Here's A Health To The Barley Mow With Alasdair Roberts + Finglebone + ShieldShaped DJ

DJ Karlsson on the roof (that's me) playing records for this:

(Sunday 11th Dec / 7.30pm / £8 advance, £10 on the door)

Join us this fine Sunday for a celebration of folk culture, ritual and song both old, new and recontextualised. Renowned Scottish musician and interpreter of traditional ballads Alasdair Roberts will be performing live with support from rising Salisbury-based experimental folk musician Finglebone. This will be interspersed with footage and films from the BFI archives that document interesting and arcane rituals in British folk culture.

Plus... LTA utilising deterritorialised social energies and force fields in a performance before the film and live art projections in the lounge and garden. Music in the bar by DJ Karlsson on the Roof.

Keep an eye out for possible special guests to be announced soon!

http://www.dragcity.com/artists/alasdair-roberts
http://finglebone.bandcamp.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/14/bfi-heres-to-a-health-barley-mow

I'll be playing old British folk and UK-based weirdness
Come and say hello...
Cheers, Sam

Deas & Denton, Birchall/Cheetham Duo, Sounding + pop-up record shop @ The Croft – 30th November 2011

Deas & Denton
Birchall/Cheetham Duo
Sounding
+ Infinite Limits pop-up record shop
@ The Croft, Stokes Croft, Bristol
Wednesday 30th November

tickets only £4 adv


A Towering triple-bill of exquisite noise and transcendent improv, featuring acts from two of the UK underground's hottest labels: Blackest Rainbow and MIE Music. + pop-up record shop!

Deas & Denton
Cam Deas (perhaps better known for his solo acoustic guitar work) teams up with Adam Denton for a twin-electric feedback assault. Intense pulsation and unholy tone float, channeling the spirits of La Monte Young, Eliane Radigue and Morton Subotnick through a no-fidelity industrial filter. Like hitting guitars with a helicopter. Deas & Denton have releases out on Blackest Rainbow, and another LP on their own Present Time Exercises imprint.

Birchall/Cheetham Duo
David Birchall and Andrew Cheetham met through playing in Rhys Chatham's G3 ensemble. They have gone on to develop a sound that explores the deconstruction of rock music within the wider context of free improv. At once chaotic and considered, Birchall/Cheetham Duo push the drums/guitar envelope up and down several flights of stairs. Their upcoming MIE Music release is a wide-eyed investigation of dynamics, tone, rhythm and texture.

Sounding
A new project from Ben Moon – one half of Sheffield's Forest Creature, who have released thump n grind party-noise on Blackest Rainbow, drawing on the directness of Fuck Buttons, Black Dice and Yellow Swans. The Sounding project holds a Reichian minimalist mirror up to the FC sound.

plus
Infinite Limits Pop-up Record Shop
a rare opportunity to browse and purchase stock from one of the UK's finest outsider-music specialists: vinyl, CDs, CDRs, cassettes, private press, art editions... Bring pocket money

A co-promotion with Infinite Limits and The Croft

tickets available from all usual outlets

Tickets on sale: A NIGHT OF THE NEW OLD-TIME...

Tickets for A NIGHT OF THE NEW OLD-TIME... are on sale at
The Here Shop, Stokes Croft, Bristol
Bristol Ticket Shop, Broadmead, Bristol (online/telephone sales also)
and from me in person

The Scout Hut is a small venue, so recommend buying tickets in advance.

Thanks

shieldshaped presents: A NIGHT OF THE NEW OLD TIME... Tuesday 28 June, The Scout Hut, Bristol

Very excited about this evening. Please come along...

Shieldshaped presents: A NIGHT OF THE NEW OLD TIME...

with live music from

The Dust Busters

From Brooklyn, New York, the Dust Busters are the sound of the old weird America. Freewheeling, high-energy resurrectors of scratchy 78-rpm ballads, backporch fiddle stomp and dusty jug-band blues.

The Dust Busters met while playing music with the legendary John Cohen (of the New Lost City Ramblers), and have since gone on to record albums both with Cohen and with Peter Stampfel (of the Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs). Alongside their recent self-released Prohibition Is A Failure album, The trio have another LP due on Smithsonian Folkways as well as an album-length collaboration with Stampfel and Michael Hurley (a follow-up to 1976's seminal Have Moicy LP).

The Dust Busters are hardcore aficionados of American primitive musics, devoting much time to the study of old 78s and field recordings, and channeling the wild energy of these records into their own performances. Just like the old time string bands that inspire them – the Skillet Lickers, the Mississippi Sheiks, Dykes Magic City Trio, etc – the Dust Busters know how to set the music on fire: this is old music stripped-down, raw, and made young again.

“Three of my favorite people to play and sing with ever, kicking musical ass all over the landscape. If you like your  trad/roots benter and hotter than normal, you’ll love this!” - Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders and Fugs.

 

Boxcar Aldous Huxley

One might hear Balkan melody, old-time banjo and brass band pomp wrapped up in Tin Pan Alley melodrama. These are songs that speak of such esoteric topics as abandoned funeral trains, Messianic visions in the Canadian wilderness, and ill-fated amateur space exploration.

 

On stage, Boxcar Aldous Huxley are a cavalcade of dapper tweeds, inaccurate historical lecturing and rattertrap musicality, trading rickety banjo clatterings one moment for ornate choral refrains the next. The harmonium wheezes; the clarinet shrieks; Stephen Foster revolves slowly in his grave.

This is music rooted in the past, but not a past that ever actually happened. 

“Like people from some grim future trying to figure out what Broadway sounded like.” – Curtis Eller

Plus

Shellac Sounds gramophone DJs

members of Crescent and Movietone playing old 78s on wind-up gramophones

Thursday 28 June, 7.30pm

at The Benjamin Perry Scout Hut, Redcliffe Parade, Harbourside, Bristol (brown wooden building across the water from the Thekla

£5 ADV  BYO Liquor

 records, CDs and original letterpressed posters available for purchase on the night

Shieldshaped #2: Damon & Naomi w/Kurihara, Richard Youngs, Silver Pyre – 14th May, Cube Cinema, Bristol

An amazing bill of artists that have played in a bundle of sublime incarnations but have their own true voices and sounds and perfect weirdness.

Damon & Naomi are v. famous from being in Galaxie 500 as well as their pursuits in the written word and duo work. Tonight they play with stella axe man Michio Kurihara from Ghost / Boris.

Richard Youngs has one of the most naturally spectacular and irreverent back catalogue and his beautifully warped oeuvre takes in folk songs/tape noise/cosmic electronic and sheer pop and savage prog. Tonight Damon joins him on drums.

Plus Silver Pyre - the work of Gary Fawle, imbuing deep, rich westcountry drones with flickering Detroit textures, loading up rural-meets-urban anthems from his forthcoming debut album proper.

A Qu Junktions / ShieldShaped / Cube OneOff

thanks

thanks to everyone who came along last night.
Details of another fine show coming soon...

first shieldshaped promotion: 5th April, Cafe Kino Bristol

The first ShieldShaped gig, a co-promotion with Qu Junktions, is coming up.

Michael Chapman + William Tyler + Eli Keszler

at Cafe Kino, Bristol

(Tue 5th Apr 2011 / 7.30pm / £7 adv)

A double bill of nomadic guitar men who follow their own maps and hearts, with the welcome addition of a superlative new-school percussionist.

Michael Chapman is a UK folk legend, his records have been released by Harvest and John Peel and has been championed by artists such as No Neck Blues Band and Jack Rose, with whom he toured the US. William is versed in more wayward indie country ways, and has been playing out with Lambchop a lot over the last 10 years. Via his jams with Silver Jews he also hooked up with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Different types, ages and influences but, each possesses their own special way of playing the guitar.

While William Tyler was sessioning with artists as diverse as country legend Charlie Louvin and soul singer Candi Staton, he spent time at home working on fragmentary guitar pieces and tape collages under the moniker The Paper Hats, calling on the spirit of Sandy Bull and the early Siltbreeze catalog. Then in 2008, his old friend and collaborator Volker Zander (Calexico) released the Paper Hats LP 'Desert Canyon' on his Apparent Extent imprint, and the two toured Europe. Now Tyler has released his first album under his own name, 'Behold the Spirit' (Tompkins Square), a collection of acoustic and electric guitar works intertwined with open form audio landscapes and delicately arranged instrumentation. Equal parts Appalachian drone and ambient noise.

Eli Keszler is a composer/multi-instrumentalist based in Providence, Rhode Island. He primarily uses percussion, bowed crotales, guitar as well as invented instruments (his harps which use strings and motors) to create his sound that balances droning harmonics with shaterring acoustic sustain and fast, free rhythm, all working in balance with his integrated installations.

In recent years Eli has collaborated with artists as diverse as Jandek, Roscoe Mitchell, Phil Niblock, Aki Onda, Ran Blake and Loren Connors, as well as performing and recording regularly as a solo artist. Drawing on elements of muscular free jazz skronk and sparse pointillist improv, Eli's music straddles the worlds of DIY art-punk and textural post-war composition. Alongside the string of CDs, cassettes, records and prints released through his own Rel Records imprint, he has recently released a mind-blowing LP, Oxtirn, on the iconic ESP-DISK label. Hot on the heels of some great reviews (The Wire, Volcanic Tongue, Digitalis, etc), Eli Keszler is back for his second UK tour.

Hello

ShieldShaped is about music.
this is where it began.