Teaspoonriverneck and friends on the frightening night

Falenizza Horsepower, Hoonose, and Turquoise Days are joining Teaspoonriverneck for a night of pagan beer-spilling at Live Lounge in Jersey, on Saturday 30th October 2010. As if that isn’t enough, DJs Carlo Zen and Stevie Dream will be commanding the floor and, in a kindly gesture of inter-island cultural diplomacy, the Bailiff has granted us an extension to 3 am!

Update: Pirate Video Company have joined the lineup of this specially extended event.

Poster by Lynchy and Dave

Teaspoonriverneck

The fascinating series of records made by Teaspoonriverneck since 2006 would captivate any fan of rock ‘n’ roll that seethes and crackles with blues, gospel, soul, sin, redemption, post-apocalyptic godlessness and twisted love. Teaspoonriverneck (2006), Craft Of Lisia (2008), Sunset’s Trip (March 2009) and IV (March 2010), four CDs made in as many years, reach heights of power in songs about love, life, sex and death played with darkly romantic literary style and lots of louche swaggering attitude.

The band gave me a copy of Sunset’s Trip when I worked with them on a show in 2009. The record’s evocative, fragmentary lyrics, furiously tight playing, and tense, heavy rock production make for an extraordinary stew of psychedelic metal, stoner folk, dirt-rock and classic r ‘n’ b, set in a zone of timeless, paradoxical perversions that will be familiar to fans of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and other eloquent, gothic rockers.

You can hear two of their best dark-hearted songs in excellent audio quality at the online home of a collective of Channel Islands-affiliated performers and promoters, Scuro Disco.

So how, you might ask, can their records be obtained? You could contact the band directly. They’d like that at Teaspoonriverneck Facebook fan page.

Hoonose

In Liverpool there lives an artist known as Hoonose who has been using self-taught studio techniques to record a series of classic albums that began around 2002 with The Filware Way. A little before that he made a few EPs and other limited releases, and before that, in the early and mid-’90s, he had connections in Jersey and collaborated regularly with musicians there.

He often busks around the country with a guitar, an amp, and a voice trained by the most improving of musical activities. Perhaps he never gave up busking because it is the perfect musical situation for him: Common and public spaces and unpredictable flows of human activity in which the performer sets himself unannounced. Some might be delighted or inspired by what they witness. Audience in that context is a dynamic, changing mass and the artist is just another part of it, real and separate, unreal and together, all at once. Hoonose is at home on the streets where we live.

After the first album by Hoonose his recording work hit a confident stride and now we can appreciate a decade-long project of studio experimentation with terrific song writing and arranging. Themes recur as facets of one overarching theme, that of love and dedication to fairness and equality in society; in frank reminders of our responsibilities, bitter critiques of misguided government, the hypocrisies of celebrity, and the dangers of political disenfranchisement. He sings of power gone out of control, of dwindling energy resources and the marginalised optimism of alternative thinkers. Optimism is the key to the work of Hoonose. It is a hard won hope bravely defended in an age of encroaching paranoia and chaos.

This is a powerful sequence of records by an artist who has never stood still or sold out. Click on the album art image above to read reviews and buy the records.

Falenizza Horsepower

Falenizza Horsepower on the bus

Quite a bit has been written about Falenizza Horsepower on these pages since the band played the first Asylum show in November 2008. The dream team of Dave Spars (s-r0, Whitechapel Murders) and Steve Hutchins (Lebatol) is the nearest thing to perfection the Channel Islands’ music scene ever had. Formidably hard-working, artistically uncompromising, capable of performances so harrowing, so rust-edged and shredded, and so brutally honest that once you’ve seen them the memory never fades. The maturity of their work does not mellow or make safer its visceral qualities but rather focuses them to a point of uniqueness. A good example is Spatchcock Recordings from August 2008 that has not yet seen a physical release but has been made available to stream from Falenizza Horsepower at MySpace. The tapes were sent to the band in May 2010 and they must have been thrilled to find such a well recorded and powerful set. Frankly, the world needs to know, and here’s hoping that Spatchcock Recordings gets its rumored release soon.

A bounty of eleven songs is available free to download from Falenizza Horsepower at last.fm. They are mp3s at 128kbps, previews really, and yet this is the mother lode: An album’s worth of tracks from one of the very greatest art punk bands in the UK.

Before the Asylum Halloween show, on 14th October 2010, Falenizza Horsepower will be performing at the Unicorn, Camden Road, London, alongside One Man Team Dance and Shield Your Eyes in a show hosted by Function Records. That’s the poster art above, obviously yeah.

Turquoise Days

Turquoise Days is a band inspired by the influential ’80s fashion for future nostalgia and utopian dreams of post-war enlightenment and industrial progress. They were among artists of the late ’70s and early ’80s who were producing what came to be known as minimal wave, and which was first called synthpop, including Joy Division / New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and The Human League. The cast of original artists who responded interestingly to the opportunities of independent creativity in the post-punk period while emulating the emotionally burned-out stance and synthesis obsessions of Bowie in Berlin, the cyborg cult of disco – in particular the science fiction fusion of soul and machine that is I Feel Love by Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer – and the haunted metronomic hymns to modernity invented by Kraftwerk, is well worth investigating.

The New York label Minimal Wave has released the album Alternative Strategies by Turquoise Days in an edition of 999 hand numbered copies on white 180-gram vinyl. Click on the album art below to go to the site’s page for the release and send order requests to info@minimalwave.org

From the record company’s press info: Minimal Wave presents a full length album by synthpop band Turquoise Days. Hailing from Jersey, Channel Islands, Turquoise Days was formed in 1981 by Luciano Brambilla and David Le Breton. Throughout the 1980s, they self-released many cassettes, as well as the renowned masterpiece Grey Skies / Blurred 7”. They were selected for the Radio Luxembourg song contest in 1985 and received press for their releases and appearance there. Their music can be described as melodic, emotive new wave.

Here is a link to a video with an introduction to this enduring genre by DJ, musician, and founder of the record label Minimal Wave, Veronica Vasicka. Her enthusiasm for this rediscovered music is great. Before her archival efforts it mostly existed only as traces on super-rare audio tapes and VHS. She talks about how fascinating it is that so many bands are now making this kind of music using the original analogue methods.

The song Blurred by Turquoise Days has also featured on a compilation The Minimal Wave Tapes Volume 1 released by Stones Throw.