Tag Archives: Brighton

Billy Mather Illustration Title Image

Billy Mather – Art in the Brighton Music Scene

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We’ve all been there… You become conscious of your surroundings for the first time in god knows how many hours and realize you’ve definitely taken advantage of one too many drink offers in a bar somewhere in Brighton. Dimly self-aware and currently micturating, you glance up and realise that dancing around you are lines and colours, grins and eyes and shapes that hint at what demons might occupy and enjoy the gradually ubiquitous blurring and slurring of your senses. A vague thought bubbles up about the artist behind it, but you’re too drunk and too determined to waste what’s left of your work-fried brain to think about it too much. So I’ve decided to write you this.

Instruments from Sofar Sounds Brighton

Billy Mather is an illustrator who lives in Brighton. Influenced primarily by the darker side of our music scene here, he seems to have a gift for channeling his thoughts into darkly comic expressions, scattering themselves across the seaside of sin from gig posters to toilet doors and pianos. He’s got plenty of other work too so check it all out on his site, link’s at the bottom.

Billy told me that he’s never forgotten a piece of advice given to him by one of his illustration tutors on the BA in Southampton. In art, there is a difference between being accurate and being believable. What comes out of this guy’s mind motivated by that phrase is some of the most distinctive art in the city, somehow managing to retain an incredibly strong sense of the artist’s character; even as the lines and colours begin to intertwine in your head and become part of your thought process. Just like editorial illustration accompanies words on a page, so his work complements and influences your internal monologue as you’re exposed to it.

Click to enlarge

For a Brighton local, the sense of familiarity that emanates from even the most twisted smile and reptilian eye in the center of his most contorted face feels commonplace and natural without ever needing to veer toward a convention. The faces in Billy’s work dance at the edge of recognition, demonically dancing on the ledge between chaotic artistic interpretation and comfortable verisimilitude, which is a long way of saying you really need to check this guy out and give him more work.

Unlike those last two paragraphs, the artwork never smacks of too much thought or trying too hard. It stands out in its naked honesty; it’s inclination to bend further towards expression than conformity. His work across the toilets of the Blind Tiger Club stretch out, allowed a luxurious amount of space yet still reaching further, expanding and moving as you look. Other pieces to watch out for around Brighton decorate Sticky Mike’s Frog bar and Northern Lights.

Please forgive the following phrase, (I promise I’m not just being lazy) but you really can’t sum his work up in words. That’s why this art exists. It expresses the feeling of standing in that space, the artist’s thoughts as he listens. Somehow, he translates the committee of voices that characterise an active mind and regiments them with ink and paint, producing expressions of the space or the event that simply couldn’t exist any other way.

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Links:

Billy’s Website

Facebook

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Sofar #291: Brighton – 26th Febuary 2013

Originally posted on the Sofar Sounds blog on the 4th March 2013.

Words/Editor: Adam Wilson (Website)

Photographers: Tony Jupp (Website) & Chris Poots (Flickr)

Sorry to tell you this, but you missed it. That’s it; the best Sofar Sounds gig to date and you (probably) weren’t there. I bet you’re glad I’ve written as much as I can to convey something of what you missed. (Unless you were there; if so, ignore the first bit and start reading from here).

As I walked in, a rectangular room packed wall to wall with bodies was there to meet me. All super sexy Sofar Sounds bodies of course, but even Sofar people have arms and legs that need to be carefully folded and tessellated to accommodate everyone. It’s funny though, how marking out your territory for the evening seems so important for those first five minutes… Then the music starts.

 

 


Marika Hackman opened up the night with a track called “Retina Television”, from her album “That Iron Taste” (released 25th Feb) stripped of everything save her voice accompanied by her guitar. Appearing before everyone as a loan figure in a packed room, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans she was at once disarmingly honest and absolutely magnetic.

 

 

As her set progressed, the eerie imagery and lonely delivery of her lyrics began to have an effect on us, catalysed by the Sofar atmosphere. Her music always slightly dodges your expectations, as you listen out for the phrase to end and the section to change, it lasts one more bar, or one less. Using what sound like simple, honest comments on elements of her life, Marika’s almost supernatural aura can completely fill the audience’s collective mind, using words to paint her peculiarly magical portraits across our perception.

 

Anna Phoebe, up next, is already well known for a career including collaborations with Jon Lord (Deep Purple), Roxy music, and being as a member of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. This violinist is a bit different to the rest. No one seems to have told her that they traditionally do as they’re told, suppressing their personality in the name of perfecting the execution of a composer’s manuscript.

 

 

Instead, her music blends her personality with the full range of her band’s influences, utilising the underlying mechanics that first supported the music of Duke Ellington as the rhythm section sets up a smooth bed of warm sonic layers, on top of which the incredibly skilled Anna weaves complicated but beautiful melodic lines, occasionally textured with palm muted guitar. The interspersing and complimentary themes on guitar and violin echo the playing of two other jazz greats, Coltrane and Davis. Despite these comparisons, the music is definitely not jazz. Anna brings her signature blend of the concert hall and the stadium, swapping the heavier, rockier side of what she does for a chance to play something more intimate and intricate.

More than a bit Po-Mo, retaining an ambiguity only occasionally punctured using leitmotifs that anchor your attention. The range of influences and their arrangement in the live set made it feel like a live artistic answer to Sgt. Peppers, perhaps helped by the addition of the distinctive tabla, piercing the musical mix with flurries of triplets that fill out the sound and introduce more ambivalence to any sense of cultural place brought about the traditional line up of guitar, electric bass and drums that make up the rest of her band.

This lady, who narrowly escaped the possibility of becoming a politician early in her career, succinctly demonstrated to us the results of a life’s complete dedication to perfection in all aspects of her chosen artistic craft.

Coming up next and snapping us out of a trance, blowing away all mental cobwebs, were CC Smugglers.

 

 

At Sofar, we can’t help but love bands that break the rules.  Continue reading →

Listen to this – Sabrina Altan

It’s been a while since anything got me excited enough to inflict my opinions on the Internet (today that’s you), but that brief reprieve is now over. Something or someone (hint: it’s a someone) has me so jumpy and excited I just couldn’t make it through the weekend without letting you know about it. If you want my opinion (I hope so or this is really the wrong website to be on) if you’re not frantically Googling the name Sabrina Altan by the time you’ve heard the audio embedded here, I’m afraid you’ve probably been born with a complete lack of conscious thought and you’re most likely to be dangerously insane.

 

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She’s taken the basic elements of music best referred to as Neo-Soul and filled in the gaps with her Freudian superego. Quality Neo-Soul looks to both the past and the future – maintaining a fiery outer shell of musical elements swirling around the immense gravitational pull of the central performer, and Sabrina brings a comfortable confidence to her performance that staples her message to the front of your brain, while her band backdrop it all with the relaxed style of people who really know what the fuck they’re doing. The brief moments of explosive virtuosity shining out through each song launch each stunningly executed phrase into the next, as sultry verses suddenly mushroom into vigorously amorous choruses. Continue reading →

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Songs from a room: Sofar sounds Brighton

I want to make you aware of Sofar Sounds. The website gives a short, simple description:

“We have created a movement which brings music lovers together in secret living room locations to hear some of the world’s most cutting edge artists. In order to create an intimate and spellbinding atmosphere, we ask that nobody talk during performances.” www.sofarsounds.com

Here’s what it looks like:

 

 

A simple concept, but started in the same spirit that made me want to write this blog. It’s a platform for bringing people and music together in a memorable atmosphere, and by doing so, gives the art a way of recapturing its aura and authenticity. Bringing the quiet respect and reverie that accompanies a poetry reading and applying that to an art form that, at times, appears to be floundering in a miserable state, partly of its own creation.

In the good old days, it was easy to make people pay for music. They simply had to; there wasn’t an option. At first, people were able to sell recorded music in the form of written notation, distributing instructions on how to recreate the sound of the piece in your own home, using nothing more than a simple piano and your own voice. If you wanted to hear music, you had to learn how to play it. Or, you could find a friend who knew how, but you’d have to find someone willing, then sit down together and experience it, most likely with even more people involved. It was a group experience, shared interpretations of a composer’s vision. Otherwise, you’d have to go to a scheduled live performance. Music was impossible without investing either time or money, but most likely both.

Even with the arrival of mechanical reproduction, allowing for most of the 20th Century music industry to happen, the music industry held all the cards. Recording equipment was expensive. If a songwriter wanted to record, they had to find someone with enough money to buy and maintain this equipment, and they’d have to work out an arrangement with them to use their facilities in return for a fee, or a share in the profits of the music. The people who owned the equipment could make as many recordings as they liked, transforming various materials into objects that would recreate a musical performance in people’s homes. Whatever the specifics of the artist/manager/record company relationship, the audiences couldn’t get their mitts on the music of their favourite artist without going through the men who controlled the recording equipment.

Now though, we’re here. Digital reproduction allows any of us to make endless free, perfect copies of any music we own. We can call thousands of songs within a few moments of deciding we’d like to hear something, and all this does something to the power music can have to affect us. With fewer people respecting music as art, and with so many subcultures through the last century co-opted by mainstream companies and used in advertising, songs which may have once poignantly expressed a social injustice or beautiful captured a moment in time are shackled to this week’s special at Burger King or last month’s car insurance deals.

 

Continue reading →

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CD Review: Collisions EP ‘Believe in This’

Chances are, you’ll know very quickly whether or not you like the CD Believe in This by Collisions. Their music doesn’t take its time to get to know you, to massage your ego, or gently prod at hidden desires. Instead, the band serves you a harmonious combination of sounds taken from nu-metal and contemporary dance music that could soundtrack a movie like Tron or the next space race. Using a calculated blend of rhythms to drive every song forward, the band’s real strengths are the way they’re able to give this EP a sense of mass, and acceleration. You can feel the weight constantly pressing on your mind, as each section of every track finds some way to ramp up the force. If this is your thing, and you’ll know that very quickly, it’ll leave you breathless and sweating, screaming out chorus lyrics like a medieval battle cry.

Collisions Brighton band

Continue reading →

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Artist Feature: Stone Sun

The best way to describe the sound of local Brighton band Stone Sun is with some big, dramatic, Hollywood style visual metaphor. Bear with me on this. I need you to concentrate. Stone Sun is their name, and I want you to work from that, imagining scorched desert sand in Nevada, somewhere outside Las Vegas. The occasional large rock is dotted around the landscape, but watch out, because this is bat country.

 

In the distance through the mirage you catch sight of a lone motor vehicle cruising through the heat, making its way across the arid landscape towards you. Don’t worry though; it’s still far off in the distance right now, driven by a lone figure. The breeze brings you the distant sound of Rock ‘n’ Roll. The song has taken on a unique tonality telling you that the driver of the car is playing his music loud.

Nevada Valley By Cooper, in Wiki Commons known as --Cooper.ch 22:17, 20 August 2006 (UTC) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia CommonsWithout warning, the camera cuts to right next to the open top car, placing you inside the noise blasting from the car’s speakers, distorting the air around them as they frantically push out bar after bar of human emotion. Pushed to their maximum capacity, they add an extra layer of distortion to an already ferocious sound.

That’s the closest I can get you to Stone Sun’s sound live.

I saw the band perform on a Sunday at The Hope, a small venue for a band with a sound like this. Their sound is full-bodied grunge, with an appreciation of the more subtle dynamics required offset against the potency of a truly beasty riff.  At their most powerful, you hear snatches of influences in bands like Smashing Pumpkins or Pearl Jam but these moments contrast with the technical proficiency of bands like Incubus.

Guitar Ricky Bass Live ShotTake their song “Memories” for instance. It somehow manages to remind you of moments sitting with your Dad, or perhaps a more elderly relative, in his workshop, the sound of hard rock reproduced via a small, tinny radio. The song suddenly twists; it speeds up and takes on an altogether different connotation of something like anger, or intense sadness. The mental image becomes that time when you were left standing alone as a teenager. At the last moment the song twists again, this time into a euphoric guitar solo reaching a peak and pushing the energy level in the room up over the edge for the final chorus. Continue reading →

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Submotion Orchestra @ Concorde 2

 

Introducing Submotion Orchestra. Here’s their latest video:

DJ/ producers live in a world where a great deal of the creativity occurs via conscious and deliberate tweeks to a record done over a long period of time. I always get the image of one man surrounded by computers, tweaking sounds and combining samples to create a mood, or make a point.

Conversely, live bands can make use of a much more subconscious creative process. Otherwise known as the “jam”, it’s how I’ve written most of my drum parts to this date. A musician playing an instrument practices and hones their craft, perfecting techniques, which can cause unexpected combinations and interesting noise when they jam with other musicians.

Watching Submotion live, the physicality of the performance is as controlled and perfected as their sound. The slim statuette of their singer Ruby Wood on a brightly lit stage, bordered on all sides by boxes spewing wires out of every available hole, provides a striking image. Surrounding her are the men responsible for operating the musical machinery, all intently focussed on performing their part in the cacophony of sound.  Continue reading →

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Artist Feature: The Peppermint Beat Band

 

Most of what I know of the 1960’s and 70’s I’ve found out from books, video footage and old people. Even so, the imagination is the best place for reconstructing what it must have been like to actually experience the world then. Slipping on some big headphones, playing a record, closing your eyes and letting the sound wash over you gives your subconscious mind the opportunity to pick up on all sorts of tiny nuances. You can build a mental picture which is impossible to describe to someone else, so you keep telling them they need to feel it for themselves.

This is where The Peppermint Beat Band reside.

Continue reading →

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The Great Ticket Scandal and…my night at the NME awards tour

In an unexpected turn of events, I managed to buy a couple of last minute returned tickets to the sold out NME awards show at the Brighton Dome, through the Dome’s own ticket office. The show’s line up was Azealia Banks, Tribes, Metronomy and Two Door Cinema Club.

I’d originally planned to talk about the artists, about how Azealia showed a lot of swagger, promise and style, but little in the way of stand out tracks in her set. Or the stark contrast between how bored I became during Tribes’ set compared to how exciting and interesting Metronomy were.

What I couldn’t help noticing on the night with our seated tickets, however, were the amount of empty seats in the auditorium. At the time, I assumed it must have been a popular gig with the more fortunate of Brighton’s citizens, who could afford to pay for their entrance but then spend the whole night milling around the bar area paying their prices for drinks. Maybe everyone had managed to sneak into the standing area, although that didn’t look properly packed until Two Door Cinema Club appeared.

However, a few days later I caught up with the Dispatches documentary “The Great Ticket Scandal” aired on C4.
It focussed on the secondary ticketing market, and specifically, on two websites: Viagogo and Seatwave. The programme claimed that the sites marketed themselves as ‘fan-to-fan’ ticket services, the idea being that if you were unable to go to a concert after you’d bought a ticket, you could sell your tickets directly to another fan, rather than using a tout.

Adrian Larkin on BBC 6 Music News gets the reaction from Ed Parkinson, Director at Viagogo UK:

Continue reading →