Total Vermin is humbled to present...
TACO BELLS
http://www.myspace.com/dar
...Amazing, ecstatic, wild, high-energy Finnish free jazz quartet, check these reviews:
"These guys can play for REAL. There’s some genuine emotion going on here, it’s a goddamn microcosmos of feeling waiting for you. No, drop the micro-, that’s making it sound like an understatement – how many expressions can one face make? It’s all here." - Tyrone D.C. Washington
"Totally blazing breakneck free jazz brut from a buncha Finns with a connection to the source. [Taco Bells] whip up the kind of energy storm that would take Brotzmann’s Machine Gun session as a propulsive model while factoring in snatches of raggedy folk melody, the kind of hallelujah overtone style of the post-Ayler choir and odd breakdowns that combine scrabbling strings with knotty drones and wildman grunts." - David Keenan/Volcanic Tongue
PEKKO KÄPPI
http://pekkokappi.com/
Had the privilege of seein Pekko play earlier this year. Jaw-droppingly beautiful Finnish folk music, played on a Jouhikko, a kind of bowed lyre, and sung in a language you don't understand.
"Pekko Kappi (who the hell is this?) is completely amazing--mind blowing in fact. I suppose it's traditional, but its the kind of traditional that makes you wonder why they bothered inventing high fidelity. It's like that track on the nonesuch collection of African music--there was this Ghana woman singing, absolutely nothing else. It completely burned everything else to the ground, and it was just a woman singing. Pekko Kappi makes me feel like some kind of barbarian in regards to my taste in music. Recording this sort of thing even seems rather pointless, since we're all too white to understand (I'm sure Pekko is white too, but I speak of the soul!)" Chris Moon, Blastitude
"This is a solo work on a Finnish "fiddle," called a jouhikko. It could find comparison with Jewelled Antler's more elegant whorl and it also has the quality of a song intoned in a tavern or on a forgotten gypsy byway. Hardcore throat singing, too. The feel of traditional music. Jaw harp over fiddle and the player's movements are caught on mic: like trees rustling or dust kicking. The tracks often have a Tony Conrad feel-- working within a repetitious pattern that opens up more and more each time he repeats it, allowing the listener a moment to step inside the note and look eke out its nuance. The androgynous vocalizations could be a woman or a man mumbling in falsetto. Everything trembles: pine cones, earthy soil. Fireside incantations. Could be a field recording from a century ago. Stunning intensity from such a minimal set-up." Brandon Stosuy, Pitchfork
PART WILD HORSES MANE ON BOTH SIDES
http://www.myspace.com/par
Manchester's incredible abstract/beautiful flute and percussion duo, who've rightly picked up plaudits and fans across the globe.
"Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides occupy the same liminal zone between free jazz and abstract sound as Flaherty/Corsano. The duo of drummer Pascal Nichols and flautist Kelly Jones play a form of improvised music that refernces many totemic fire music sources - John Coltrane's LSD-inspired masterpiece Om, the classic Don Cherry/Ed Blackwell Mu sessions or, more specifically, Cherry's soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain - while subverting them with a punk primitive attack that owes as much to Leeds's drone pioneers Vibracathedral Orchestra as it does to the Fluxus-inspired ritual of Japan's Taj Mahal Travellers" The Wire magazine
PLUM SLATE
Picked and plucked non-diatonic improvisation for prepared acoustic guitar.
£6 pounds entry. 8.00pm start.
Taco Bells and Pekko Käppi are also playing...
11.11.10 - Glasgow, 13th Note w/ Rictus
12.11.10 - Edinburgh, The Roxy Art House w/ Usurper
14.11.10 - Leeds, Cardigan Arms
15.11.10 - London, The Miller (London Bridge) w/ Alan Wilkinson
16.11.10 - Brighton, The Cowley Club w/ Bolide, Sunshine Variety
PLUS! The Gamecock are going on tour!
Read this lovely description,
"Duo of Stuart Arnot (Smear Campaign; Plum Slate) and Nick Mitchell (Beach Fuzz; A Wake). They play a kind of arrhythmic, un-danceable funk of high-end frequencies and low-end drum machines, fed through a wah-wah and rammed forcefully into the listener's cerebral cortex. Pitch-shifted casio crap and unadorned Roland Juno shimmer are melded to form what is at once both sweet and listenable and yet still, somehow, horribly repellant. Sitting somewhere uncomfortably, painfully and way away from the hypnogogic pop bandwagon, where the drum machines have bronchitis and the synthesizers sneeze, they are brutally loud, joyfully all-consuming and epic in their prolongation of the crescendo."
30.10.10 - Salford, Islington Mill
31.10.10 - Hull, The Boathouse
1.11.10 - Edinburgh, Sunbear Gallery
2.11.10 - Glasgow, 13th Note
3.11.10 - Leeds, Cardigan Arms
PLUS! Massive new batch of tapes about to drop. Bigger than ever. Will be available initially on The Gamecock tour above.
