UPSET THE RHYTHM: Negative Scanner, Horse Lords and Tim Presley in London soon!

Friday again!

Where has this year gone? We’re arriving like a whirling vortex into our final shows of 2016 now. Tomorrow, we have the astonishing Negative Scanner and Score performing for us at The Victoria in Dalston. Negative Scanner roar and sprint through their songs, launching fast-paced riffs head first into Rebecca Valeriano-Flores’ ferocious vocal. We’ve been blown away with their recent Trouble In Mind record so we’re very excited to have them come over from Chicago to headline London for the first time. Score, one of our favourite new London punk bands, will be dealing out the squall and surge in a frenzied manner too, cannot wait!

Then straight off the bat on Monday, Upset The Rhythm will be heading to The Lexington for another colossal lineup. Middex will open the show with his eerie synth and vocal debris. Then South London trio Primordial SOUP will begin sprawling through their evocative songs. Headlining we’re very excited to say will be Baltimore motorik force Horse Lords, a band who almost every act who have come over from the US these last few years have said they love! Horse Lords square the circle, making music that is alternately tight and loose, real-time risky and process oriented, blurring the borders between prog, no-wave and minimalism. I’m sure they’ll take us all to a whole new dimension and leave us there hopefully!

We have one more concert taking place soon that we also wanted to shout in your ear about. One week tomorrow, i.e. Saturday 19November, we have the excellent Tim Presley of White Fence in town performing songs from his brand new Drag City album ‘Wink’. Journalist Laura Snapes described Tim’s new album as sounding like “ Television tackling an obstacle course” and I can’t think of a more succinct finger on the pulse of the sound. Cate Le Bon contributed to the writing and recording of the album and their combined high-wire songwriting here is addictive. In support we have majestic folk-rock from The Wharves and an opening set from Alex Dingley, newly signed to Tim Presley’s label Birth Records.

It was brilliant to see so many of you at the shows already this week, thanks so much for coming out! Here is the full scoop on the next few events…

\\\\\ TOMORROW /////

NEGATIVE SCANNER

SCORE

Saturday 12 November

The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Rd, Dalston, E8 3AS

7.30pm | £6.50 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/370748

NEGATIVE SCANNER are a Chicago post-punk quartet formed in 2012 by Rebecca Valeriano-Flores (guitar, vocals), Tom Cassling (drums), Matt Revers (guitar), & Nick Beaudoin (bass) in the wake of the breakup of Flores & Cassling's previous band 'Tyler Jon Tyler'. A fierce live unit, they honed their chops on Chicago's robust DIY scene, propelled by the rhythm section's dialed-in hive-mind & the twin guitar attack of Revers & Flores, whose powerful voice delivers her lyrics with passion & conviction. The band has previously released two 7-inch singles in 2014 - the first on Trouble In Mind & second on Tall-Pat Records. Negative Scanner excel at creating tension, which sets them apart from similarly zipped-up post-punk acts. Their fast and barbed eponymous debut LP (also on Trouble In Mind) is a potent demonstration of how tension is most rewarding when it snaps.
https://negativescanner.bandcamp.com/

SCORE make blown-out energetic no wave/anarcho noise; all the right amounts of harsh, sassy structure, bile and beauty. Members of Woolf, Dregs and Cop come together in a gritty torrent of rawboned hardcore bratpunk, primitive and pounding, searing and surging. Demo imminent, no link yet!

\\\\\ MONDAY /////

HORSE LORDS

PRIMORDIAL SOUP

MIDDEX

Monday 14 November

The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, N1 9JB

7.30pm | £6 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/377189

HORSE LORDS make music with guitar, bass, drums, and sometimes saxophone, but you couldn't really call what they do rock music. Rock is just a small piece of the greater amalgamation—a simple-yet-complex affair that welds repetitive riffing in strange time signatures to microtonal harmonies that glint like flecks of mica. It might be tempting to call it math rock, but these aren't problems to be solved—they're patterns that unfold as if of their own accord. The Baltimore band has released two albums up to this point, both of which alternate switchbacking studies in rhythm and drone with noisy, knotty studio experiments. They've also released three freeform "mixtapes" containing sidelong collages of full-throttle rave-ups, modular synth sketches, and live recordings whose audio fidelity suggests that they may have been recorded to a Dictaphone at the bottom of someone's gym bag. New album ‘Interventions’, on Northern Spy Records, marks a major step forward in every way: The jams are both more focused and more hypnotic, while the quality of the recordings has a newfound clarity and fullness that does wonders for the music. Guitarist Owen Gardner and bassist Max Eilbacher play instruments re-fretted according to the principles of just intonation, and their curious tuning—intermingled with saxophonist Andrew Bernstein's complementary bleat—yields an unusual and visceral sound. It's subtle, but you can feel it vibrating in the air all around you. The band’s Northern Spy debut is also the first Horse Lords album to explore the classic studio-as-weaponry strategies of yore, mapping the quartet’s raw Baltimore lightning onto the experimental musique concrète territory surveyed by elder heads like Faust and This Heat. Floating at the boundaries of composition and improvisation, electronics and performance, the underground and the vast improbable 21st century indie mainstream, Horse Lords exist in none of these places and all of them.

https://horselords.bandcamp.com/

PRIMORDIAL SOUP are a London trio who wheel around the melody, their songs questing their way through the wilderness. Bass, guitar, drums and vocal admissions are all ingredients in the cauldron from which their songs spring forth. Check out their brand new EP, ‘The Sins Of Others’ now!

https://www.facebook.com/primordialsoupsoup/

MIDDEX trades in suburban deliberation and galactic musings. This is outer space hidden in the outer boroughs plastered over the flat thump of frosted Perspex hearts. Check out his two lathe cut 7”s out now on Polytechnic Youth.

http://polytechnicyouth.com/

\\\\\ SATURDAY 19 NOVEMBER /////

TIM PRESLEY (White Fence)

THE WHARVES

ALEX DINGLEY
Saturday 19 November
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, N1 9JB
7.30pm | £10 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/374378

TIM PRESLEY is a man in a glass booth, grabbing at scraps of paper blown at his windscreen as if they were of the greatest value. They're actually of the only value. And we grin in delight in his twist and tumult; in this process, he's assembling his tunes in essential fashion, rolling around in the dust of his Id-bowl, then reordering the scrambled head-events into a barrage of phrases and stages, flickering through disembodied and re-embodied moments, held together by Tim's inviolable belief in the song progression underneath. The tension is unbreakable, a thin plastic slip, as he intones upon a maze of high wild mercury stings. On the cover of his new album on Drag City, you see a bare chest and bits of bodies sketched in ragged lines of black and white. Inside, in full calor, we find Tim Presley. The dark force behind White Fence, Drinks, Hair and Darker My Love stepping into the solo light with 'The WiNK'. When you tune in to 'The WiNK', it takes a couple minutes for you to hear a word. But then it takes only one line until "and then you die," uttered in a voice of mottled, throaty horror, as if ghosts that haven't yet shown themselves are advancing through walls. Working with the creative team of producer Cate Le Bon, drummer Stella Mozgawa, and engineer Samur Khouja, Tim's located the corners of a perfect square, with their creativity and truth crafting unique parts to function as songs within songs, giving the tunes double-jointed features that extend their original intentions. The Presley guitar hand has a powerful, yet quicksilver touch, with metallic brilliance always, especially in rhythm figurations, where it wrings chords out like panic signals, highlighting 'Can You Blame', 'Long Bow', 'Underwater Rain' and 'Clue' (to name a few), and a cover version of Willie "Loco" Alexander's 'Kerouac' (nod and a wink!), where a smooth and steadfast lyric melody is supplanted by a throw of broken guitar and shards of keys. Throughout 'The WiNK', Tim's tone is thin and princely, connecting the dots sideways and backwards to align and make the image emerge.

http://www.dragcity.com/artists/tim-presley

THE WHARVES combine gracefully minimal psyche-rock with fuzzed out folk. Their songwriting remains consistently rich, largely due to the startling harmonies of Gemma Fleet (bass) and Dearbhla Minogue (guitar) that bond together each song. They invoke the reverberated spook of 60s girl groups, the mid-fi guitar crunch of Kim Deal's The Amps, the vocal flavours of The Roches and the narrative and structural panache of 70s progressive folk. Marion Andrau's thunderous drumming drives through these compositions, ensuring the wealth of disparate influences remain focused and celebratory. Brand new album, Electa, builds on last year's 'Naz' 7" on Upset the Rhythm, refining their distinctive sound with increasingly notable elements of heavy rock and folk. Three part vocal harmonies remain staple to the format, underpinning their progressive instrumental step-up.

https://thewharves.bandcamp.com/

ALEX DINGLEY traveled from West Wales' Llansteffan to California's West Coast to make his forthcoming album, Beat The Babble, with Tim Presley, Cate Le Bon and Samur Khouja. He took it on the road supporting Le Bon on her May UK tour and early next year Presley will release it on Birth Records.
http://www.dingleydingley.com/

Here Endeth! Thanks for all your support,

Have a wonderful weekend!

UPSET THE RHYTHM

http://www.upsettherhythm.co.uk

http://upsettherhythm.bigcartel.com/

http://www.upsettherhythm.blogspot.com

\\\\\ UPSET THE RHYTHM /////

///// UPCOMING SHOWS \\\\\

NEGATIVE SCANNER

SCORE

Saturday 12 November

The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Rd, Dalston, E8 3AS