Thursday 13 April 2017, 7.30pm
“Folk moves into a new era with Cath and Phil. Their combination of earthiness and grit, raw yet heartfelt and beautiful singing and immaculate playing makes this one of the most exciting and most moving albums I've heard in a long while.” – Fiona Talkington, ‘Late Junction’, BBC Radio 3
“Dumb Supper is one of those rare modern folk albums that will find a home in both the longstanding ‘traditional’ music community and among those attracted to the form’s more experimental and lo-fi possibilities….It’s a weird looking-glass effect many folk fans will be familiar with: the straighter you play it, the stranger it gets…Shirley Collins always understood this and so do Cath & Phil Tyler.” – Frances Morgan, Plan B Magazine
Cath & Phil Tyler play Anglo-American folk music using guitar, banjo, voice and fiddle. Cath was a member of the band Cordelia’s Dad in the 1990s when she lived in Massachusetts, USA. Phil, from Newcastle upon Tyne has played in various folk, rock and ceilidh bands for many years. Coming together musically through a shared love of traditional narrative song, full voiced sacred harp singing and sparse mountain banjo, they have performed on stages as diverse as the Royal Opera House in London and a dank tower in the old city walls of Newcastle. Taking a more minimal approach to their material than some, they have been described as ‘one of the most compelling musical partnerships on the scene’, their music being ‘a highly concentrated and intimate musical experience that penetrates to the very rawest essence of folktradition’.
The Sacred Harp is an old tradition of community singing that uses a hymn book published in the American South before The Civil War. The music is sung unaccompanied in four parts with the singers seated in a square and facing inwards. The sound is direct and raw. One by one singers step into the centre to lead a song of their own choosing. There are no rehearsals and normally no performances. Singers sing for themselves and for each other in that moment.
London Sacred Harp meet about once a week in the Capital and welcome new singers.
Essene is the long-term collaborative project of William Fowler and Travis Miles, and aims to chart a middle-ground between Popol Vuhlian meditations and a kind of comedown folk music.
