Richard Dawson, Raising Holy Sparks, Birchall & Cheetham, Saul Levine screening
Black Sun, the Guesthouse & Plugd Records present:
Friday 8th March | Plugd Records at the Triskel Arts Centre | 8pm, €7
Richard Dawson Richard Dawson has been a much-loved musical spectacle in his native Newcastle for many years now, a skewed troubadour who sings and plays guitar with a rare intensity and a very singular style. Beguiled northern audiences have long awaited the arrival of recordings that capture Dawson’s genius, and it has finally arrived with his album The Magic Bridge, a 10-song collection out now on cd and vinyl by Box Records. Dawson’s music is a collision of opposites, his hoarsely cracking voice suddenly rising to a magical soar that’s been compared to Tim Buckley, John Martyn and Richard Youngs, while his battered acoustic guitar veers from stumble to sublime in a way that can recall Sir Richard Bishop or Captain Beefheart. Add this to his snaring way with words and Dawson’s got you pinned – stories like the one relayed in Black Dog In the Sky typify his by turns heartbreaking and hilarious self-deprecation and skill in painting a story with both words and guitar. The listener is drawn in carefully but irresistibly from the instrumental opener Juniper Berries Float Down The Stream, which creeps in falteringly but grows and envelops before you realise it’s happened and your gripped. By track 2 and the arrival of his skyward voice (not to mention its beautifully tender conclusion) and Dawson has you under his spell. In the words of The Wire, “What makes The Magic Bridge such a remarkable album is that every comparison one might make, however illustrious the precursor, feels both entirely justified by Dawson’s music, yet entirely inadequate as an explanation of it. This elusive freshness is why the album demands to be properly heard, compelling the listener to keep coming back to it.”
<a href="http://richard-dawson.bandcamp.com/album/the-magic-bridge" data-mce-href="http://richard-dawson.bandcamp.com/album/the-magic-bridge">The Magic Bridge by Richard Dawson</a>
Raising Holy Sparks Fronted by David Colohan, drawing on the devotional musics of church & countryside, Raising Holy Sparks play Appalachian Kosmische hymns to the lunar/rural arcane. David (also of United Bible Studies, The Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree, Cubs etc.) formed Agitated Radio Pilot in 1993 as his musical solo project. A great amount of material has been recorded and released over the years, genres varying from lo-fi, ambient and alternative rock to the melancholic singer-songwriter and psychedelic folk of today. Looking in new directions, David has embarked on a new project under the name Raising Holy Sparks.
<a href="http://agitatedradiopilot.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-the-unitarian-church-dublin" data-mce-href="http://agitatedradiopilot.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-the-unitarian-church-dublin">Live At The Unitarian Church, Dublin by Raising Holy Sparks</a>
Birchall & Cheetham duo
David Birchall (guitar) and Andrew Cheetham (drum kit) met when they were invited to play with Rhys Chatham as part of his G3 Ensemble in Manchester, March 2011. Since then, they have been improvising free-form deconstructed rock and drones in a tiny room within a dilapidated printing press. 'Tipping Point' was released by MIE Music (Pelt, Sarin Smoke, Richard Youngs, Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides) and they toured the UK in November 2011. David and Andrew have both toured the UK and Europe extensively with various musical projects. Recent gigs have seen them opening for Alan Silva & Roger Turner, Jon Mueller, Volcano the Bear, Ken Vandermark Trio and a performance at the Hunters Moon Festival 2012 in Ireland.
"A blend of disjointed, free form cosmic edged curves performances. Their sound is not a million miles away from some sort of repressed free jazz, but is a bit too esoteric to be just that." - Hunters Moon Festival Programme "Raw, chaotic, as if the guitars have been fashioned with tendons in place of strings, and the drums skinned with actual skin." - Fluid Radio
"Bad teach holier mulch, a cab hum-thrilled echo, David Birchall and Andrew Cheetham cut up some Elmore James tapes and spliced them back together all out of sequence then learned the results note-for-note, I reckon. " - Braw
Screening of Saul Levine's Notes of an Early Fall (1976, 34 mins) Notes of an Early Fall is a classic of personal filmmaking by Saul Levine, a man hailed as ‘the king of Super-8’. Film diary and film poem in one, it collages images taken from daily life and surroundings into a throbbing yet subtle meditation on claustrophobia and a sense of entrapment. The distinctive rhythms of camera movement and editing cause this raw, tactile work to breathe and react with a vividly individualistic force. Every frame attests to the handmade nature of the work, the material fragility and luminous vitality of Super-8 in the grasp of a poet. Saul Levine is not only a maker but also a respected advocate of avant-garde film and video. Based in Boston, he is currently a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he has taught for over 30 years and programmed the longstanding MassArt Film Society. He is noted for his dedication to social change and personal self-expression. “There's something naggingly incomplete about the cinema of Saul Levine. No slight intended. Really, such a quality is intrinsic to the appeal of his films, those fluttering transmissions of stream-of-consciousness nostalgia. This is rough draft cinema, work perpetually in progress… His films scream and stretch at the seams. Splices announce themselves loudly and proudly, rudely even. The mark of the maker is evident… [The films] seem to begin and end in the middle, as though we were leaping into them mid-stream, mid-sentence, mid-thought. If there is a structural integrity, an organizing principle, it is an inherently emotional one... They churn like the endless flood of human memory.” (A. A. Dowd, In Review Online) Our deepest thanks to Saul Levine for giving Black Sun, Cork permission to screen his work.