Friday 9 March 2018, 7.30pm
Hugely excited to host a residency featuring two of the most consistently mindblowing outsider groups performing today!
Celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, Vibracathedral Orchestra are the totemic ensemble of contemporary British outsider music. Their chimerical DNA spans from beatific Labour-club raga to full-on face-flaying West Riding Kraut-out, whilst the core membership and elastic supporting cast that has realised this wayward vision is an unrivalled who’s who of the UK audio underground.
Guttersnipe have been performing together for far less time but since forming in 2014, the duo of Xyloxopa Violaxia Bdallophytum (guitar, vocals, electronics) and Oxylepis (drums) have forged an incendiary reputation for their incredible live shows that have resulted in numerous gushing comparisons but really sound like nothing else.
For this special residency, the groups call on the services of artists spanning the breadth of Leeds' undervalued but vital new music scene before sharing the stage for an unmissable double-header.
Now in their seventh year of praising tetrahydrocannabinol through phantasmagorical electronic abstractions, La Brea Pulpit AKA Vymethoxy Redspiders and Squander Accrue, a sea-hag and a goblin from darkest Leodis, join forces by the alchemical powers of ganja and electronic synthesis to summon a microbial astral landscape of dissolving black-hole drones, obfuscated pulsar melodies and filter driven solar radiation noise that often builds to a cacophony like a collapsing space station. Over the years their sound has mutated from a full-whitey inducing racket to the scuttling, flecks of biochemical light-in-the-dark-depths sounds of the Crayfish-Mind 3 bowls deep and back around again resurfacing as something more intricate and delirious, the once purely analogue array now expanded into digital and sample based technologies, yet still ever centrally focused on the Chronic.
Neil Campbell and Michael Flower have a history as two key members of legendary Leeds freak-out collective Vibracathedral Orchestra. They've also been moonlighting as a parallel universe rock'n'roll duo, where they take some of the archetypes of garage rock and drag them through a muzzy haze of blown-out multi-phasing repetition to head out toward the unknown region.
Todmorden/Huddersfield wunderkinder of drone/noise/folk dreamscapes Sophie Cooper (also of Tor Invocation Band + Leopard Leg + heaps more) and Julian Bradley (also of Vibracathedral Orchestra) get together to forge a ghostly tapestry of earthen whirring, phantasmal resonances, sheets of textured skree and touching, hazy vocals, which stir the waters of the soul and evoke strange landscapes in the mind.
In 2016 Supernormal Festival commissioned Sophie Cooper to create a new duo work for performance and her first choice for collaborator was Julian Bradley. The commission was successful and Bradley / Cooper choose to continue the duo beyond this live performance, and are now a permanent collaboration under the name ëThe Slowest Liftí.
The Slowest Lift LP was released on VHF records in December 2017.
https://vhfrecords.bandcamp.com/track/hi-from-the-skyline-swim
Cracked lounge crooner Herb DiamantÈ emerged from a long psychedelic incarceration, largely intact, over 20 years ago. His songs of alcohol, tobacco and desire are driven by his rich, golden voice atop a psychedelic showroom of sound. A long, tragic set of strange circumstances and sporadic insanity has somehow combined to create his extended and sometimes frighteningly vivid hallucinatory universe. However, he remains a hopeless romantic and will forever pursue his difficult and evasive vision.
