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Category: CQAF2023 – Thursday 27 April
Dani Larkin – ‘Walking With Natives’ Tour
Pipped by RTE Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, Double J (Australia) and Folk Radio UK as a rising star on the Irish folk and alternative scene, the last few years have been a breakthrough for this emerging alt-folk artist, with 2023 shaping up to be an even bigger year with new music on the way and several debut global live tours.
Nominated for ‘Best Single’ (2022) ‘Best Album’ (2021) at Northern Ireland Music Prize, and ‘Best Emerging Artist‘ at RTE Folk Awards (2021), Dani Larkin has been an artist picking up speed with each release, and one that has been making her mark on the industry, in her own way.
An artist renowned for her unforgettable live performances, her magical songwriting with her vocal always taking centre stage, accompanied by her impressive guitar and banjo playing. Larkin has the ability to blend the old and new perfectly through her songwriting, delicately weaving themes of Celtic folklore with the more modern day landscape of her own experiences.
WASTELAND
In 1994 hundreds of coal miners hung up their pit boots as Grimethorpe Colliery was destroyed, along with the tight-knit working-class community that surrounded it. WASTELAND, Gary Clarke’s sequel to COAL, looks at how two generations coped in this era of radical upheaval. As we see one generation grind to a halt, we follow the next into the 90s illegal rave scene, where derelict warehouses and abandoned work spaces became home for a new-found community of music and dance.
Bringing together Clarke’s vivid physical dance language performed by a company of exceptional dancers, a community cast of singers, brass musicians, archive film footage, a powerful rave soundtrack and unique artwork by Jimmy Cauty (co-founder of The KLF), WASTELAND dives headfirst into a gritty story of loss, hope, escapism, and survival.
Gary Clarke Company will recruit 2 brass musicians from a local championship brass band and 4 men from the community to perform as Pit Men Singers in the show. More details of the recruitment guidelines can be found here.
Ages 14+
Contains some strong language, strobe lighting, loud music, haze and smoke effects.
Christine Bovill – From Piaf to Pop
Christine Bovill’s award-winning Paris established her reputation as one of Europe’s finest interpreters of French song. In her new show, she travels into the 60s and the Americanisation of French music: le yé-yé. A time of great cultural change in France, would the high art of chanson survive…?
This new show – a smash-hit sell out at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe – offers a sexy and delicious celebration of the Golden Age of French song and how it evolved during the Swinging Sixties. Singing in both French and English, she honours many stars including Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg and Francoise Hardy.
Edinburgh Fringe reviews:
“Christine Bovill concocts a sublime evening of French pop classics in Paris: From Piaf to Pop, bringing a sense of warm charm, vocal prowess, and knowledgeable insight to the fold” ★★★★★ Culture Fix
“For a brief escape from the troubles of the world, there can be no finer prescription than a healthy dose of Paris” ★★★★★ Braw Theatre
Doors 7.30pm | Unreserved seating
Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection
Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2, sees the Nashville-based musician step further from the pedal steel and towards centrestage. Released on the evergreen Full Time Hobby label, this new collection of tracks is a kaleidoscopic collection of folk, jazz, and pop, cut through with immaculately-rendered songwriting.
Romford to Nashville is hardly the most well-trodden of paths, but for Spencer Cullum it was a way of getting to the essential heart of pedal steel, what was then and remains to this day his musical raison d’être.
Growing up in a large East London town brought him early exposure to classic pub rock by way of his father such as Dr. Feelgood and Thin Lizzy, and farther-flung music by way of his mother, such as Talking Heads and Lou Reed. However, it was learning pedal steel from legendary English player B. J. Cole that set him on the path he still walks today.
After touring with Nashville-based groups and hearing tales of “seasoned Nashville steel players”, the young musician upped sticks and found a “nice little crowd of weirdos” in his chosen city. Cullum has always maintained a somewhat silent presence-even now saying “I still want to hide behind my pedal steel in fear”-but 2020 saw him release his debut solo effort, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection. Despite his project with Jeremy Fetzer, Steelism, showing off more of his talents, never before had he felt the limelight so firmly on him.
Although…Coin Collection’s modus operandi was “a very quintessential English folk record, but with really good Nashville players”, Cullum says of…Coin Collection 2 that “I wanted to be different. I wanted to try and pull away from wearing my influences on my sleeve… I was trying to pick out ideas that were new to me. You can never escape your musical influences but I wanted them to be more hidden subconsciously than upfront.”Though you can pick out the odd similarity to other things here and there-The Beach Boys’Friends LP, perhaps, or The Incredible String Band, or Joni Mitchell-the thing is decidedly Cullum’s own.
What’s also reassuring is that there hasn’t been some giant sonic leap from…Coin Collection, instead that the beautifully sun-kissed, English country garden, bees-buzzing-round-lager atmosphere has remained, but complicated, weirded, deepened. Much in the same way that the album doesn’t wear its influences (Amon Duul II, Skip Spence, Ennio Morricone, ChuKosaka, Michael Chapman) lightly but rather is steeped in them and toys with them, Cullum brought in a host of guests to turn…Coin Collection 2 loose from being a purely solo effort.
Rich Ruth
Rich Ruth – a.k.a. veteran Nashville-based musician Michael Ruth – took a break from touring with various bands in 2018 and dedicated himself to composing ambient music in his small home studio, focusing on the diverse traditions of ambient, new age, spiritual jazz, Kosmiche, and minimalist music. His ideas became fully realized with the inclusion of additional players, pairing his repetitive, droning synthesizer movements with spur-of-the-moment improvisation to transform the material into something much more lush and unpredictable.
One summer morning, Ruth was held up at gunpoint and carjacked by two people outside of his home. His music allowed him to work through this personal struggle, infusing his 2019 debut album, Calming Signals, with striking layers of angst and emotion. Where There’s Life followed in 2021, a collection of meditative pieces written in the early months of the pandemic manifesting the collective sense of uncertainty and solitude of the time.
Doors 7.30pm | Unreserved seating
Pye Corner Audio – Live set
Pye Corner Audio is a British electronic music project by Martin Jenkins. He deals in an eerie, fragile strain of electronic music mixing the Radiophonic/library music sound, sometimes with a post-punk influence that aligns him firmly with such seasoned hauntologists as Mordant Music, Belbury Poly and The Advisory Circle.
Jenkins refers to himself as the mysterious and nameless Head Technician in most of his online profiles, and extra detail is taken to make the audio and visual elements of his performances look and sound worn and vintage.
PCA first came to attention with 4 volumes of Black Mill Tapeson his own label Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services. Like his contemporaries Demdike Stare and Ghost Box, Martin seemed to be tapping into some hidden energy current, channelling spirits via electrical means. The pioneering transmissions of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop could be detected lurking within the music’s staticky swirl; so could the ominous throb of John Carpenter’s film soundtracks.
Since 2021 he has recorded three timeless LPs for Ghost Box and the 5th Black Mill Tapes volume for Barcelona label Lapsus, and has also contributed numerous singles and Eps that come across as mini-albums for labels including Death Waltz, Lapsus and Ecstatic.
The musical landscape has changed considerably in the past decade, but what is remarkable about Pye Corner Audio’s material is that it hasn’t aged a day; its retro-futurist transmissions sound just as mysteriously compelling as they did the first time around. While they purport to faithfully transcribe the sound of yesterday’s technology, they end up being something more: a record of what we wish the past sounded like –a rickety tape transfer of desire itself, spooled and boxed, just awaiting discovery.
Matthew and the Atlas (Solo)
Across Matt Hegarty’s first three LPs, and the four stripped back EPs that preceded and followed them, he has traversed a range of musical territories from classic acoustic folk, to dramatic synth-laden electronica, and urgent guitar led alt-rock.
The common thread in his Matthew and the Atlas project has been a songwriting style that marries a subtle melodic sensibility with lyrics full of natural imagery and dark emotional heft – all delivered in his striking and distinctive vocal. In the process Hegarty has quietly built a major cult following in Europe and and the US.
‘[Morning Dancer] weaves an emotional tapestry around you as you listen.’ (Thank Folk For That)
With support from Lemoncello
Doors 7.30pm | Unreserved Seating
Donovan Wylie
Bank Gallery (High Street)
Donovan Wylie
Belfast Exposed is delighted to present Blinded by the very force it imagines it could handle, a new film from Donovan Wylie and Peter Mann, which contains never before seen footage from the demolition of the Maze Prison in 2007.
Blinded by the very force it imagines it could handle builds on work done by Wylie as part of his landmark exhibition The Maze (2004) – which was first shown at Belfast Exposed – that saw Wylie given access to the Maze/Long Kesh Prison site as in stood empty, but kept ready for future use, in Northern Ireland’s post-Good Friday Agreement political landscape. By this time, the Maze had become a location synonymous with the Trouble, due to its role in holding ‘special category’ prisons with links to paramilitary organisations and as the site of the infamous Hunger Strikes of the early 1980s. It was arguably one of the most famous prisons in the world. Despite having been emptied in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the site was maintained and kept in readiness for several years, prepared in case conflict returned. It cast a long shadow over the early years of post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland, as the first steps towards devolved, power-sharing government were being made.
It was in this context that Wylie was given free, unsupervised access to the Maze in order to document the site. His images captured both the physical structure of the prison, as well as the psychological impact of the Maze’s architecture. The Maze brought Wylie widespread critical acclaim and was a powerful documentation of living history in Northern Ireland.
In 2007, Donovan Wylie and filmmaker Peter Mann recorded the demolition of an internal perimeter wall of the Maze/Long Kesh Prison, as part of Wylie’s work to document the demolition of the site following the prison’s final closure. It is this, previously unseen, work that forms the basis of Blinded by the very force it imagines it could handle.
In this new work, Wylie continues to chronicle the architecture of conflict. His work is rooted in the idea of art as an antidote to the nihilism that conflict can induce, and was influenced by his experiences as a child growing up during the Troubles (Wylie was born in Belfast in 1971). In Blinded by the very force it imagines it could handle, the scenes of the demolition are directed so that at different moments, the viewer feels oppressed by the wall of the Maze, and then paradoxically protected by it. The almost overwhelming sound as the wall is destroyed evokes Wylie’s childhood memories of sleep broken by explosions in the city, and the destruction of the wall creates a space into which a sense of peace emerges. The film features excerpts of Simone Weil’s ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’, read by Paula McFetridge.
Belfast Exposed will also be using Blinded by the very force it imagines it could handle as an opportunity to publicly open the Bank Gallery, a new complex of exhibitions and event spaces and artist studios on Belfast’s High Street. This will be the first public event held in the Bank Gallery.
