Altmusic Presents: Richard Youngs, Velvet Hour

Altmusic Presents:Richard Youngs (UK), Rachel Shearer, Velvet Hour

8pm Saturday 6 November
Harbour Light, Lyttelton, Christchurch
$9 Presales from Under the Radar / $10 General Admission

Richard Youngs is one of the most acclaimed, chameleon-like explorers of modern music, traversing a diverse set of distinctive and multi-instrumental forms that encompass avant-folk, psychedelic drone, progressive minimalism, lysergic pop, and rock concréte. The stark, unyielding minimalism of his piano-oriented 1990 debut, Advent, prompted The Wire’s Alan Licht to list it alongside works by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Phil Niblock, and Tony Conrad as a revelatory favourite of rare minimalism, while Youngs’ subsequent and prolific collaborations with Simon Wickham-Smith as R!!! &S!!! are widely seen as opuses of mind-altering cosmic abstraction, with one critic describing them as ‘Throbbing Gristle reimagined as Zen garden desk accessory’.

From the carnivalesque kazoo-psych and warble of ‘New Angloid Sound’, the heartbreaking candour of ‘Sapphie’ - featuring just Youngs’ plaintive voice and a classical guitar, and likened to a hybrid of Galaxie 500 and Nick Drake - the desolate a cappella of ‘Summer Wanderers’ and gorgeous pastoralism of his collaboration with Tirath Singh Nirmala, to the ‘ecstatic house’ of 2009’s ‘Like A Neuron’, the intrepid, curveball pop of ‘Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits’, and the cyclical, stream-of- consciousness and hymnal ‘Under Stellar Stream’, Youngs’ music remains as evocatively beautiful as it is perennially mutable.

While recording with an array of various collaborators, including Jandek, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Neil Campbell of Astral Social Club, Alastair Galbraith, Matthew Bower of Sunroof, and Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple, and appearing on a slew of labels such as VHF (Jack Rose, Pelt, Aethenor, Sandra Bell) and Table of the Elements (John Cale, Fennesz, John Fahey, SunnO)))’s Stephen O’Malley, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Rhys Catham, Faust), Youngs has been reticent as a live performer, playing only a handful of occasions between 2006-2008, at Thurston Moore’s All Tomorrows Parties in 2006, and alongside Jandek and Heather Leigh Murray on European tours.

It is thus a rare and special opportunity to witness in person what Melody Maker has described as the ‘grand-meister of contemporary British improv, spiritual son of Eddie Prevost and Maddy Prior; gentle manipulator of English hymn-notics and religious incantations; protégé, challenger and radicaliser of folk, blues, rock, minimalism and improvisation’.

Since forming Angelhead with The Dead C’s Michael Morley and White Saucer’s Stella Corkery in 1987, and going on to play with Corkery in the Siltbreeze alum, Queen Meanie Puss, Rachel Shearer’s music has ebbed radically between petaline chanson, enraged GRRL and concrète elysia. Her multiform collaborations and solo endeavours have surfaced on a cluster of labels, including Family Vineyard (Loren Connors, Hisato Higuchi, Jailbreak), Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace (Magik Markers, Samara Lubelski, Religious Knives, Awesome Color), Corpus Hermeticum and Xpressway.

Velvet Hour is a Christchurch and Melbourne-via-Auckland duo comprising Tim Coster (Vogue Forums, Currer Bells) and LA Lakers. Their debut release on Fictitious Sighs - a quiet mélange of chance rock and geodesic punk - was recorded instead of going out to dinner with Bruce Russell. Velvet Hour’s lambent, auricular rites and enchance operations currently embrace mimed grooves guided by mittened guitar, unfledged Tintinnabuli, hummed rounds, curvilinear thrums, and funereal yet utopian bongo intrigue.

Altmusic is a series of sound events, funded by Creative New Zealand, featuring respected
international sound artists. It is run by the Audio Foundation Charitable Trust (http://
www.audiofoundation.org.nz/about), a peer-based facilitative organisation dedicated to New Zealand sound culture, whose events in Christchurch are run by a team of local sound artists and commentators.

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