Upset The Rhythm had a bumper year! We released eight diverting new records by The Pheromoans, Marcel Wave, Earth Ball, Parsnip, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, Normil Hawaiians, Robert Sotelo & Mary Currie and The Green Child. We also organised a tremendous 44 concerts, which we hope you found absorbing.
Giant thanks to all the artists involved and to all of YOU for supporting us through our many endeavours in music both live and recorded.
Let’s make 2025 our best year yet!
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Beyond thrilled to have Myriam Gendron playing a special show for us next April at Grand Junction! Tickets now on sale, ooh!
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MYRIAM GENDRON
Monday 7 April
Grand Junction, Rowington Cl, London W2 5TF
7.30pm | £18 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/B9332cba32bb
MYRIAM GENDRON is a Montreal-based songwriter, guitarist and singer. Mayday is the third LP by Gendron, it follows her earlier, critically acclaimed albums, Not So Deep As A Well (2014) and Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found (2021). Prior to her debut album, Myriam's primary musical focus was busking in Paris Metro stations, performing the songs of Leonard Cohen and others, accompanying herself on guitar. Through her day job, working at a Montreal bookstore, Myriam discovered the poems of American writer, Dorothy Parker, who was better known for her cutting wit than her verse. Inspired by Parker's words, Myriam wrote music to accompany a suite of them, then recorded the results in her bedroom. These recordings were issued as her debut LP, and continue to delight listeners who discover them, with their freshness, clarity and humor. After a brief hiatus, Myriam began exploring the complex folk traditions of Quebec (and beyond), recording the 2LP, Ma délire, which combines traditional and original songs (largely in French) with arrangements that make space for avant-garde musical interludes by such folks as guitarist Bill Nace (Body/Head) and renowned jazz percussionist Chris Corsano. Mayday is an even more syncretic fusion of these elements. Most of the songs are original, in both English and French, and blend traditional and avant elements with abandon. Additional players this time include drummer Jim White (Dirty Three), guitarist Marisa Anderson, Montreal bassist Cédric Dind-Lavoie (a fellow fan of trad/avant dynamism), Bill Nace and saxophonist Zoh Amba (whose horn actually gets the final “word”). Mayday is a thoroughly thrilling effort that manages to create new vistas of sound while maintaining a feel that is both intimate and familiar. Beautiful work.
https://myriamgendron.bandcamp.com/
Upset The Rhythm presents...
WOLF EYES
Thursday 10 April
The Underworld, 174 Camden High St, London, NW1 9DL
7pm | £15 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/qa5f170d34a7
WOLF EYES have spent 26 years fusing together DIY electronics with the avant-garde sensibilities of Fluxus and the granite of dreary Midwestern life. Their new album 'Dreams In Splattered Lines' is a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna. As if pulled from a fever dream, the surrealists of the 1960s converge with alien electronic blues musicians in an underworld of mystery. The air is thick with car wash radio white noise, crackling and fizzing like a toxic elixir, spoken word poetry transmissions as absurd and cryptic phrases. Each corroded aural environment is a microcosm of chaos, honed to razor-sharp precision. Swept away in a whirlwind of thirteen perplexing narratives, each one an unpredictable journey through subterranean worlds, a sonic trip of reality folded into itself.
Wolf Eyes have released three albums recently ‘Dreams In Splattered Lines' was preceded by the compilation of collaborations 'Presents Difficult Messages', and the band followed this up with the release of 'Wolf Eyes w/ Spykes', bringing a much sought after early release to vinyl for the first time, documenting a recording session pivotal to the ongoing development of the group’s sound. Alongside this has been the usual steady stream of lathe cuts, side hustles, art and inzanity. A new LP is due out soon charting Wolf Eyes’ recent recordings with Anthony Braxton too, look out!
https://wolfeyes.xyz/
Very pleased to say our Six Organs of Admittance show on March 27th has blossomed into a Drag City showcase with the addition of the magnificent Bill MacKay to the lineup!
Upset The Rhythm presents...
SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
BILL MACKAY
Thursday 27 March
Metronome London, 41 Commercial Road, Whitechapel, London, E1 1LA
7.30pm | £18 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Gb5ecad0f987
SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE have built a prolific and diverse body of work over the last 20+ years. Ben Chasny's project is an experimental amalgam of new folk, drone music, percussion and strange textures, with Chasny delivering an outpouring of eclectic releases in the early 2000s for various small labels before finding a longstanding home on Drag City. In 2003, Chasny began an association with Comets on Fire, which led to him becoming a full-time touring and recording member of the band. After recording and touring extensively with Comets on Fire in 2004, Chasny returned to the studio and issued the moving and beautiful School of the Flower on Drag City in January of 2005. Sun Awakens and Shelter from the Ash arrived in 2006 and 2007. After touring and a break in 2008, Six Organs began what would become a prolific return to force, releasing a further 18 astonishing records up to the current time. First was the release of the sonically expansive - and very electric - Luminous Night, followed by the double-disc retrospective RTZ, both of which appeared on Drag City. Chasny also plays in 200 Years alongside Elisa Ambrogio (of Magik Markers), with Donovan Quinn (Skygreen Leopards) in the project New Bums, and is also a member of tightly-wound improv unit Rangda, accompanied by Sir Richard Bishop and Chris Corsano.
Chasny more recently developed a card-based creative system called a Hexadic for making music and released several related albums before resuming his primary project with new work like 2021's The Veiled Sea and the 2024 Shackleton collaboration Jinxed by Being. This year Six Organs also released a fully solo album Time Is Glass, which consists of haunted, unsettled rural folk sounds. With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spider-webs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition.
https://sixorgansofadmittance.bandcamp.com/
BILL MACKAY is a guitarist, improviser, composer, and singer based in Chicago. An accomplished collaborator with projects that include Katinka Kleijn (Stir, 2019), Nathan Bowles (Keys, 2021), and Ryley Walker (SpiderBeetleBee, 2017), MacKay is also a solo artist creating multi-dimensional works such as Esker (2017), Fountain Fire (2019) Scarf (2020), and Locust Land (2024), all released on Drag City Records. Bill’s music is a visceral crackling where it meets the air, and Locust Land can’t help but reflect its era more than any other in his discography. A restless energy and urgency is repeatedly felt — in the driving momentum of “Keeping in Time,” “Glow Drift,” and “When I Was Here” — while a dogged persistence radiates from the tone colors and percussion of “Oh, Pearl.” The sense of searching, displacement and longing in vocal tracks “Keeping in Time,” “Half of You,” and “When I Was Here” speak literally to the tumult of current vibrations. Within the arrangements, there’s also departure from previous norms — in addition to the brilliant guitar work for which he is known, Bill plays a variety of keyboards, from piano to organ to synth, extending his music with the available voicings, while enriching the sound field without abandoning his signature brevity. For fans of his singing, and following in the recent tradition of Fountain Fire as well as his collaboration with Nathan Bowles, Keys, Locust Land expresses with an increased vocal presence — and heightened engagement, with Bill’s words and melodies drawing us closer.
https://billmackay.com/
Romantic times! We have a new show lined-up on Feb 14th with Callahan & Witscher!
Upset The Rhythm presents…
CALLAHAN & WITSCHER
Friday 14 February
The Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London, E8 2EB
7.30pm | £8 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/ic571250f2f8
CALLAHAN & WITSCHER is the project of NYC-based musicians Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher. Witscher has been one of the most daring voices in underground American music for two decades, highlighted by releases on Pan and NNA Tapes. Callahan’s focused, uncompromising approach to sound caught the attention of both Demdike Stare’s DDS label and Swiss composer Jürg Frey, who took Callahan on as his first composition student. Fans of their individual work might expect opacity, disruption, or rhythmic irregularity from their collaboration, but their debut LP ‘Think Differently’ sounds like a pitbull in a convertible, a sand-kicking beach party, the dopamine hit you get from 311 or Smash Mouth. It’s a punchy, crunchy, highly infectious record. How did Callahan & Witscher cut the path from the ghostly margins of avant garde musics to the gutters of post-grunge American hard rock? In the words of Callahan, “at some point, you start to need a stronger drug.”
The most potent characteristic of this stronger drug is the guitar. And not just any guitar, but a sassy, contagious, blithe guitar. Its presence is a drastic shift for two guys who’ve combined to make dozens of records over the years, not a single one of which has a recognizable guitar sound on it. Alongside the cool breezes and hyperactive fretwork of Callahan’s guitar playing, the songs are backboned by strutting, groove-happy vocals: all bark, all bite. Every song is a careful collage, light but dense, ornate with gang choruses, soulful femme vocals, autotune and whisper scratches. This accumulation almost manages to hide the record’s potent undertow of dread. ‘Think differently’ was released by Post Present Medium last September.
https://callahanwitscher.bandcamp.com/album/think-differently
