Upset The Rhythm presents…

 

SNIFFANY & THE NITS
Tuesday 10 September
The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle Street, Angel, London, N1 0XT
7.30pm | £6 | TICKETS

 

KAPUTT are a recently hatched post punk act from Glasgow, Scotland. Numbering six, Kaputt feature Simone Wilson and Cal Donnelly on guitars and vocals, Chrissy Barnacle also sings and plays saxophone. Tobias Carmichael is responsible for bass, whilst Rikki Will and Emma Smith cover drums and percussion respectively. Racing away from the playful torn edge of no-wave song, Kaputt blurt out tracks with twitchy charisma, their catchy riffs circle with relish, allowing timely sax stonks and stop-start rhythms to drive things on. Vocals leap, guitars bluster and always the saxophone snakes, hypnotically drawn through the erratic beat. There’s a riot of fun at play in their febrile racket, but there’s also some deeply cerebral grooves and choice lyrical concerns evident too. Kaputt’s debut album ‘Carnage Hall’ will be released this September on Upset The Rhythm, this show appears as part of their tour in support of this stunner of an LP.
https://kaputt1.bandcamp.com/

THE COOL GREENHOUSE make hypnotic home-brew post-punk. Their two 7”s and tape (also released on 10” through Lumpy) are a treat of elusive DIY moves and sarcastic wit. Very reminiscent of the early 80s post-punk cassette scene and messthetics compilation groups.
www.thecoolgreenhouse.bandcamp.com

SNIFFANY & THE NITS are an itchy, twitchy new pogo punk outfit feat members of Artefact and The Snivellers.

 

Upset The Rhythm presents…

 

DANIEL O’SULLIVAN
BRIGID MAE POWER
Friday 13 September
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB
7.30pm | £12 | TICKETS

 

DANIEL O’SULLIVAN is a composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer living and working in South West London and has been contributing a vibrant, chameleonic brew to the music landscape since the late 1990's. He has achieved acclaim writing, recording and performing with a myriad of groups including Grumbling Fur (with longtime friend and collaborator Alexander Tucker), Ulver, Mothlite, Sunn O))), Guapo, Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses, Miracle, Æthenor and This Is Not This Heat. He has composed several sound works for film and installation.

Whether solo or in his varied collaborative projects, O’Sullivan’s work is remarkable in the way it infuses familiar everyday experience with traces of the uncanny, the secret and the magickal. His 2017 solo album VELD distilled these tangled realities into a rich and complex soundworld, strikingly dense and allusive. Released in April by O Genesis, Folly is O’Sullivan’s second album under his own name and embodies a confident, evolution from VELD. This cycle of twelve songs deftly illustrates O'Sullivan's ascent as a unique and multidimensional songwriter. Moving from the familiar pantheon of experimental music and arriving upon a universal narrative probing the human condition from the inside out. Both lyrically and within the intricate lattice of arrangements, traditional forms are reshaped into transcendent pop symphonies. Both intimate and alien, archetypal and atypical, joyous and melancholic, the aperture of Folly is wide open and light streams in. For this special performance O’Sullivan will perform his new songs as an ensemble of eight, featuring Peter Broderick and Thighpaulsandra (Coil, Julian Cope Band, Spiritualized) who also recorded and mixed Folly at his Aeriel studio premises in Wales.
http://mothlite.blogspot.com/

BRIGID MAE POWER is an Irish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who, like Judee Sill, Micky Newburyor Linda Perhacs before her, paints her songs in dreamily expansive strokes, transporting earthly compositions into universal and exultant realms. Her self-titled debut on Tompkins Square was a majestic suite of reverb-swathed laments for voice, guitar, piano, accordion, and harmonium, recorded at the Portland studio of key musical foil Peter Broderick. Themes include transformation, change, motherhood, acceptance, strength, courage and trust. In the words of Power, the album was about "trusting if you lose yourself or your way - you can come back". New album 'The Two Worlds' is another masterful collection of effortless, hypnotic folk, and an album that furthers the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist's already stellar reputation. Live, Brigid can encapsulate the timeless magic of her songs either solo or as a duo with Peter. Thus far she has toured throughout Ireland, UK and the US together with artists including Lee Ranaldo, Richard Dawson, Alasdair Roberts, Peter Broderick and Ryley Walker, with performances at Le Guess Who? and TUSK festivals along the way.
http://www.brigidmaepower.com/

 

Upset The Rhythm presents…

 

KURWS
HANDLE
Saturday 14 September
New River Studios
199 Eade Rd, Harringay Warehouse District, London, N4 1DN
7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS

 

KURWS (from Wroclaw, Poland) formed in May 2008 as an unexpected result of a ping pong session. Since then together they pursue their own search, not as much in areas of defined genres, but within the very foundations of rock “base”, expression and sound. It is a workshop, where improvisations penetrate through composed material, which seems to be a congealed form of the creation process. Armed with repetitions, recombinations, variations and contrasts, they frolic with memory and expectations. Post punk, krautrock, rock in opposition, funk, no wave - modes of playing, motives, riffs we heard time and time again, are being here presented in a totally different context - they are dissected from their original environment, placed side by side, used in a brand new manner, deconstructed and distilled.
https://kurws.bandcamp.com/album/alarm

HANDLE are a recently formed trio featuring a few familiar faces from Manchester’s creative underground scene. On bass guitar and drums, there’s Giulio Erasmus and Nirvana Heire, former members of the much-loved punk band DUDS; while upfront on vocals and keyboards is Leo Hermitt, a genderqueer multidisciplinary artist renowned for their challenging, thought-provoking work on the city’s arts and literary scenes. The end result, in Handle, is a wonderful amalgam of each member’s respective CVs – a band which absorbs punk, poetry, politics and the avant-garde, while wearing its Manc DIY credentials proudly on its sleeve. Powered by looping, hypnotic synth lines, tribal percussion and urgent, agitated vocals, their songs – all of which clock in around the two minute mark – owe as much to performance poetry as they do to post-punk and new wave. In these times of anxiety and confusion, Handle provide a much-needed dose of musical catharsis.
https://absolutefiction.bandcamp.com/album/handle-demonstrations

 

Upset The Rhythm presents…

 

Saturday 21 September

Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL

7.30pm | £8 |  TICKETS

 

TRASH KIT are Rachel Aggs (guitar, vocals), Rachel Horwood (drums, vocals) and Gill Partington (bass). Three deeply creative individuals who play in a multitude of other groups including Bas Jan, Sacred Paws, Shopping and Bamboo, united by a shared decade of spry musicality that surges through their bodies, hearts and heads with Trash Kit. Their songs once succinct, patchwork post-punk numbers of an honest diary-like nature now tussle more with long-form songwriting, expeditious polyphony and cascades of sung-spoke vocals. This new focus began with their last album ‘Confidence’ (2014) and has now grown into something exhilarating and rapturous. New songs like ‘Disco’ have had their very fabric stretched into smart new shapes, allowing the band to run away with refrains and unlock the dancefloor. Although Trash Kit have their forebears in bands like Sleater Kinney, The Ex and The Raincoats, their sound is still very much their own take on facing forwards and relies as much on the naturalism of an internalised folk music as on their sincerity of vision. Since forming in 2009, Trash Kit have released two albums for Upset The Rhythm and a selection of singles, this July however they made their most majestic move yet with their resoundingly huge Horizon album. An album that forever listens for the next moment and will meet you once more at the vanishing point.
https://www.facebook.com/TRASH-KIT-329766302806/

CHILD’S POSE play punk-inflected pop music, something like if Elastica had built their home in the Slampt Underground instead of making a #1 record. Their caustic slash-and-burn style is sneering and ebullient all at once, detached yet intimate, trim and nervy songs that reward listen after listen, personnel from Woolf, Sauna Youth, Sarcasm, and Nekra sparking joy and dread in equal measure. It’s the sound of the first warm day of spring and the accompanying cans in the park and the crisp cool wind chasing you home at dusk, that sinister manic magic feeling of learning how to inhabit your body again after a long cold winter. It’s been winter for years now and we all need warming up. Let Child’s Pose take you with them.
https://childspose.bandcamp.com/

THE PLAN have perfected a stop/start abrasiveness with their stirring, woman-powered dispatches from Southend-On-Sea. Boasting members of Wetdog and Vic Goddard’s Subway Sect, they fuse post- punk with folk, no wave with psych. It’s a heady brew and endlessly inventive. Jangly Kinks guitar, cryptic lyricism, cherubic vocal harmonising, dervish leaps into The Ex-like noise... there’s enough room under this tarpaulin for everyone.
https://theplan1.bandcamp.com

 

Upset The Rhythm presents…

 

ES
Friday 27 September
Moth Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette St, Hackney Central, E9 6NU
7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS

 

EXEK thrive amidst noirish, dub-dilated post-punk, with lyrics skirting the sardonic, mired in disdain. Situated in a reservoir of space echo and assisted by the heavyweight bass-and-drum brunt of Henry Wilson and Sam Dixon, vocalist Albert Wolski conveys an oblique, literate nihilism that resembles both a sneer and a smirk. Wicked turns of phrase are spiked with black humour and surrealism as the rest of the band summon sparse, reverb-drenched runs of percussion and a thickset low end prone to detour and dysfunction. Exek recently followed up their ‘Ahead Of Two Thoughts’ LP released last year on W.25TH (Superior Viaduct) with their astonishing ‘A Casual Assembly’ EP. This new record from Melbourne's audio-wranglers coalesces around a stirring theme for synthesizer, trumpet and bass, bringing together reference points to Laurie Spiegel, Jah Wobble and The Velvet Underground's ‘The Gift.’ Frontman Albert Wolski's disembodied narration – at times reminiscent of Samuel Beckett or Robert Ashley – unfolds over a series of dark vignettes set in a dystopian near-future. Autotune has been banned, secret police patrol the redoubts of the wealthy, and world beaches have been cleared of their sand for the construction of enormous urban prisons. As these events turn more fraught and absurd, Wolski reveals just how much is gained through EXEK's stripped-down arrangements and dreamlike tones.
https://exek.bandcamp.com/

THE REBEL is prolific London outsider Ben Wallers; a charismatic lone wolf in a cowboy hat or trilby and a tie whose electrified howls are too idiosyncratic to be broken down into market-oriented terms. It is difficult to sketch a thumbnail summary of a musician who has amassed a vast and unwieldy discography under a variety of names and genres: the most widely acclaimed is probably the Country Teasers, but he also moonlights as, or in, the Rebel, the Company, the Male Nurse, the Beale, the Stallion, the Black Poodle and Skills on Ampex, across folk, country, garage, post-punk, no wave and electronic pop. In the main part The Rebel is centred around twisted Casio drones, clanging guitar and some defiantly deadpan vocals, all thrown in the pan and pressure-cooked in Wallers' mind. Wallers has amassed a near-unquantifiable discography over the past 20 years, from scores of more or less "official" LPs, EPs and 7"s to seemingly endless self-released cassettes.
https://therebelband.bandcamp.com/

ES are the soundtrack to your no-wave nightmares, proffering 'mutant synth-punk for our dystopian present' (Jes Skolnik). Ethereal synths, tense basslines, wired drums and cold vocals collide, proving curiously dark, intense and unrelenting. After releasing their debut 'Object Relations' 12" EP on La Vida Es Un Mus in 2016, all members now reside in London and are working towards their debut album. ES feature members of Public Service, The Worms, Primetime and Scrap Brain.
https://esband.bandcamp.com/releases