Skinny Wolves Presents
A double headline show from:
JAMES BLACKSHAW
(Important Records) /
ALEXANDER TUCKER
(Thrill Jockey)
with special guest:
CIAN NUGENT (VHF Records)
Unitarian Church, Stephens Green, Dublin
Friday 11th May – Doors 7.30pm
Tickets €15 from www.tickets.ie/skinnywolves
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JAMES BLACKSHAW
http://soundcloud.com/
James Blackshaw performs celestial and spirit-lifting guitar-led compositions. Meditative in quality, cinematic in scope, his music spirals gracefully across complex patterns, motifs and harmonics. He made his name as a 12-string acoustic guitarist, and his relationship with the instrument is near perfect. With an extensive back catalogue to his name on labels like Young God Records, Tompkins Square and Important, he has developed a unique playing style that takes Takoma school finger-picking into an entirely new place. Swirling overtones, cascading notes and a thousand points of light cascade from his guitar and create ever-shifting textures that bear the influence of contemporary classical composition, post-rock dynamics and invisible soundtracks as much as the American folk guitar tradition.
Despite his transcendent state music he is a grounded and earthly fellow who has been written about with reverence and has played churches, festivals, folk clubs and large concert halls on his many travels in the US, Europe and Japan. These have included extensive touring with the reformed Swans, as well as collaborative performances with Hauschka and Nancy Elizabeth. He performs and records as a member of Current 93 and with Jozef Van Wissem as Brethren of The Free Spirit.
New album Love is The Plan, The Plan Is Death is released on Important Records in April 2012. Written at a time of great emotional disquiet, it’s a beautiful and bittersweet new chamber work containing six original pieces whose titles are lovingly misappropriated from those of short stories by the great science fiction author James Tiptree Jr AKA Alice B. Sheldon. The instrumentation is more stripped back and integrated than on recent albums, allowing his impeccable nylon-string classical guitar playing to come to the fore, with small details like the scraping of his fingers on the strings and breathing patterns adding to the emotional honesty of the mix. Grand piano, vibraphone and B3 fill out the tracks, with Geneviève Beaulieu’s stunning vocals featuring on the track ‘And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways’.
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ALEXANDER TUCKER
http://
http://soundcloud.com/
British avant pop artist Alexander Tucker releases his much anticipated new album, Third Mouth, on Thrill Jockey in 2012. This album builds on the strengths revealed by his landmark debut for the label, Dorwytch released in April 2011, culminating in his finest work to date.
Using songs written over a 12 month period he achieves his own inimitable blend of psych rock and ambient pop using a variety of studio crafted effects, rudimentary beats, guitar and bass, as well as synth and cello drones. He pushes himself even further however as he breaks new ground on the electronics only track “Rh” and heads further out into the deeper reaches of space with the sci-fi influenced cosmic meditation “Andromeon” as well as experimenting with more progressive song structures like those in “The Glass Axe”.
Tucker’s sound has developed over the years since his first self-titled solo album, which featured acoustic finger-picking, experimental electronics and was released on Jackie O Motherfucker’s U-Sound Archives label. He went on to combine compositional song structures, drones, layered vocals and improvisations on his 2005 album Old Fog released on ATP Recordings. This collection of spectral moods, eerie landscapes and fragile emotions was followed by Furrowed Brow (2006) and Portal (2008), where the songs and melodies became more pronounced, whilst infecting the tracks with underlying drone currents, traditional finger-picking, doom riffs and David Crosby inspired harmonies. There was a shift in direction away from improvisation and toward scored pop music for Dorwytch (2011) with its nods to Brian Eno’s Another Green World, while still retaining the organic drones of Cluster and Lichens.
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CIAN NUGENT
http://www.vhfrecords.com/
http://soundcloud.com/
Cian Nugent is a guitar player and composer from Dublin, Ireland who combines personal passions, such as suburban/coastal blues, traditional musics, late 1960s & ’70s singer-songwriters, jazz ambitions, 20th century composition and the Takoma school into a deeply personal style. His music boasts an orchestrated and fully instrumented sound that is playful and eerie at the same time. In the past he has toured with people such as Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, Micah Blue Smaldone, Ben Reynolds, Nalle, The Family Elan, George Stavis, Jozef van Wissem, C Joynes, Peter Delaney, Thinguma*jigSaw and James Blackshaw throughout Europe and the United States.
