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Upset The Rhythm presents…
ANA DA SILVA & PHEW
TARANTULA
Monday 27 May St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, King's Cross, NW1 1UL 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS
ANA DA SILVA & PHEW have a
new collaborative album entitled Island, full of absorbing textures,
tactile beats, and a masterfully dynamic compositional style. Each
cavernous track feels like a conversation, and out of the ominous dark
comes a generative hope. Ana and Phew contribute pointillist bits of
spoken word in each other’s native tongues of Portuguese and Japanese,
reflecting on isolation, friendship, and nature. The quotidian is made
profound. A gripping mood is set by the shared stoicism and subtle
playfulness of these two cult punk icons. Island’s logic is one of wise
minimalism. There is a feeling of discovery that will be familiar to
Raincoats fans—a sense of poetry and inquisitiveness, of intuition and
invention, of new languages taking shape.
Ana da Silva is a founding member and songwriter of the pioneering post-punk band The Raincoats. Across four daring full-length records, The Raincoats helped shape the timeless notion that punk is what you make it - an act of raw expression, not any one sound. The Raincoats have offered creative and spiritual inspiration for several generations of artists. They set a crucial precedent for feminist work within a DIY punk context, marked all the while by Ana’s poetic lyrical style and innovative noise guitar playing. After The Raincoats’ hiatus in 1984, Ana collaborated with The Go-Betweens, This Heat’s Charles Hayward and choreographer/dancer Gaby Agis. Ana returned to song writing and performing with The Raincoats after Kurt Cobain invited them to tour with Nirvana shortly before his untimely death in 1994, and they released an album ‘Looking in the Shadows’ in 1995 on DGC and Rough Trade. In 2005, Ana released her solo debut, ‘The Lighthouse’ - a self-recorded collection of spare, elegant experiments in electronic indie-pop. Ana’s recent appearances with The Raincoats include a 2016 collaboration with Angel Olsen for Rough Trade’s 40th anniversary, as well as a 2017 presentation at The Kitchen, New York of The Raincoats and Friends, a celebration of Jenn Pelly’s book The Raincoats. http://www.anadasilva.net/ Phew consolidated her binary interests as a vocal performer and analogue electronics improviser with the 2017 release of her album ‘Voice Hardcore’. Indeed, since her 2013 conversion to analogue electronics Phew has continued evolving her live solo project around the world. In 2015 she released her first almost entirely solo-driven album, aptly titled ‘A New World’, on the Japanese label Felicity featuring nine songs backed by herself on electronics and drum machine, with contributions from Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, and synthesizer / electronics player Hiroyuki Nagashima. In 1978 Phew started out as the singer in Aunt Sally, the Osaka punk group who released just one outstanding album on Vanity Records. A year later Phew released her debut solo single, produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 1981 she made her debut solo album ‘Phew’ at legendary producer Conny Plank’s studio near Cologne, accompanied by Plank, and Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. She returned to Conny’s studio to make ‘Our Likeness’ (Mute, 1992) with Jaki Liebezeit, former DAF/Liaisons Dangereuses member Chrislo Haas and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Alexander Hacke. And in 2011, she and Erika Kobayashi formed Project UNDARK to record the texts of ‘Radium Girls’ with music by the late Dieter Moebius, of Cluster. In Japan she has made a series of acclaimed records under her own name and with leading bands such as Novo Tono and her contemporary punk group Most too. https://phewjapan.bandcamp.com/ TARANTULA are a free-form punk racket formed on planet Glasgow 2017; a low brow jazz melting stair tumble, the sound of joy. All associates of the Glasgow DIY ganglands and normative rock bands, Tarantula - influenced only by shreds videos - take all shapes; every moment improvised and transient. Comparisons have been made with Y-pants, the magic band, the Arkestra and Hole. itsticks.github.io/tarantula |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
CHRIS COHEN
THE JELAS
Wednesday 29 May MOTH Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette Street, London, E8 1EL 7.30pm | £9 | TICKETS
CHRIS COHEN’s songs initially
sound easy. They’re each tiny jewels that unfurl at a leisurely pace,
but dig a little deeper and you’ll reach a melancholy core. His previous
two albums, 2012’s ‘Overgrown Path’, and 2016’s ‘As If Apart’, were
built from lush, blurry tracks that embedded themselves in your
subconscious, like they’d always been there. ‘Chris Cohen’, his new solo
album on Captured Tracks, was written and recorded in his Lincoln
Heights studio and at Tropico Beauties in Glendale, California over the
course of the last two years. Cohen would sing melodies into his phone,
fleshing them out on piano, then constructing songs around the melodies,
and later, adding lyrics and other instrumentation with the help of
Katy Davidson (Dear Nora), Luke Csehak (Happy Jawbone Family Band), Zach
Phillips, and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, among others. It is his most
straightforward album yet, but it is also the conclusion of an
unofficial cycle that began with ‘Overgrown Path’. ‘Chris Cohen’ is an
album about pain and loss but it’s also about accepting loss. Of the
song “Green Eyes,” Cohen says “[It’s about] the men in my family and how
they passed their worldview along to each other from great emotional
distances. My father and grandfather were full of secrets and longing,
which were communicated through everyday actions like driving a car or
cooking a meal. We all wanted closeness, but never found it in each
other.” This is a statement about a specific song, but it is also a
statement about the album as a whole: it’s a beautiful sound, but it’s
also unflinching in its depiction of emotional turmoil.
https://chriscohen.bandcamp.com/ THE JELAS are smart, complicated and intricate. They are angular and fidgety and their lyrics are poetic and funny and it all fits together perfectly but only just. Listening to their ‘Beetroot Yourself’ record makes you think about complexity in art. Furthermore the lyrics are totally and completely beautiful. They are poetic, filled with imagery and metaphor but Colin and Nat’s delivery is so unaffected they never come across as pretentious, only truthful. https://jelas.bandcamp.com/ |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
BILGE PUMP
WITCHING WAVES
SLAGHEAP
Friday 31 May
The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle St, Angel, London, N1 0XT
7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS
BILGE PUMP are long term
linchpins of the Leeds DIY scene, they now follow their own paths;
growing veg, running up hills, building musical paraphernalia. Every now
and then the call goes out; the time comes to do another tour, put
another record out. With new album 'We Love You' (their first in 10
years) out now via Gringo Records, Bilge Pump unveiled a new single,
'Wheel of Yew' - it's PiL bass lines, Spacemen 3 guitar and a blistering
Butthole Surfers-esque solo are all held together with the tightest
drumming this side of Bill Ward. They have spent a while getting this
album right, writing songs that describe a world where the council lets
it rot and the kids make trouble, or sometimes music. For Bilge Pump,
who first formed in 1996, this isn’t a career, it is more important than
that, feeling the right moment, not forcing it. Drummer Neil Turpin
says "A gig is good when the rhythm created and projected propels the
crowds arms and legs, looping into a glorious reciprocal exchange of
energy." Anyone who has ever seen them will tell you they are loud. But
loud and clear, defined patterns, riffs smoulder into drones and then
catch fire again lyric’s trimmed of fat, precise and witty.
https://bilgepump.bandcamp.com/ WITCHING WAVES formed in 2013 by Emma Wigham and Mark Jasper and released a tape EP on Suplex Records. They then released an album on Soft Power entitled Fear Of Falling Down in late 2014. This was followed up with their second LP Crystal Cafe in February of 2016, after which they toured the U.S. and Europe. In 2017 Estella Adeyeri of Big Joanie joined the group on bass, and the band continued a relentless schedule of touring and recording. Witching Waves are now set to release a new album on Specialist Subject called Persistence on April 6th. https://witchingwaves.bandcamp.com/ SLAGHEAP play energetic post punk nonsense from their HQ of Bristol. Melodic, naive and raucous songs about our experience of the world. https://soundcloud.com/slagheapbristol |
Thanks as ever for reading and for all your unending support!
Upset The Rhythm
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