Devastating live renditions of Bridget Hayden's personal reconfiguration of the blues including a radical re-working of the traditional 'When I Was In My Prime', three new songs from her own pen and closing with an improvisation for bowed guitar.
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Bridget Hayden / guitar, voice
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Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Wednesday 25 March 2015 by Shaun Crook. Mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Grays Inn Road, London.
Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC.
Tracklisting
1. When I Was In My Prime 5:08
2. Buried Breath 7:54
3. Shipwrecked 6:23
4. Intervention 10:30
5. Bowed Improvisation 4:16
All music by Bridget Hayden, except 'When I Was In My Prime' - Trad. Arranged by Bridget Hayden.
Bridget Hayden is a singer, guitarist, piano player, and a visual artist, based for a while now in semi- rural West Yorkshire. In the seven-year period since her last solo LP – A Siren Blares In An Indifferent Ocean, released by the Belgium-based Kraak organisation – she has put out a number of short-run cassettes, such as last year's fine tape of blown-out synth/vocal recordings on Fort Evil Fruit, and contributed to several interesting compilation projects, but a vinyl follow-up is what the 'Other' music community has been craving.
Her new LP "Pure Touch Only From Now On, They Said So" (september 2018, Early Music Records) has been a long time coming and provides the first full-length documentation of a number of zones that the artist has been inhabiting in live performances of the recent past: blasted, highly personal blues that has lurked under the surface of previous releases but that appears here in starker form; two-chord torch songs that use minimal structure to achieve maximal atmospheric tension; and a vocal melodicism abstracted by a gravitation towards the ecstatic possibilities of noise.
This is a record of significant heft and rare intensity, driven by the slow movement of heavy metal slides and the distorted surge of the guitar's lowest end. The contrasts herein – of density and starkness, turbulence and calm, grounded instrumental drone and vocal soar – are suggestive of great weights being borne and lifted, and of an artist letting go.
