Plus returns to Brighton! Wed 3rd March @ the Latest Music Bar

We've been wanting to return to Brighton to play a show for some time, after all this is where we started the band, and we still have friends there. For some reason, it's taken us a while but we've now put an exciting bill together, well, John did, so hopefully this will be a good one, looking forward to it... Wednesday 03 March @ The Latest Music Bar in Kemptown, just off St James Street, from about 20h... In John's words it goes something like this:

"

The When I’m Pretty Brighton Special....

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The long-running tri-monthly night in Kings Cross, curated by Plus, comes to Brighton.. for a one-off. Strange things can happen…

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Plus formed in Kemptown over 10 years ago. They wear Amy Winehouse wigs. They use guitar, 808 and far-out vocals to create a sound described as ‘strangely-flavoured frozen junk pop’, ‘fucking shit’ and ‘the best band I’ve ever seen’. They have been curating When I’m Pretty for 3 years, showcasing acts as diverse as Bach-playing classical guitarists and hardcore industrial noise, normally on the same bill; this is their first ..Brighton.. date for 6 years. Part performance art, part punk, part prog, you won’t have seen anything like them, and you won’t forget them.

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DJ Tendraw is a musical anarchist who has been described as ‘the British pioneer of ‘circuit bending’’; he has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally (Glastonbury, 2009/08/07, Next Festival, Slovakia, Bent Festival, LA/MPLS, US, Destroy Athens, Athens 1st Biennial, Below The Radar, Portugal) and has delivered lectures in turntablism and circuit-bending at the Kinetica Museum, Science Museum and the ICA, London, UK. He  has written and presented radio shows for Resonance 104.4 FM, and released music on Big Dada, 4th Harmonic and Stationary Records.

‘DJ Tendraw has spawned a scene and production style entirely of his own creation and watched it grow to become an underground phenomenon from grimy South London clubs to the dancefloors of the electronica elite.’ www.Iconscious.co.uk

‘Circuit bent analogue mayhem ... re-routed childrens toys, magnetic hotel keys, feedback, casio keyboards, and an array of home made ‘jump loops’ wallpaper textures & things that i've never seen before.’ The More or Less Club

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Adam Lygo & EMB

Two-man improvised guitar massive sullen noise. Sounds like a house being sucked into a jet turbine.
’Digging deeply into claustrophobic spaces...the only intention is to suggest a feeling of enclosure, of huge gravitational weight, and powerful seismic forces at work.’

-Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector

www.myspace.com/adamlygo
www.myspace.com/murmurblend

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DJ Melita will be bookending the acts with a selection of downtempo electronica.

www.myspace.com/melita666

Only £4.00 on the door"

An Evening with the Weaklings: Winter Rites@Bistroteque

A fundraiser for the Five Years gallery, a non-commercial artists-driven space, essentially a small flat in a council estate near the East London gallery hub of Vyner Street.

The beautiful dark interior of the small Bistroteque theatre with its many swirling lights:

The angel-voiced Nick Hudson and assorted players:

Dirty Snow: Esther Planas, Wolf and Tender Prey create a doomy, ambient dronescape with occasional hushed vocals and a lot of eerie chemistry. Thankfully it's not too loud and quite subtle, as isn't always the case with these things ;)

Jeremy Reed and Itchy Ear, aka The Ginger Light, a multimedia poetry performance that feels almost like a seance:

renewed plastic time

while heroes sleep

turn another corner into song. bigger lines, no refusal, no fuss. the shock of renewed tears in my fictional desert.

the glittering lights that lead nowhere, really.

sweat runs down the older hero's face as he still sings of youthful abandon.

little lines cross horizontically across a gothic wedding scene.

the reds in the wedding cake remind you of the times you go back in that box.

i've rehearsed my lines for years, to explain what happened.

the emptiness near the motorways and the airports in the 50s and 60s.

snapping into mythological fatherhood. being so cute. homemovies for the future, assigned for you and me.

behind the fence, maybe a monster?

fast moving action time.

the low voice that wants to describe everything as it was, chicken, salad, the older singer's eyes, sparkling in eternity.

the huge snowman that never was.

my direction is for change, but i'm always stuck in the same old song.

i want to take care of you, ride that horsie.

aftershocks in the memory, when all the food is gone.

when did i receive that and where is it now, it's all so fluid in my head.

he remembered his humble beginnings, i'm flashing your images right back at him.

taken to be ideal. this is not a real life. i performed myself to oblivion. driven forever. no answer.

the end of being cool hangs out of your trousers...

...it's filling the room in odd intervals.

when you go to sleep and the lights go out.

i want to to be good. it's me with the wig, feeling bloated.

the truth behind the shades, going up and down, behind the man in black.

i'm on the wave, whooping like a tiger in the new plastic time.

memories mix, come together and mould a 60s hounddog, intellectual doesn't come into it.

when she speaks, i have all the time in the world.

he's sitting on a horse, riding off. the smoke was only yesterday.

it was you and the whole wide epic world, the electric shapes that made the sunset clearer, the passionate goodbye amplified over nature.

in endless copies we try to be ourselves in the old songs, and just before they were written.

i said yes reluctantly.

coming closer on the stairs.

the original figurehead, the original tone riding into the mind.

what's still plastic now, like those memories?

it speaks to me, it duplicates.

his telepresence, his letter head glory projecting into the holes in the ground. it was always the same. we're in a cloud. we're trapped. we can redeem this soul, and climb!

Hampstead (for Camilla)

Camilla called us from Stockholm on Sunday, said she was going to see the new Jane Campion movie about John Keats, set in Hampstead I believe, so we were just about to leave the house to go to the heath as well so I said "we'll both be in Hampstead then this afternoon",and she said "take pictures", so here there are, the good ones anyway.... and merry x-mas! thomas x

Ali's 40th birthday party/jamming session @ West Hill Hall in Brighton

 another atmospheric shot of Brighton beach, it wasn't as windy as two weeks ago but it still looked fairly dramatic, ever since Aldeburgh I started paying more attention to the clouds when taking these kinds of pictures

and another shot of Waterloo Street... and onto West Hill Hall, a beautiful community centre in the Seven Dials area, sometimes used for acoustic, informal gigs and gatherings. For his fortieth Ali had organised an afternoon of mulled wine and some short sets of jamming with friends and other musicians from Brighton and beyond, even some morris dancing, etc. so here are some pics:

so happy birthday, Al!