Thursday 12 April 2018, 7.30pm
American composer/performer Ashley Paul celebrates the release of new album, Lost In Shadows, on Slip – an expansive, deeply personal excavation of recent motherhood, told through songs dissolving and re-crystallising at the threshold of free improvisation.
At the LP's heart is Paul's mercurial multi-instrumental style, which renders the primal wails, clunks, and twangs of clarinet, saxophone, percussion, and guitar uncannily melodic, alchemised by frank, vulnerable vocals. The deft negotiation of the fragile and the coruscating evidenced on Paul's 'Line The Clouds' (2013) and 'Heat Source' (2014) has now reached a kind of hesitant sublime.
Recorded over 3 weeks at a FUGA residency in Zaragoza, Spain in December 2016, 'Lost In Shadows' documents a cathartic outpouring; the first time Paul had been able to write since the birth of her daughter 11 months earlier.
The record is completely influenced by "many hours spent awake at night in a dream like state of half consciousness, darkness and solitude; an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and exhaustion made light by a profound new love", with Paul's solo playing bolstered by additional baritone saxophone, cello, tuba, and percussion. This ensemble set-up, which premiered much of this work at 2017's Counterflows festival, gives the album a fresh sense of luxuriousness, bounce, and rich possibility.
Ashley Paul / saxophone, voice, guitar
Ben Pritchard / guitar, voice, percussion
Lia Mazzari / cello, percussion
Yoni Silver / bass clarinet, keyboard
David Aird / tuba
Ashley Paul is an American performer and composer based in London. She uses an array of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, guitar, bells and percussion, mixing disparate elements to create a colorful palate of sound that works its way into her intuitive songs; free forming, introverted melodies. This blend manifests beautiful and simple musical forms against acoustic experimentation.
Ashley has performed or recorded with Phill Niblock, Rashad Becker, Nik Colk Void, Loren Connors, Heatsick, Aki Onda, C. Spencer Yeh, Anthony Coleman, Bass Clef, Joe Maneri, Joe Morris, Seijiro Murayama, Greg Kelley, Bill Nace and Eli Keszler appearing on such labels as Important, PAN, ESP-DISK’ and Tzadik. She received a Masters of Music from New England Conservatory in 2007.
Fielding Hope is a London/ Glasgow-based live music curator and facilitator.
Gwilly Edmondez emerged in the 1980s from Bridgend, South Wales, where he was a founder member of Radioactive Sparrow, once dubbed ‘the most legendary band you’ve probably never heard of.’ Gwilly practices a form of composition that disavows fixity and rehearsal, preferring an approach that dissolves the line between ‘life’ and ‘performance’ in ways that compromise neither. Having coined the term Wild Pop to describe his aesthetic as both a solo artist and as Gustav Thomas in YEAH YOU (est. 2013), his embracing the age of evaporation is manifest in a relentless autopathology oriented towards devotional sublimation.
Gwilly closes Day 2 of the residency with a special dictaphone karaoke set, a real crowd pleaser.
