Woven Skull are heading off on a jaunt across the sea. We're still looking to fill two dates. We can play anywhere at all.....or alternatively to a gig, we could come to your house and read you bedtime stories and bring you milk and cookies. Grateful for any tips to fill our two wandering days!!!
Fri 9th March - Bristol, UK (hare & hounds)
Sat 10th March - Brighton, UK (the evening star) FREE SHOW!!!
Sun 11th March - Antwerp, BE (forbidden city)
Mon 12th - Saarbrucken, DE
Tues 13th - AVAILABLE!!!!
Wed 14th - Geneva, CH (pavillion bleu)
Thur 15th - Clermont - Ferrand (raymond bar)
Fri 16th - AVAILABLE!!!
Sat 17th - Rouen, FR (le 3 pieces)
Image on poster by Eamon Espey
Our new ten inch EP came out on 25th August 2017 on Lanchashire & Somerset Records. The design for the LP was done by David Hand and the drawings were done by Eleanor Cully.
This vinyl release is made up of a Woven Skull ensemble featuring mandola, guitar, viola, full drums, flute & synth with Jorge Boehringer, Eleanor Cully, Cullen Camic extending out the Woven Skull triangle on this one.
The recordings were done in SARC at Queen’s University in the Sonic Lab.
The title for this tape was taken from a line in a Dermot Healy story. The cassette was released July 2017 on Cruel Nature. There’s a handful of copies still available through our bandcamp.
Maghreb Sharit Mix No 1 - Chaabi and Folklore موسيقى All songs taken from cassette tapes bought in Morocco. This is a mix of Chaabi (popular/wedding music) and Folklore (Moroccan Folk Music). I have provided a visual track list. This mix was first aired on Tristan Bath's wonderful Spool's Out radio show on Resonance FM. https://spoolsoutradio.wordpress.com
To share the love of the music we buy on cassette tape when in Morocco, Willie and I are making compilations from our tape collection of music/sounds from the Maghreb region of Africa.
Sometimes there's hiss and warble but sure, that's the nature of tape, huh?
This is Mix No. 1 which first aired on Tristan Bath's wonderful Spool's Out radio show on Resonance FM.
The next one is a mix of just the ladies which I’ll pop up on International Women’s Day.
We’ll have a few more mixes going out on different radio stations over the next while and we’ll be doing a few live sets at dance parties. If you’re interested in a radio guest mix or dance party in your living room, get in touch.
Below is a list of stuff I wrote. Hope the songs get your head bopping.
- Natalia
1. Between us, Willie and I have about 4 phrases in Arabic: Salaam (Heya), Shukran (Thanks), Inshalla (God Willing) and Kowahalib (Coffee with Milk). In French, between us, there's even less: Qu'est-ce que c'est (Eh, what?) and Sacre Bleu (Eh, what?).
2. I like very much to get lost. I like piles of treasures covered in dust. I like to dig.
3. Usually tapes are found in little music kiosks or else in stores that sell electronic goods.
4. Like a lot of others, we knew the music of Joujouka so we flew south along the globe to find more sounds.
5. Arabic and French are the two main languages spoken in Morocco. One can find themselves lost without these.
6. Usually, the tapes for sale are very covered in dust. I guess because most people buy cds now. Or else you just give a memory stick to the guy behind the counter and he'll fill it with music for you.
7. The men in the tape-selling shops (it's only ever been men) are 90 percent of the time just as excited to figure out how to communicate through the language barrier as I am.
8. Did I mention? I like to get lost.
9. Unlike my friend Eva who speaks all the languages, I don't get to listen to the tapes in the shops as she does. But Eva's got the right words and the sass to boot.
10. It takes months to go through the stack of tapes once they're home. Some sounds are not up my alley at all at all (there’s only so much auto tunes….only so much…..). Those I give to friends. The others get played excitedly for all visitors to our house. The sounds can sometimes be challenging to our visitors. The shrill flutes and singing is unfamiliar and the rhythmic patterns are a world of their own. With certain friends, these listening parties turn into dance parties. The dog, who looks with disdain at most of the sounds that come out of the living speakers, will generally start to dance as well.
11. One tape seller will point you in the direction of others in the town. On the way, getting at least a little lost is fairly inevitable. This allows plenty of excuses to drink kowahalib and watch the world go by.
12. I have never been offered tea in a shop or kiosk selling tapes. It's not that kind of shopping experience.
13. The tapes, especially “My Favorite Tape” have gotten warbly over years of play. And because of their age too.
14. Dance parties are great but many great dance parties can make your tapes warbly.
15. What about when all the tapes get warbly and all the sounds get lost?
16. One of my favorite days ever, I spent hours in the back of a instrument shop getting shown the basics of the gimbri by a gent named Hamid. Once me and Hamid had tried a few standard songs together, we decided to just have a jam. Trying to keep the rhythms was making both lobes of my brain work overtime. The longer we played together, the freer our interpretations got. He confessed to me that he loved the blues. Great, I said, let's jam out some simple lines together. “I couldn't do that,” said Hamid solemly, “the rhythms are much too complicated.” On this day, we drank a lot of tea.
17. Tape sellers have pulled stacks out from deep behind the counter/from out of long forgetten about boxes/down from overhead storage spaces. And then, it's mainly a guessing game based solely on the look of the covers. A photo of a lady in her 60s playing what looks like a home made banjo? Bring it on! A photo of a young fella in a silk waistcoat who looks like he might play regional synth pop and sing through a vocoder at kids birthday parties? Why the heck not!
18. It's good for your brain lobes to take on challenging sounds. It's good to share this music. Because unlike me, it probably doesn't like to get lost.
Including Woven Skull in our 17 for ’17 list feels like a little bit of a cheat, seeing as they have been producing music together since 2008. The trio have been lurking quietly in rural Leitrim, making music that is as rugged, gnarled and atmospherically captivating as the landscape they operate within. Utilising raw experimental…
Thanks to Colum O’Dwyer for a day of photos and pints and thanks to the Thin Air for spending some time with us.
Guerrilla Studios is built into the arches of a train bridge in Dublin so when you’re there you can feel the carriages passing overhead and shaking the walls. Practice Tapes recorded us doing a session in the studios. See if you can hear the trains lending us some extra rumble.
We had three cassettes come out there over the last while and today they've all gone up on our bandcamp for your ear pleasures. So take a wander over and have a listen, if your ears are that way inclined.
There were some fine eyes behind lenses this past month on our UK tour. Thanks for all people taking photos! Images by Andrea Breau, Pier Corona, Jose Ramon Caamaño, Steady Focus Photography, & Yoshiwara Collective.
There's an interview with Natalia about Woven Skull, bbqing unusual food and the magic of the number 3 in this new zine just out by the Yoshiwara Collective. And there's plenty more reading in there:
"Our brand new publication is a lavish 104 A5 pages on 115gsm paper with a 250gsm colour card cover and 6mm spine. It contains 17 detailed features and reviews column that spans the proggy folk psychedelic drone space rock universe through the vessels of Krautzone, Lamp of the Universe, Owl Glitters, Woven Skull, Black Panda Beach, ST 37, Annot Rhul, Giallo Disco (label), Nightsatan, Earthling Society, Brigid Mae Power, Kommun2 (label), Flowers Must Die, Moloch / Saturn Form Essence, Trupa Trupa, Sangre de Muerdago and Dementia Five. It's bold, it's diverse and genuinely a portal to another dimension. We bid you enter…"
We've got a live track on this stellar compilation put out by Was Ist Das in aid of Calder Valley Flood Relief. There is so much good music on here! We've been listening to it all weekend long. Get yourself a whole heap of tuneage and help a good cause while you're at it.
“Features: Ashtray Navigations, Dean McPhee, Acid Mothers Temple Official, Dead Sea Apes, Bird People, UK Muzzlers, MV & EE with Mick Flower, vert:x, Suzuki Junzo, Raising Holy Sparks, Wooden Wand, GIRL SWEAT, Hush Arbors, Chicaloyoh, Isnaj Dui, Woven Skull with Core of the Coalman, Richard Dawson (musician), Bridget Hayden and Carlton Melton (band page) all recorded live in the Valley plus bonus tracks from BLOWN OUT and Aaron Dilloway”
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