Islet this Thursday, The Silver Field on Friday and much more for March!

Alright there!   Two top London shows for you this week! On Thursday at Space 289 we’re thrilled to be hosting Welsh, lysergic pop group Islet. The Powys trio release their astonishing, multifaceted album ‘Eyelet’ this very Friday and so Thursday night squarely lands us in album launch territory. Overflowing with sublime synth lines, fizzing drum machines and expansive lyrical themes it’s a dazzling listen, really looking forward to seeing them play this live! Also, Despicable Zee from Oxford will be showcasing her deeply evocative cycles of song too, see you very much down the front. Tickets available from the link below and on the door from 7.30pm too, roll up, roll up!

Our second show of the week kick-starts the weekend with some exemplary, questing pop this time in the shape of The Silver Field. Diaries open to Friday night, venue this time SET in Dalston. Hypnotic, honest and verdantly bejewelled, The Silver Field’s sound is enveloping and intimate, truly otherworldly. London-based French multi-instrumentalist Clémentine March will also share songs from her brand new record of joyfully alive music at this event, plus Loose Joints and Katayoun Jalili will keep the party furnace stoked with some bountiful DJ sets too.

You’ll also find below the details of our two events planned with Limpe Fuchs at Iklectik on March 14th (concert) / 15th (workshop)!   Limpe Fuchs is a German composer of acoustic and visual happenings who creates sound with unusual, large-scale instruments. After studying piano and violin in the early sixties at the school of music in Munich she started Anima Sound, a collective name for twenty years of ‘sound research’ with her partner, sculptor Paul Fuchs. They epitomised the ingenious marginal freak scene of the sixties and seventies and are often cited as a major influence on Krautrock, her subsequent solo work has proved equally fascinating and original!

A rather epic concert planned with Spinning Coin, Bas Jan and Robert Sotelo at The Lexington on March 18th is also outlined below, making you fully up to speed with everything we have on this month!   Since we last talked we’ve added some new events to our upcoming concert programme too, including shows from Lungbutter, Brigid Mae Power (full band), Ian William Craig and an album release party for Lea Bertucci in Mile End Park’s Ecology Pavilion! So much to look forward to this year already!

Upset The Rhythm presents…   ISLET DESPICABLE ZEE Thursday 5 March Space 289, Railway Arches, 289 Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9HA 7.30pm | £9 | TICKETS   ISLET are a Powys trio whose free-spirited invention and exuberant intensity flows through experimental pop: hypnotic, exhilarating and defiantly unique. They began in Cardiff in 2009 when Emma Daman and brothers Mark and John ‘JT’ Thomas resolved to form a band with one rule: that anything was possible. Soon after, they were joined by Alex Williams. The band had no lead singer or set roles, switching instruments from song to song, melding psych rock, ethereal atmospherics and jagged post punk, with most gigs seeing the walls and spectators played as instruments. They were soon surrounded by a buzz of excitement and mystique, cherished locally, then globally. They wrote about their philosophy in their own zine, started a festival, helped other bands; they are stalwarts of the Welsh DIY community. Two albums (‘Illuminated People’, 2012 – shortlisted for the Welsh Music Prize – and ‘Released By The Movement’, 2013) and a handful of EPs followed, released on their own label, Shape Records. Now Islet have signed to Fire Records, with Emma Daman Thomas moving into focus with her unleashed, mesmerising vocals against a synth-driven sound, unexpected shifts of rhythm, playful inventive lyrics; an exhilarating, electronic purr that provokes thought and feeling. They have matured, are more tender and composed, but still eclectic, mysterious and intriguingly themselves. Brand new album ‘Eyelet’ will be released on March 6th! https://islet.bandcamp.com/ DESPICABLE ZEE is the solo project of Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani, who has been writing and performing for more than 15 years. She is the director of the Young Women’s Music Project, which continues to inspire her. Zahra specialises in leftfield, electronic lo-fi-pop – wonky yet meditative tunes, punctuated by biting rhythms. With echoes of The Knife, Tirzah, CocoRosie and Madame Gandhi, her recent EP sounds like longing, like searching, like hacking away at old vines to reach what’s behind them. https://despicablezee.bandcamp.com/

Upset The Rhythm presents…   THE SILVER FIELD CLEMENTINE MARCH LOOSE JOINTS (DJ Set) KATAYOUN JALILI (DJ Set) Friday 6 March SET, 27A Dalston Ln, Dalston, London, E8 3DF 7.30pm-2.30am | £6 | TICKETS   THE SILVER FIELD is a sound world of Coral Rose & friends. Voice, tapes, bass, strings, reeds, drums, small sounds, big sounds, sunlight, moonlight, a lot of water. March 2020 sees multi-instrumentalist Coral and drummer Kiran Bhatt (Red River Dialect) take to the road across the UK, sharing songs from their forthcoming second album, to be announced early 2020, as well as selections from The Silver Field's debut Rooms. Recorded by Coral at home in south London, Rooms was brought to the world in January 2019 by Tim Burgess' O Genesis Recordings and received high praise for its dreamlike tapestries of tape loops, reverb and folk instrumentation, including plays on BBC 6 Music, BBC 3's Late Junction, NTS and Soho Radio, as well as print and online love from The Quietus, Electronic Sound, God Is In The TV and many more. https://thesilverfield.bandcamp.com/ CLÉMENTINE MARCH is a London-based chanteuse, composer and filmmaker, her musical forays portray a very personal approach to the pop song, playing with languages and textures, with a Brazilian savoir-faire and a post-punk edge. https://clementinemarch.bandcamp.com

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. https://robertsotelo.bandcamp.com/

Thanks as ever for reading, see you lots this week and next! Upset The Rhythm

UPSET THE RHYTHM UPCOMING SHOWS

ISLET DESPICABLE ZEE Thursday 5 March Space 289, Railway Arches, 289 Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9HA 7.30pm | £9 | TICKETS   THE SILVER FIELD CLEMENTINE MARCH LOOSE JOINTS (DJ Set) KATAYOUN JALILI (DJ Set) Friday 6th March SET, 27A Dalston Ln, Dalston, London, E8 3DF 7.30pm-2.30am | £6 | TICKETS   LIMPE FUCHS 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    SPINNING COIN BAS JAN ROBERT SOTELO Wednesday 18 March The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB 7.30pm | £8 | TICKETS   Upset The Rhythm & The Barbican present… RICHARD DAWSON: Delight is Right CIRCLE HANNAH DIAMOND HUMMING DOGS BAMBOO ASIQ NARGILE YAMA WARASHI METTE RASMUSSEN Barbican Hall, Silk St, Barbican, London, EC2Y 8DS Saturday 28 March 3pm - 11pm | SOLD OUT   IRMA VEP SOFT WALLS Friday 3 April New River Studios, 199 Eade Rd, Harringay, London, N4 1DN 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS   Upset The Rhythm & SA Recordings present… LEA BERTUCCI - ‘Acoustic Shadows’ release party! RHODRI DAVIES Tuesday 14 April Ecology Pavilion, Mile End Park, off Haverfield Rd, Grove Rd, London, E3 5TW 7pm-10pm | £6 | TICKETS   Upset The Rhythm & The Barbican present… LANKUM CAROLINE Wednesday 15 April Barbican Hall, Silk St, Barbican, London, EC2Y 8DS 7.30pm | £17.50-£22.50 | TICKETS   NAP EYES Wednesday 15 April Moth Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette St, Hackney Central, E9 6NU 7.30pm | £12 | TICKETS   PAN AMERICAN MIYAGI-LAMMARDO DUO ASUNA Tuesday 21 April Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS    BONNIESONGS YUMI AND THE WEATHER GARRET MOORE Wednesday 22 April Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London, E8 2EB 7.30pm | £6.50 | TICKETS   PROTOMARTYR Monday 27 April Peckham Audio,133 Rye Ln, Peckham, London, SE15 4ST 7.30pm | £15 | SOLD OUT PROTOMARTYR Tuesday 28 April The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB 7.30pm | £15 |  SOLD OUT   OLD TIME RELIJUN Wednesday 29 April PinUps (formerly The Islington), 1 Tolpuddle Street, Angel, London, N1 0XT 7.30pm | £8.50 | TICKETS   LUNGBUTTER ADULKT LIFE Thursday 30 April The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Rd, Dalston, London, E8 3AS 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS   IAN WILLIAM CRAIG Friday 1 May EartH Kitchen, 11-17 Stoke Newington Rd, Dalston, London, N16 8BH 7.30pm | £12 | TICKETS   SHOPPING Tuesday 5 May The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS   ESCAPE-ISM (Ian Svenonius of Chain & The Gang, The Make-Up) Thursday 7 May Space 289, Railway Arches, 289 Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9HA 7.30pm | £11 | TICKETS   BRIGID MAE POWER (full band) Wednesday 10 June The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, London, N1 9JB £10 | 7.30pm | TICKETS