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The Mire

Sunny Murray screening competition

We're running a competition to win tickets for this week's screening in London of Sunny's Time Now , a new documentary about the influential drummer Sunny Murray, with a Q&A; afterwards with saxophonist Tony Bevan and Tony Herrington from The Wire . Here's the details: Win a pair of tickets to the London ICA Screening! The Wire presents: Sunny's Time Now + Q&A; London ICA, Cinema 1 18 April 2009 8:15pm £8/£7 Concessions/£6 ICA Members. "Bang! Let's go on. Like Louis Pasteur. They ain't fucked with the milk since then, except maybe diluted it a little bit." Sunny Murray Sunny's Time Now retraces the rough-and-tumble life and career of influential free jazz drummer Sunny Murray. Directed by Luxembourg film maker Antoine Prum, this documentary includes interviews with key witnesses (including Cecil Taylor, Val Wilmer, Robert Wyatt, William Parker, Grachan Moncur III) and exclusive concert footage of Murray in performance with the likes of...

The Mire

Bushwacked

Good article from the New York Times on Lloyd Barnes of the Wackies label fame.

The Mire

Cath & Phil Tyler's Lovely Molly

A great part of Cath & Phil Tyler gig at Dalston's Café Oto a couple Friday's ago (20 March) was hearing their version of the trad tune "Courting Is A Pleasure" one of my favourite recordings by the guitarist/vocalist/fiddler Nic Jones - a tune from his excellent Penguin Eggs album. Jones's recording is a great example of his impressive guitar skills, with its faultless and quick, almost harsh rhythmic picking complementing and intertwining with his vocals creating an uncomfortable and driving effect. The Tyler's version on the other hand, broke the song down into slowly shifting fragments and a sleepy pace, a great version that translated the song into a kind of lullaby (well, compared to Jones's version...) Either way, the Tyler's show was a great gig, different from the studio recordings I've heard (Dumb Supper) which were far more dry, droning and harsh, than the rounded folkiness I heard on Friday. ...

The Mire

Adventures In Modern Music 26 March 09

Chris Bohn's Adventures In Modern Music show on Resonance FM last night included a mix from Ekkehard Ehlers, with scratchy vinyl delights from Alice Coltrane, Caetano Veloso and more. Other good stuff from the show included The Threshold Houseboys Choir, Trembling Bells and Super Vacations.

The Mire

Adventures In Modern Music 12 March 09

Took a while, but our Adventures In Modern Music show on Resonance FM from 12 March is finally online ready for download etc. Includes tracks from Mordant Music, Evan Parker & John Wiese and Alasdair Roberts. Available here . Sorry for the delay, normal service is now resumed etc.

The Mire

Nadja + Capillary Action

Last night at Bardens Boudoir, Capillary Action and Nadja played like each other's inverse reflection. Capillary Action offered the spectacle of virtuosity, with technical mastery of their instruments and a sophisticated understanding of melody and harmony. But their immaculate rehearsal-room constructions – imagine Prokofiev re-arranging Red Krayola – left nothing to chance, and as a result felt somewhat empty emotionally. Everything was so controlled it failed to engage. Nadja on the other hand offered no such spectacle. Just two folk onstage playing their bass and guitar very very slowly, occasionally tweaking the knobs on their FX units and murmuring lackadaisically into their mics. But their (vaguely adolescent) brand of shoegazing miserabilism possessed the emotional richness that eluded Capillary Action. Best enjoyed with eyes closed, their vast, fuzzy drones and delicate fragments of melody enraptured the crowd, who stood there pale-faced and solemnly nodding, dreaming of forests. A victory of heart over head.

The Mire

wire mire linkage 18/03/2009

http://current.com/e/89891932/en_US >>>>>UR on TV (well, internet TV...)******* Go To: Cath & Phil Tyler come south to visit Dalston this Friday Go To : Matt Stokes: The Gainsborough Packet and Club Ponderosa , Victory Over The Sun ... Zaum is coming soon! "On The Idea Of Communism" at Birckbeck via YouTube ......why not. Eduardo Kac (animated) concrete poetry on UbuWeb The Art of the Overhead [Projector] Festival 2009... Johan " Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y " Grimonprez & Tom "Tintin" McCarthy's film on Alfred Hitchock ...

The Mire

William Furlong

A short (and shaky) doc of William Furlong’s installation Possibility & Impossibility Of Fixing Meaning at Laure Genillard , 2 Hanway Place, London until 9 April. The sound is fairly indistinct and messy until one gets closer to the roughly canvas-sized frames where the directional aspect of the voices can be properly heard. It’s impossible to find any kind of proper narrative or conversation going on inside the chattering hubub of voices mainly constituted by short phrases of conversational hiccups, uhms and half finished sentences. As a whole, the space sonically resembles a sleepy pub or some other public meeting space and the closer one listens, the more hypnotising and numbing the effect becomes. Furlong (who is the man behind Audio Arts Magazine cassette series, which from 1973 has collected interviews from a broad range of contemporary artists) culled the voices used for the compositions from his...