Get The Blessing - Astronautilus album launch

Pete Judge

Get The Blessing
Jake McMurchie - Saxophone
Pete Judge - Trumpet
Jim Barr - Bass
Clive Deamer - Drums

Venue - Match&Fuse Festival, Rich Mix, London
Date - 16th October 2015
Current Album - Astronautilus (Naim Jazz Records naimcd221) 

Jake McMurchie

See them -

27.11.2015 La Source, Fontaine, FR

05.12.2015 The Goods Shed, Stroud, UK
08.12.2015 Duc Des Lombards, Paris, FR
10.12.2015 Jamboree, Barcelona, ES
11.12.2015 Sala Clamores, Madrid, ES
12.12.2015 Sala Clamores, Madrid, ES
13.12.2015 El Almacén de Little Bobby, Santander, ES
14.12.2015 Las Armas, Zaragoza, ES

Bristolian 4 piece launch new album Astronautilus at the Match&Fuse festival.

Jim Barr

Funeral fires, burning slowly, Get The Blessing burn with more purpose, a slow violence with a latent or undiscovered promise.

Imposing, yes, but always as though they are a step further back from the edge of the stage, an invitation to bring the audience forward, waiting for the people to commit.

Hip Judge and McMurchie twitch their anthemic muscles, flexing like two body builders at a meet, glistening with a ping. Judge forever opens the door for us, leaving the windows wide, he is the accomplice to our raid. The wind rushes through, maybe (again) think of slow movements, not as soft as 'Un homme et une femme' but more the darker passages of 'In the mood for love'.

Clive Deamer

Rib cage and elbows, Deamer is a walking Vanitas tableau, the momento mori of the band, he has the look of an undead king, both regal and macabre. Barr is always the presence in the background, the unexplained, the watcher in the forest. It is because of the bowed head, and the eyes that watch out through the lowered brow.

My quick drawings are never heavy enough to convey the presence of Get The Blessing. Film does it best, and the live visuals from John Minton did it even better.

The girls screamed for McMurchie, adoration from the JM fan club being the strangest of juxtapositions.

AL.

Alfie Ryner - Match&Fuse

Paco Serrano

Gérald Gimenez

Alfie Ryner
Paco Serrano - saxophone, voice
Guillaume Pique - trombone, electronics
Loris Pertoldi - drums
Guillaume Gendre - double bass
Gérald Gimenez - guitar

Loris Pertoldi

Venue - Match&Fuse Festival, Rich Mix, London
Date - 16th October 2015
Current Album - Brain Surgery (2015)

See them - Espace Job, 105 route de Blagnac, 31200 Toulouse, France. 28th November 2015, 9pm.

Compelling French five piece Alfie Ryner are the BANG of the Match&Fuse festival.
Pétard Jazz at its best.

Guillaume Gendre

The chains are off and we are wheeled into surgery. Crazy doctors with shakey hands and laughing eyes cut us open in this mugwump hospital. Surgery as real theatre. Your innards dance within, desperate to burst out. They ask to be cut out, burst across a sickly body. Rasping files and grating saws are Gérald Gimenez tools.

It is music as purge, a ridding and shedding of what you were once before. Alfie Ryner sucks this from you, the skin, the bones, pierced repeatedly by Gimenez's guitar.

Guillaume Pique

Serrano's diatribe is deliciously rancid, stinking French, drunk so fervently we choke ourselves on his sick beauty. Row upon row of his hated life, his dirt is piled on the wall and knocked off like green filthy bottles.

A full belly of trombone catches again in our throat as we swell once again. Poetic punch. They are dog meat, pulsing living sickening dog meat, stamping chunks of gristle and succulent moments between the teeth.

AL.

Attwenger - Match&Fuse

Markus Binder

Attwenger
Markus Binder - drums and vocals
Hans-Peter Falkner - button accordion and vocals

Venue - Match&Fuse Festival, Rich Mix, London
Date - 16th October 2015
Current Album - Spot (Trikont)

Live dates in 2016 -
2nd March, Karlsruhe, Jubez
3rd March, Darmstadt, Centralstation
4th March, Berndorf, Stadtsaal
19th March, Wien, Austria
8th April, Freistadt, Salzhof
23rd April, Neusiedl am See, KV Impulse
14th May, Zurich, Helsinki
15th May, Engelberg, Halt auf Verlangen
2nd June, Salzburg, ARGE Kultur

Hans-Peter Falkner

Boing! Austrian duo Attwenger play a unique set of droll unpredictability at London's Mathc&Fuse festival.

Chewing hundreds and thousands backwards, as they spill out of mouths and tumble onto the floor like a jackpotted fruit machine. Attwenger are dark clowns lets loose in the control room, pressing rewind on lives taken too seriously. Horsing around.

They are as tight as those donut shaped rings covered in wool, then cut and split with scissors, becoming a pom pom of ever swelling porportions. Attwenger are a comedic parody of Westworld, a wild west punch up from men in an elastic world.

Dogs chase their own bottoms, forever swelling and biting. They are Haribo hounds salivating in a continuous loop. Rub them up the wrong way though and they leap in the air with static energy and snap.

 

 

Snack Family - Match and Fuse

Andrew Plummer

James Allsopp

James Allsopp - Saxophones and Synths
Tom Greenhalgh - Drums
Andrew Plummer - Baritone Guitar and Vocals
Natali Abrahamsen Garner - Vocals

Venue - Match&Fuse Festival, Rich Mix, London
Date - 16th October 2015
Current Album - Pokie Eye



Tom Greenhalgh

See/hear them next....
28th November 2015
The Bird's Nest

32 Deptford Church Street, SE8 4RZ, Deptford, UK

020 8692 1928 www.thebirdsnestpub.com

 

Andrew Plummer

The deadly twinkle of three piece Snack Family are joined by Natali Abrahamsen Garner from Norwegian indie-pop-act Antler at the Match&Fuse Festival 2015.

 

Scrawl. Tear of the plaster from the hairy body. Tear as in cut not as in drip.

Manic bleep test. James Allsopp's saxophone is a deliciously sickening gobstopper that rolls and rolls round the mouth, threatening to choke you.

 

Throbbing keyboard march, rolling over the coals and boiling us to mush.

Skank heat, hurt punch, drunk heave.

 

Natali Abrahamsen Garner

Earthy knocks to the face, dirt and tarmac. These aren't just bloodied and scuffed knees this a streaming mouth, as thick as the spittle gobs raining down from Andrew Plummer's vocals.

 

Beautiful march again of this black viscosity, yet Plummer's voice is the trapping claw of this liquid music, Garner is the unnerving impenetrable sheen on top.

 

AL.

Troyka - Transient lists

Joshua Blackmore - drums

Troyka launched their 3rd album, Ornithophobia, on Naim Records last Thursday (12/02/15) at Rich Mix in London. It was a night like no other. For good or bad it was a night you couldn't keep pace with. It was not a festival of speed nor one for showboating either. This description is about as useless as we sometimes felt in the audience. Troyka cannot be contained within the usual paragraphs.

Troyka were ambitious.
Troyka were adventurous.
Troyka's music is as slippery as an eel.

Troyka were sometimes like the static energy that won't leave you.
Troyka were sometimes soft and sometimes abrasive. This made you alternate between feeling close-to and far away.
Troyka like changing pace, sometimes many times in a short space of time.

The ripping supremacy of Troyka made you admire them with a cinematic glow.
The tune 'Tax Return' was broken into hundreds of shards. It tightened and unwound like a volatile clock.
When Troyka were slow you imagined you were Orson Welles in The Third Man.

Kit Downes - Keys

Kit Downes bends in the middle.
Kit Downes can transform himself onstage.
Kit Downes makes his keyboard sound like it is hyperventilating, like it was gulping mash potato, sucking it up through a straw.

Chris Montague

Chris Montague had the ability to crush us with his guitar.
Chris Montague squeezed us emotionally, spread us thin.
Chris Montague's music and sound was Hope itself.

Joshua Blackmore was always at the centre.
Joshua Blackmore rattles the panes that stand between audience and performer.
Joshua Blackmore is the hardest member of Troyka to keep up with.

Petter Eldh

Petter Eldh produced and mixed Ornithophobia.
Petter Eldh joined Troyka onstage.
Petter Eldh's music has a beastlike resonance.

Life is Transient is on the album and was played at Rich Mix.
Life is Transient feels like a fairground ride in the hands of Kit Downes.
Life is Transient is hopeful.

For a moment none of us were transient,
we were listening to Troyka.

But in truth, life is transient, and so are we.

AL.

Dan Nicholls - Esoterica

Dan Nicholls

The music streamed off into the audience like the continuous roll of paper in Jack Kerouac's typewriter. Some was incoherent, much was about the journey from A to B, but all of it came from the hand tectonics of Dan Nicholls. It was a short half hour set at Rich Mix (12/02/2015) that unwound in one electronic reel of music.

Nicholls played both laptop and small keyboard often with head bent over always with intensity.
His set was a seeping cinematic creep like the slow-motion lava that edges towards the expendable villagers in a Technicolor epic. In the dark belly of Rich Mix's crowd I could not see my sketchpad so I wrote blind, the words tumbling out with Kerouac rapidity.

Dan Nicholls

Start
Phase 1 - Metallic hyenas and Spirographs spheres. The dusty smudges of a hand leave imperceptible layers of graded grease as it works back and forth. Momentary flashes on the retina, the memories of a dazzling light. The memories of a day in the park, the dancing drops of light. The sound is the body and the body is all. It is all of me. Kickback.

Phase 2 - Blip. Makes the mouth form a silent vowel. A silent movie plays as actors loop on screen, they pronounce their a's, e's, i's, o's and u's. Zero in on just the lips.

Phase 3 - Rumble. Polyp. The sudden disturbance of a fish on the silty bottom and then the resettling. The first spoken word of a man, the sound of his voice on an empty telephone line. Echoing chambers of communication.

Phase 4 - Industrial. Punching engines, daily punishment and crazed enjoyments. We are complicit in being chewed up. The dull turning of my neighbour in bed during the night, he turns, again and again. Does he ever stop turning?

Phase 5 - Metallic. Wood against wood. Clogged ball-bearing, marble hunter. Fingers reaching into pipes. Wind whistles through small holes. Pushing plasticine into my mouth. It comes out of my nostrils, my ears, my belly button, nipples and follicles. Rising higher and higher, this mass of pink cushioned worms.

Phase 6 - Big round laundrette circle. Mini washers rinsing the ears, filling your mind with suds. I am mentally seasick. They stick my head on rinse and the ideas wash out in tiny baubles.

Phase 7 - Nazi salutes, men marching in reverse, swallowing bile. Hard shoes scraping shins, one overlapping the other, frog marching, goose stepping on top of one another. Tanks crushing tree. Plural squashing the singular.
End.

As you can see Dan Nicholl's music is worth squeezing the inspirational juices from, even if the residue is only imbibed by the esoteric few.

AL.

ArHai - Lets Get Lost

Adrian Lever - Tambura

It is not often I feel lost, or get lost.
With a good sense of direction and hopefully being an observant fellow I am not accustomed to that dead swell in the stomach or the gravity defying sweats that swell the blood in thundering temples.
Is it a good thing to lose oneself?
Well yes is the answer, and I lost everything with ArHai at Rich Mix last Saturday (04/05/2013).

A master of London's transport network, working the buses, tube and trains to my advantage I arrived in good spirits and of stable mind. Alert and darting, my gaze absorbed the clues I would need for the rest of the evening and to help write this of course. I searched for traces of the two protagonists, Adrian Lever & Jovana Backovic and the stage revealed plenty of leads amongst which sat a tambura, dulcimer, keyboard, electronic boxes and a bodhran secreted in the shadows.

Sebastian Merrick

I was welcomed in the pit of the venue by Sebastian Merrick, tonight's promoter. His easy smile settled me but I was eager for more information and was disarmed when he said, "I'm not totally sure what to expect myself tonight, I've been burning the candle at both ends with other projects and rather left this performance to evolve itself."
I suspect this wasn't quite true because as the atmosphere gently bubbled he leapt onto the stage to introduce the support.

Gokce Kiliner

Gokce Kiliner is one cool cat. Playing the guitar and languidly introducing her tunes, she never once broke sweat. Her playing was of the plodding unnerving kind, the slow strums felt like footsteps on an empty road. More than once I felt a chill of Lynchian delight as Rich Mix's red and green lights reminded me of my lonely late night retreats from music venues, crossing intersections, accompanied only by the winking of silent traffic signals.



Jovana Backovic

Kiliner's set revealed nothing of what was to come so I asked the DJ, Vince Millett from 'The Secret Archive of the Vatican'. Now this man should know some secrets, no one has kiss-and-told on this most covert of organisations. Unfortunately as he pressed his mouth to my ear the main act ArHai immerged.

Adrian Lever is unusual for a public performer, a tall slim introverted figure he most resembles a heron, planted in his spot with occasion movement from one leg to another. He exudes calmness and is devoid of aggression or machismo. His right hand on the Tambura is quite the opposite, frantically grating an imaginary coleslaw, the tone of the instrument is light and steely. Accomplished like a master acupuncturist, you flinch as his needling notes assail your ears only to find you're achieving a new state of ethereal being.

Tad Sargent - Bodhran

In contrast Jovana Backovic's voice has the best qualities of a darkened room on a summer's day, soothing and disorientating. In a long red robe with sleeves that stretched to her knees I was transported to Mongo, where Ming The Merciless' daughter Princess Aura weaved a heady mix of beauty and magic over me.

Despite a long association with Jazz and my recent 6 month residency at folk venue Twickfolk I was totally out of my depth. As the tunes washed over us all in the dark depths of Rich Mix, I found myself more and more lost. Whether this was a totally positive experience I am not sure, all I know it was a powerful one!

Tom Arthurs - Trumpet

We were given a lifeline of percussion when Lever and Backovic introduced their first guest, Tad Sargent, who rescued us from the effective but dripping projected visuals. It resulted in some clarity for this album launch, their interpretation of 'Beneath the Tree' became a focal point on what was a beautiful yet intangible landscape.

It only got better with the addition and swell of Tom Arthurs on trumpet and we were treated to a strong determined finale to tonight's proceedings. Despite a little indecision amongst the quartet, Arthurs helped steer us homeward and for me personally into a more familiar and beautiful territory.

Only after getting lost can you appreciate both the length of your unshackling and the path you have taken.
If in Ralph Waldo Emerson's words “Life is a journey, not a destination.”

Then Life had blindfolded me, spun me around several times and hand in hand we have walked deep into the Balkan sunset.

AL.