UPSET THE RHYTHM: RICHARD YOUNGS - A Tower Hamlets Trilogy

Hello 2015!

I hope you all had a fantastic break over the Xmas holidays! Upset The Rhythm returns next week with a series of shows for RICHARD YOUNGS entitled a Tower Hamlets Trilogy. Over three days, January 16th-18th, Richard will perform three very different sets in a host of unusual non-venues across the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Richard Youngs is such an endlessly inventive musician that we thought he deserved some equally inspired spaces to perform in, so this project was born.

The first concert will take place in the Balfron Tower Community Cabin and promises to be an intimate, unplugged affair in the shadow of Ernö Goldfinger’s Brutalist tower block. For this show Richard will be joined by TOM JAMES SCOTT in support, so attention to detail, hushed field recordings and quiet gestures are bound to all play their part.

The following day sees experimental folk musician LAURA CANNELL channel some decidedly medieval atmospheres with her overbowed fiddle and double recorders at St George’s German Lutheran Church. For this show Richard is planning a supremely minimal performance, tapping into the unique acoustics of the UK’s oldest surviving German church.

On Sunday 18th January the trilogy of events will draw to a climax at the Mile End Ecology Pavilion, a truly unique contemporary space situated amongst the reed beds and nature lakes of Mile End Park. For this final concert, Richard will be supported by his good friend DYLAN NYOUKIS, bringing an unparalleled brain-warp improv and amplified physicality to proceedings. Read on for the whole story, tickets for each event cost £8, whilst a £20 pass for all three dates is also available.

\\\\\ NEXT WEEK /////

RICHARD YOUNGS

A Tower Hamlets Trilogy

‘Three different performances in three different places’ …

Friday 16 January

Supported by TOM JAMES SCOTT

Balfron Tower Community Cabin, 82 St Leonard's Rd, Poplar, E14 0QU

7.30pm - 10pm | £8 | http://www.wegottickets.com/f/8532

Saturday 17 January

Supported by LAURA CANNELL

St George's German Lutheran Church, 55 Alie St, Aldgate East, E1 8EB

7.30pm - 10pm | £8 | http://www.wegottickets.com/f/8532

Sunday 18 January

Supported by DYLAN NYOUKIS

Mile End Ecology Pavilion, Haverfield Rd off Grove Rd, Mile End, E3 5TW

2pm - 5pm | £8 | http://www.wegottickets.com/f/8532

* Ltd. Three day pass for £20 | http://www.wegottickets.com/f/8532

RICHARD YOUNGS is an iconic figure of the UK underground, having spent the last 30 years working on an incomparable output of solo records alongside numerous collaborations. Originally from Cambridge, but based in Glasgow for the last two decades, Youngs is as prolific as he is diverse turning his hand to lush folk hymnotics, a cappella minimalism, tactile improv, synth pop, hardcore punk and avant garde weirding. Youngs is even in a band with his six year old son Sorley and long time collaborator Andrew Paine called The Flexibles, who have a devolved industrial rock arc to them. All of these eclectic musics have amassed on almost as many labels with key releases being found on VHF, Jagjaguwar, MIE Music and Ba Da Bing! as well as on his own No Fans imprint. Over the years Richard has also lent his skills to a number of bands including Ilk, Vibracathedral Orchestra, A Band and Sunroof! as well as playing bass for Jandek during his debut series of live concerts, and has collaborated on joint works with Luke Fowler, Andrew Paine, Makoto Kawabata and Simon Wickham-Smith to name a few. Richard Youngs plays an eclectic range of instruments on these records from guitar to zither, homemade modular synth to recordings of a motorway bridge, yet central to all this is the importance he places on his own unadorned vocal, which almost acts like a rope pulling together all the disparate tangents and unpredictable projects into his very own transcendent realm of sound.

http://nofansrecords.wordpress.com/

For this very special trilogy of shows in London’s Tower Hamlets, Richard has been working with Upset The Rhythm to take live music away from its safe domain of established venues to somewhere different in search of a more radical and memorable experience. Over the three nights Richard Youngs will perform an entirely different in tune with each specific place and supported by the following artists:

TOM JAMES SCOTT is a classically trained musician interested in rich, densely treated atmospheres and lucid reflective moments. Tom's influences stretch far and wide, touching upon aspects of traditional music, improvisation, vocal music, composition, and field recording to name but a few. Tom's previous albums for Bo' Weavil, were both guitar based with added piano, distilled through a minimalist mind set to create some of the most beautiful elemental melodic lines that take the listener on a journey of meditative contemplation. 'Drape' is the title of Tom's recent LP of solo piano pieces. Strings of single notes become humming, shadowy resonances within the body of the instrument, echoing into frequent pause and fragmentation. New album ‘Teal’ was released last month on LP via Skire Music. Uniting all these records is Scott’s rare ability within ambience to stop everyday life dead in its tracks, forcing an invitation for consideration and contemplation at every moment.

http://skire-music.blogspot.co.uk/

LAURA CANNELL is a young woman drawing on ancient transcendental and earthly musics, playing fiddle, overbowed fiddle, double recorders, sometimes percussion and other rarefied wind instruments. Her sense of space, dynamics and working with acoustics is super sensitive. Whether solo or otherwise she explores the spaces between ancient, traditional and improvised music, often utilising a fragment from a medieval theme to her own end in a manner that embraces the apparitional, historical or the otherworldly. Her seemingly wild side, in such rarefied circles makes her involved yet emotive music really bristle and connect. Laura’s exquisitely-realised solo album Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth was released in July 2014. Haunting chords move the heavy air of the church as fiddle drones drift across the flatlands of East Anglia. Her current live music show finds her performing improvisations on ‘over-bowed’ fiddle and double-barrelled recorders creating spell-binding new interpretations and breathing new life into lost and forgotten melodies from the 5th – 14th centuries.

http://www.lauracannell.co.uk/

DYLAN NYOUKIS understands nothing if not the value of showmanship. Tempting though it may be to pursue a career in the vending of substances as wispy as a foul wind, Nyoukis’s vocation is solidly within the jurisdiction of Well Tempered Theatrics. A native son from a northern area of the UK, an obscure, little-talked-about quadrant of The Realm that locals claim created the modern world and everything in it, Nyoukis has been putting on the style since the early 1990s, first with Dora Doll in Prick Decay / Decaer Pinga, an experiment that transmogrified youthful no wave vigor into an exponentially larger and encompassing street brawl of visionary sound, later with painter / collage artist Karen Constance in Blood Stereo, a malleable unit that can stain with their very personal splat any avant canvas set in their way.

Nyoukis currently enjoys fairly high regard among aficionados of non-idiomatic gibber created using naught but what the Yanks refer to colloquially as The Piehole, though in contrast to his master-class peers such as Phil Minton or Jaap Blonk, he concerns himself less with a panoply of techniques than emitting gurgles and squelps with a clear head and in-the-moment viscerality. But the lad’s abilities in the fussier, more disciplined art of sound collage can’t be given short shrift either. His solo LP The Acrylic Window (Discombobulate 2013) journeys deep into a rarefied psychedelic tension worthy of freemasons and illuminati. The more diminutive Babble For Bisciglia (Vauva 2014), no less of a masterwork, deploys cunning editing and production techniques to locate the sweet spot between expansion and contraction, a worthy tribute to its departed namesake.

http://chocolatemonk.co.uk/enter.htm

I hope this reaches you well and that you’re enjoying this new year.

Thank you as always for reading!

UPSET THE RHYTHM

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