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 Upset The Rhythm presents… NO AGE SHAKE CHAIN Saturday 4 March 100 Club, 100 Oxford St, Oxford Street, W1D 1LL 7.30pm | £14 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Zf02f4acddc4 NO AGE have a guiding principle: first thought, best thought. Constantly responding to their own streams of consciousness with reductive flexibility, they’ve taken the basic duo of guitar and drums with vocals WAY farther than anyone listening in halcyon Weirdo Rippers days could have guessed. Expounding on those larval possibilities, they’ve zig-zagged in serpentine precision, in and out of the teeth of the wringer - ranging outside and back in again, as befits the present thought. And now, 16 years deep and six albums into it, these motives have led them to make People Helping People (Drag City). ‘People Helping People’ sees No Age deep in the lab, scraping available nuclii together to see what new compound they find next. Erasing the starting points, reordering the pieces and beginning anew. Side one ricochets expertly back and forth between magisterial instrumentals and sing-song forms cut up on the mixing desk, as with the undeniable hitness of “Plastic (You Want It)”, winningly rewired to MIDI-mangled beat squelches. Straight up punk-style riffs get busy on side B, their aesthetic choices continuously reframe the norms, enhancing their inherent power. ‘People Helping People’ finds their disparate desires operating in perfect sync; prolegomenic weirdness fused immaculately to classic rock propulsion, transforming the energy pouring out from their hands and feet with electronics. This is ‘People Helping People’: unpretentious, suspicious, inviting, and left-field. The most accurate display of the No Age ethos put to record. Yet! https://noage.bandcamp.com/ SHAKE CHAIN have been busy demolishing audiences and expectations for the best part of the last three years. Vocalist Kate Mahony sets that standard by anything from crawling through the audience’s legs in a bright yellow raincoat to crying and washing her hands in a nearby toilet, as the rest of the band start the set. A feeling of anxiety and unease conjures relevant questioning, ‘what an earth is going on?’, ‘am I hallucinating?’ and ‘is this part of the show?’, all hallmarks of Shake Chain’s unruly and lyric-bespattered rock show. The four-piece from London are completed by Robert Eyres (Synth/Guitar), Chris Hopkins (Bass/Synth/Samples) and Joe Fergey (Drums). Born from the ashes of their former bands, the group met with a desire to create something that would feel new for each of them and audibly take its own course. The result is a nervous propulsion of bass lines, twitchy guitars that jolt and jerk and tack sharp drums, overridden by screeching vocal slurs and sampled television. Kate’s singing is a unique embrace of flights of atonal fancy, head-first repetition and ecstatic frenzy. Opinion-dividing arguably, but singular in making Shake Chain dauntingly brilliant. The band’s debut album ’Snake Chain’ is out now on Upset The Rhythm. https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/snake-chain |
 Upset The Rhythm presents…
ME LOST ME
BULBILS LUKI
Sunday 5 March
Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL 7.30pm | £8 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/jfe003fa3a38 ME LOST ME delights in experimenting with songwriting and storytelling, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully push the boundaries of genre. Led by Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent who takes influence from folk, art pop, noise, ambient and improvised music, the project has transformed since 2017 from a solo endeavor to an expanded group; regularly collaborating with acclaimed North-East jazz musicians Faye MacCalman and John Pope. Me Lost Me’s music has been described in The Guardian as "stripping folk back to its bones while letting its future echoes bleed out", and by BBC Radio 6's Tom Robinson as a "brilliant peculiar noise". A prolific writer, Me Lost Me has released two crowdfunded albums: ‘Arcana’ (2018) and ‘The Good Noise’ (2020), which was included in Electronic Sound Magazine's Album of the Year list. These in addition to her latest EP 'The Circle Dance' (2021), which was described as "her most textural and sonically adventurous music to date" by NARC Magazine, and an extensive touring schedule around the UK DIY scene, has won her unique sound much support across the musical spectrum. Dent has notably performed live for BBC Radio 3’s After Dark Festival and as part of the 2022 BBC Proms alongside Spell Songs, Royal Northern Sinfonia and the Voices of the Rivers Edge Choir. She recently received the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers and was 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at Sage Gateshead. https://www.melostme.com/ BULBILS is Sally Pilkington and Richard Dawson, a duo from Northumberland channeling the infinite with their burgeoning, beguiling homespun music. Their vast catalogue stands at 71 titles (at time of writing) and runs the full gamut with mesmeric, drifting, inventive freedom occupying the heart of the group. Resolutely lo-fi, spontaneous and often unruly, Bulbils started out as a lockdown coping strategy based around the idea of providing comfort and employing synths, bass, drum machines, vocoder etc. but has sparkily propagated into something truly expansive, unhurried and horizon-chasing. You can check out all the duo’s recordings on their bandcamp page linked below. Pilkington and Dawson also perform together in another of our favourite bands, Hen Ogledd. https://bulbils.bandcamp.com/ LUKI is the music project of singer and pianist Lucy Duncan and producer Misha Rivers. Using voice, piano, synths and electronics, they create atmospheric pop that blends the everyday and the imaginary with theatrical and emotive force. Indebted to folk, post-punk, art pop and the odd edges of musical theatre, their music is immersive, narrative driven and direct. Following the release of ‘Wisps’ on Glasgow’s label GLARC in 2018, LUKI released a single ‘The Parts’ on lathe-cut label Sonido Polifonico. Their debut EP ‘Half True’ was self released recently too. https://glarc.bandcamp.com/album/wisps |