HP Gundersen spotted a special guitar tuning in Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Suite Judy Blue Eyes, and then spent two years playing only the modal drones it inspired, while the jazz prodigy Heidi Goodbye sang. The resulting album, augmented by other top Norwegians, centres around the thirty minute Ballad Of Billy And Lilly, a harmony-heavy,…
Having wet-nursed the experimental ambitions of upwardly mobile rock bands, such as Wilco and Sonic Youth, Chicago’s irrepressible musical explorer Jim O’Rourke split to Japan in 2006 to rediscover the personal voice he’d subsumed somewhat into star names’ signature sounds. The Swedish free jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafson’s Fire! trio came to Tokyo and invited him…
Stewart Lee gave up stand-up comedy in 2001 after deciding that his material was “arch, cynical, tired, fake, conceited, formulaic and flat”. He threw his energies into co-writing and directing Jerry Springer: the Opera, which earned him an Olivier Award, opprobrium and no money. In 2004, he began his comeback as an “alternative” comedian, and…
Cheltenham’s durable electronics duo, Longstone, enlist various local experimental luminaries in a suite of fizzy noise, with all profits to Japanese Tsunami relief charities. Clattering blips arrive, from Dusseldorf via Detroit, and bleed into becalmed woodwinds. Cautious melodic progressions emerge from shuddering systems of un-danceable beats. Ice sheets of high end drones slide into the…