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Hello everyone!
I hope you enjoyed Hen Ogledd's 8-hour concert a week or so ago,
what an immense effort, huge thanks to the band and all their special
guests. We have since sent the pantomime horse, who graced the stage
multiple times, to glorious pasture.
Our next London show falls on July 1st at The Old Church in Stoke Newington. We're very fortunate to have the evocative Alison Cotton performing.
Alison's new album The Gods Laugh (out today no less)
inhabits a sublime twilight of viola drones, cavernous percussion and
soaring, poignant vocals. Drawing on folk mythos, the nature poetry of
John Clare, and unsettling landscapes of emotion - the album is a
triumph of atmosphere!
The hypnotic Ecka Mordecai will
also appear with their ghostly spectrum of rich sound sources. Read on
for context galore, including full listings for July 1st, and our
upcoming August shows for Prolapse and Jeffrey Alexander & The Heavy Lidders.
You'll also find below new shows added to our live music programme for Marisa Anderson, The Hobknobs and Sir Richard Bishop. Thank you!
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Upset The Rhythm presents… ALISON COTTON
ECKA MORDECAIWednesday 1 July The Old Church, Church St, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES 7.30pm | £15 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/z09756e9c72eALISON COTTON
is a London-based composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist whose
music centres on viola, harmonium, and layered vocal drones. Originally
from Sunderland, she first emerged in the UK underground in bands
including Saloon, The Eighteenth Day of May, and more recently, The Left
Outsides before beginning her solo career in 2018. Her debut, All Is
Quiet at the Ancient Theatre introduced her long-form, place-inspired
approach to composition. This was followed with Only Darkness Now and
The Portrait You Painted of Me, both acclaimed for their immersive
atmospheres and emotional depth. All three albums appeared in The
Quietus’ End of Year lists, with Only Darkness Now topping their New
Weird Britain chart and The Portrait You Painted of Me was also Folk
Record of the Month in The Guardian. In 2024, Cotton released
Engelchen, a work inspired by the lives of Ida and Louise Cook and their
efforts to help refugees escape Nazi Germany. The album deepened her
interest in narrative composition, blending historical research with her
distinctive drone-based sound. Her records have been released by Rocket
Recordings, Feeding Tube Records, Cardinal Fuzz, Bloxham Tapes and Clay
Pipe Music. Cotton continues to explore drone, experimental folk, and
narrative forms, establishing herself as a singular voice in
contemporary experimental music. For this show Cotton will be playing
music from a new album and will be accompanied by Mark Nicholas on
percussion, harmonium and synths. https://alisoncotton-uk.bandcamp.comECKA MORDECAI
is an artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and
olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello,
horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into
time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity. https://eckamordecai.bandcamp.com/track/leau-dhiver
"Cotton may expand folk’s raw emotions
into more avant garde territories, but they still feel possessed by a
blood-red muscle memory that goes back centuries" – The Guardian
“The power of this music is simply awe-inspiring. When Alison Cotton plays, the world stands still”. – The Quietus
“Alison
Cotton’s music speaks of places, people and stories not quite of this
world, while orchestrating folk and drone elements meticulously, as if
following an arcane ritual” – The Wire
“Her exquisite
voice calls to mind both the chill of the best British folk…and the
psychedelic detail of Occitanian traditional song” – Uncut Magazine
“Some of the most moving, powerful music you’re likely to hear this year” – NARC Magazine
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Upset The Rhythm presents…
PROLAPSE
JETSTREAM PONY
Friday 7 August
100 Club, 100 Oxford St, London, W1D 1LL
7.30pm | £15 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/u09e48cb795cPROLAPSE
formed in Leicester in the early 90s and are now spread across the UK
and Scandinavia. Still pursuing their own path of repetition and twisted
melodies, they merge influences from post punk to krautrock and even
folk. Their previous releases have included numerous singles and four
albums on various labels, including Cherry Red and Radar. They feature
vocalists Mick Derrick and Linda Steelyard, whose intense duelling
vocals combine with ferocious triple guitar assault and pummelling
rhythms. The fifth Prolapse album “I Wonder When They’re Going to
Destroy Your Face” will be released on Tapete Records and marks the
bands first new recordings since their last album, “Ghosts of Dead
Aeroplanes”, released 26 years ago, but in some ways it feels like there
hasn’t a break at all. From the opening incessant riff of ”The Fall of
Cashline”, Prolapse set their stall out, hammering the message that
they’re back, over and over (and over and over) again. https://prolapse2.bandcamp.com/
JETSTREAM PONY come to us
(mainly) from Brighton, channelling a love of post‑punk and indie‑pop.
Led by vocalist Beth Arzy (Aberdeen/Trembling Blue Stars) &
guitarist/vocalist Shaun Charman (The Wedding Present/The Fireworks),
the band fuse chiming melodies with driving bass and propulsive rhythms;
a sound they’ve taken from "schrammelig” (German for rough or raw) to
slightly less "schrammelig" from the early singles in 2017, to their
newest album, “Bowerbirds and Blue Things.” Most recently releasing a
BBC6 Riley & Coe session on Precious Recordings of London. https://jetstreampony.bandcamp.com/
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Upset The Rhythm presents…
JEFFREY ALEXANDER & THE HEAVY LIDDERS
CHRISTINA CARTER
Saturday 8 August
Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL
7.30pm | £12 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/yfbbe41cc761JEFFREY ALEXANDER
has been frittering around the edges of the psychedelic underground for
decades, evolving his own musical space that overlays dusty folk,
cosmic jazz, deep psych, free improv, and even (gasp!) indie rock. He’s
been called a “psych rock lifer” (UNCUT), crafting “digressive jams that
meander through free-form jazz, bluesy kosmische” (PROG) and “extremely
highgrade psych” (MOJO). Convened in 2019 on Alexander’s relocation
back to his native east coast, Philadelphia’s Heavy Lidders are the
latest hard-touring expression for the guitarist’s music, joining a vast
and tangled discography (and tape list) that includes the beloved
long-running west coast Dire Wolves Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band
and, before them, the Iditarod and Black Forest/Black Sea, as well as a
bushel of solo play-all-the-instruments projects, a stint with Jackie-O
Motherfucker, sessions with Kemialliset Ystävät and Avarus and others. The
newest studio LP, “Liquid Donnon” (released 12 June 2026 on Riot
Season), catches Jeffrey Alexander & The Heavy Lidders at their
heaviest, “heavy” in the Lidderverse being far from a monolithic musical
idea. There’s heavy like the album-opening “From Loch Raven to Fells
Point,” one of several tracks with elegant and gnarled conversational
jams featuring the core Lidders lineup of Alexander alongside guitarist
Drew Gardner and bassist Jesse Sheppard (both of Elkhorn) and drummer
Scott Verrastro (Kohoutek, Bardo Pond). But there’s heavy, too, with
tracks where Gardner shifts to dream-space vibraphone, and those with
Christina Carter of Texas noise-psych legends Charalambides on
veil-crossing wordless vocals, her first collaboration with Alexander in
some 20 years. She will indeed be fronting the band on this brief UK
tour. For fans of Meat Puppets, Trad Gras och Stenar, Ornette inspired
Krautrock, Sonny + Linda Sharrock, Jerry - Jorma interplay, SPACE. https://jeffreyalexander.bandcamp.com/CHRISTINA CARTER
was born in the bayou city of Houston, Texas in November of 1968, and
co-founded the group Charalambides there in December of 1991. Ever since
she has deeply mined her own vein of sound-as-music with voice, guitar,
harmonica, and piano. For the past several years, Christina has
utilized extended improvisational guitar passages within and without
song structures and investigated 'the song' as a thing unto itself,
specifically concentrating on 'the word'- both in her own lyric writing
and her interpretations of the work of other lyricists. In addition to
performing extensively in the US, UK and Europe as a solo artist,
Christina has played and recorded in various groups and duos with
Jeffrey Alexander, Maria Chavez, Loren Connors, Spencer Dobbs, Sandy
Ewen, Julia Hungerford, Alistair Lingren, and Joe McPhee, amongst
others. Concurrent with her work as a musician, Christina has
expanded her involvement in writing and visual art. Her poetry has been
published by Digitalis Industries, The Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal,
Glass Eye, Slow Toe, and Shelter Press. In 2007, her art piece Forever
21 appeared at Salon Mijangos in San Antonio, Texas as part of a
concert/exhibit featuring Tom Carter, Warmer Milks, and Tetuzi Akiyama.
Forever 21 was a labor of love and destruction: six of her handwritten
diaries cut up painstakingly with scissors into miniscule pieces, which
then filled a large yellow plastic shopping bag. In 2024, Unifactor
published For Want Of Walls, Christina’s book of personal yet abstracted
writing and watercolor paintings. Christina currently resides in
Austin, Texas. Her latest release is the solo voice, guitar and
accordion album Like A Bayou To Its Gulf (Bud Tapes 2025). https://christinacarter.bandcamp.com/ |
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