Le Guess Who? unveils full line up for 2019 edition

20 September 2019

With just under two months to go until Le Guess Who? extravaganza kicks off in Utrecht, today the organisers revealed the full line-up. A cluster of new announcements, including Ami Dang, HHY & The Macumbas, Xylouris White, Group Listening, Bremer/McCoy, Mythic Sunship and Ed Dowie join a star studded line-up, co-curated by Fatoumata Diawara, Jenny Hval, Patrick Higgins, The Bug, Moon Duo, and Iris van Herpen & Salvador Breed.

After enticing us with its curators and artist announcements over the last few months, with a lot of bands that we absolutely love, Le Guess Who? has now revealed the full line-up for its 13th edition running from November 7-10 in various venues across Utrecht.

Avant-garde composer, guitarist, and producer Patrick Higgins had already unveiled his sublime curatorial bill including Dossier X, his own immersive audio-visual collaboration with installation artist Matthew Schreiber and choreographer Monica Mirabile, as well as the likes of Tyondai Braxton, Conrad Tao, Leila Bordreuil, Vicky Chow, Lightning Bolt, Miranda Cuckson and Holly Herndon. Added to Higgins’s curation is an incredibly special performance by AEAEA, his new project with Chilean producer Nicolas Jaar, which will see its premiere at the festival. Through instrumental performance and live digital acrobatics, the pair will resample each other’s instruments live.

Setting the stage for rare performances, Le Guess Who? unveiled a new ambitious program called Hidden Musics, in collaboration with Grammy-award winning music producer, activist and author Ian Brennan, and Ljubljana based American musician, record producer and Glitterbeat Records founder Chris Eckman. Paying special attention to musical traditions from secluded regions of the world, Hidden Musics will include female Greek choir Isokratisses, Pakistan’s 75-year old Surti master Ustad Saami and Mexico’s La Bruja de Texcoco.

Another fresh addition is a special collaboration between guitarist and composer William Tyler and experimental harpist Mary Lattimore.

Also amongst the final wave of names newly added to the general line-up is Baltimore based vocalist, sitarist, producer and composer Ami Dang presenting her recent instrumental album, Parted Plains, inspired by South Asian and Middle Eastern folktales, enigmatic Kiwi singer-songwriter Aldous Harding, following the release of her critically acclaimed third album Designer, Detroit-raised, Brooklyn-based rapper and producer Quelle Chris, Portuguese collective HHY & The Macumbas, known for the tribal and exhilarating energy of their live shows, Danish dub-jazz duo Bremer/McCoy who have a new album releasing next month and Xylouris White, the duo of Cretan lute player George Xylouris and Australian drummer Jim White, who will be gifting the world with their fourth full album, The Sisypheans, on the eve of their performance at the festival.

Other new musical treats across the dozens of stages include Ghanaian hip hop outfit FOKN Bois, lo-fi pop singer songwriter Ed Dowie, the utterly engrossing ambient reworkings of some electronic classics by Stephen Black and Paul Jones who operate as Group Listening, London-based experimental singer-songwriter Koichi Yamanoha aka Grimm Grimm, the solo project of Peter Cat Recording Co frontman Suryakant Sawhney under the guise Lifafa, the dark and ritualistic performances of Russian indie band Shortparis, Danish progressive space rock band Mythic Sunship and experimental producer Alessio Natalizia, aka Not Waving, and alt-rock icon Mark Lanegan who teamed up this year for their collaborative album Downwelling.

With such a wealth of sonic offerings from all over the globe, the stars will align to celebrate the 13th edition of Le Guess Who?. So be sure to look up and consider this a celestial warning to grab yourself a ticket. Daily tickets and 4-Day Festival Passes are now available on leguesswho.com, where you can also find the full line-up in detail and more info.

Field Music announce new album and share lead single ‘Only In A Man’s World’

19 September 2019

Field Music, the sibling duo of Peter and David Brewis, are back with a new album called Making A New World. Due out on January 10th through Memphis Industries, the upcoming record features “songs about ultrasound and about shooting yourself for the sake of art and about gender reassignment surgery and about Becontree housing estate”, as they explained. There is also a killer track about sanitary pads, ‘Only In A Man’s World’, of which David says:

“I found myself researching the development of sanitary pads – not a statement I’ve ever imagined myself making – and was surprised at how little the advertising material has changed in a hundred years. It’s still, Hey Ladies! Let’s not mention it too loudly but here is the perfect product to keep you feeling normal WHILE THE DISGUSTING, DIRTY THING HAPPENS. And you realise that it’s a kind of madness that a monthly occurrence for billions of women – something absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity – is seen as shameful or dirty – and is taxed MORE than razor blades?!

At every stage of making this song, I had to ask myself, am I allowed to do this? Is it okay to do this? And I cringed in the next room when I first showed it to my wife. But I think confronting my own embarrassment is a pretty fundamental part of what the song is about.”

‘Only In A Man’s World’ is the album’s lead single and you can listen to it below.

In other related news, Field Music have announced a string of shows in some UK record stores in January. Take a look at all their stops:

Jan 09th – Liverpool, Phase One – Liverpool
Jan 10th – Manchester, Piccadilly Records outstore at Soup Kitchen
Jan 11th – Edinburgh, Assai Records outstore at The Mash House
Jan 15th – London, Rough Trade East instore
Jan 16th – Bristol, Rough Trade Bristol instore
Jan 17th – Brighton, Resident Brighton instore
Jan 19th – Newcastle, Reflex CD Vinyl Newcastle outstore at The Cluny

Visible Cloaks, Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano announce European tour and share live video for ‘Atelier’

17 September 2019

Photo: Miyu Terasawa

FRKWYS is the ongoing 12-inch series from boundary-pushing label RVNG Intl that “pairs contemporary artists and their progenitors” for unique collaborations. serenitatem is their fifteenth and latest instalment and it brings together Visible Cloaks, Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano. The four musicians met and started working and recording the album when Visible Cloaks were finishing their first Japanese tour in December 2017. serenitatem came out last April and they performed it for the first time in June, but they have also announced a string of live dates in Europe this Autumn, including a show at Le Guess Who? in Utrecht on Thursday 7th November. To get us enticed, they have released a video for ‘Atelier (Live)’, recorded in Tokyo and directed by Road Izumiyama. Here it is.

New band Whistling Arrow set to release self-titled debut album this Autumn

16 September 2019

Whistling Arrow is the exciting new project that brings together quite the doozy of musicians: pioneering drummer, composer and improviser Charles Hayward, composer and performer Laura Cannell, multi-disciplinary musician Andre Bosman and Benjamin D. Duvall, Benjamin Fair and Jonathan Hering of experimental mallet-guitar trio Ex-Easter Island Head. They got together and recorded a spontaneous nine hour improvised session in Liverpool and lucky for us, they are releasing it as a self-titled album on November 22nd through God Unknown Records. And what’s more, they have let loose ‘Forking Paths’, serving as a magnificent taste of what they’ll be throwing at us. Take a listen now.

Penguin Cafe share second single, ‘Chapter’, off upcoming album Handfuls Of Night

13 September 2019

Penguin Cafe announced last month the release of their Antarctic-inspired album, Handfuls Of Night, and shared the first magnificent taste from it, ‘At The Top of The Hill, They Stood…’. Now they are offering a second glimpse at the new material with new track ‘Chapter´ and a single-shot accompanying video, filmed in New York. Of the video, Penguin Cafe´s Arthur Jeffes says:

“’Chapter’ is for me one of the big tracks on the album. We got into this mindset where we were creating cinematic story lines for our imaginary penguin protagonists – and this one was a lot of fun to make.

There’s a hint of 70’s cop-show about the main motif with the double push in the bass line and we got this idea of a hard-boiled detective-penguin, with a leather jacket and a cool car in New York. The video totally goes with that feel for me.

I love the idea of a familiar landscape being gradually moved into an imaginary, almost dreamlike version of itself – and the slow build in the video hit this exact note.”

Take a look at the video now.

Handfuls Of Night is out on October 4th through Erased Tapes.

Will Samson announces fifth album Paralanguage

12 September 2019

British-born, Brussels-based musician Will Samson has announced the release of a new album called Paralanguage, which is inspired by his first and only psilocybin experiment. Years after the sudden death of his father in 2012, and after a difficult grieving process, Samson and his girlfriend retreated to the countryside to try psilocybin, and the upcoming record seeks to mirror that experience.

Mostly a solo work, Paralanguage saw Samson enlist the help of some stellar collaborators, including Beatrijs De Klerck, Christina Vantzou, Ben Lester, Jeremy Boettcher and Michael Feuerstack. Marking his fifth studio album, Paralanguage is also his first for Wichita Recordings and arrives on December 6th. Ahead of it, Samson has shared the first single, the utterly beautiful and serene ‘Ochre Alps’. The song has been paired with a gorgeous video, and Samson had this to say about it:

“The starting point for Ochre Alps was a dream. In it, I found myself stuck half way up a mountain, with my foot lodged deep in the snow. I looked up into the distance to see other climbers reaching the top and below me was a long descent back down. My short analysis is that some old patterns had to be shed in order to move forward. The lyrics that made their way onto the final song were written after a gentle psilocybin journey in the countryside, which naturally eased its way into the song, thematically blending with the mountain dream. That experience is best described in the opening two lines of the track ‘I woke up into my body – deep in the silence’. The characters in the video are waking up into the landscape of a lucid dream. Much like the psilocybin experience, the characters rediscover a silent mind – giving the space to totally inhabit and celebrate their bodies.”

The video for ‘Ochre Alps’ was directed by Lily Marks and Eren Kaplan and you can watch it below.