I've been hoping to find a way of writing about Wes Finch for a while.
At the Warwick folk festival he played a version of Richard Thompson's Vincent Black Lightning that was so good it made you forget to breathe: to be honest I don't think the recording I've linked to there really does it justice. Judging by the wild applause he received Finch, who's local to Warwick, impressed more people than just me that afternoon.
I spent good money buying the album, Mayflower, (above) listened to it a couple of times and then forgot about it for a few weeks until my stereo developed a mind of its own one day and stuck it on. By then the CD had become separated from its cover and while I was scrabbling around confusedly thinking "Bloody hell, that's good. What is it?" several of the tunes had become earworms. Check out Good morning, captain! and Bowl of Stars.
So I rang him, in order to find something to say that you couldn't hear for yourself by listening to the album, explaining that I tend not to write reviews because I don't think on the whole they're very useful. The beauty of blogging, anyway, is that you can embed the music and let other people make up their minds.
Wes gamely told me a bit about himself. Turns out he's 36, has recently gone full time with the music, which he can do because he plays in a band that does covers for weddings called Doc Emmett Brown, after the character in Back to the Future, and another calledBy Lantern Light. As a solo artist he's working on a project with Gerry Diver, who has recently produced albums for Lisa Knapp and Sam Lee, though I always think he sounds like a character from The Beggar's Opera. And then, to show what a pro he was, Finch also came up with a good anecdote.
"I supported Billy Bragg at the Royal Shakespeare Company's theatre in Stratford recently and they gave me the male lead's dressing room, which had a balcony over the river. I'd like to become accustomed to that kind of thing... And it's an amazing place to play because there's this wall of people in front of you.
"I'm not sure whether I could say that I really met Billy Bragg though. We shared a lift but he seemed a bit preoccupied, and I don't really talk about politics or football so I didn't know what to say. Plus for a while I didn't recognise him: he was in kind of a disguise."
"That'll be the beard," said Billy Bragg, over Twitter. "It does have that effect on people."
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This was a real surprise, and one that may intrigue Fairport Convention.
"Come and see the man who bought the shotgun that Kurt Cobain killed himself with play some rock and roll," was the invitation. Who could resist such a morbid offer? Not me...
Dylan Carlson was best friend of the unhappy Cobain, which puts him if not actually in the rock and roll hall of fame, then lurking somewhere in an anteroom nearby. Rock loves a good tragedy and so, if we are completely honest, do most of us so long as it's happening to someone we don't really know. Carlson carries with him a trace of that mortal glamour and, accordingly, his later show sold out so quickly that The Lexington cannily decided to schedule another at 5pm. This also sold out, if I'm not very much mistaken, despite starting at a time when only freelances and students were really likely to make it.
It was quite a show though. Dirty, fuzzy, grungey guitars played by seated musicians - first Thurston Moore and friend, then Carlson accompanied by a really sympatico drummer - in the Lexington's upstairs room with all the windows blocked up, organised in such a way that it was completely mesmerising: it felt like a cross between a rock and roll show and an extended dope-smoking session. Or something that the Barbican might put on as part of a modernist season.
It was great: a mind-altering musical experience.
And then Carlson pulled a cultural rabbit out of the hat. A young female vocalist came on, the drummer departed temporarily, and they proceeded to do the filthiest, weirdest version of Reynardine that you're ever likely to hear. The grunge curled and twisted around the familiar tune as the singer, who went by the name of Teresa Colmonacco, gave it a kind of haunted-house Sandy Denny without overdoing it. It was perfectly judged and fantastically surprising under the circumstances.
It turns out that Carlson is an Anglophile, in a semi-mystical, imagined Albion, renaissance fairekind of a way. His Twitter handle - @drcarlsonalbion - reflects this and when I asked him about Reynardine he said: "Liege and Lief was one of the first albums I ever had. It was given to me by my uncle, so the songs on it are all part of my personal history."
I wonder whether his curiosity has taken him to Cropredy yet? He may be ripe for a crossover project, clearly loves the material and does something darkly enjoyable to it.
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It is a warm night, and on an island in Mexico an orchestra in white tie sits playing Stravinsky under the stars. Across the lake, which is carrying the sound, an audience in neat, seated rows is absorbed by the music and by the spectacular lights that are playing across the island's trees - lumiere for the son. But the evening is about to become even more magical... For when a break comes between movements, the orchestra quietly puts down its traditional musical instruments - the clarinets go back on their stands, the cellos balance on their sides - and continues the symphony by playing the trees instead.
This is one of several projects - this one potentially to be sponsored by a bank - that have been suggested to Bruno Zamborlin, a 29-year-old Italian drummer who is completing a computer science PhD at Goldsmith's College and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, since his TEDx talk (below) about Mogees.
In essence the technology is a microphone that can be attached to any hard surface, which can then be played in a variety of ways: it detects all movement around it. The output can be programmed, using related software, by the player in advance and what can be produced is, therefore, bounded only by the player's imagination.
The TEDx talk has been watched more than 8,000 times on YouTube but judging by the number of commissions that have come Zamborlin's way, it's likely that a large number of these views were by people working in the creative industries. For this is a technology with a million potential applications.
The last time I saw Zamborlin he was too busy to talk because he was doing a demonstration at an evening organised by MC Saatchi ad agency to promote Peroni beer by association with the work of world-beating Italian expats - of whom there are a great number for reasons he explained succinctly, if sadly. "Nothing in Italy works. People leave."
But when asked about Mogees' applications, the first thing Zamborlin mentioned was music teaching. "There is usually a gap between starting to play music and enjoying it, simply because it doesn't sound good. During that period a lot of children give up or come to the conclusion that they'll never be able to do it. But Mogees is really nice to play even if you don't really know how to - it allows you to improve your skills without making any terrible sounds."The hope is that Mogees will encourage musical confidence, building music into the lives of those it touches.
Accordingly, the EU has provided a grant to manufacture the system for classroom use, at a cost of around £1 per microphone. That's one above, attached to a railing that temporarily became an instrument for demo purposes, along with the iPhone that is running the software.
There was also an installation for the Italian kitchenware company Alessi, which had Zamborlin turn some of their products into a musical instrument for promotional purposes, much as he does with the bicycle in the video above.
And then there are the wider applications of the technology, which is known as EAVI - "embodied audio visual interaction" - for the group of talented researchers working in the same field. One of Zamborlin's colleagues, Mick Grierson, has been working with handicapped children and told me: "I've been working with some boys aged 12-14 at Whitefield School and Centre, who are very seriously affected by their autism: they are non-verbal, sometimes violent and with extreme repetitive behaviour.
"I worked with them to develop a sound and music system for the iPad called "Sonic Scrapbook" and an interactive squeezable interface for sound recording and manipulation. I developed the interface because although most people find iPad touch screens easy to use, the people we were working with didn't always get along with it.
"These new interfaces [can't] make them less autistic, I think it's pretty clear that this is impossible. What you can do is make them feel that their choice is important, and that whatever they do can have an impact on the world. From talking to teachers and carers, this is a good thing you can try and do for people who have autism."
There is also talk that the EAVI technology has been used by researchers in the US for military purposes connected with the sighting of tank guns: as I say when you can programme the output of a device to be anything you would like it to be, the practical uses to which it can be put are limited only by the user's imagination.
* Bruno Zamborlin will be producing an installation atRich Mixon Bethnal Green High Road at the beginning of May 2014. In the mean time you can contact him hereand follow him on Twitter @brunozamborlin
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In terms of being unemployed in Hackney on a weekday afternoon this was a bit like winning the lottery. There was (a) a copy of ahab's forthcoming new album, called Beautiful Hell, sitting on the pub picnic table in front of me and (b) Dave Burn getting increasingly slurry and whimsical on the other side of it.
Over the course of a few messy and hilarious hours given in the service of this blog - it's a tough job etc - several things lodged themselves in the increasingly mushy folds of my mind. Firstly, ahab is a man down this time around.
Callum Adamson, of the 12-string guitar, has departed. This is because his partner has had a baby and the line is that he needs to make a more stable home for his family than is presently possible as a musician playing Americana - however brilliantly - in a country that isn't the US. Since I, coincidentally, saw him disappearing into the office of a media company on Dean Street in Soho earlier this month - his day job has always been in digital media - it looks as if the plan may be working out.
"He's still on the books and he's got writing credits for the album. But I don't know whether he's coming back," said Burn, who along with Luke Price and Seebs Llewellyn, is the remainder of the song-writing quartet.
Secondly, the album cover bears a picture of a brothel in Spain taken by David Emery, a friend of the band, which is therefore also the significance of the the discarded mattresses on the slip, and was deemed appropriate subject matter for an album called Beautiful Hell.
"But don't mention that if you write something."
OK, Dave.
And third, ahab is having more and more trouble online over the fact that they share a name with a German doom metal band. This has potential for hilarity - the other band is very doomy - but it's also a marketing handicap in a small digital universe. "I've been in touch by email with them a lot," said Burn, "and it's all very amicable - I like their stuff. The trouble is that we both started out at roughly the same time and though we've tried to differentiate ourselves with upper and lower case letters, that doesn't always help and there's one new and important site - called Bands in Town - that keeps sending messages out to our fans saying that we're playing gigs in Germany."
He looked a bit glum.
"I don't know what's going to happen with that. I suppose it's possible that we'll end up having to change our name. Both bands seem to be doing OK..."
The response ahab gets online is strong - watch the avalanche of "likes" and comments pile up when they post something - so it would be a shame to have to take a step back, which is what a name change would involve, if they go properly global. And since there may be a US tour in the offing...
Which brings me to the album. On first listen I was inclined to think that without Adamson and John Leckie - who mixed their eye-opening KMVT EP in 2010 - there was a certain kick-arse quality that was missing. But I've actually changed my mind.
There's a sweetness to it that is a lot to do with Burn and Price's voices. But there's also enough dramatic light and shade - particularly toward the back end of the album - to make you want to listen over and over. The trick with a band that is as good as they are live, is punching that quality into the mix. I'm not sure they've quite pulled it off on this occasion. But the songwriting is as strong as ever and I'm looking forward to hearing it from a stage. Preferably a large one. This is a high quality album from a band with a lot of petrol in its tank.
Specifically In My Dreams feels like a departure, a kind of sweeping, 80s-themed reverie with a vein of synth running through it; while This War has a riff that could be a tribute to Big Country, a band buried deep in ahab's genetics.
Rescue Me - I think, it's not listed so let the CD run to the end - is my favourite track, megaphone hystrionics and all, and I can't find it yet online. Personally, I think the more stressed out and strung out they sound the better...
ahab deserves far more success than they've had so far - despite what sounds like several near-misses with the major leagues. I wonder whether a US tour will finally give them the oxygen they need?
* You can buy Beautiful Hellhereand they kick off their UK tour in Southampton on October 1.
* If you'd like to read more about ahab there's this, about the first time I heard them, including an interview with Cal Adamson. And there's thisabout them and Show of Hands at the Bristol festival in 2012.
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What an opportunity to impress industry people in the largest market for roots music in the English-speaking world: a lot of bands would kill for such a trip. I asked the great man why he's doing it?
"I've got very involved with BBC Introducing," Harris told me over the telephone: you can probably imagine him saying it. "The whole exercise is a fantastic opportunity for young bands to have their music heard. They can upload songs directly on to BBC Introducing's website, where they will get listened to by someone from their local BBC station and from where they can come to the attention of people including myself on the national stations. It's a great way to have your music bounced around.
"Two or three months ago someone from BBC Introducing suggested that I take one or two bands out to Nashville with me when I go this year. It turned into three bands, we'll be out there the better part of a week and then I'll be splashing some of the stuff I hear out there through the shows in the near future."
He mentioned that, as of four months ago, there is a branch of the Americana Association in the UK, which he sees as a natural extension of the US organisation. "It's a community of like-minded people, including an agent called Bob Paterson and another called Paul Fenn, who bring a lot of American acts over here and then return the favour. To my mind this is all a very positive step in the right direction. The more contact British musicians can make with the Americana Association and the festival the better."
I put it to him that there are an awful lot of terrific unsigned bands in the UK and relatively little music management, marketing and PR talent. Since the collapse of the traditional record industry and the rise of the internet a real gap in the national skill set has opened up, which used to be filled by transatlantic record companies. British bands need access to world markets - our creative industries are our crown jewels - but bands are often young, whatever age they are they are rarely well-organised and there's barely anyone with the expertise to usher them out on to a larger stage.
Cue Whispering Bob: for surely what he is doing next week is traditionally the job of an impresario rather than a DJ?
"Maybe. What I know, though, is that British folk and roots music is flowing back across the Atlantic. There's Mumford & Sons, who are the apex of that, and - although I take your point that they haven't pulled many other bands through with them - that wasn't what they signed up for and they have, at least, shown that there is an appetite for what the Americans are beginning to call 'Briticana'. There is also a British band called The Dunwells who have made an appearance in the Americana charts over there recently and Billy Bragg will be receiving an award at the festival this year."
Aha! That's interesting because when I was at the Tonder festival last month Billy Bragg was talking about Americana and had a difference of opinion with the extremely glamorous Pokey LaFarge that was played out over two nights on the main stages about what the term actually means. I understand Bragg is writing a piece about it for the Guardian.
"There's certainly a debate about what Americana is. I'm against categorising music unnecessarily. But in this case the term Americana has provided a kind of mast to which people can nail their flags and which has only been good for folk and roots. There are two new Grammy categories for Americana, so it's a way of bringing folk, bluegrass, blues and country into the mainstream."
"I've spent quite a lot of time in Canada over the years," Harris said, "where there is just an enormous amount of acoustic talent, including a wonderful band called The Great Lake Swimmers. And the thing that I was amazed by was the financial support that Canadian artists could get, as - at least the last time I was there - you could apply for a grant of sorts. If you had a good plan and your music was good they had a budget of around $200,000 a year to underwrite the international tours of young Canadian bands.
"I remember that it funded the Trafalgar Square concert on Canada Day one year, which I helped to compere. And there is an example of another country's government seeing its creative talent as a kind of ambassador for the whole country and using it to create an awareness of who the Canadians are.
"I think there are definitely times when we knock our traditional music over-much in this country. All the cliches about the finger in the ear and the woolly jumpered folk singers just aren't true any more. And it's the same with the cliches about country music: you still hear it referred to over here as country and western, which hasn't really existed as a genre since about 1958. Especially over the last four or five years there has been a huge upsurge of talent and I don't really understand why people - the older generations I suppose I mean - aren't more open minded about it. My daughter really really loves Kacey Musgraves and quite rightly so. She's amazing."
So how did he choose the three bands that he's taking to Nashville next week?
"It was partly a personal choice. It was a question of who do we like, who is ready and who is available? I would have liked to have taken Keston Cobblers Club but they're on a sell-out tour at the moment so that wasn't possible. And BBC Introducing has certain ideas about how far a band can have progressed before they become self-sufficient. But if this goes well, then I hope we can do it again next year and take more: four or maybe five acts."
Would he like to see other people take a cue from him in this respect? Surely it would be in the interest of UK record labels to expose their bands to such a huge market? I can see from looking at the gigs list that Communion Records - founded by, among others, Ben Lovett of Mumford & Sons - has its own slot on the Americana festival timetable.
"Absolutely. One of my favourite record labels Six Shooter Records - again, Canadian - are doing exactly that and renting a venue in Nashville for the festival. If British labels began to see the festival as an opportunity, maybe three or four of them could take a venue and each take five or six acts out there." And then the British would definitely be, as they say, coming...
I can think of a couple of bands off the top of my head that would probably go down a storm at Nashville - ahab and Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker who, when left to their own devices, are as likely to write a country song as something resembling English folk.
I enjoyed talking to Bob so much. We chuntered on for over an hour in the end, exchanging anecdotes about the state of the music industry and he left me with this...
"Have you ever heard of a band called Walk Off the Earth?" I had to admit that I hadn't. "They're like the Keston Cobblers in a way. They're very creative with their videos and have built a global following just by putting videos on YouTube. They were over" (again they are Canadian) "for five gigs in April and they did one number for Radio One in the Live Lounge, after which I managed to grab them for a quick interview. But I have never seen that place so packed. It was busy for Robert Plant. But nothing like this. It was just heaving.
"The point is this. Their version of Somebody That I Used to Know has been watched something like 150 million times on YouTube and yet ask a record company executive who they are and nine out of ten of them will have absolutely no idea."
His point, I believe, is that it's all up for grabs. There is a kind of anarchy about the music industry at the moment that will reward risk-takers.
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The Barr Brothers' previous gig was in a northern outpost of Quebec and it had taken two days to get to southern Denmark with a pile of gear that included a harp and a percussive bicycle wheel. However, on arrival it rapidly became clear that all was not as it should be.
"We lost an antique organ somewhere between here and Quebec," Andrew Barr (left) told his audience at Tonder yesterday. "Which is terrible because it means a lot to us. Plus we lost all our clothes. But the festival said 'That's OK. We have underwear for you.' So I would like to congratulate the festival for being that on it that they anticipated someone here would lose their underwear."
Instead of his missing guitar slide Barr improvised with a cigarette lighter. "The missing instrument is a kind of pump organ, like a harmonium," he said later. "They used to use them on battlefields during the civil war for funerals. We came by Air Canada with a final leg on Lufthansa and I don't know which of them lost the gear.
"So Brad and I received a toothbrush each and two medium sized pairs of white underpants. Now it looks as if the organ has turned up and will be with us in time for gig number two tomorrow, so that's OK. We still don't have our clothes though."
Jing Haase is the middle of three generations of her family to volunteer at Tonder - her parents are among the festival's founders - and is the lucky lady with responsibility for The Barr Brothers' crisis pants.
"Me and Eric are the panic team," she explained. "We are the kind of crisis task force and we have a large red bag of supplies to start us off. We do tampons but not condoms and there's women's underwear in there as well - though it's not very sexy stuff.
"The weirdest thing we ever had to do was when Taj Mahal arrived and his suitcase disintegrated."
That's a reason to sing the blues.
"Yes. Especially because it was a Sunday and all the shops were shut. But Tonder is a small town - fewer than 10,000 people - and so I rang up the man who runs the suitcase shop and he opened up so Taj Mahal could go down and pick one out. I've also got a dentist on standby, for emergencies.
"The Barr Brothers have been unlucky to lose their luggage... their clothes still haven't turned up, have they? We gave them a festival T-shirt each, which they wore for today's gig. But I have a feeling that they may need to buy new knickers tomorrow."
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It was the pithy banter, the total absence of mumbling and the way in which there were approximately no notes out of place that rooted me to the spot. I'd always thought of Billy Bragg as politically less subtle than Ben Elton during his standup days and yet - with the flawless stagecraft as a runway - the realisation unfolded last night that, like Peter Tatchell, he is a man with whom history has caught up. My plan to slope off for a dose of Lau evaporated.
Although he should always be thought of first and foremost as the milkman of human kindness(because it's a phrase of genius), he's recently morphed into something of a silver fox - lucky bloke - and in the context of the equal marriage laws, his song Sexuality has finally ceased to be a slightly boastful paean to shagging ("I've had relations, with girls from many nations") and now wears the glamour of a prescient civil rights song. That's the odd thing about progressive politics, I guess: if you hang around long enough there's a distinct possibility that you'll end up in the mainstream eventually.
Tonder flipping loved him anyway. More to the point, he mentioned during his set that he'd recently heard that the English Defence League - best known for its racially inspired violence - has, wait for it, set up an expat branch in Spain.
"This is a party that is fundamentally about hating immigrants," he explained to his Danish audience. "So this latest development was a bit of a surprise."
I caught him later and he explained that he'd heard about the irony-free expat branch on tour to Barcelona a month or so ago.
"It crossed my radar on Twitter, where I follow a few anti-EDL accounts. The thing is that you can tell this story in Barcelona and you can tell it in Sweden and everyone will think it's hilarious. And yet the EDL don't see the inherent lunacy of having an expat branch. It shows them up for the humourless idiots they are."
Still, it gives the rest of us a chuckle.
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