Afternoon everyone!
Last night we held a launch party at Café OTO with Normil Hawaiians
to celebrate the re-issue of the group’s 1984 album ‘What’s Going On?’.
Today sees that release hit the shops on limited LP (with
hand-numbered poster), CD and digitally, accompanied by a plethora of
bonus tracks and copious liner notes explaining how the malaise that
afflicted early 80’s Britain resulted in a defiant cry from Normil
Hawaiians that became ‘What’s Going On?’.
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Upset The Rhythm presents…
RAYS
DESIGN A WAVE
MAEDCHEN 84
Tuesday 16 July Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London, E8 2EB 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS
RAYS returned to the fray with
their second album, You Can Get There From Here, their first release
since their eponymous Trouble In Mind debut in 2016. Rays formed in the
fertile crescent of the California Bay Area, a hotbed of musical growth
in the past decade, and Rays' members pull not only from that recent
miasma but also from a wealth of Bay Area musical history. You Can Get
There From Here represents a turning point for the band, angling their
scrappy, post-punk fury into a more refined & melodic pop
sensibility, drawing inspiration from UK DIY pop & punk like Dolly
Mixture, Cleaners From Venus, Television Personalities & more.
Straight from the gate, songs like "Fallen Stars" & "The Garden"
temper their sonic crunch ever so slightly, relying more on the harmonic
wallop of a solid hook than the sheer volume of guitars & cymbal
crashes. This is urgent, chiming guitar pop of the highest order that
clangs with a sonorous melancholy & a ramshackle grace. Rays can
still lay it down with the rest of 'em; tunes like "Subway" & "Work
of Art" shuffle & stumble forward, skirting chaos in a flurry of
strums, recalling recent antipodean pop groups like UV Race, Dick Diver
or The Shifters who cull inspiration from idiosyncratic UK greats like
Mark E. Smith or Robyn Hitchcock. With You Can Get There From Here, Rays
add their voice to the chorus. The new album finds the core group of
Stanley Martinez, Eva Hannan, Troy Hewitt & Alexa Pantalone
augmented by new member & keyboardist Britta Leijonflycht, whose
synth flourishes add melodic embellishments, sonic heft or psychedelic
swirl where needed.
http://www.troubleinmindrecs.com/artists/rays/ DESIGN A WAVE aka Tom Hirst is a London based artist who has recently released music on Rush Hour’s No Label, as well as contributing to Ravioli Me Away’s opera. Design A Wave also has past releases on Alien Jams, Subsubtropics and the Alter label. Tom Hirst has been making music for many moons. Initial buds featured tape collages, distangled pop music, various dictaphone experiments, and over time all this meshed and warped into his solo musical venture known as Design A Wave. Initiated in the late 90s, the project was loosely named after one of the gangs in the Troma film Surf Nazis Must Die which, alongside other similar movies and music of it’s time, informed a particular vision of an idealised weird - a trashy synth orientated 80s B-movie soundtrack, which provided an aesthetic platform on which to dive, surf and ride. https://soundcloud.com/deswav MÄDCHEN 84 put a dent in ya head! A sample square of vinyl from wickes and a tearout guardian review of minaj's latest is available to be sent in the post for anyone who needs to feel real. https://maedchen84.bandcamp.com |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
DANIEL HIGGS
ETERNAL BROADCAST
Wednesday 17 July HQI, The Rotunda, Wood Lane, White City Place, London, W12 7TP (3 min walk from White City tube directly north up Wood Lane. Venue is behind the green gates) 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS
DANIEL HIGGS is a musician and
artist from Baltimore, Maryland on whose behalf superlatives are
destined to fail. It’s not that his artistic output - spanning three
decades, numerous albums, books of poetry and collections of drawings -
simply eludes classification, it defies it. Often we hear that a true
work of art is meant to speak for itself, and with the work of Daniel
Higgs the maxim rings truer than ever. Higgs is known primarily for his
work as the sole lyricist and frontman of the band Lungfish, a
four-piece dedicated to charting, in this listener’s estimation, nothing
short of the evolution of all species, known and unknown. They are
enshrined as one of America’s last true folk bands, and Higgs anointed
as a patron saint to artistic purity. In recent years, Higgs has
released a number of solo outings that can only be described as the
ultimate in isolation, worlds away from the hypnotic, communal rock of
his band. Higgs weaves meditative, casually ruptured drones using
acoustic and electric guitar, upright pianos, banjo and jew’s harp,
recorded entirely at home on cassette recorder. He pairs the music with a
series of paintings that call to mind religious iconography passed
through the disfiguring surrealism of Miro. His art is of the cosmos.
https://danielhiggs.bandcamp.com/ ETERNAL BROADCAST are a collective from Sheffield harnesses the background noise of the Universe; the radio waves rippling into space at the speed of light; the fallout from the Big Bang. A cosmic symphony of crackled transmissions. Featuring past and present members of Boring Men, Sister Wives, Feature, Night Flowers, Acid Mass. https://soundcloud.com/eternalbroadcast/sets/notebooksoep |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
PRISON RELIGION
HYPERSTITION DUO Friday 19 July The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB 7.30pm | £8.50 | TICKETS
PRISON RELIGION are a hardcore
noise project from Richmond, Virginia, comprised of Poozy and False
Prpht. Though the two are solo artists in their own right, they
collaborate regularly to make collages together that are indebted yet
flippant to hip hop, punk, and techno. Working together since 2016, the
duo have dived deep into the space between blown-out trap (2016’s Cage
With Mirrored Bars) and contemporary destructive club music (2018’s O
Fucc Im On The Wrong Planet). Since linking up with Texas-based
experimental label Halcyon Veil, they've connected a global crewsof
likeminded collaborators for a remix album including Rabit, Endgame,
Swan Meat, Lee Gamble and Bonaventure. The production destroys any
notion of comfort afforded in dance music, with cold industrial and
glitchy hip hop textures serving as the stylistic anchor of the record.
With close ties to NON Worldwide, Prison Religion are also ushering in a
new wave of vocal-based club performance.
https://prisonreligion.bandcamp.com/ "The barely tonal beats of tracks like "Shots Fired" have this way of making it feel like the 808s are falling apart or dissociating, like a crowd dispersing as Jones and Black spin kick in the centre… acid drenched tracks draw on the history of industrial music, metal iconography and experimental club music." (Noisey) "Prison Religion are one of the most hardcore, rap-related acts we've heard in years. Philip Best levels of mic-burning bile and vitriol shrieked and expectorated over bludgeoning beats, field recordings and charred electronics." (Boomkat) HYPERSTITION DUO plunge deep to deliver a maximalist collective immersion into their own lysergic phonosphere. Lurching, polyrhythmic pathways crumble and re-assemble; elastic dynamics snap; propulsion sparks from the nerve-centre of machine and corporeal entanglement. Featuring ex-members of Blood Sport, templexing, möbius loops and cybernetic subjectivities abound in an attempt to conjure escape vectors in a world of ubiquitous sound. |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
ADVANCE BASE
ALICE HUBBLE
Monday 22 July Redon, Railway Arches, 289 Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9HA 7.30pm | £12 | TICKETS
ADVANCE BASE is the electronic
solo project of Chicago, IL singer/songwriter Owen Ashworth (formerly of
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone). Using a two-handed arsenal of
electric pianos, autoharps, Omnichords, loops, samples & drum
machines, Ashworth builds minimalist, heavy-hearted, &
nostalgia-obsessed tunes around his conversational, baritone vocals. The
sound of Advance Base has been described as "lo-fi," "depressed" &
"weirdly uplifting." Advance Base has supported live dates for The
Postal Service, Pedro the Lion, The Mountain Goats, Dean Wareham, Alan
Sparhawk, Mark Kozelek & Stephin Merritt. The debut Advance Base
album, ‘A Shut-In's Prayer’ (2012), was released by Caldo Verde Records
& Ashworth's own Orindal Records. ‘Nephew in the Wild’, the second
album by Advance Base, was released in 2015 by Orindal Records &
Tomlab Records. PopMatters named ‘Nephew in the Wild’ the number 1 Indie
Album of 2015. ‘Animal Companionship’, the third & most recent
album by Advance Base, was released last September. The sound of the
album is soft and thick and comforting. And when we’re working with
songs as sad as the ones that Ashworth writes, that level of comfort
really comes in handy. He used to write sad love songs, or sad songs
about love. He’s still doing that, really, except that he’s now
middle-aged, with a wife and kids, living in suburban Chicago, and the
songs reflect that. The songs on ‘Animal Companionship’ are full of a
whole life’s worth of regrets and missed opportunities and moments of
acceptance and dead friends. It’s not as bleak, either; there are
moments of happiness, or at least sustenance, sprinkled all through
‘Animal Companionship’. But in its sharp and unrelenting and empathetic
specificity, this is some real masterly heart-wrecker music.
http://advancebasemusic.com/ ALICE HUBBLE is the new project of Alice Hubley (Mass Datura, Cosines, Arthur and Martha), the product of one lady locked at home with her collection of analogue synthesisers. Inspired by 70’s recordings by Tangerine Dream, Delia Derbyshire, Mike and Sally Oldfield, hers is a distinctly feminine take on the sometimes pompous 70’s sound. Her new album will be available on Happy Robots in Summer 2019. https://www.facebook.com/alicehubblemusic/ |
Thank you for everything, see you so soon!
Upset The Rhythm
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UPSET THE RHYTHM
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