La Cala with Asylum and The Future Shock presents
Jonny Lives! ~ Of Empires ~ Harlequin Knights ~ Semu Cà
23 August at 20:00
La Cala, 22 Beresford Street, St Helier, Jersey, UK
Tickets in advance from White Label Records and OTD £5
La Cala with Asylum and The Future Shock presents
Jonny Lives! ~ Of Empires ~ Harlequin Knights ~ Semu Cà
23 August at 20:00
La Cala, 22 Beresford Street, St Helier, Jersey, UK
Tickets in advance from White Label Records and OTD £5
The Future Shock is a live music collective based in Guernsey, organising promotions, tour bookings and events in the UK and Channel Islands with a stylistically eclectic approach and forward-looking philosophy embracing rock, metal, punk and indie. For September 2012 The Future Shock has scheduled a tour across the country that culminates in Guernsey and Jersey. The Jersey show is the final date in this ambitious programme, and Asylum is helping to stage the show at Live Lounge, St. Helier.
The event takes place on Sunday 30 September 2012 from 7.30pm until about midnight. Entry is £5. Five excellent bands are lined up: Nightworkers, Last Of The Light Brigade, Of Empires, Harlequin Knights and Beau Fiasco.
Nightworkers (Brighton)
Jack Moullin – vocals
Jamey Exton – guitar
Rowan Reddington – guitar and vocals
Joe Haberfield – synth and vocals
Alex Roberts – bass
Jonny Ross – drums
“Nightworkers have emerged from the insomnia of a town that never sleeps. Taking influence from rock ‘n’ roll’s finest craftsmen including Primal Scream, Rolling Stones and Brian Jonestown Massacre, their unique blend of electronically pulsing, guitar driven hypnotic rock creates a stampede of sonic ecstasy. They have kept close to them the identity and beliefs of great guitar bands that modern music has lost along the way. Nightworkers not only demonstrate a brave, solid sound but visually seduce you through the intensity of their performance and the strength and belief behind their songs.” ~ Sarah Wade, Disorder magazine
Last Of The Light Brigade (Guernsey)
Tyler Edmonds
Ben Queripel
Stu Carre
“Last of the Light Brigade formed in 2010 and following the amicable departure of guitarist Joshua Moore settled on the more angry three-piece set up for which they are best known. Having recorded the album The Ones You Left Behind at the analogue Gizzard Studios in London, their own distinctive brand of British rock has seen them carve out a niche in Guernsey’s music scene and earn acclaim from Radio 2’s Janice Long and local luminaries The Risk. In 2010 they supported Paul Weller at the Jersey Live festival, and last year shared the stage with Ocean Colour Scene at the inaugural Guernsey Festival of Performing Arts.” ~ Dominic Laine
Of Empires (Guernsey)
George Le Page
Matthew Berry
Jack Fletcher
Liam Bewey
“Born as a result of the all-inspiring state that is intoxication, like the spawn of an accident that happened one fateful night but one that you’ll never regret. Of Empires have only just entered the world and their declaration: To embark on a stripped down, no bullshit rock ‘n’ roll. Reminiscent in places of the hard rock sounds of the 1970s, a genuine and authentic sound driving the pure fundamentals of that rock ‘n’ roll tradition which we all believe in.” ~ Of Empires
“With their new take on the hard rock sounds of the 1970s, debut single I Am The Night certainly hints this is a band worth watching.” ~ Tommy Girard
Harlequin Knights (Jersey)
Marcus Harley – vocals and keyboards
James Dolan – guitar and vocals
Gary Law – bass
Leon Bouhaire – drums
Marcus is well known as a vocalist in the stylish and successful big band Inside Job. James is a maverick singer-songwriter who blazed a trail of magnetically indecorous indie rock in The Author and The Tracys. Gary’s supercooled bass grooves made unforgettable impressions in the performances of Velofax, Methylated Spiritualists and Bubblebrain. Leon is a powerhouse drummer who has worked with BlackStats and The Audio. Together they are experimenting with an unconventional new sound uniting rhythm ‘n’ blues and progressive rock.
Beau Fiasco (Jersey)
Hannah Campbell – vocals
Steve Catterson – keyboards
Sam Robinson – drums
Matt Munro – bass
Rhodri Hart – guitar
Beau Fiasco – A Beautiful Storm
Beau Fiasco have been playing on and off since January 2012 working on dreamy indie pop, and band members have previously played in The Mulburys, Honey Bun and Hip Hoperation.
We recently carried out an unscientific private poll to find which live music acts a few friends would like to see chosen from the set of musicians and bands either connected with or situated on a Channel Island. Here we’re asking anyone who wants to offer recommendations or opinions.
Acts can be groups or solo performers. Artists needn’t be based in C.I. but should be currently or at least theoretically contactable, able and willing to play gigs in Jersey at reasonably short notice – think about a month.
The Gaa Gaas (44)
Parker and The Flowing Wow (42)
Scruffians (36)
Stan Smith (22)
The Valentines (21)
Brave Yesterday (15)
FlashMob (15)
Pirate Video Company (15)
The Pirate Party Brigade (9)
Salem’s Lot (7)
Jaded Things (6)
Soulless Kings (6)
Teaspoonriverneck (5)
Bulletproof (4)
Top Buzzer (4)
Whitechapel Murders (4)
Any Given Sunday (3)
Chaos Theory (3)
Falenizza Horsepower (3)
Gum (3)
Nocturnum (3)
The Morves (3)
Beef (2)
Blackgrass (2)
Brobots! (2)
Dead wing (2)
Demise of Sanity (2)
Electric Brick (2)
Experience (2)
Heave (2)
Lifejacket (2)
Morning Face (2)
Oi Division (2)
The Cryptics (2)
The Meatballs (2)
The Wizz (2)
China Aster (1)
Echodeck (1)
Erebos (1)
Giles Robson and The Dirty Aces (1)
Gorey Inbreds (1)
Masticated (1)
Robert J. Hunter (1)
The Centeniers (1)
The JC Band (1)
The Phantom Cosmonaut (1)
The Seagulls (1)
Thee Jenerators (1)
Timmy and The Pelicans (1)
The numbers above represent popularity of bands in mentions or votes. Asylum is inviting bands that top the poll to work with us on a show in Jersey.
UPDATE 16:29 30/04/2012: On Saturday 5 May 2012 the poll will be closed and the top five bands in our chart that are available will be invited to perform at the show. We hope to announce the final line-up for the show on Ryan Morrison’s BBC Introducing in Jersey radio show on Saturday 5 May 2012.
Some commenters have said they are concerned about a few people’s multiple votes for the same band. To tackle this problem, we will be removing any votes of this kind that come from the same IP address. See reply by likeallstars, 30 April 2012 3pm, in the comments thread below for a more detailed response to this issue.
We are counting mentions in comments on this blog post, also on the Asylum Live Facebook page and suggestions that we receive in tweets to @asylumlive
UPDATE 21:18 30/04/2012: We have recounted the votes, removing 57 duplicate votes for bands sent from the same IP addresses. A database of all IPs is maintained for this poll, and any similar ‘spam’ votes will not be counted from now on. We keep available the option to post here anonymously, because we believe it is the right of every web user to be anonymous if they want to be.
It’s just a week to go before the Halloween show at Live Lounge, an Asylum-produced fright-night special with five of the best bands you will ever see.
Pirate Video Company
Turquoise Days
Hoonose
Teaspoonriverneck
Falenizza Horsepower
The show starts at ten o’clock next Saturday 30th October at Live Lounge. The incomparable Wilson Nash of Cowshed Acoustics is boss of sound and stage for the night. I’ve already posted some videos, links and opinion about the contributing bands at Avantstonerkrautloop! When that was written Pirate Video Company’s involvement wasn’t quite in the bag so they were a bit under-represented in the article. So who, why, what and how the hell are they?
Complex yet accessible, groovy and hard-rocking, the edgy, melodic post-punk pop of Pirate Video Company is one of the finest achievements of the Jersey alternative music scene. They have been diligently getting on with the job of crafting a set of unstoppable future classics, and by peerless performances at events by Jersey Live, Club K, and Asylum, have developed a reputation that persuasively precedes them. As it says on their MySpace, ‘Enjoy / Detest / Criticise / Listen’. They don’t demand respect, they’re too cool for that.
Here’s a recent video of the band in rehearsal piecing together a brand new song. The camera is focused steadfastly on Nick Wells, the drummer. “omg nickwellz so phit” says a fan in the video comments. In the film the band runs through a work-in-progress with a gritty punkoid sound that is reminiscent of Can with a motorik beat and drone-based harmonic sparseness. Never before in this island has a band joined minimalism and rock attack together in this way. Next Saturday is a fantastic opportunity to see them live. They’re the first band on stage.
Also performing at our Halloween party are … (click on images for more information)
Facebook event here: Asylum Halloween Gig
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.
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
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.
For the second time this fine, hot, dusty month of May, JMCT, Music Scene and Asylum together present a musical event of world-class quality.
Joe Driscoll is the man described by Speech of Arrested Development as “the true essence of hip hop music”. He is a guitar playing, beatbox-looping, consciousness-sharing one-man revolution of peaceful protest in song. Joe’s website joedriscoll.net is a fine place to start for those who require more of an introduction; it is overflowing with critical praise, accolades from superstar peers, video clips of performances and TV appearances, and a whole lot more. The collected lyrics are well worth investigating – here is a mind questing, testing, and defiantly not resting as it weaves together tales of personal growth and universal experience.
Joe Driscoll, maverick manipulator of live loops, plainly loves connecting with his audience and making friends all around the world. He is also commendably not afraid to speak out with political observations like his recently published blog in which he explores with maturity and wisdom the paradoxical issue of the war that President Obama has chosen to continue to wage in the name of peace: The Roots Of Violence
A performance by Joe Driscoll in an intimate back street club like the Live Lounge is a rare treat that is, frankly, unmissable so don’t miss it. Supporting acts are Jamie-Lee Fallaize from Guernsey and DJs Carlo and Livingstone. Tickets are available from Music Scene and White Label Records. A Facebook event has been set up here: JOE DRISCOLL (LIVE!)
The brilliant poster art for this and last week’s campaign was designed by Mark Evans. Go to his website markhevans.co.uk and if you want your business or brand to be touched by genius, contact him.
Asylum on Saturday November 14th, our eagerly awaited big metal night, will be one of the best productions of fierce, furious and filthy music the Live Lounge has ever hosted. One of the bands due to appear on the night, Nailed To The Furnace, has had to pull out. The remaining five bands, Bulletproof, Chaos Theory, Nocturnum, We Bury Our Own, and Brutus Stonefist from Guernsey, are joined by special guest DJ Danny Parkes. Doors open at nine o’clock.
Brutus Stonefist have two songs up on MySpace. Five Pounds Of Flesh and Redgrave are deathcore tours de force with feral riffing and swarming, scabrous atmosphere. Have a listen and pay your respects to the Channel Islands’ kings of fear at Brutus Stonefist MySpace
JMCT, Music Scene and Asylum have joined forces to present Brobots! with Lee Downie and The Mulburys at Live Lounge on Saturday November 21st.
Brobots! were the subject of a recent profile in Gallery. With forthcoming appearances for Club Kamikaze at Live Lounge on November 13th and Hadouken at Liquid on November 28th, they are the 100% synthetic boy band that all of Jersey has come to love. Lee Downie aka Jackson Lee, beat box champion, last played for Asylum at the Oxjam Jersey event in July and impressed the audience there with a unique mix of hip hop and acoustic guitar playing. The Mulburys recorded a set of songs with producer Sam Falle this summer. Their sophisticated, punchy power pop is laden with lush grooves and irresistible hooks.
James Evans explains the inspiration for this show, “Instead of donating the money to charity as we have for the last twenty JMCT gigs we will be using any money we make this time to put an Asylum CD out next year and hope to start raising cash to put bands in the studio to record.”
Asylum has been going for a year now and over fifty bands and solo artists have contributed to the nights. It is thanks to those artists that the reputation of Live Lounge as Jersey’s outstanding music venue has grown in that time. Asylum has demonstrated by objectively representing the island’s diverse music culture that it is not necessary to hire tribute bands or the same few guaranteed crowd-pullers to preserve a collective project of artistic relevance. Thanks to all fans of good music in Jersey for their support.
We have chosen to mark the anniversary with a weekend of shows starting on Friday October 30th at Live Lounge with The Raffle, Esther Rose Parkes, Annie Law, Stephan Metcalfe and DJs Carlo and Livingstone. The entertainment continues on Saturday October 31st at Blue Note with The Coal Box Generals, Esther Rose Parkes and Stephan Metcalfe.
Stephan has a blog hosted by WordPress in which his gigs and recording sessions are documented with honest and intimate style. Check it out here Stephan Metcalfe
During a concert in Rörum, Skåne, Sweden on August 14th 2009, Esther Rose Parkes was joined for a performance of her song Climbing The Stairs by Maria McKee. This video was uploaded to YouTube by Loffamalm