Saturday 26 January 2019, 7.30pm
The daughter of a coal miner, weaving a trail from West Virginia to Texas and now residing in Scotland, Heather Leigh furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar.
Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with a feel for the full interaction of flesh with hallucinatory power sources. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions.
New album 'Throne', out on Editions Mego, is a suite of heartbleed ballads cauterised with burning riffs. After the rawness of its precursor I Abused Animal, Throne is a record of late night Americana and heavy femininity; intimate love songs smoked in sensuality. The songs on Throne are woozy, gorgeous and uncomfortable, smothered in thick layers of bass but lifted by multitracked vocals. These are rich song forms that stand in contrast to the stripped down steel in her duo with Peter Brotzmann. It is an album of cosmic echoes, abstractions and introspection, of characters and stories that make up Leigh's first best pop record, its melodies and hooks set alight with the fiery core of her unique and distinctive pedal steel.
Where to begin with a figure like Simon Fisher Turner? From teenage stage and screen star to illustrious recording artist for Creation and Mute and score composer of Caravaggio (1986), Blue (1993) and The Epic of Everest (2013) - via a stint with The The and collaborations with Derek Jarman, David Lynch and Tilda Swinton - Turner embodies a distinctly modernist sensibility and boundless curiosity for sound. For A Colourful Storm, discovering Deux Filles, his devilishly intriguing, perfectly camp project with Colin Lloyd-Tucker, was a significant moment in shaping the label’s identity.
Caravaggio began Turner’s long relationship with the BFI, leading to the original score composition for restorations of three silent films, Un Chant D’Amour dir Jean Genet (1950), The Great White Silence dir Herbert Ponting (1924) and The Epic of Everest dir. Captain John Noel (1924, the latter winning an Ivor Novello Award. He has also composed film music for Mike Hodges, Michael Almareyda and Isao Yamada, while his collaborators over the years include Ryuichi Sakamoto, Gina Birch, Klara Lewis and The Elysian Collective. He returns to the stage for A Colourful Storm, following their Under the Arches release, Instability of the Signal (Mute, 2024) and ongoing missives for Touch’s sonic blog, Guerilla Audio.
Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer and broadcaster. She writes on underground and experimental music, and is a presenter on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. Her first book, The Foghorn’s Lament, was out in 2021 on White Rabbit Books. Her next book Clay: A Human History is out in 2024.
