Hey
everyone!
Thank
you all for coming out to see Carla dal Forno last weekend, I hope you enjoyed
those evocative dubby, songscapes as much as we did. It’s been a productive
week for Upset The Rhythm, confirming new shows for OOIOO, Xiu Xiu and Rat Columns. If you like Japanese
gamelan freakouts, ecstatic synth revelation or melancholic guitar pop we have
you covered! We’ve also been working with Wolf
Eyes on the lineup for next month’s show and can now confirm a special modular
synth set from Mumdance and an
explosive performance from Guttersnipe in
support. All sounds great to me, let’s talk of things even more imminent.
Tomorrow
we’re heading to The Islington for a concert with three incredible acts who all
manage to shake new technicolour vibes out of music’s well worn raincoat. Cian Nugent will headline with his dazzling
guitar fretwork and deeply resonant songwriting. Mega Bog will use her intuitive grasp of melody to traverse vast
jazzy wonderlands, whilst Jess
Williamson will open proceedings with her earthy, gothic folk. Tickets will
cost you £7 on the door from 7.30pm, see you there!
Next
week we also have two other events lining up for you! On Wednesday we’re very
honoured to host HEXA; a duo made up
of Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and perceptive,
Australian composer Lawrence English.
They will be performing a specially commissioned soundtrack to David Lynch’s celebrated Factory
Photographs. Taking place at The Forge in Camden the performance will
be heavily immersive with projections and meticulous walls of sound. The
endlessly inventive Graham Dunning
will also be debuting a set of music based around his recent Aggregate composition.
Then
on Friday we’re back at The Islington hosting Sacred Paws and Spinning
Coin as they whirl around the UK on their joint headline tour. Expect
cascading guitar pop galore with moments of afrobeat adventuring and post punk
propulsion. No that’s what I call alliteration! Life Drawings will open the
show too, full details on all three marvelous events can be found below. Read
on for all particulars!
\ \ \ \
\ TOMORROW / / / / /
CIAN
NUGENT
MEGA
BOG
CIAN NUGENT is a mercurial guitar player and
composer from Dublin, Ireland. Cian combines personal passions, such as
suburban/coastal blues, traditional musics, late 1960s-'70s singer-songwriters,
jazz ambitions, 20th century composition and the Takoma school into a deeply
personal style. New album, 'Night Fiction' is Cian Nugent's third album but his
first taking on the role of singer-songwriter. Where his previous two albums:
2013's 'Born With The Caul' and 2011's 'Doubles' saw him exploring extended
guitar based instrumentals with his band, The Cosmos, here he has reigned
things in and focused his songwriting skills. Guitar fans, do not fear, there
is still plenty of soloing and fingerpicking here. With 7 songs both solo and
with his band, this album amalgamates everything Cian has done up to this point
and reveals a more broad palate of influences, including The Velvet
Underground, Richard Thompson, Television, Neil Young, John Lennon, Fred Neil,
etc. Cian will perform this show as a trio showcasing lots of songs from his
recent album, 'Night Fiction', out now on Woodsist.
https://soundcloud.com/cian-nugent
MEGA BOG is the moniker of song-dribbler Erin Birgy, a Pacific Northwest
rodeo child with an unmistakable laugh who was allegedly cursed upon
conception. Over the past 8 years the band has stretched and wandered in a
crescendo towards musical freedom. Now based in New York City, Birgy has
adopted a band of wiggly jazz cartoons lifted from bands like Big Theif, iji,
Big Eater, Causings, Hand Habits, Heatwarmer and others. Melodies always lush,
erotic and free. Chords always dissonant, abstract and evolutionary. On their
2013 album Gone Banana, Bog settled into their homemade cloud of pop and jazz.
Spreading the discs around the world over countless tours of dim zones. On
their new bug, "Happy Together", Mega Bog leapfrogs further into the
storm. Dizzying fusion of lounge, pop and bouncing rocks under poetic tantrums
of love gone all the way wrong. Listen closer.
https://megabog.bandcamp.com/
JESS WILLIAMSON’s Heart Song is a brave record. It
explores the strength in vulnerability, the power in silence and empty space.
The recordings bristle with energy and confidence while maintaining the intense
intimacy Williamson is known for. Like the visceral desert landscape that
inspires her, she knows when to let her vocals drift across the song, light
like a tumbleweed, and when to, like the fiercest of Texas storms, unleash
thunder and lightning with her band.
http://www.jesswilliamson.com/
\ \ \ \
\ NEXT WEDNESDAY / / / / /
HEXA: FACTORY
PHOTOGRAPHS
(Jamie
Stewart & Lawrence English sonic response to David Lynch’s photography)
GRAHAM DUNNING (Aggregate performance)
Wednesday 15
February
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey St,
Camden, London, NW1 7NL
HEXA is a project by Australian composer
and artist Lawrence English and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart exploring the
physicality of sound and its abilities to infiltrate, abrade and occupy the
body. Premiered at the David Lynch: Between Two Worlds retrospective at GOMA
museum in Brisbane, Australia in April 2015, HEXA is a sonic response to
Lynch’s Factory Photographs, a collection of images Lynch took of disused
factories and the ruins of industry in the USA, Poland, Germany and the UK.
Using the factory photographs as both a literal and metaphoric source, their
performance draws root from the texture of Lynch’s images, the imagined and
actual spaces, and the spectral histories contained within them. The effect is
like “cascading low frequency pulses and tectonic plates of sound, suspended in
cavernous cathedral-like spaces.” When asked recently about his decades’ long
interest in photographing factories in various states of disuse, David Lynch
remarked “I grew up in the north-west of America where there are no factories
at all, just woods and farms. But my mother was from Brooklyn, so when I was
little we used to go there and I got a taste for a certain kind of architecture
and a feeling for machines and smoke and fear. To me, the ideal factory
location has no real nature, except winter-dead black trees and oil-soaked
earth. Time disappears when I'm shooting in a factory, it's really beautiful.”
HEXA's album is out now on the Room40 label.
http://lawrenceenglish.com/
http://www.xiuxiu.org/
GRAHAM DUNNING is self-taught as an artist and
musician having studied neither discipline academically. His live work explores
sound as texture, timbre and something tactile, drawing on bedroom production,
tinkering and recycling found objects. He also creates visual work, video and
installations drawing on these themes. Graham has performed solo and in
ensembles across the UK, and Europe, and exhibited installations in the UK, New
Zealand and USA. He teaches Experimental Sound Art at the Mary Ward Centre in
London and also gives various independent workshops. He has released through
Entr’acte, Seagrave, Tombed Visions and more. For this show Graham will be
performing a live set based around his recent solo composition ‘Aggregate’,
based on a visual score, using the resonances of rooms within now-empty
brutalist towerblock, Balfron Tower, alongside record crackle and analogue
synth.
https://grahamdunning.com/
\ \ \ \
\ NEXT FRIDAY / / / / /
SPINNING COIN
SACRED PAWS
LIFE DRAWINGS
Friday
17 February
The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Angel, London,
N1 0XT
7.30pm | £6 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/387070
SPINNING COIN are a fiercely independent rock group
from Glasgow, something you could probably guess by listening to any of their
songs. Their roots are all over the place but a simple love of playing together
in their rehearsal space, and almost never turning down shows, has seen them
coalesce a winning group sound in almost no time at all. Drummer Chris
White is part of the Winning Sperm Party collective, who document of a world of
shadowy Glasgow music running all the way from the Glasgow Music Collective to
Fuzzkill Records today. Where Spinning Coin branch out from things is in
their cascading melodicism topped with some amazing shredding. This
connects into a slightly different Glasgow music scene more associated with
Orange Juice, Teenage Fanclub, and of course The Pastels, who released their
debut 7” through their Geographic Music imprint. Both songs are
home-recorded but show off the group’s easy flair for getting things to sound
right without trying too hard, both are bittersweet, both are beautiful.
https://soundcloud.com/spinning-coin
SACRED PAWS are a fantastic, intuitive dream punk
duo, comprising Eilidh of Golden Grrls and Skeleton Bob on drums, and Rachel
from Trash Kit and Shopping on guitar. Raw Soweto high-life riffs and rolling
Afrobeat grooves are filtered through post-punk sass and ramshackle K Records
charm. It’s an utterly joyous sound, the duo trading giddy melodies and
righteous chants over febrile rhythms and chunky, infectious riffage. Rock
Action are releasing the band’s debut album ‘Strike A Match’ on January 27th!
This record follows their wonderful EP, and was produced by Tony Doogan and
Sacred Paws at Castle Doom, Glasgow before being mastered by Frank Arkwright at
Abbey Road Studios.
https://soundcloud.com/rock-action-records/sacredpaws-everyday
LIFE DRAWINGS are an un-googleable
band of tip-top artrockers using lo-fi vocals, low key guitars, catchy bass
bits, cheap keyboards, a drums and advanced admin for songs almost exclusively
inspired by Country Teasers and The Fall.
Have a terrific weekend, thank you for
reading!
UPSET
THE RHYTHM
x
\\\\\
UPSET THE RHYTHM /////
/////
UPCOMING SHOWS
\\\\\
CIAN
NUGENT
MEGA
BOG
HEXA: FACTORY
PHOTOGRAPHS
(Jamie
Stewart & Lawrence English sonic response to David Lynch’s photography)
GRAHAM DUNNING (Aggregate performance)
Wednesday 15
February
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey St,
Camden, London, NW1 7NL
SPINNING COIN
SACRED PAWS
LIFE DRAWINGS
Friday
17 February
The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Angel, London,
N1 0XT
7.30pm | £6 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/387070
MILKY WIMPSHAKE
‘20th Anniversary
Show!’
ROBERT SOTELO
THE PLAN
Saturday 4 March
The
Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Angel, London, N1 0XT
WOLF EYES - ‘Undertow’ Album launch
MUMDANCE
GUTTERSNIPE
Friday 24 March
EXFED, Unit 4, 199
Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN
MARY OCHER
Thursday 5
April
The
Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Angel, London, N1 0XT
RAT COLUMNS
Wednesday 19 April
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, N1 9JB
OOIOO
Thursday 20
April
Kamio, 3
Rivington Street, London, EC2A 3JL
DANIEL BACHMAN
JAKE XERXES FUSSELL
Monday
1 May
Cafe
OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
XIU XIU
Monday 22 May
Kamio, 3
Rivington Street, London, EC2A 3JL
PRIESTS
Thursday 25 May
The Victoria, 451
Queensbridge Rd, Dalston, E8 3AS
NOTS
Wednesday 7 June
Cafe OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
DEERHOOF
LE TON MITÉ
Monday 4 September
Village
Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London,
EC2A 3PQ
NB. This is the
new date for February’s postponed event, original tickets remain valid.
