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Upset The Rhythm presents…
LIMPE FUCHS - Concert
WATERLESS HILLS
Saturday 14 March
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, London, SE1 7LG
7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS
LIMPE FUCHS - Workshop
Sunday 15 March
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, London, SE1 7LG
1pm-3pm | £15 | Very limited places: TICKETS
LIMPE FUCHS is a German sound artist and instrument builder
whose vibrant performances develop from a real time engagement with the
ecology of the space at hand. Using wood and granite stone rows, ringing
bronze within pendulum string instruments and employing the percussion,
viola and voice she studied at the Munich Conservatory she sensitises
the process of hearing through an exploration of music-making as a part
of everyday life. An original member of ‘70s Krautrock duo Anima Sound,
Limpe and then husband sculptor Paul Fuchs embodied a radical form of
free living, farming and building instruments like the Fuchshorn,
Fuchszither and Fuchsbass at a professional metal workshop in their
Pfarrhof—a thousand-year-old former priest house—in rural Bavaria. Anima
Musica' epitomised the ingenious marginal freak scene of the sixties
and seventies and are often cited as a key influence on Krautrock. In
1971 they hitched a handmade mobile home and stage to an old Hanomag
tractor and toured Europe bringing their anarchic, uncompromising
improvisations to an impromptu public at 19 kilometers per hour. A
champion of egalitarian performance, Limpe quit the group in the ‘80s
when new experimental theatre work demanded agreement with more members
and she felt that her voice was being compromised. Ever since she has
devoted herself to “making music while listening to the streaming of
time…with simplicity and emotion”, following the influence of soundscape
artists. Whether improvising solo or with other players, Limpe
unfailingly coaxes an otherworldly atmosphere from the sounds and
silence of her surroundings with a childlike wonder, always open to
surprise. Her engaging performances require attention from the audience
as she moves freely in space evoking her natural sound-scapes while
playing her viola woodhorn, bamboo flute, pendulumstring, a four-meter-
steel constructed lithophone, sheet metal, pieces of wood and singing in
her unique ephemeral bird-like style.
We follow up the Saturday night concert with a Sunday afternoon workshop based around a sound installation of Limpe Fuchs. Limpe invites participants to play her instruments in the sound installation and they can bring their own instruments too. Only three are playing, the others are listening. When all have played in different combinations, we decide how to go on. It is important to stay simple, so that the instruments are treated with love and the skill of ones hands is not overstrained. The sound of the ensemble has to be in balance between chaos and order. When the handling of the tools and precision of listening is growing starts nonverbal communication with music. http://www.limpefuchs.de/en/ WATERLESS HILLS is a new project put together by drummer Andrew Cheetham (now playing with Richard Dawson, Kiran Leonard, Irma Vep, Yerba Mansa, Desmadrados Soldados de Ventura etc). The group consists of Andrew and two further members of the Manchester Underground wrecking crew - dbh (Kiran Leonard band, Irma Vep band, Jim Ghedi band, his own bad self) on violin; Gavin Clarke (DSDV) on bass – and augmented by Cambridge-based avant-folk musician C Joynes on electric guitar. Their debut album 'The Great Mountain' (out 29th Feb on Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube Records) was recorded in one day direct to 1/4” tape at Hallé St Michaels, Manchester. All tracks were wholly improvised, and the tapes document a slowly-evolving interplay and, at times, ‘on-the-edge’ exchange between the players. The results were eventually shaped into an imaginary soundtrack to an orientalist western loosely themed around Freya Stark's 1935 travelogue 'The Valleys Of The Assassins' and the surrealist occult art of Ithel Colquohoun. https://waterlesshills.bandcamp.com/ |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
SPINNING COIN
BAS JAN
ROBERT SOTELO
Wednesday 18 March The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB 7.30pm | £8 | TICKETS
SPINNING COIN are Sean Armstrong (vocals, guitar), Jack
Mellin (vocals, guitar), Rachel Taylor (bass, vocals, keyboards) and
Chris White (drums). Hailing from Glasgow their cascading melodicism is
topped with some amazing shredding. Their music connects into a local
music scene more associated with Orange Juice, Teenage Fanclub, and of
course The Pastels, who release the band’s records via their Geographic
Music imprint. Their music is beautifully rough-hewn guitar pop that
takes in frustration, but also gracefulness and splendour, in equal
measure. On February 21st, Spinning Coin will release their second album
‘Hyacinth’. A brave step forward, ‘Hyacinth’ is an album full of
poetry, light and warmth of heart, and presents a band holding nothing
back. Throughout there is joy in spades, but also melancholy, and a
checked fury, threading the group’s political vision through their
reflections on the personal and the interpersonal. Jack explains that
the new songs “are about the need for love in an often very unloving
world. Trying to find a balance of some kind between feelings of apathy,
negativity, detachment and action, positivity and oneness.” Whilst
Mellin’s songs were more pointedly political on debut LP ‘Permo’, here
he has built more complexity into his writing. Ultimately Spinning
Coin’s ethos stays true to itself, as Sean expands about the experiences
and the motivations behind the new music: “It’s trying to connect with
other people on a human level, doing something that we love, and trying
to embrace the unknown.” This show sees them head to London date during
their European tour in support of ‘Hyacinth’ in March!
https://spinningcoin.net/
BAS JAN are a London-based experimental post-punk trio built around the remarkable and distinctive voice and songs of multi-instrumentalist and composer Serafina Steer. Named after the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who was last seen setting out to sail across the Atlantic in 1975, Bas Jan’s earliest songs were initially conceived as Serafina Steer solo material, until Bas Jan co-founder members Sarah Anderson and Jenny Moore triangulated the whole collaboration and, in 2015, the band was born. Since recording Yes I Jan, both Sarah and Jenny have moved on to other projects, and currently joining Steer in the new incarnation of Bas Jan are violinist, bassist and vocalist Emma Smith (Meilyr Jones, Seamus Fogarty and founder member of the Elysian Quartet) and drummer and vocalist Rachel Horwood (Trash Kit, Bamboo). Bas Jan’s utterly brilliant debut album Yes I Jan was released via Lost Map Records in 2018.
https://basjan.bandcamp.com/
ROBERT SOTELO is a cosmic pop melodist; a heartfelt multi-instrumentalist whose direct songs are curiously affecting. His debut album ‘Cusp’ from 2017 was packed with miniature psych overtures and earnest musings, he then followed this up in 2018 with an album called ‘Botanical’, more keyboard-minded and playful with its near-absurdist palette of sound and reflective mood. Last September Upset The Rhythm released Sotelo’s third album ‘Infinite Sprawling’, his first record since relocating from London to Glasgow and partly inspired by his new city’s inclusive and collaborative musical world. Recorded with Ruari MacLean (of Vital Idles, Golden Grrrls) and Edwin Stevens (Irma Vep, Yerba Mansa) at their home studio Namaste Sound, ‘Infinite Sprawling’ grew out of Sotelo’s sketchbook of skeletal songs, with MacLean and Stevens developing their own drum, guitar and keyboard parts. These songs pulled together like a wakeful stretch on a Sunday morning, flowering with a lightness of touch, sounding both carefree and brisk. |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
IRMA VEP
SOFT WALLS
THE TUBS
Friday 3 April New River Studios, 199 Eade Rd, Harringay, London, N4 1DN 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS
IRMA VEP is the on-going, evolving main vehicle for polymath
musician Edwin Stevens and on his latest album Embarrassed Landscape,
due 3rd April via Gringo Records, the project has reached a zenith.
Primarily recorded in Stevens’s adopted home town of Glasgow over two
days with frequent collaborators Ruari Maclean and Andrew Cheetham,
Embarrassed Landscape is an album that breathes in a fetid skip full of
millennial dread, self-effacing anxiety and doubt before exhaling it as
heartbreaking songs and ecstatic abandon. Built around the skeleton of
Stevens’s songwriting and fleshed out with loose, virtuoso playing, it’s
a body of work that could have been the anxious songs of an
over-thinker but rendered here Embarrassed Landscape revels in a kind of
un-selfconscious confidence. Indeed, various tensions through out the
album are constantly revealing. Lyrics are riven with poetic, crushing
self-analysis and absurdity only to be performed against a backdrop of
trance-rock music skewered with Stevens’s own instantly recognisable
guitar playing, a style free and full of fire. Songs wring nuggets of
uncanny truth out of prosaic, every day activities while sounding like
Rolling Thunder Revue era-Dylan. Songs that seem hewn from some
unspeakable personal pain are laced with a disarming streak of black
humour, massive, world-ending psych jams that harken to Vibracathedral
Orchestra’s wall of sound dissipate into tender songs that deserve to be
picked apart and cried to. Tension needs release and here the release
needs tension. To celebrate the release of this new album, Irma Vep is
going on tour with Soft Walls.
https://irmavepirmavep.bandcamp.com/ SOFT WALLS (Dan Reeves of Cold Pumas) released his third album ‘Not as Bad as It Seems’ last year on cassette, now it’s been picked up for an LP release by Part Time Records! The album kicks off with ‘Misperception’, which comes across as a bit Deerhunter via Spacemen 3. A steady drum beat, a simple guitar melody, and Indian raga inspired keyboard drones. For what is essentially a one-man band, Soft Walls comes across as surprisingly lively (even amidst all that lo-fi scuzz). That is largely down to the drums which despite coming out of a machine, when rendered through a dodgy 8 track, can easily pass as someone churning out a bit of motorik. Soft Walls also have amazing records available through Tough Love and Trouble In Mind.
THE TUBS aim to channel "The Tubullar Sound"; a thick soup
of influences ranging from antipodean jangle, to needling Post Punk, to
traditional British Folk music. The Tubs feature former and current
members of Joanna Gruesome, The Estate Agents, Garden Centre and Keel
Her. The Tubs try to locate The Ignorant Sound on debut single I Don't
Know How it Works (out now on Prefect Records). An admission of pure
incomprehension, The Tubs spend 2.30 minutes sonically failing to grasp
almost every aspect of modern existence. Operating a simple can opener?
They don't know how it works. Logging on to their favourite 'chatting
app'? They don't know how it works. Creating jangle music under a regime
of Capitalist Realism? They simply don't know how it works.
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Have a fantastic week and we’ll see you over Saturday/Sunday.
Thanks as always for your time!
Upset The Rhythm
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UPSET THE RHYTHM
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