUGGERS
AUSMUTEANTS
Friday 24 June
O2 Forum Kentish
Town, 9-17 Highgate Road, London, NW5 1JY
7pm | £17 | http://www.songkick.com/concerts/26246629-ty-segall-and-the-muggers-at-o2-forum-kentish-town
EARTHEATER
GABRIEL SALOMAN
COMMON EIDER, KING EIDER
Saturday 25 June
Cafe OTO, 22
Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
LUCKY
DRAGONS
JIN&DAUN
Saturday 2 July
DIY Space For London, 96-101 Ormside St, South Bermondsey, SE15 1TF
SONIC BOOM
Saturday 9 July
OSLO, 1a Amhurst Road, Hackney, E8 1LL
PROTOMARTYR
Thursday 14 July
Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 44 Pollard Row, Bethnal Green, E2
6NB
THE OBLIVIANS
DEAF WISH
Wednesday 27 July
Tufnell Park Dome, 178 Junction Road, Tufnell Park, N19 5QQ
HEATHER LEIGH
ASIQ NARGILE
Thursday 4 August
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden, NW1 7NL
7pm | £10 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/358631
ASIQ NARGILE
Thursday 4 August
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden, NW1 7NL
7pm | £10 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/358631
CHRIS COHEN
Monday 5 September
Cafe OTO, 22 Ashwin
Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
8pm | £8 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/361146
In collaboration with Caught by the River…
KATE
CARR
THE
LONDON SOUND SURVEY
DJ
NICK LUSCOMBE
Thursday 22 September
Cafe OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston,
E8 3DL
UPSILON ACRUX
GUAPO
Friday 7 October
Cafe OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
7.30pm | £7.50 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/356180
