Thursday 20 September 2018, 7.30pm
Low Company record shop in Hackney Downs presents live performances from three of its favourite contemporary artists: Tropa Macaca (Portugal), Blod (Sweden) and Acolytes (UK).
"We read someone somewhere recently (can't remember who, sorry) casually referring to Tropa Macaca as the best band in the world and you know what? It's not an outrageous statement. There's certainly an argument for it, at any rate. Active since 2006, the Portuguese duo's lived-in, vegetative (in the sense of organic and of-the-earth not, er, braindead), skunk-drunk electronics are the missing link between Siltbreeze and The Trilogy Tapes (mean that quite literally: they've released on both, 2016's TTT effort Vida being a particular shop favourite). Caçador do Futuro, their new one for DUNNO, found them harnessing more bass-weight and rhythm-gristle than ever before, into two shape-shifting, shut-in tekno sculptures to mess you up proper."
"Blod aka Gustaf Dicksson is part of the Forlag För Fri Musik orbit that also includes Neutral, Enhet För Fri Musik, Leda et al. His most recent release, Knutna Nävar, was a Strange, bittersweet concoction of woolly but frost-bitten psychedelic folk (with some carefully calibrated prog flourishes), Flying Nun-ish evergreen-dazed jangle-pop and at least seven other shades of DIY/art-rock abstraction… one minute you feel like you could be listening to a Felt or David Kilgour instrumental, elsewhere passages of woozy pastoral ambience trade blows with Lynchian organ drift and post-punk ice-sculptures cut from the same block as Martin Hannett’s Scandinavian Wastes...culminating in a kind of pseudo-medieval, flute-driven loner jazz that sounds like Third Ear Band if they’d made a record for Vanity."
Acolytes is the alias of London based producer Denesh Shan, whose music probes a variety of forms both past and present to concoct a blurred mindspace. His work spirals around its own schizophrenic logic creating a haze of suggested melody, garbled vocal loops and an ebbing system of deferrals, as manifested on the 2018 release Rupture, released on Helm's Alter imprint.
After well received mixes on BCR, NTS, Bus Editions and Blowing Up the Workshop, and live dates with Helm, Drew McDowall, Oxhy, Lolina and John T. Gast, he is following up with some scattered dates around Europe and a forthcoming collaboration with Berlin's Alobhe."
