Blissful noise, slippery fragments of melody, the thrill of unknowing. It’s always a joy to encounter music that pulls the rug from under your preconceptions, bucks expectation, challenges your perceived limits. There’s a pleasing rise in musicians and promoters exploring the margins around Cardiff at the moment – Phantomhead and The Lows And The Highs have hella form in DIY recordings, releases and activities, for starters – but Bristol’s been supporting communities like this for years. This album release show for MATT LOVERIDGE’s debut full-length Atworth brings together one of Bristol’s most dizzingly prolific musicians, one of its most creative and supportive venues and a label that’s quietly put out a couple of dozen small-scale releases over the best part of a decade.
Loveridge is actually Matt Williams, known to most as Team Brick. That name was retired in 2010, but gave way to a multitude of splinter-projects which give breathing space to Williams’ wildly varied outpourings. For the most part these seem allocated to particular styles or visions, be they meticulously programmed synth compositions as Gnar Hest, beat-driven variations of same as Klad Hest, or woozy ur-pop as Fairhorns, not to mention work with BEAK>. Live performances as Matt Loveridge, it would seem, bear the closest relationship to his Team Brick work; big on decaying loops, throat singing, wordless chants, saxophone, guitar FX and a maelstrom of percussion. Given that Atworth is three lengthy tracks of improvised piano drone, recorded to dictaphone in a Wiltshire church, what to expect from this launch gig is anyone’s guess. Let’s just leave it at ‘captivating’ and ‘recommended’.
Intense drone action in support from Charlie Romijn out of Thought Forms (see them at a FUTURE JOY COLLECTIVE PRESENTATION, friends) in the guise of SILVER STAIRS OF KETCHIKAN. Nestled in the eye of the storm, offering welcoming balm, is ROVING BLADES’ acapella English folk incantations. Take the plunge, you won’t regret it.
Matt Loveridge (album launch)
+ Roving Blades
+ Silver Stairs of Ketchikan
8.00pm – 10.30pm
£5 adv* / £6 door
tickets on sale now at Here Gallery, and Bristol Ticket Shop and WeGotTickets
*advance tickets subject to booking fee (booking fee varies, but is usually about 10% of ticket price)
MATT LOVERIDGE was, until recently, better known to most as Team Brick. A multi-instrumentalist composer from Bristol, his highly experimental work is usually focussed around looped chants, noise and bells, with squeals of saxophone and clarinet, but he has recently also written more ambitiously constructed pieces, including a performance with the Emerald Ensemble at the Colston Hall in September 2009, and his debut album Alogon, released on Invada Records. His enthusiastic and prolific devotion to music makes it a challenge to keep up with his creative output, but a rewarding one!
This show marks the launch of his album, Atworth, for Stitch-Stitch records, a shimmering drone piano piece in three parts, recorded at Atworth church in Wiltshire, using only a dictaphone.
Matt can also be seen playing keyboards and guitar in Beak (with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow) and bass in Yoshy!
http://www.stitchstitchrecords.co.uk/artists/matt-loveridge
http://www.invada.co.uk/
http://www.myspace.com/teambrick
ROVING BLADES are an a cappella harmony folk group, focussing on English folk songs.
www.myspace.com/rovingbladesbristol
SILVER STAIRS OF KESHIKAN is the solo project of Charlie Romijn, guitarist in fellow Invada improv-rockers Thought Forms. Quietly intense eye-of-the-storm tension builds to sinister intonations and pre-tonal drones.
“Like Morton Feldman forgetting everything.” – Matt Loveridge
http://silverstairsofketchikan.bandcamp.com/
www.thought-forms.co.uk
