Old sepia or black and white photos are often the best. This night will be similarly drenched in levels of class and old style quality you will never achieve, but don’t let that put you off. Give it up for wunderpromoter Shieldshaped, previous organisers of stellar Briz gigs such as William Tyler/Michael Chapman/Eli Keszler and Damon & Naomi/Richard Youngs/Silver Pyre, and now creators of the Night Of The New Old Time, a dusty time trip in the sweet wooden environs of the old Scout Hut. It’s a well crafted bill: headliners The Dust Busters make Americana so completely entwined in the past it’s a wonder they actually release it on CD – latest album ‘Prohibition Is A Failure’ (with John Cohen) is a great half hour of fiddle stomping, banjo wail and plaintive lamentation. It sparkles like a moonshine bathtub in the woods; live, unplugged as the sun sets over the harbour, will be extra shivers. Supporting in fine style are wheezing weirdos Boxcar Aldous Huxley, while Shellac Sounds DJs will be cranking actual gramophones to play 78s. Maybe they’ll let you touch them too. Either way, the atmosphere will be unique, the treat yours. 

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 oldweird 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