This was a great night of intimate performances, helmed by the might Olive Grove Records, with the long-suffering Lloyd Meredith taking tickets and suffering abuse from his roster from onstage.
The night started unexpectedly with a glockenspiel and voice set from Adem, at times struggling with the notes and the lyrics, but very charming and importantly everybody shutted the feck up during the set, thankyou. The five or six songs showed a very sensitive take on life, but Adem comes across as very nice guy and BM would expect nothing less.
Up next is Wolf, the moniker of Kim Moore – a class act, ambient, an intoxicating cocktail of double-tracked fiddle, breathy vocals and keyboard washes, along with some triphoppy beats. This could go far, and Kim is very focussed, although not too serious to acknowledge a squeaky chair at the end of one track to be a “great sound”… the audience was pretty rapt, as they should have been because this is some of the best new music that BM has heard this year. There are tracks available online but please Lloyd or someone else, give her an album release, it could be immense.
Jo Mango has been around for a while and BM has enjoyed her on record (some great remixes as well) but never seen her live, so this was a real treat. She was launching her latest EP ‘System Hold’ (“not an album” as she shouted to Lloyd from the stage). There was some back catalogue from Jo and her band (various musicians switching instruments, including Adem eventually) before she launched into the EP, and very good it was too.
It’s a ‘soundtrack’ to ‘Pervasive Punishment’, a book by criminologist Fergus McNeill, “based in thoughts about ‘mass supervision’ in criminal justice systems.”
‘Depth’ was quite amazing, and Jo’s voice is brilliant, some tropes of triphop but very much her own thing – ‘Weight’ was quite brilliant, with Adem on the tricksy keyboard (there was a word for it but BM forgot it). This is one of the tracks of the year so far, a contrasting acoustic and battering song, quite out there and so much respect for the people who put this together, such things can change someone’s life, including BM, it is raw and soft, and sometimes words fail…