Saturday, 08 March 2008
Resonance FM
Preslav Literary School plays live on Resonance FM as part of the AV Festival 08.
Saturday 08 March
12noon to 1pm
Works for radio
LIVE radiophonic performance for multiple dictaphones by Adam Thomas. Plus Fari Bradley’s Audio Works For Paper.
10pm to 11.15pm
Works for radio
Radiophonic performance for multiple dictaphones by Adam Thomas; Fari Bradley plays mima; Chris Weaver’s lunch at the Sage; Speedreading Middlesbrough (various artists). New works for radio specially made at mima and beyond for AV08: Broadcast.
Listen live on 87.7FM in the Tees Valley, 104.4FM across London or via www.avfestival.co.uk/onair & www.resonancefm.com
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Saturday, 02 February 2008
Stray Signals
Preslav Literary School will be playing at the fantastically named Stray Signals festival.
It takes place at The Cumberland Arms, Byker on Sunday 17th February
Visit >here< for more details.
There's also an Analogue Discharge gig in the pipeline, probably end of March.
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Sunday, 27 January 2008
Lines
New Preslav Literary School fragment up on the myspace player, ripe for download.
Next live show - Fri 1st February at the Side Cafe, Newcastle.
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Monday, 14 January 2008
Winter Weekend
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Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Winter Weekend '08
Preslav Literary School will be playing at next year's Winter Weekend. Expect War of the Worlds, tribal voices, toy keyboards and country guitar licks.
***
Now entering its 4th year, the Winter Weekend at The Cumberland Arms has always been a real signpost towards the musical direction that the new year will take. Unveiling new collaborations, debuting fresh material and launching the careers of local and national artists has always been the speciality of this action-packed weekend, and Winter Weekend 08 is no different.
As always, the Saturday pays homage to the folk, roots and blues music so engrained within the pub’s unique musical heritage, with a hand-picked blend of regional names.
Sunday moves towards an eclectic line-up of innovative and engaging acts including Guessmen, Semi-Squared, Laish, Mushi Mushi and more to be confirmed.
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New releases on GFDM Records
Glosses for die Masses Records has new releases out. Some are available on CD-R, some on dowload. All can be read about and extracts listened to at www.myspace.comglossesfurdiemasses .
***
Glosses fur die Masses Records:
Glosses fur die Masses is an independent record label that releases D.I.Y., hand-made CD-Rs to an unsuspecting public. Glosses fur die Masses has no musical remit.
Releases:
GFDM001: Over Kodiak - Noijen Falsies (Oct 2006)
(Live, one-take improvisations of jazz and blues elegies occasionally overwhelmed by sourced feedback and static traumas) Limited edition hand-made CD-R.
GFDM002: Preslav Literary School - Autumn Bricolage (Nov 2006)
(Soundscapist compositions set in English parkland) Free download available through myspace. Limited edition hand-made CD-R also available.
GFDM003: Preslav Literary School - Live At Tripswitches (April 2007)
(Live spoken-word and arabic classicalisms, ruptured by Casiotone) Free download available through myspace. Limited edition hand-made CD-R also available.
GFDM004: Sweet Veal - Vagitarian (April 2007)
(Robot monologues and delightfully dreary dictats on the socialisation of the middle classes) Download only.
GFDM005: When No Means Yes - Verge (Expected July 2007)
(Ropes, bell towers, ciders and sunsets from folk historian and antiquarian soundmaker) Hand-made CD-R, download available.
GFDM006: Over Kodiak - Live at Tripswiches (2007)
(Three men and some dictaphones) CD-R and download only.
GFDM007: OCDC - Ghost Tapes (2007)
(Haunted textures, dark matter and repeated death moans) Ltd edition tape.
GFDM008: Laish - The Sea Summons (August 2007)
(Debut album, post-Nachmi come down. Acoustic odes of movement and change, lyrical and direct, with bouts of experimentalism) Ltd edition CD-R with home made sleeve.
GFDM009: Laish - Tan hits and trinkets EP (December 2007)
(Four songs and two bits with an exploration of room. Scrape and hiss and creak and sigh. A new Spanish guitar and a sense of purpose. Humble and endearing. ) Ltd CDR.
*** Please contact us via myspace to receive more information regarding CD ordering and downloads.
Send any demos to Glosses Fur Die Masses, 38 Gladstone Place, Brighton, BN2 3QD
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Monday, 16 July 2007
PLS - 24/07
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Friday, 29 June 2007
Nachmi
July 2nd, The Cumberland Arms
Nachmi, Newcastle's finest purveyors of folk-blasted alt.pop and other genres play a farewell gig at their spiritual home. I'll be there with my tapes, still desperately trying to get in the band.
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Tuesday, 19 June 2007
When No Means Yes
The wonderful sounds of Graeme Walker and his percussive, melodic cranium will soon be available on Glosses Fur Die Masses (home of Preslav Literary School, OCDC, Over Kodiak and more!). It's his third album recorded under the When No Means Yes nom-de-plume and we're very excited. As a result we've invited Graeme to join Over Kodiak for our special Ouseburn Festival gig on 21st July.
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Sunday, 13 May 2007
Christ. gig
I'm promoting this gig in June along with one other, details to follow...
Tuesday 12th June
The Cumberland Arms
CHRIST.
RANDOM NUMBER
CATHODE
Understated, warm melodies from live vintage keyboards, drones and atmospherics from reel to reel tape players, phenomenal live drums, and specially commissioned new visuals from an groundbreaking artist. Fresh from his Japanese tour, Christ. (Benbecula Records, ex Boards Of Canada) will be performing tracks from his critically acclaimed new album “Blue Shift Emissions”. www.myspace.com/christhyperact
Random Number (Rock Action, ex Hood) is the foremost purveyor of Northern Wrongbeat, a backcountry electronica that explores glitch, tone and symphony. Machinist and beat driven, yet familiarly organic, his laptop makes a furious, emotive noise that draws comparisons, compliments and crowds, but no equals. www.myspace.com/randomnumbermusic
Cathode is Newcastle’s Steve Jefferis (Expanding Records, Static Caravan, Warm Digits). Expect the precise electronics, driving pop textures and sine-wave action at the edge of audibility that has marked Steve out as one of the finest electronica artists working in the UK to date. www.myspace.com/cathodeonline
£5 on the door. 8pm
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Tuesday, 08 May 2007
Over Kodiak
Two new Over Kodiak dates have been confirmed. Over Kodiak are myself, Daniel Green (Nachmi, Cleft Richard, Cabinet) and Rory Dickenson (Nachmi, OCDC, Tiny Grimes) and are the flagship band for our Glosses fur die Masses record label. We have neither flags or a ship.
The dates are both in conjunction with the Ouseburn Festival and all or one of us will definitely be playing some or both of these two dates:
June 4th - Cumberland Arms, Newcastle - Ouseburn Festival Press Launch
July 21st - The Ouseburn Valley - Ouseburn Festival
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Analogue Discharge
Under my drones and tapes guise Preslav Literary School, I'll be playing this month's Analogue Discharge show at The Telegraph on Friday 18th May.
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Wednesday, 02 May 2007
Bearbones
A while ago I did a show for Bearbones Radio with the irrepressible, irreplacable Richard Dawson. Check out both online, as both are beacons for the talent of the North East.
The podcast of our show is archived on the site.
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Preslav Literary School discography
The Preslav Literary School album "Autumn Bricolage" has finally found packaging and a release on Glosses Fur Die Masses Records. The CD-R is highly limited and features a hand-painted outer sleeve as well as hand-made inlay booklets. Contact for purchase (RRP £5), hagglers welcome.
Tracks are also available for free download (for those allergic to hands) on the PLS myspace and on the lable myspace.
Preslav Literary School's performance at Tripswitches on March 20th 2007 has also been mastered (thanks to Alan and John for inviting and recording) and released as a limited edition CD-R on Glosses Fur Die Masses Records with photographic inlays. Contact for purchase (RRP £3).
Two tracks are now available on the myspace player, 'Good Advice' and 'The Third Function Of Dialogue'. Both are available for free download. The third EP track, 'Daylight Never Seemed To Appear' is on the label myspace.
It's open season.
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Monday, 20 February 2006
If this occurs.
I don't know why.
I don't know what it means.
It is just there. But only sometimes.
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Sorry for this HTML intrusion, especially if it obstructs your reading. I want it to go away
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Monday, 23 January 2006
You've been watching.
Eighteen bands over fourteen hours, a murk between them in the haze that hangs over the moor. We’ve just finished tying leads, the remainders and I, pulling them and separating from the bundle, unplugging from the mixing desk and wrapping them in figures of eight.
Remembrance comes in hurdles, mountable and singular. Back then things worked in order, but now we face a retrospective, turning to see ourselves, held in the crux of a morning and the cradle of an afternoon. It ended with an evening, with dancing and polyrhythms, megaphone distortion and shattered beats, filling a room with intention and edge. But it ended long before that with mixes and breaks, glitches and beats. It started of course with balkan genius buffonery.
Previously we were haunted, stalked and driven to the shallows by pop epithets, tranquil lacerations upon a Daily Express Sunday, reprimanded juvenile sex and odes to mental health. We had drawn previously upon stand-up basses, twirling the mics and moustaches, a joyful frenzy, a rise and a breakdown, a breakdown and a rise, into glory and euphoria, all the measure of a train hitting upon blues and ecstacy, and a banjo elegy roaring at us from beautiful round man with a giant voice.
In the day we sat and waited and took filmed breaths between dulcet guitar absence-and-loss complexes, and a man with a black and white rickenbacker (but not a website), a scottish edge and a purring intonation. There were others of course, but names were never my forte. I drop them all too often.
Thankyou to all. x
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Tuesday, 17 January 2006
In The Reins
Calexico and Iron & Wine combine with a pastoral scene that mimics the title. Bordered, edgily and untidily by white, it is not a border as such but unpainted canvas. The impression of the piece is formed in primary colours, bled out into various shades and textures by over indulgent watercolours. A red, translucent horse stands behind a viciously perspectived, In The Reins, by a mottled wooden fence, jagged and slanting. The horse’s mane is detailed, brush strokes of coarse hair, but everything else is left to outline, a mistake of green obscuring part of his front leg. A startling, luminescent white rein bridles his head and leads into the hand of the man.
The man is blue, framed by thin wavers of tight red, immaculate detailing given to the pockets and curt of his shirt and collar and also his hands, the grasp of the fingers highlighted above the lumpy, playful ridges of the hills in the background. The varied, darkening of the blue background is dominated by two large, pale circles. One surrounds the man’s head, or rather the absence where his head should be, and the other surrounds the sliver of a quarter moon lazing in the centre of the sky, propped in its position by concentric broken circles of small, curved pink lines.
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Summer In The Southeast.
Summer In The Southeast is a beauty. Dirty glaciers in the foreground fall away onto rising, icy slopes with crags of rock, blackened by shadow piercing into the freshness of the air. The mountains sit in the distance, hugged by loose cloud, the wind almost evident in their shape. Deep, scores in the hardened, frozen ground pull the ye towards the peaks and on the far side, a tall lone finger of blurred height, a scratch upon the photograph itself circling its uppermost taper. That is not the first thing of course. The first thing is the blue of the sky, it always is. And then, shortly after, in the journey that all great visual art forces us to make, we travel to the clean lines of the title and artist: Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy in gentle pink, a heavy sans-serif font, and then Summer In The Southeast in bold neon. A stement, an irony both in positioning, choice of photograph, the title, all of it seeks to defy construction and expectation, the snow tumbling in passages and peaks, an effort of distraction and preparation.
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Fires In Distant Buildings
In collecting digital music, one obviously loses the aesthetics, the clutch of LP sleeve. The purchase of records happens steadily around here, one for each month perhaps. The stack lies of the floor, terrible I’m sure for shape and condition, but it sits there end on waiting to be searched, propped by a line of shoes. The pictures mean something; the sounds are to be written about by someone else, somewhere different.
For now, it suffices that Gravenhurst, as the newest, is the first. Textured skyscrapers, at night as though printed on cloth, a blurred fabric edge to the pinpricks and rectangles of light that emanate from their towering forms. They distort though, like Fires In Distant Buildings, and are collaged with close ups behind a neatly scrawled type, impressions made through careful repletion, stencilled white on black. Disparate and subdued, the lines of construction are obvious, but the timeframe is not. Layered and overlapped, one is unsure of perspective, of which came first and what should dominate. A row of small dot-matrix letters, the end of a linear sequence running to thirteen, sits in the bottom left corner upon what looks like a strip of fabric. Occasional daubs of ochre, vague stultified pinks seep through the transparent areas of the cover and a horrid white tear runs from the centre to the bottom of the square, ripping straight down in fissures from the ‘a’ of distant.
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