Monthly Archives: May 2012

Heliopause / The Lumo Tapes

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Once upon a time there was a three piece band from Belfast who made rather nice dreamy folk music. Then main protagonist Richard Davis relocated to Brighton, and found that being in a band where your bandmates are on a completely different landmass was a bit tricky. For a while, Richard tried his own thing, putting together layers of sound on his laptop, calling his new project Lumo. He played a few gigs which were mostly improvised, and got approached by Brighton label Precious Metal, who have started putting out releases on cassette.

When Richard agreed his original thought was two put out two longer tracks of about ten minutes each, with one on each side, but things grew and grew. Guitarist Niall Harden had also moved to Brighton, and they couldn’t turn their back on Chris McCorry who was still back in Belfast. The release would be as a new, bolder, more ambitious Heliopause, and instead of two tracks, a whole album’s worth of material was recorded.

The result is the Lumo Tape. It’s recognisable as the old Heliopause, but the songs are bigger, richer and more atmospheric. Guitars are run through numerous pedals making them distorted and fuzzy. Electronica generated on the laptop twinkles and burbles in the background. Layers of reverb are added to the songs making the whole sound much warmer – like Sigur Ros with intelligible lyrics remixed by Kieran Hebden.

The album was launched at an intimate gig at Brighton Electric Studios on Saturday 5th May. Support came from local electronica act Krill, and Before Machines, a post-indie band who are old friends of Heliopause’s from Belfast.

Only fifty cassettes have been produced, which went on general release at the gig. Soon they’ll be taking some to Canada – the band are performing at this year’s NXNE festival in Toronto in June.

http://preciousmetal.bandcamp.com/

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Emma Gatrill album release

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Emma Gatrill (of Laish, Sons of Noel and Adrian etc) launched her first solo album ‘Chapter One’ in the beautiful environment of the Church of Annunciation last Friday night. The quirky but holy surroundings perfectly suited Emma’s hushed yet accessibly moving harp-based songs. The album is really lovely and well worth checking out – available now from the Willkommen label http://www.willkommenrecords.co.uk/shop/releases/emma-gatrill-chapter-i

Support acts on Friday came from two local acts I had not seen before –  the Steve Aston Trio who played some beautiful jazz-based guitar in the style of Django Reinhardt (whose name I surprisingly spelled correctly at the first attempt!), and the opener who was the amazing Nick Edward Harris, who managed to play some extrordinary songs on the guitar using some impressive slapping and tapping and quite original ways of playing that instrument. Both supports are also well worth catching if you get the chance.

Beat Express raising funds to perform at the Irish Performing Arts Festival

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Beat Express are a local band with a difference – they’re the UK’s first all learning disabled band. They’ve been going for ten years, and are supported by Carousel – a Brighton charity which works with disabled people and the arts. Earlier this year, they submitted a song to a competition where the prize to play at the Irish Performing Arts Festival & European Song Festival in Cork which is an international performing arts festival for people with disability, and not only have the band been invited to play but they’ve also been invited to host a workshop.

Beat Express

This is all very good news, but taking a band to a festival is a lot more expensive than you or I buying a ticket to festival and jumping on the train. Factor in disability and the fact that the festival is in a different country, and the costs mount up. To help with all of this, the charity have set up a crowdfunding page to help give the band the support they need.

Here at the blog, we wish all local bands every success, but I’m sure you’ll all agree that seeing Beat Express doing well would be something special.

New Fear of Men Single

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It seems like forever since Fear of Men put out the debut 7″ Ritual Confession last year. It’s probably been barely six months, and in that time one of their early cassette released tracks, Doldrums, appeared on the Sea Monsters 2 compilation, but now the band are just about ready to put out their next single.

Green Sea is coming out on limited 300 only 7″ on June 18th on Sexbeat records, backed with another new track called Born, which they claim is “hook laden”. If you want to hear what Green Sea sounds like before then, you can because they’ve put it up on Soundcloud:

If you want to hear what they sound like playing it live, then they’re playing at the Great Escape Festival, Friday 11th May at 9.30pm at Queens Hotel, and they’re back again supporting Best Coast at Coalition on 21st June. Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’ll actually play the new single, but I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t.