London show for Keiji Haino confirmed!

 

 

Upset The Rhythm are delighted to welcome the legendary Keiji Haino to London next March! This show at the ICA will be the UK premiere of his Polygonola performance, wherein Haino-san will play a unique, suspended, polygonal metal instrument that produces a rich variety of complex non-integer overtones. Tickets on sale now!


Upset The Rhythm presents…

KEIJI HAINO 
Tuesday 17 March
ICA, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
7.30pm | £25 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/V8e7432de701

KEIJI HAINO was born in Chiba, Japan on May 3, 1952. Inspired by Antonin Artaud, he aimed for the theater, but an encounter with The Doors stimulated him into music, where he has examined and absorbed a wide range of expressions from the early blues, especially Blind Lemon Jefferson, or European medieval music to popular songs across the world.  In 1970, he joined a group Lost Aaraaf named after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem as a vocalist. Meanwhile, he started to work on home recordings and learned the guitar and percussion autodidactically. In 1978, Haino formed a rock band Fushitsusha, and since 1988, after a recuperation period from 1983 to 1987, he has been internationally active in various forms including solo, groups such as Fushitsusha, Nijiumu, Aihiyo, Vajra, Sanhedrin, Seijaku, Nazoranai or The Hardy Rocks and DJ as “experimental mixture,” as well as in collaboration with artists from different backgrounds, drawing the performance of the guitar, percussion, hurdy gurdy, string instruments, wind instruments, local instruments from across the world and DJ gears to the extreme through idiosyncratic techniques. Haino has released more than 200 recordings and performed live at least 2,000 times.

In March 2026 Japan, Haino will present two exclusive performances in Europe on polygonola, a metal-flat polygonal instrument, based on the 2nd dimensional vibration theory, built by Naoki Skura. One fo these performances will take place at the ICA on March 17th.

https://keijihaino.bandcamp.com/album/my-lord-music 

Yellow Swans - London show!

One of our favourite bands, who played Upset The Rhythm so many times in our early days, are back! Please be upstanding for the return of YELLOW SWANS, thank you 2026!


Upset The Rhythm presents…

YELLOW SWANS
Monday 16 February
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB
7.30pm | £18 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/r1ab97cac2bd 

YELLOW SWANS have carved an influential path through America’s experimental music underground, at the axis of noise, psychedelia, industrial, drone, and hardcore. From their 2001 founding to the duo’s final shows (and subsequent hiatus) in 2008, Gabriel Mindel Saloman and Pete Swanson released well over 50 recordings documenting studio experiments, live improvisations, and numerous collaborations. Together they relentlessly toured North America, Europe, and Oceania, performing at numerous international music festivals including Sonar (ES), Open Circuit (BE), and Sonic Protest (FR), and were invited to join Art Council England’s Free Noise Tour in 2007. Yellow Swans performed for Upset The Rhythm multiple times over these busy years. Now, after a 15 year break, they have returned to recording and performing. Their music continues to be restless, ragged, and forever in flux, untethered and unresolved. Check out the duo’s two new cassette albums on Bandcamp now, ‘Out of Practice I & II’, the second is particularly striking and alien, enjoy!

https://yellowswans.bandcamp.com/ 

 

 

 

Bill Orcutt - solo show in London next April!

 

Not content with having Orcutt Shelley Miller playing twice next year in London, we are BEYOND happy to announce a solo show from Bill Orcutt on April 13th at Bush Hall too!


Upset The Rhythm presents…

BILL ORCUTT
Monday 13 April 
Bush Hall, 310 Uxbridge Rd, Shepherds Bush, London W12 7LJ
7.30pm | £18 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/U67bfce667c6

BILL ORCUTT is a guitarist and composer. He has been described as “thrillingly original” (Will Ainsley, Bandcamp Daily) as "a go-for-broke guitar improviser," (Ben Ratliff, New York Times) “creating a new language” (Marc Masters, Pitchfork) whose playing would "make Derek Bailey do a double-take" (Lars Gotrich, NPR). Orcutt tours actively, appearing at festivals worldwide, including Rewire (The Hague), Presences Electronique (Paris), Jazz em Agosto (Lisbon), Goner Fest (Memphis), Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville), Big Ears (Knoxville), Music Unlimited (Wels), Le Guess Who? (Utrecht), Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou (Paris), Unsound (Krakow), a Maida Vale session for BBC 3 (London) and a Tiny Desk concert for NPR.

2025 saw Orcutt release ‘Another Perfect Day’,  his first solo electric guitar record since 2017’s eponymous Bill Orcutt. While that eight-year gap might not seem like a ton of time on the cosmic scale, it nonetheless represents a busy half-decade plus for Orcutt projects: a raft of improv collaborations, an acclaimed run of chopped and looped albums on Fake Estates, and the collision of Orcutt’s computer and guitar music on Music For Four Guitars and last year’s How to Rescue Things, both on Palilalia. The undeniable alchemy of those latter mashups inspired not only a wider appreciation of Orcutt-as-composer, but also the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader, as the Bill Orcutt Quartet hit the road in support of Four Guitars, Orcutt’s first work with a proper score. ‘Another Perfect Day’ sees Orcutt building tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they’ll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass. It’s an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player - angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. 

https://billorcutt.bandcamp.com/

EarthBall - London headline show!

  

Upset The Rhythm presents…

EARTHBALL
Friday 17 April
Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL
7.30pm | £12 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/u7705d1dcd32

EARTHBALL are a wild ensemble from Canada, mainly based on Vancouver Island. EarthBall's live shows epitomise their commitment to spontaneous composition, offering audiences a unique experience with each performance. The last two years have seen EarthBall release their debut LP 'It's Yours' and a live album entitled 'Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2' featuring Chris Corsano and Steve Beresford on Upset The Rhythm. This winter they returned with their best effort to date 'Outside Over There’ - a gathering of sound at the forest's edge; where feedback, saxophone screams, and ecstatic vocals dissolve the boundary between chaos and clarity. Perhaps John Olson of Wolf Eyes sums up the album best:

“Outside Over There is an eight-track odyssey that unfolds like a dreamscape, where whispered incantations brush against the shadowy fringes of the cosmos, and wild, Cézanne-inspired rock anthems erupt like geysers of color in the midst of a western warm and wet rain storm… culminating in the sprawling eleven-minute masterpiece, ‘And The Music Shall Untune The Sky,’ aptly dubbed the Earth Crusher. A creation so utterly deconstructed and intertwined with the pulse of nature itself that if AI was called upon to conceive ‘Outside Over There’ anew, it would just spit back, “F.U. in Tree Font”. An enchanting invitation for even the flat-earthers to join the circle, if only just a little.” 

https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/outside-over-there

Dog Chocolate - 'So Inspired, So Done In' announced!

 

Big day today, the new Dog Chocolate album, heavily trailed in person at our label showcase last week, has been officially announced!

After 7 strange years of relative silence, Dog Chocolate have now returned with ‘So Inspired, So Done In’. This fourth album is their most focused, cohesive and song-based yet. They still sound like a bin full of wasps, but now the bin has double-cream or a Viennetta at the bottom, nice! While many of the 16 songs on here barely make it past the 3-minute mark, each one is bursting with all the textures and colours you’d expect from the band.

Thematically, a lot of ground is covered, with songs tackling subject matter as diverse as overheard conversations, the Rogerian concept of the Actualising Tendency, bronze age living conditions, and human-plant relations. Work (and anti-work) is another recurring theme, as is artistic inspiration and burnout. 

Listen now to Dog Chocolate’s first single ‘Employee’, a bouncy dissonant song that trades experiences of the mid-2020s job market.

 

 

Dog Chocolate revel in the mundane and incidental to explore bigger, existential questions with this record. They continue to investigate their internal and external landscapes with playful curiosity, frustration, silliness and empathy, but this time there’s a contemplative glaze.

'So Inspired, So Done In' is available to pre-order now on black bio-vinyl, with accompanying A3 poster and lyric booklet.

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