part wild horses mane on both sides - bataille de battle - singing knives - cd - 12$
From Lyon, avant-primitivism of real beauty on flute, voice and an assortment of percussion courtesy of Kelly Jones and Pascal Nichols of Stuckometer/Cooper-Jones/Axis Mundi etc.
directing hand - songs for the red house - singing knives – lp - 27$
Brand new, William Morris inspired, lp called 'Songs From The Red House' out now. Four live songs and two studio songs with full colour artwork by Lavinia Blackwall.
Directing Hand began as a corollary to drummer/vocalist Alex Neilson’s growing interest in the original folk music of the British Isles. Initially, the group was set to amplify the early experiments in form that he had undertaken as a founding member of the Scatter ensemble. But as the project grew, the connection between earlier modes and current praxis became increasingly circuitous, with Neilson joining the dots between seemingly mutually-aggressive musical strands such as dilated big-band improvisation ala Globe Unity Orchestra and Taj Mahal Travellers, the fractured experiments in time of The Shaggs and Henry Flynt & The Insurrectionists and the spontaneous vocal energies of Patty Waters and Charlie Feathers.
The current Directing Hand line-up – consisting of Vinnie Blackwall on improvised vocals, cello, harp and harmonium and Neilson on drums and psaltry – represents the group’s starkest incarnation to date.
Blackwall is a classically trained vocalist, though she rarely makes a move that could be associated with any particular school. Sure, there are moments of tongue pressure that orbit the art trance of early Meredith Monk or Julie Tippett’s work with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble circa One Two Albert Ayler but there’s also a ton of mystery in the way that she seems to incorporate snatches of mellifluous choral and early music melodies in between full-body soundings and vegetable wordage. When you first catch it, it’s as shocking as an Australian in cut-offs, but as you surrender your brain to the glorious see-sawing command with which she pilots the furthest vectors of her body into sound, it seems to have the same connection to free jazz as the divine madrigal stylings of Dolly Collins on Anthems In Eden and Love, Death & The Lady had to the triumphal melodies of the Albert Ayler Orchestra.
Neilson’s playing detonates time by exploding any notion of accompaniment, response or precognition in favour of a profound simultaneity. Drummers have always been the revolutionary agents of musical change; switch up the beat and you reconfigure time, reconfigure time and you re-draw reality. In Neilson’s playing there is truly no past or future, simply Now over and over. Just one movement of his hands and then the next. And in a historical/cultural moment as oppressively 4/4 as 2008, it feels like a fucking revolution.
Just as the traditional readings are illuminated by the advanced application of vanguard, modernist aesthetics, the improvisations feel intuitively authentic and deeply volk-ish. For a tradition to go on living, sometimes it is necessary to kill it off completely. So, Directing Hand. On your knees, sir.
-sk
mv&eee - meet snake pass & other human conditions - singing knives – lp - 27$
recorded at the Heeley Institute in Sheffield in 2007 by ben nash
Stephanie Hladowski - the high nest - singing knives – 10" - 14sold out
Four traditional songs exquisitely sung by Stephanie with accompaniment on bouzouki, clarinet and pedal harmonium by her brother Chris (of Nalle & The Family Elan) and cello by Isobel Campbell. Sleeve artwork by Hanna Tuulikki (Nalle) and extensive liner notes by Alex Neilson (Directing Hand, Tight Meat Duo etc).
-singing knives