Sonic Youth Gossip - London - October 14 to 16

LONDON: Cafe Oto
FRI 14TH OCT, 2011 7PM

BILL ORCUTT / JESSICA RYLAN / CIAN NUGENT BAND / POSSET

£10.00

The first of two London dates shooting off from the epic four-day Tusk Festival championing unclassifiable music in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These two shows feature two rare appearances by former Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt - both solo and in duo with Paul Hession, Jessica Rylan's unique combination of outsider songform and DIY synth-wizardry, Sheffield junk gamelan ensemble The Hunter Gracchus, post-takoma guitarists Steve Gunn and Cian Nugent (playing with a full band) and Newcastle's Posset, who twist samples into a gloriously ramshackle collage of psychedelic noise.

DAY ONE : FRIDAY 14/10/11

BILL ORCUTT
JESSICA RYLAN
CIAN NUGENT BAND
POSSET

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BILL ORCUTT

Bill Orcutt first became widely known as guitarist for Miami noise-rock trio Harry Pussy. Their sonically unruly performances quickly earned them a reputation as a wildly unhinged band whose violent and sexually charged shows were lauded by the likes of Thurston Moore and Lou Barlow.

Still highly influential despite having dissolved in 1997 (drummer Adris Hoyo has been cited as a major influence by Chris Corsano), Harry Pussy went their separate ways and Orcutt seemed to disappear for a while. Then in 2009, an album appeared entitled 'A New Way To Pay Old Debts', a glorious collection of apparently stream-of-consciousness guitar playing with sporadic and involuntary vocalisations that sounds like they were recorded to tape in his Californian living room, with the window slightly open and the phone even ringing at one point.

The album is visceral and exhilarating and sent the leftfield music bush telegraph all giddy with reverie. The vinyl quickly disappeared, was re-issued on cd by Editions Mego and followed by a small flurry of tour only vinyl. This will be his first London appearances since returning to the stage.

JESSICA RYLAN

Jessica Rylan could be simply pigeonholed as a noise artist, but she's so much more than that, its almost an insult. Rylan runs Flower Electronics, a business producing her own line in compact analog synth modules and noise flingers of various models, and as Jessica Rylan and also as Can't, she has produced a string of often very personal and liberated/liberating releases that can hurtle from caustic sound projectiles to blissful, sometimes childlike a cappella experiments and back.

She first excited our ears in 2006 with her gleeful excoriations on the album Key Cutter (Load) - a clash with Bill Nace and Chris Corsano's Vampire Belt that saw her circuit abuse dueling grandly with guitarist Nace and producing a satisfyingly exhausting listen. Further investigations reveal Rylan to be wonderfully unbound by the conventions of the genre she finds herself in, citing Voice Crack's Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang as influences and striving for an almost hand-moulded feel to her static emanations.

She's also collaborated with Jackie O Motherfucker, C. Spencer Yeh, Kevin Drumm, Mike Shiflet and more, and toured with Emil Beaulieu and John Wiese, but remains a beguiling and very individual artist.

CIAN NUGENT BAND

Cian Nugent has that tender touch. A young guitar player from Dublin who draws on a rich mix, suburban/coastal blues, traditional musics, late 1960s & ’70s singer-songwriters, jazz ambitions, 20th century composition and the Takoma school into a deeply personal style.

POSSET

Newcastle’s Posset flesh out collections of miniature collages, dictaphone rants and blends noise and non-music components into captivating oddball songs. However odd they may sound, there’s an easyness and an everyday feel to these folks.

"Skittering crackles over regular rhythmic squelch and sonar blip." (Brainwashed)

BILL ORCUTT/PAUL HESSION DUO, THE HUNTER GRACCHUS, STEVE GUNN, POSSET
LONDON: Cafe Oto
SAT 15TH OCT, 2011 7PM
The second of two London dates shooting off from the epic four-day Tusk Festival championing unclassifiable music in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These two shows feature two rare appearances by former Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt - both solo and in duo with Paul Hession, Jessica Rylan's unique combination of outsider songform and DIY synth-wizardry, Sheffield junk gamelan ensemble The Hunter Gracchus, post-takoma guitarists Steve Gunn and Cian Nugent (playing with a full band) and Newcastle's Posset, who twist samples into a gloriously ramshackle collage of psychedelic noise.

DAY TWO : SATURDAY 15/10/11

BILL ORCUTT/PAUL HESSION
THE HUNTER GRACCHUS
STEVE GUNN
POSSET

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BILL ORCUTT

Bill Orcutt first became widely known as guitarist for Miami noise-rock trio Harry Pussy. Their sonically unruly performances quickly earned them a reputation as a wildly unhinged band whose violent and sexually charged shows were lauded by the likes of Thurston Moore and Lou Barlow.

Still highly influential despite having dissolved in 1997 (drummer Adris Hoyo has been cited as a major influence by Chris Corsano), Harry Pussy went their separate ways and Orcutt seemed to disappear for a while. Then in 2009, an album appeared entitled 'A New Way To Pay Old Debts', a glorious collection of apparently stream-of-consciousness guitar playing with sporadic and involuntary vocalisations that sounds like they were recorded to tape in his Californian living room, with the window slightly open and the phone even ringing at one point.

The album is visceral and exhilarating and sent the leftfield music bush telegraph all giddy with reverie. The vinyl quickly disappeared, was re-issued on cd by Editions Mego and followed by a small flurry of tour only vinyl. This will be his first London appearances since returning to the stage.

POSSET

Newcastle’s Posset flesh out collections of miniature collages, dictaphone rants and blends noise and non-music components into captivating oddball songs. However odd they may sound, there’s an easyness and an everyday feel to these folks.

"Skittering crackles over regular rhythmic squelch and sonar blip." (Brainwashed)

PAUL HESSION

Paul Hession was born in Leeds in 1956. After early singing experience as a boy soprano in a church choir and experiments with the guitar, he took up drumming at the age of 15 and since then has played and broadcast in many European & Scandinavian countries as well as Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, USA & Canada. He has played with many of the major figures on the free music scene (for example; Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, Lol Coxhill, Sunny Murray, Marshall Allen, Frode Gjerstad, Peter Kowald, Joe McPhee, Borah Bergman, Otomo Yoshihide as well as his old friends Alan Wilkinson, Simon Fell, Mick Beck & Hans-Peter Hiby). Collaborators from a different scene include Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher), Bill Orcutt (of Harry Pussy) and techno musician/dj Paul Woolford. He is known to relish the interaction of collective music-making, but also responds to the challenge of solo performance.

THE HUNTER GRACCHUS

The Hunter Gracchus have at its core a trio of improvisors whose roving susceptibility to esoteric influences has resulted in a music sometimes termed 'ethno-forgery'. It could be said that they are the next in a line of Yorkshire-based torch bearers (along with the excellent Blackest Rainbow and their own Singing Knives labels, and similarly casually ecstatic performers such as Chora and Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides) following the death of the Termite Club and the evolving status of Vibracathedral Orchestra, and provide an earthy contrast to home city Sheffield's usually electronic sonic heritage.

The Hunter Gracchus famously pissed off audiences across Europe last year in a bizarre turn of events that found them supporting Grinderman; Nick Cave's audience, it can be said, struggled with hearing something as joyously un-pigeon-hole-able as The Hunter Gracchus. Fantastically, the trio responded by adding Dylan Nyoukis on vocals.

Live and on record, The Hunter Gracchus achieve greater heights of trancendentalism than they have a right too, and their quietly industrious umbrella also covers the work of Blue Yodel and Harrappian Night Recordings.

STEVE GUNN

Steve Gunn has been a stalwart of the american experimental scene for closing in on a decade. He has a prodigous talent for fusing traditional american song structures with a raga influence and is known by many for his contributions as one half of the core duo behind GHQ (with marcia bassett) as well as for his many other affiliations with underground luminaries such as Tom Carter, The Magik Markers and Marc Orleans.