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I’m in the Barbican watching a band from the Congo. Nothing new there then. But hang on a minute. Four of them are in wheelchairs. One is on crutches. One is playing an instrument fashioned out of a milk can and length of wire. And together, they are creating the most incredible afrobeat stew, an irresistible funk that is dragging most of the audience to their feet. The band are Staff Benda Bilili, finally making their UK debut following the acclaim afforded to their Tres Tres Fort album on the Crammed label. This is really something. Something else entirely. Read the rest of this entry »
OK, so I’m a little biased here. Hope Sandoval was a big teenage crush of mine, but having spent my teenage years in the far North of Scotland I never got the chance to see her perform in person. Her two albums with My Bloody Valentine’s Colm Ó Cíosóig and the rest of her Warm Inventions have been fine continuations of the path she set out on in Mazzy Star twenty years ago, although such is my infatuation with her voice that Hope Sandoval could both sing about (and be accompanied by) some small children having their skin flayed and I’d pay to hear it. Read the rest of this entry »
The recent Etching LP (I’ll hand you over to the Milkman for the positively glowing review) suggested that Mountains were somewhat different live to on their records. On Etching, Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg were able to stretch out and luxuriate in the space, resulting in one long and increasingly intense track. Having now witnessed their performance in the intimate space under The Slaughtered Lamb pub in Clerkenwell, I’m not sure their recorded output does them justice – this gig, with support from the excellent Pausal, was very special indeed. Read the rest of this entry »
With apologies to my one-year-old nephew (who as far as I’m aware hasn’t RSS’ed this site yet) Grouper’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill and Fennesz’s Black Sea were the two best things to come out of 2008. Hence if you were to stick those two artists on a bill together there would be no way I’d miss it, even if that meant sitting for four hours in church on a rock hard pew with no toilets. I’ve long been sceptical about the merits of St-Giles-In-The-Fields as a venue for such events, but after having experienced Fennesz’s sublime and powerful set in that space, I could be converted. Read the rest of this entry »
Whatever next? A hip-hop concert? Well, why not? Don’t you think I’m street? I’m street. I’m East coast. Mainline. Word. Uncut. Mojo. I know my Ghost Box Killah from my LTJ Dilla. Most definitely. For sure. I’ve seen The Wire. Hell, I’ve contributed to discussions on the Guardian newspaper’s website about The Wire. I even own some Adidas. Well, Adidas cycling gear. Well, actually, it isn’t Adidas at all, it is Mavic, if you are going to be that picky about it. So, anyway, you shouldn’t be too surprised to see me getting my groove on down the front of a Rahzel concert. As Mister Rhymes once said – pass the chardonnay. A nice oaked one, if you will. Read the rest of this entry »
A few miles across town, Steve Reich was performing his minimalist masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. And here I was at the Barbican for a “pop” concert. I think it is fair to say I’d had a few misgivings about my choice of entertainment for this evening. Actually I’d been having my doubts about Grizzly Bear ever since the release of third album Veckatimest, an album which – deliberately or not – seemed to sand off the band’s rougher, more quixotic, and more interesting edges. So why was I here? Well, for tonight’s show the multi-talented Nico Muhly had arranged Grizzly Bear’s songs for the London Symphony Orchestra. And having heard him do similar for Antony and the Johnsons and Toumani Diabate in this same venue around a year ago, I had high hopes. Hopes that ultimately weren’t quite fulfilled. Read the rest of this entry »
To Kings Place, the apostrophe-light home of the left-leaning Guardian, the liberal-minded London Sinfonietta, and for tonight, a new free-thinking jazz ensemble. This was to be the first public sighting of a constellation of 12 stars drawn from across the UK jazz galaxy under the curatorship of Orphy Robinson. Expectations of musical supernovae were high by virtue of their none-more-luminous name: The Spontaneous Cosmic RawXtra. Read the rest of this entry »
The combined age of the Arkestra must be getting pretty close to that of the planet itself. Their tectonic plates continue to shift, with new and returning members filling spaces vacated by the old, overlaying new patterns on ancient structures. At the core remains the octogenarian Marshall Allen, who in his last appearance at Oto showed that he is still a white hot improvisational presence. Tonight, he led a twelve-strong Arkestra on a glorious two hour dig through the Sun Ra catalogue, in front of a never-more-packed Café Oto. Read the rest of this entry »
With hindsight, the fact that the Barbican chooses to locate its cinema in what it charmingly calls “The Pit” should have given ample warning that this hour spent in the company of Wolfgang Voigt wasn’t going to be an uplifting one. For music birthed from the German techno scene, Voigt’s GAS project is a dark and at times unsettling one. His avowed aim is to “bring the forest to the disco”, and at times little light penetrates through the thick canopy he constructs – however the experience is an unforgettable one. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes I really wonder why I don’t just move to Dalston and be done with it. I’m spending so much of my time riding the 236 these days that my clothes are beginning to smell of bus. Or maybe the bus smells of me. Either way, it isn’t pleasant. Unlike tonight’s particularly fresh-smelling gig, in which the Wire’s three day celebration of the new slipped into the Freudian, slapping its Oyster Card against the reader for a voyage into the realms of the uncanny. Read the rest of this entry »
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