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Upset The Rhythm presents…
MARY LATTIMORE
LUCINDA CHUA
Monday 19 November
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB
7.30pm | £8 | TICKETS
MARY LATTIMORE is a harpist living in Los Angeles. She
experiments with her Lyon and Healy Concert Grand harp and effects.
Memories - places, vacancies, allusions - are fundamental characters in
Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives,
indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something
enchantingly new. Lattimore recorded her breakout 2016 album, 'At The
Dam', during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene
landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In
2017, she presented 'Collected Pieces', a tape compiling sounds from her
past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and
beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station - a
redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate
Bridge - emanates 'Hundreds of Days', her second full-length LP with
Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech,
between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal
understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling
torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in
Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in
how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world.
Throughout the shifting locales there is one consistent companion Lattimore engages: a 47-string Lyon and Healy harp. The instrument wires directly into her psyche. Pitchfork's Marc Masters posits, "she can practically talk through it at this point; she's created a language." Lattimore's voice sweeps beneath the plucks and washes of opener "It Feels Like Floating," enraptured by the winding current, and reappearing in the second minute of the immense "Never Saw Him Again." The track elevates towards a shimmering apex of static and percussion before organ drone yields to signature halcyon flutters. As with much of Lattimore's work, the track titles are telling; "Baltic Birch" is a somber windswept march that sways gracefully out of step, a remembrance of a recent trip to Latvia where she was struck by the abandoned resort towns along the Baltic Sea. "Hello From The Edge of The Earth" is an earnest reflection of Lattimore's love of the natural world, recognising the thresholds of varying terrains. 'Hundreds Of Days' is out now on Ghostly International. Mary also writes harp parts for songs and recordings, performing and recording with such great artists as Meg Baird, Thurston Moore, Sharon Van Etten, Jarvis Cocker, Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Ed Askew and Fursaxa.
https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/
LUCINDA CHUA is a London-based singer-songwriter whose had a very productive year. The gifted cellist was a member of FKA Twigs’ live band, composed a Tchaikovsky-inspired score for a Russian fashion documentary, and has fostered a wide-ranging community of collaborators from her city’s diverse indie scene—among them Westerman, Ben Vince, and Laura Misch. These wildly different projects show the breadth of the artist’s interests, unified by Chua’s subtle chamber pop touch. Chua’s mode isn’t vigor: her songs are understated and somber, the energy so subdued it’s practically somnolent. Chua used to tour long ago with Stars of the Lid, and indeed that ambient band’s mournful, super-delicate style offers a clear idea of how Chua approaches her music, she was also a member of Felix on kranky records too. There is an unflappable calm present in all of Chua’s work, and on the quiet and intensely-felt recent single, ‘Somebody Who’, she is breaking out on her own. |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
HEN OGLEDD
BAMBOO
TOWER RAVENS RAPPER
Friday 30 November
The Courtyard Theatre, 40 Pitfield Street, Shoreditch, N1 6EU 7.30pm | £12 | TICKETS
HEN OGLEDD is a project founded by Richard Dawson and
harpist, Rhodri Davies, with the addition of Dawn Bothwell and Sally
Pilkington. The name of the group is a reference from the Welsh for The
Old North. Each hailing from historically different tribal regions of
the Old North, the musicians in Hen Ogledd challenge the idea that the
ancient world was rife with magic, while the new is infiltrated by cold
logic. This has led to the band’s new album for Weird World, ‘Mogic’,
being created. This third record from the group is a phantasmal blend of
images and ideas that draw upon the mystical and technological. ‘Mogic’
is a discombobulating pop prayer exploring artificial intelligence,
witches, nanotechnology, pre-medieval history, robots, romance, computer
games and waterfalls. This dynamic album of eddies and swirls,
ravishing melodies, hallucinatory textures and rapid rhythms is pinned
down by some deft performances: Pilkinton’s picture-perfect pop and
earthy singing, Davies’ blazing harp splutterations and guitar moans,
Bothwell's twisted telephone techno and bamboozling lyric-bombs and
Dawson's utter bass. No small mention must go to special guest Will
Guthrie, one of the finest and classiest drummers there is, who's all
over this record like long grass on dunes. ‘Mogic’ is released on
November 16th and supported by a short tour of the UK of which, this
show is the London date!
https://youtu.be/5O9BXeFm_yg
BAMBOO is the majestic pop project of Nick Carlisle and
Rachel Horwood. Their music is vivid and deeply poignant, locking into a
magnetic pull between Rachel's flawlessly resonant folk cadence and
Nick's pristine synth pop production. Bamboo’s second studio album, The
Dragon Flies Away, was released last year on Upset The Rhythm. The
Dragon Flies Away tells a story loosely associated with the Hannya demon
mask of Noh theatre plays such as Dojoji, and reflects the range of
emotion the Hannya mask is capable of displaying: obsession, jealousy,
sorrow and rage. The album presents its story in two acts and is
presented with a gatefold sleeve and lyric / artwork sheet. Horwood’s
evocative paintings are given centre stage with the packaging, allowing
the album's story to grow beyond sound, making the journey all the more
immersive. Bamboo are currently a live quartet and have just finished
off their new record, ‘Daughters of the Sky’, look out 2019!
http://www.bamboosongs.co.uk/
TOWER RAVENS are an all female rapper dance team based in central London. They take their name from the feathered guardians of the Tower of London, and are accompanied by a brazen Beefeater. They dance out in the city on a monthly tour of favourable pubs, and attend events and festivals throughout the year. Rapper sword dancing is a form of traditional dance which comes from the north east of England. The “swords” (inch wide strips of metal with a handle at each end) are used to make intricate locks and patterns whilst the dancers perform precise and neat stepping combined with fast and exciting movements. |
Upset The Rhythm presents…
ERIC CHENAUX
ROBERT SOTELO
Wednesday 5 December The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Angel, London, N1 0XT 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS
ERIC CHENAUX makes conceptual music that’s not meant to
sound conceptual. He operates among various ‘traditions’ but perhaps
most broadly, Chenaux’s records grapple with the relationship between
improvisation and structure in very particular, unique, idiosyncratic
ways – and quite without irony or cynicism, through love. Because
fundamentally, Chenaux writes love songs, which he sings in a voice
honeyed and clear, while his guitar gently bends, frazzes, chortles,
diverges and decomposes. This juxtaposition of his mellow, dexterous
crooning and his highly experimental (and equally dexterous) guitar
explorations, explodes even unconventional notions of singing and
accompaniment, of tonal and timbral interplay between guitar and voice.
As a solo artist, Chenaux’s improvisation methods are in certain literal ways solipsistic: as a singer-songwriter, he plays his guitar around and against his voice, challenging easy notions of harmony/harmoniousness, improvising ‘with himself’ in pursuit of surprising himself (and his listeners) as he unfurls ribbons of voice and instrument often to the point of seeming independence, all the better to capture – and be captured by – unforeseen, intimate moments of interdependence: a definition of freedom, as a profoundly intentional state of openness, presence and play. Even within avant-garde currents of folk and jazz balladry, Eric Chenaux feels like an outlier. Yet his music remains wonderfully warm, generous and fundamentally accessible in spite of its irrefutable iconoclasm. While the constitutive elements of Chenaux’s solo work in recent years might suggest some underlying devotion to asceticism, the opposite is much more true: his musical reveries resist, critique and counteract austerity (in all its forms) in a joyful abandonment to the improvised space where playfulness and light-heartedness are taken seriously, and where love is invoked and expressed, without reductive or facile sentimentalism, in a full, nuanced, clear-eyed suspension/rejection of the cynical life. Slowly Paradise (on Constellation Records) is Eric Chenaux’s most recent solo record – a lovely collection of mostly long songs guided by soothing, buttery singing and bent, fried fretwork. It is arguably Chenaux’s most assured and essential solo work, expanding upon the critical acclaim his previous releases Guitar & Voice and Skullsplitter have rightly garnered. http://cstrecords.com/eric-chenaux/ ROBERT SOTELO is the nom de plume of Andrew Doig, a 36 year old serial musician originally from Peterborough, UK. Andrew's middle name is Robert, whilst Sotelo is his mother's maiden name. Sotelo's verdant world of sound is at once intimate, choosing to build songs up from ambitious layers of instrumentation into miniature psych pop overtures of genuine sincerity of feeling. Very much grounded in that particular forward-facing strain of mid-60s rock that edged towards psych, Sotelo's music owes as much to Davies and McCartney's unashamed belief in melody as it does to the uncertainty and confusion that comes with mid-thirties existentialism. Debut album ‘Cusp' (Upset The Rhythm) was an album that explored the individual in a post-social life era, with Sotelo starting the project initially as an attempt to re-engage with the people he used to know, without relying on nostalgia as a common bond. From this worthy spark of a plan, he's created something grand and compelling, a vast tapestry of songs that stand up and sound afresh. Check out his exquisite recent cassette ‘Botanical’ on Nicey Music too. |
Thanks for reading, catch you on Monday!
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