We're very excited to announce an absolutely super line up for the 6th August - Mary Hampton, Rozi Plain and Savaging Spires.

Advance tickets available from Modern Art Oxford: http://www.modernartoxford?.org.uk/whats-on/rozi-plai?n/about/
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...MARY HAMPTON...
http://www.myspace.com/mar?yhampton

"Folk music rich in poetry & passion"
Record Collector

The wonderful Brighton based artist Mary Hampton is kindly relaxing her folly-only tour restrictions (see http://www.sounduk.net/eve?nt_page.php?eid=25) to join us for what promises to be a wonderful night at MAO.

"Hampton is a rare talent. Backed by her string-heavy four-piece band Cotillion, the Brighton singer works firmly inside the folk tradition, but operates with an inventiveness that makes her mostly self-penned material sound refreshingly original."
The Guardian

Praise for "My Mother's Children":

"terrifying and gorgeous....unusual and strong.....epic and tiny... 'My Mother's Children' is an album I know I am going to love for life." Eliza Carthy, fRoots

"songs, which recline with shimmering sensuality in various shady cloaks of weirdness...fragility, desolation and humour...scurrying around Dartmoor under cover of darkness." Telegraph

"her bizarre flights of fancy are the dreams of children, far more unsettling for an adult.....evoking Eliot’s Wasteland in it’s beautiful bleakness". Wyl Menmuir, Fly

"coffee-table-shattering purity...these are songs of unnerving delicacy, elemental and acoustic simplicity...potent and enchanting" **** Uncut

"brilliant..peculiar...how? great the unexpected on this album makes me feel" Acoustic Magazine

"...a true original.....Hampton's vocal lines are not so much melodies as weather systems" ***** Clare O'Brien, Subba-Culture,

Songlines ****

Mojo, Folk album of the month ****

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...ROZI PLAIN...
http://www.fencerecords.co?m/artists/rozi-plain/

ROZI PLAIN was born Rosalind Leyden, in the leafy-greens of Winchester, 22 years ago. Since moving to Bristol she’s been working on the ferries that bob in and out of the city, along the Avon, whilst creating her own beautifully intimate music that captures life slowly floating by. With her older brother Sam (aka Romanhead), and her pal Rachael Dadd, she is a founding member of the Cleaner Records collective – a loose assortment of singer-songwriters from the Bristol area.

Through her output on Cleaner Records, and at various live shows, Rozi’s songs reached the ears of Fife Fence Records label bosses – Kenny Anderson and Johnny Lynch (aka King Creosote and The Pictish Trail). She’s subsequently played at many Fence Records events (including their annual Homegame Festival, in Anstruther), and has contributed to numerous Fence Collective compilations.
Her stunning debut album, ‘Inside. Over Here‘ will be released on Fence Records Autumn 2008 .

Praise for "Inside, Over Here":

"Woos you with its easy charms, which stills your spirit with its banjos rippling like a bubbling stream. Rozi Plain's catherine wheel vocal harmonies set your mind a-wandering and you begin to recline into the sound of her voice and melodies like you would a warm bath surrounded by candles and shared with a lover. Plain, the latest signing to Fife's Fence Records, has made an album of such charm that there lies a problem in critiquing it effectively. Let me bathe in it, instead."
The Skinny

"A remarkable album... I could listen to it on repeat for a long, long time (and believe me I have!)...Every note on the record is there because it should be there, everything is allowed to breathe and be natural and it all sounds wonderful...This is a stunning listen, a stunning 40 minutes or so of music and hopefully Rozi Plain can continue to beguile and charm us in future."
Plentyside

WITH SPECIAL GUESTS:

Savaging Spires
http://savagingspires.band?camp.com/

Fresh from this month's Wire Tapper compilation...

This music belongs somewhere. Late summer afternoons, English pre-twilight and the old house that could do with some work. You walk along the edge of the lake and catch the scent of jasmine. The voices are still out there, all these years later, singing something you remember.

Savaging Spires (and their true identity is still somewhat shadowy) have created a world of sound where old ghosts can walk freely through these sunny grounds and impart equal doses of dread and joy. Take opener 'Bending the Rules of Time' which immediately transports us with whistles, strings and those soon-to-be-familiar choral vocals. A kind of work song for the dead, it is a brief and wonderfully melodic songdream. In fact none of these pieces outstay their welcome, allowing us to feel as though we just happened to grasp them for a moment: music at once spontaneous and eternal.

In a break from the acoustics, 'Trust' employs stuttering feedback worthy of Washing Machine-era Sonic Youth before collapsing into hazy music box melancholy. 'Crows' allows the mood to darken further with a repeated entreaty for the subject to "wake up". It sounds like a wake outside the caravan and beneath the stars. It is left to 'Seconds In Motion' to close the record with a gentle reverie of harmonica and slide guitar. Another, until now hidden, continent creeps into view for a moment and we sense possibilities beyond these gentle haunted lawns. But that's for another time, insofar as Savaging Spires pay attention to such constraints. For now we have one of the most evocative records you're likely to hear this year.