Monday 11 March 2019, 7.30pm
Australian guitarist Julia Reidy performs her new Slip LP ‘brace, brace’, alongside visuals by Suze Whaites. Pianist Eliza McCarthy joins them, playing piano music by Mica Levi, and an inestimable new duo of multi-instrumentalist Ashley Paul and bassist Otto Willberg.
Julia Reidy writes and performs original music using guitars, synthesised and recorded sound. She plays as a soloist and in projects such as SPOILER, Tennis of All Kinds and the Splitter Orchestra. She's also appeared in various 'improvised music' contexts and performed extensively throughout Europe, Australasia and North America.
Succeeding recent issues of her work by Feeding Tube and Room 40’s A Guide To Saints, 'brace, brace' is Julia’s soaring return to for Slip: a dread-tinged incantation unfurling from breath-down-the-neck field recordings, auto-murmured voice, synthetic hum, and irrepressible guitar kinetics.
The LP tours with visuals from Suze Whaites. Whaites’ projection environment is built from the coruscant light sources and surface reflections with which her video footage is made, creating mutable vistas at once microscopic and panoramic, domestic and sublime.
Describing herself simply as a "modern English musician", Eliza Carthy is one of the most recognisable faces in British folk. Launching head-on into the scene in the early 90s, she quickly became one of its great innovators. Born into a formidable musical dynasty, Eliza grew up steeped in the folk traditions of England. Her mother Norma was one of The Watersons, whose tight harmony arrangements of traditional songs became one of the defining sounds of the 1960s folk revival. Her father, Martin Carthy, is a hugely significant singer and guitarist, who influenced the likes of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. As a youngster Eliza was profoundly inspired by the incredible range of traditional and contemporary musicians who were part of the Waterson/Carthy world. But far from being a copyist, Eliza began from an early age to develop her own, unique approach to traditional music. This was at least partly because of her own vastly eclectic tastes: she is knowledgeable about and interested in musical traditions from all over the world, which continue to fuel her creativity to this day. She’s worked with a wide variety of musicians, ranging beyond folks to include the likes of Van Dyke Parks, Kate Tempest and Bill Frisell. This year she released a new solo album, 'Restitute', to raise funds for her Wayward Band with guests including Martin Carthy, Jon Boden, Dave DeLarre, Ben Somers and Ben Seal; and, with Norma Waterson and The Gift Band, this summer’s 'Anchor' on Topic Records. Eliza has been nominated twice for the Mercury Prize, won a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, has received eight BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and was awarded an MBE for services to Folk Music. Vice President of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, she has also been an Ambassador for Resonance FM since its inception.
Ashley Paul & Otto Willberg are London-based musicians working at the threshold of untethered improvisation and stricter forms. They’ve issued music integral to Slip - ‘Lost In Shadows’ and ‘Got Gills?, respectively – but this is their first duo performance.
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.
Otto Willberg plays various bass instruments and lives in London. Live, Otto performs unashamedly melodic improvisational workouts created almost entirely with heavily filtered bass harmonica and electric bass. Strangely abstracted funk and fusion, a blend of the abstruse and immediate. silky smooth, luxurious, odd and compelling, "like listening to Eberhard Weber through a drainpipe”.
Otto is often heard on acoustic and electric bass with Laurie Tompkins (Yes Indeed) and Charles Hayward (Abstract Concrete//This Heat), as well as the fractured No Wave unit Historically Fucked. His previous solo releases have ranged from extended technique double bass to explorations of the acoustics of a 19th century artillery fort.
He has a solo record called ’The Leisure Principle’ out on Oren Ambarchi's the Black Truffle label. 6 unashamedly melodic & profoundly strange workouts for heavily filtered bass harmonica & electric bass!
