Gravid Hands presents:
Duke Garwood & the Ladywoodsmen,
The Exploits of Elaine,
Sixtoes

Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston

SATURDAY 22nd August 2009

Time : 7.30pm

Tickets : £6/£5 cheaplist available in advance; register names at gravidlist@gmail.com

DUKE GARWOOD & THE LADYWOODSMEN

Duke Garwood plays a haunted contemporary blues music, by turns evoking windswept plains and the hive-like emptiness of inner city estates. He drags the downtrodden spirit of plantation blues forward through time to linger in shopping malls and empty train stations. As if to emphasize this juxtaposition, Duke left his home in South London to record his last album, Emerald Palace, in a Surrey log cabin. The resulting music twists the blues template thoroughly, with rasping acoustic guitars exploring ethereal tonalities as they clamber over rattling, syncopated percussion. Metallic tones and eerie drones imbue country idioms with the alienating clamour of the city. Duke’s voice ranges from a well-worn gruffness close to Sprechstimme, through plaintive melodies, to a feral howl. The effect is at once beautiful and disturbing, familiar and alien. Duke’s next LP, The Sand That Falls, will be released on 10th August through Fire Records.

For fans of Mark Lanegan, Captain Beefheart, William Elliot Whitmore

Appearing alongside Duke will be:

Paul May, drums

Dom Garwood , keys ,horns

Neil May, bass

Alex Tucker, cello, voice

Jon Richards, guitar voice

PRESS QUOTES:

PLAN B - “The South London blues, according to charismatic travellin´ man Duke Garwood, is a clanging, loping blues, all pots and pans percussion and monotone Tom Waits growl via Trout Mask Replica and Deptford post-punk mavericks This Heat.”

INDEPENDENT - “It's like traditional country blues subjected to a barrage of 21st-century urban noise, with something of the guitar-improv abstractions of the late, great Derek Bailey thrown in.”
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THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE

Northern Improv group The Exploits of Elaine draw from a diverse set of influences to create textural, percussive music that is hallucinatory and propulsive in equal measures. The musicians operate with a near-telepathic sense of ebb and flow as they combine timbres to create a rich landscape of sound with true depth of field. Repetitive, driving rhythmic figures lend a sense of stratified structure to the heavily-processed interlocking guitar tones, so that one can picture an immense rusted post-apocalyptic machine, its parts all whirring in synchronisation and grinding together. This is folk music from a dystopian future where the vestiges of technology are gradually decaying and the old pastoral/urban dichotomy takes on new, sinister connotations. Plateau Suite by Exploits of Elaine is forthcoming on Gravid Hands.

For fans of Sunburned Hand of the Man, Neptune, Faust, The Dead C.

Personnel:

David Bell

Patrick Farmer

Graham Jones

Michael Jones

Stuart Sutherland

David Thomas

PRESS QUOTES:

DROWNED IN SOUND - “Each musician seems to be ploughing their own furrow in the soundscape, intensely involved in their individual activity but also aware of the complex panoramic parallax they are creating.”

LOSING TODAY- "an eerie slice of abstract atmospherics that creaks, whines and see saws throughout amid a haze of slow recoiling dislocated arid delta blues"
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SIXTOES

London Sextet Sixtoes (David Greenep, Benny Crane, Anne Carruthers, James Hitchins, Tom Platt and Hannah Philip) deal in a melancholic, mostly acoustic folk music that utilises tremulous, ethereal vocal melodies and interweaving strings to create an eerily captivating atmosphere. Their edgy, intense live show builds layer upon layer of instrumentation into a trance inducing whole. Their Debut album ‘Trick of the night’ was released earlier this year to critical acclaim and the band have been steadily building their profile and regularly impressing audiences with their “intricate, idiosyncratic beauty” (Chris Roberts)

PRESS QUOTES:

BEARDED - "a rattling cacophony of spiralling vocals and jittering guitar lines that packs more psychodramatic undercurrents than four acts of Chekhov"

NME - "Scruffy, sinister folk rock. Something like Anthony and the Johnsons singing the scariest words of Aleister Crowley. In hell".