Wednesday 5 February 2020, 7.30pm
Get to know Eric Copeland if you haven't quite yet made the time. Copeland is an Brooklyn-based experimental musician and a core member of Black Dice. Eric is also one-half Terrestrial Tones duo, finding Animal Collective's Avey Tare on the other end of that project. Copeland released his first solo effort, Hermaphrodite, in 2007 on the Paw Tracks label, with his next full-length LP, Alien in a Garbage Dump, via the same imprint. For his next work, however, Mr. Copeland jumps on board the great ship DFA for a solo long player, Joke in the Hole (2013) and continues to record for both DFA and several other Cutting edge labels such as Escho, Underwater Peoples Records L.I.E.S. records to this day.
Copeland has continued on his path of deconstruction- forming tracks of of scrapped samples, damaged loops and controlled chaos. Certainly not easy listening music, somehow Copeland manages to pull through with his demented pop sensibilites crawling up from the muck and spawling out on the beach to catch a tan. Jesus Freak is as addictive as it is confusing with it's screwed vocal hooks and demented twang heard throughout. This is best demonstrated on the closing track Billy Goat, which can be summed up as mouth harping redneck psychedelia cruising down a polluted river to nowhere. Just when you think "Jesus Freak" resembles something you know seconds later it becomes foregin and unattainable, yet remains headscratchingly familiar.
Harrga is a band formed in Bristol in 2017 by Miguel Prado (Nzʉmbe) and Dali de Saint Paul (EP/64, Viridian Ensemble, The Sound Cupboard,DSC).
In May 2019, they released Héroïques Animaux de la Misère, on Avon Terror Corps, in honour of those who burn the borders & keep indelible marks, glossolalia and xenoglossia. Diaspora of the future. Harrga means A Burn in the Moroccan Darija dialect, and also recalls the term harragas, which refers to migrants who burn their ID papers and seek asylum in Europe. The album is explicitly framed as a tribute to these asylum seekers, bearing a frenzied urgency which refuses the listener a comfortable position, with an intensity to match the similar combination of political and sonic radicalism of Moor Mother, who makes a brief contribution to the final track “À Vif”.
In May 2020, they published “Femmes d’Intérieur” on Takuroku, (Café Oto digital label) considering this time domestic abuse and exploring tropes of femininity.
Yes Indeed are Laurie Tompkins & Otto Willberg. Live, they play keys, bouncy bass and sing over tactile, emotive samples. The music is fuggy and soaring, deliciously out of place.
On 2021’s ‘Exorcise’ EP, they let ratty violin, syrupy bass and foolish voices congeal over a backbone of co(s)mic spinnet and pit percussion. Boomkat rightly dubbed it “proper mad scones”. ‘Rotten Luck’ - a sodden, diaristic epic and YI’s first album proper – is out in September 2022.
Laurie is a composer, helps run the Slip label and has put out CDs on Entr’acte, 33-33 and Hyperdelia this year. Otto is a bassist, plays in groups with Ashley Paul & Charles Hayward and his great band Historically Fucked has an LP coming on Upset The Rhythm.
