Tuesday, June 21, 2011

A grand day out: DOUBLEDOTBASH!

For that name to be standable at all you need to know this is the project of a Reading based collective (promoting, zines, CD-Rs) called doubledotdash!? (punctuation artist's own). In association with and at South Street Arts Centre and RISC they're putting on a day's worth of underground artists over three stages, such as...

Islet
Always different, always the same. That is if you consider the same to incorporate frequent crowd visits, quadruplet drumming and a set of songs that pull the rug out from underneath noise-pop, No Wave, psychedelia, krautrock, wired post-punk and everything else that breaks tunes into small pieces, gets pissed and attempts to rewire them from memory. Somehow they're currently esconsed making all this into album form. Extraordinary in all senses.



Darren Hayman
Hayman's on a solo tour at the moment to promote the latest in the Hefner reissue series, and in many ways the most controversial. He's not stinted on playing songs from Dead Media live since he picked up the solo baton but, as he sardonically notes of the analogue keyboard-led collection, "as time goes by more and more people some up and tell me how much they like it. Well, if you'd all told me at the time perhaps there'd be a sixth Hefner album".



Shield Your Eyes
A new split 10" with That Fucking Tank and Kong plus news of a fourth album currently being mixed helps bolster the trio's reputation as among our most prolific, not to mention most weirdly frenetic. Almost free jazz in math instrumental form, they rub shards of musicianship up against each other in a wildly atonal but somehow gripping form. Also, occasional growls-for-vocallist Stef Ketteringham has been known to cut strings off his guitar between songs rather than take the coward's way out and retune.



ALSO: So, so many bands with curious names. Among the notables Minotaur Shock is the name under which David Edwards records wandering acoustic electronica latterly for 4AD, Hannah Peel received many positive notices for her post-Newsom sinister folk and Rozi Plain is a plaintive scion of the Fence Collective.

Calendar: 2nd July
Tickets: £17.50 from WeGotTickets

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