Saturday 12 April 2025, 7.30pm
After successful UK and European tours in 2023-24, with performances at Café OTO (London), Wharf Chambers (Leeds) and Stereo (Glasgow), as well as shows in Liverpool, Vienna, Geneva, Warsaw and more, Kulku are delighted to bring their unique live show back onto the road. Returning to the UK via the legendary Les Ateliers Claus in Brussels, they will perform music from their latest album Reset To Be, released on Phase Group last year.
Formed in Berlin at the turn of the millennium, Kulku have evolved as a highly unique and free-formed collective of musicians that make trance-inducing, jazz-entwined, percussive and soulful (mostly) acoustic music that takes cues from the rhythmic propulsion of Jaki Liebezeit’s Can, the street-folk of Moondog, the minimalism of Steve Reich, and the droning rock n’ roll of the Velvet Underground, forming a sound that they themselves have coined ‘No-Age’.
Kulku return to showcase the unique identity the band have been developing over the past 20 years; a sound crafted through experimentation and innovation with primarily acoustic instruments; droning harmoniums, repetitive and phasing xylophones, timpani, cello, scrap metal and woodwind reeds, all sitting alongside soulful saxophones and the voice of frontman Andreas Riska, singing in both German and English.
Joe Barton, Mickey Donnelly, and Louie Rice met in London during the 2000’s but it wasn’t until they had relocated to Norwich in recent years that they rented a studio in a condemned brutalist shopping centre and the Germ Lattice sound was formed. They began by agreeing what they didn’t want the project to be: no improvising or jamming, no overdubs, keep the tracks short etc..
Gipping Through the Ages presents the band’s structured, repetitive & linear tracks built around drums, bass, and synth with deliberately abstract vocals, which draw as much from folk traditions and the broader east Anglian landscape as they do from our fragmented modern world. Their novel use of microphones and live tape processing add a dynamism to the music where elements mask each other or the overdriven meters suggest the whole thing is on the brink of collapse.
Gipping Through the Ages can be seen as a palimpsest, rooted in place but spanning time, layering ephemeral traces of Mark E Smith, WG Sebald, and Laura Oldfield Ford.
Mosquito Farm began in 2022, an artists band and collaboration between Maddie Banwell and Grace Black. Their performances include many handmade instruments - mechanical, electronic and acoustic, alongside props and devices to play them with. Some forms are unrecognizable as instruments, while some resemble more conventional strings, drums or machines. These create sequences of drone and percussion, switching between microtonal harmonies and more chaotic layered rhythms with harsher sounds. Their performance is as much object theatre as music - their physical presence is choreographed around parameters to construct or collapse their set up, veering between intensity and awkwardness.
So far, Mosquito Farm is mostly experienced live, however they have 2 tracks on SELN’s compilation ‘The Last Londoner’ from 2023, and a track on The Wire Magazine’s ‘Below the Radar’ compilation in November 2024. They are currently working towards a solo release with SELN later this year.
