Sunday 13 March 2016, 8pm
Killer, high-voltage line-up with James Sedwards' avant-punk / jazz-prog / noise-rock group Nøught, Alex Ward and Jem Doulton's Dead Days Beyond Help project performing with Alan Wilkinson, and Golden Oriole, featuring members of Staer and Tralten Eller Utpult.
Nøught is a synthesis of the experimental, avant-punk, jazz-prog and noise-rock credos, distilled into the paradoxical confines of a musically volatile, instrumental power-quartet. Originally formed in Oxford in the late 90's by eminent guitarist James Sedwards (Thurston Moore Group / Guapo / The Devil), the current line-up has been based in London since 2002. Their music is profoundly exhilarating when encountered and often provokes an hypnotic sensation from an audience as their incendiary live performances can easily entice and captivate a listener, due to the highly artful, polished and demanding compositions. Pieces span the extremes of short, catchy, three minute eruptions to long, dense and evolving half-hour incantations. Nøught’s music provides an uncommonly refreshing, non-derivative sensibility and approach, and they continually astound as they develop, invoke and deliver their singularly potent blend of sonic diabolism.
Abstract and minimal music. Members of Staer + Tralten Eller Utpult. Musique pommes frites meets funky concrète.
Dead Days Beyond Help (Alex Ward and Jem Doulton) take the physical assault of rock and the free-wheeling exploration of post-idiomatic improvisation to new levels of power and density, while Alan Wilkinson comes blazing out of a saxophone tradition that includes the likes of Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, Mike Osborne, Evan Parker and Brötzmann with a highly vocalized and personal style. DDBH's most recent album, 2014's "Severance Pay" on Believers Roast records, was described by The Wire as "a reminder that there are still thrills aplenty to be gained from the pursuit of complexity"; and Stewart Lee has called Alan Wilkinson's trio with John Edwards and Steve Noble "as powerful as The Stooges and as fluid as John Coltrane". Given their collective pedigree of collaborations with such luminaries of free music and avant-rock as Derek Bailey, Thurston Moore, Tatsuya Yoshida, Talibam!, Weasel Walter and Chris Corsano, it is no surprise that when the three musicians join forces the results are brutally intense, deliriously virtuosic, and utterly untrammelled by stylistic constraints.
