http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk & Constellation Records presents:

ERIC CHENAUX
DRAW ME STORIES
DEAD RAT ORCHESTRA
PAGAN WANDERER LU

Wednesday 10th March 7.30pm
Buffalo Bar, Cardiff
Ages: 18+
£5 adv / £6 doors/ £5 NUS
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http://www.wegottickets.com/event/70636

Canadian born Eric Chenaux experiments with guitars, ballads, electronics and tunes as an improviser and songwriter with an affection for balladeers such as Betty Carter, Howard Skempton, Willie Nelson, June Tabor, Sade, Tony MacMahon, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Van Heusen, Nic Jones, Carla Bley, Peter Cusack, Anthonello de Caserta, Waterson:Carthy, Pascal Comelade and Paul Bley.

Chenaux’s songs begin as singular vocal lines and become thorny with his elastic and mouthy guitar playing. Of this guitar playing, Toronto critic Carl Wilson writes, “Ornette Coleman might call it harmolodic. Chenaux might call it an amazing background. His strings chime with all those thoughts at once. I adore the way he teases out a melody, never beginning a phrase so much as joining one already in progress. The sound quivers and multiplies such that I picture his strings fraying and sprouting into more strings, weeds, nests, marshes, frogs’ tongues, cancelled coins, nickel pipes, drainage systems, catacombs, coral reefs… I could pick Chenaux’s guitar out of a lineup within a few woozy notes, because it’s no longer confined to the orthodox pluck, squawk and scrape of [Derek] Bailey-influenced guitar improv; instead it has absorbed Bailey’s open field of possibility into a love of song. And the songs are strong enough to take it”.

In the 1980s and 1990s Chenaux sang and played guitar in the post-punk band Phleg Camp and later wrote songs with the guitar duo Lifelikeweeds. In 2001 Eric co-founded the Toronto-based record label Rat-drifting, on which he releases the music of friends and collaborators. Rat-drifting projects to-date include The Guayaveras and The Draperies (fried improvised polyphony with Chenaux, Ryan Driver and Doug Tielli), and The Reveries (again with Chenaux, Driver and Tielli), an ultra psychedelic sweet-lounge jazz trio who sing and play jazz standards with cellphone speakers placed in their mouths to amplify each others instruments. About the latter project, Martin Arnold (another Chenaux collaborator) writes, “experiencing it is like encountering delicate ultra-lounge psychedelia picked up from afar on a static-ridden short-wave radio.”If you're loving Bon Iver, then you don't want to miss Chenaux's special Cardiff show at the Buffalo Bar on the 10th of March 2010. Chanaux is more electrified than Bon Iver but they both have that mellow intensity and melancholy voice that sucks you in. Eric has great credentials Chenaux is an important member of Sandro Perri's band. And both of his recent excellent long players Dull Lights (2006) and Sloppy Ground (2008) are out on Constellation(silver mount zion, do make say think etc etc)in the UK.

"Chenaux's songs are played by a loose-sounding set-up of musicians that includes violin, melodica and banjo; but it is Chenaux's guitar playing and singing which work hardest to inform this music with a lingeriing, oddly languorous intensity..."The Wire

http://www.myspace.com/ericchenaux

The energetic Draw me Stories from Cardiff provide the ears with a "wonderful" and yet "unsettling" brand of music. Whilst they march happily under many musical banners they never stray away from the organic and haunting style that makes them so appealing. The driving, scattering rhythms, groove-laden guitars and haunting folk-like vocals bring to mind something that is both epic and humble. By the end of their first year their set had evolved into an organised miscellany that attracted comparisons as varied as The Doors, Arcade Fire, The Veils, Nick Drake and Fleetwood Mac. The acclaim attached to their acoustic album 'The Unplugged Sessions' suggests that Draw me Stories are completely comfortable with exploring the many sides of their creativity.Their appearances at SWN, in London and on a recent French tour have garnered plaudits for their ragged, hypnotic folk rock sound. Their new EP 'The Sky and the Mirror'is a progression too.

"Hopping from unplugged folkiness to mains-powered ragged rock, Cardiff’s Draw Me Stories put a little soul into all they do. Updated traditionals with some powerful hollering attached." - Swn

"This is a superb EP from one of the best folk-rock bands in the country right now" - God Is In The TV

http://www.myspace.com/drawmestories
http://www.rawrip.com/drawmestories

Chameleon-like musical magpies, the Dead Rat Orchestra set out to plunder the music of other acts, amalgamating all within their own particular aesthetic. Uniquely able to play the entire venue as a sound source, they equate concert violins with wineglasses, air vents with copper records, mammoth organ pipes with eskimo kisses. Muttering, shuffling and searching for those moments when it all just seems to make sense. Broken melodies, fragments of noise, sounds found at the back of their throats. For every event a new set is crafted, worked and sculpted.The physicality of feet stomping, instrument breaking and voices cracking and laughing. Creating with anything they can draw a sound from: guitar, accordion, balloons, cattle grids, harmoniums, dansette record players, bowed saws, sine waves, feedback, celeste, tubular bells, singing bowls, music boxes, toy birds and what-ever they just found in the street outside the venue.

The exploration of these instruments creates a music of constantly varying form. They seek to make music with resonance: joyous, beautiful, sad. Improvisation is key and no matter what structure they create, every time they perform they are free to stray.

http://www.myspace.com/deadratorchestra

Pagan Wanderer Lu is a Cardiff based songwriter with an iconoclastic take on classic british songwriting, setting wryly witty lyrics to playfully experimental electro-pop tunes.

'In the world of big bland bands and groups trying so hard to sound like each other, artists like Pagan Wanderer Lu are a breath of fresh air.' - Huw Stephens - BBC Radio One

'Whether its Nintendo-folk, folktronica or Casio-coustic, it sounds like someone gleefully hammering together two pieces of a jigsaw that arent supposed to fit.' - Drowned In Sound

http://www.myspace.com/paganwandererlu

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