An evening of improvisation, weaving and disrupting the threads of folk & traditional music and our fading & imagined histories.

Sullow

Jacken Elswyth, Daniel S. Evans and Joshua Barfoot are a rolling, improvising off-shoot from their group Shovel Dance Collective. Informed by traditional music on both sides of the Atlantic (think the guitar ragas of Davy Graham or Robbie Basho with smoky Appalachia banjo rolls), repeated patterns rise and fall with scurried decays and dense bursts of momentary composition. Somewhere between an instrumental coda from a New Weird America album from the early 2000s & the scratched metal strings of a vocal-less Black Angel Death Song from The Velvet Underground’s debut, Sullow stretches out across the post-industrial edge lands and muddied marshes of East London’s River Lea.

This is a soundtrack to the psycho-geography of an Iain Sinclair meander along the River Thames, weaving musical threads of traditional music in the city. We trace psychic & historical folk lines through Broadside ballads, Victorian alehouses, the 1960s waterways of John Renbourn’s houseboat & the Kingston Folk Club on an old Dutch ship moored in Kingston upon Thames - where John Marytn, Sandy Denny & Jackson C. Frank performed. We hear the zither-like mysteries of Irish street musician Michael O’ Shea haunting Covent Garden & busking the London Underground in the late 1970s to a background of David Hoffman photographing East End folk music & community housing group squatters; there is such inviting intertextuality in the present fertile folk scene of Milkweed, Shove Dance Collective & Goblin Band.

Sullow have released on Mossy Tapes & Betwixt & Between Tapes and shared bills with Sun City Girls’ Sir Richard Bishop, Eric Chenaux & The Sprigs.

The Greater London Banjo Trio

During the early years of the 20th century there were up to 100 banjo manufacturers in Britain - most of them in London - ranging from individual craftsmen to factories employing scores of workers. By the 1990s only the devotees of the B.M.G. Federation, the 'Banjo Times' and ‘Banjo Broadsheet’, and Reading Banjo Festival kept the dying flame flickering. The old London Banjo Club, by now renamed the Westminster Banjo Circle, was also in extremis. In January 1992 the Banjo Circle began publishing their journal and decided that the way forward was to present the banjo to the public at every opportunity. To this end they commended holding regional banjo rallies. Thirty years later, The Greater London Banjo Trio was formed.

Fohn & Norman Church

Norman Church (Hamish Trevis / Kinlaw) & Fohn (Tom Connolly / Quade).

An urban drift of distant & overheard voices, quiet & submerged echoes in an embroidery of textures of metallic dulcimer strings, lo-fi static synth wash & graceful violin; this is poised minimalism that brings to mind the atmospheric Liverpool of Terence Davies’ moving documentary Of Time and the City and the pastoral chamber music ambience of Virginia Astley’s 1983 masterpiece ‘From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.’

The open & steady strum of the dulcimer & the bowed draw across the violin is both lamenting and hopeful in conveying the movement across time & specifically in the duo’s only recording, the harbour’s waterways. Edward Thomas’s observation from In Pursuit of Spring as “the slow stealing away of day..the beauty of this slow fading” echoes throughout their collaboration.

Fohn’s debut album Seanteach, a soundscape of traditional Irish fiddle with warm ambient electronics & evocative field recordings, was released last year on ODDA Recordings. His playing draws on studies in Anglo- Saxon, Norse & Celtic literature, lived experience and the soulful Irish fiddle player Martin Hayes, the environmental music & sound art of Japanese composer FujiIIIIIIta and Norwegian hardanger tradition.

As Kinlaw, Hamish is widely celebrated for his ferocious & fractured electronic distortions with releases on Drowned By Locals & Avon Terror Corps. Under the moniker of Norman Church he’s able to pull up a chair and explore the quieter resonances of the Appalachian dulcimer.

Only a small run cassette exists so far of an afternoon meeting upstairs in the function room of the Nova Scotia pub, down on the Cumberland Basin in Bristol, with the windows open and the bustle of the dockside beer garden and the sea cadets in earshot. A sound collage of Bristol’s quiet inland harbour overheard. Presented by The Pheasantry Society Library, any remaining copies may or may not be available at the show.

Take a rare glimpse before the duo combine with Georgia Cusack for a special En Masse performance later in October.

Ewen MacIntyre

Ewen is a Scottish unaccompanied singer, story teller and versed in the sean-nós tradition too. A strong participant in Bristol song circles & trad sessions for the last number of years, Ewen's unhurried presence, wit & low drawl takes the floor and echoes balladeers from a long, long tradition.

FFO: Shovel Dance Collective, Milkweed, United Bible Studies, Córas Trio, Davy Graham, Michael O Shea.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions — Read more — Read less