Wednesday 28 August 2013

"The Barr Brothers" - The Barr Brothers

One of the things I always think about music made in Canada is that it has a very definite sense of place to it - I’ve noticed this with folk artists, electro-rock bands and everything in between.  I can’t even articulate that properly, or quite put my finger on what it is – the word “cinematic” comes close. Maybe it’s a product of the fact that it’s not exactly a country where bands rush to tour, or possibly just because parts of Canada are so quiet and serene. It might be that it’s “just me”, and that I picture it as this far away (and maple syrup filled) Disney Land of tranquillity, but there’s definitely a sense of both refuge and distance in the sound that a lot of musicians that spend time over there produce.



To me, the Barr Brothers self-titled debut epitomises that spirit. “The Barr Brothers” was released in 2011 but it seems to be only now that it’s getting a lot of attention here in the UK, with recent radio plays from Lauren Laverne and rave reviews for their shows all over Canada and the States this summer.

Andrew and Brad Barr grew up in Rhode Island, count rock and roll as a big influence, and as kids they put all of their rage, energy and passion into intense boxing matches with each other – now, they channel it into music.

They moved to Montreal in 2005 and began this project, picking up harpist Sarah Page along the way, who Brad met when he overheard her playing through the shared wall of their neighbouring apartments. With the bringing in of their friend Andres Vial to play keyboards, bass, percussion and sing back-up vocals, quarter that is The Barr Brothers was assembled.

The album itself is gorgeous, folky without confining itself to one particular genre – it’s full of different sounds and moods and textures, from the serene and gentle “Beggar In The Morning” to songs with slightly rougher edges, like bluesy “Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying”.

They’re about to embark on a six city UK tour, kicking off tomorrow night at the Borderline, London, and will also be playing at the End of the Road Festival this Sunday. You can find out more on their website.

Thursday 22 August 2013

Recommendations: July 2013

As with the last few, this is hilariously belated but we should be back on top soon enough!

"Tickle Me Pink" - Johnny Flynn
Another artist I was reacquainted with because of hearing him play at Mumford and Sons' Lewes Stopover, I'm hugely excited about his new album "Country Mile" which is scheduled for release this September. "Tickle Me Pink" is one of his absolute classics.

Castro
These guys come from Derby, recently supported Catfish and the Bottlemen and their EP "Dirty Vibe" demonstrates a sound that's messy, full-on and passionate. I'm definitely excited to see how these guys develop.  *

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" - Betty Smith
One of the best books I've read perhaps ever? A snapshot of family life in Brooklyn in the early twentieth century, this novel is narrated by Francie, a young girl that reminds me in so many ways of none other than Scout from "To Kill A Mockingbird"

Keaton Henson (dot com)
This is a bit of a weird one - despite being a big fan of Keaton Henson, I'm not exactly recommending him so much in this case but his... website? Just trust me, and follow this link for hours and hours of mind-numbing, creative, sleep-inducing procrastination/bliss.

Fluffy Towels - Yankee Candle
Call me a corporate soulless cow for investing the admittedly ridiculous £16.99 on such a stupid brand (something they sell for less than a pound in Ikea) but I came across 'fluffy towels' scented Yankee Candle when my friend took me into their store in early spring, and spent every pay day for months trying to decide whether or not I could justify spending that amount of money on a candle. It turns out I could, and in return I've been provided with 150 hours of my entire room smelling like a fancy hotel.

Tuesday 20 August 2013

Music, Pussy Riot, Adventures // love a little bit more.

Hello!

I want to apologise for the lack of blog posts these last few weeks/two months. I've been all over the place - as well as results day stress etc partly literally - travelling through four different countries, working at festivals, going to cities in the UK I'd never been to before, and I've been lucky to meet so many fantastic musicians, writers, events people who are not only talented and hardworking but just incredibly kind.

I was a tiny part of the craziness that was Mumford and Sons curating and headlining an enormous yet very warm-hearted festival in Lewes, I've been to so many great gigs, learnt about Russian politics, told drunk secrets with my best friend in a dark flat in Amsterdam, listened to an entire James Blunt album more than once in a row, made a lot of new friends, swam in the English Channel at midnight.

Every day I am gaining faith, gradually starting to feel like there's people that do their jobs because they want to give an audience a great service, and to make this crazy industry and also this world a little bit of a better place.

Monday night was the Pussy Riot Commemoration event at Kraak, which I wrote about here before hand and helped out with on the day - bands from all over the country and even the world came to Manchester to put their love and their time into an incredible event. I was on the merch stand on the night, and loved chatting to everyone about their reasons for coming (and I met someone that read this blog?!), and local businesses and creators and artists contributed raffle prizes and auction gifts, and it was again, something that couldn't have happened without that sense of community spirit and giving from everyone involved. I'm proud of all of them.

As cheesy as it sounds, I keep thinking that that's what Pussy Riot really is: the more I've learnt about the girls, the more I think that this is what they'd want - on top of a protest, a headline in the paper, a cry out in the courtroom - this is a reminder to love a little bit more, to do and not just be. That's something you can do if you can't donate, if you can't speak out, just think about how freedom of speech affects you, and those around you.

I was telling someone about the event earlier today, and they asked "So why did you do that, was it for your personal statement and for work experience?"

I wanted to tell her "fucking course not".

It's so hard to imagine doing anything like this for a CV or personal statement, which I am constantly being told is valuable at the moment. And I'm honestly not attempting to seem gratuitously good hearted by saying that, that's not how it is at all - it's just so basic to care about something and put in what you take out, and I think that's the attitude we should have to everything we do. When you care about something, and love something, it doesn't feel like work, it doesn't feel like you're giving up time, it feels like you're doing the best thing with it that you possibly can.

Before these last few months I was told that workplaces are all bitchy, competitive, unfriendly environments, that people care only really about money, and that I should never have expected a change from that when I left school. I can honestly say that the majority of those I've worked with or been involved with in the last month in the music and arts industries haven't been like that at all, but love what they do, and work towards a goal.

And I know that real life's going to swoop back in and take over soon, and I'll be applying to universities and studying for exams and things and I'm so worried that I'll forget what it means to have this kind of passion for what you do. (re applying for uni, they tell us all the time not to use the word "passion" in personal statements so do leave your favourite synonyms in the comments)

Regular posts should be back to normal (as normal/organised as this ever gets) as soon as possible.

Lots and lots and lots of love. 

be brave and kind.


Sunday 4 August 2013

REVOLUTION: Pussy Riot Commemoration Festival @ Kraak

I had, admittedly, almost completely forgotten about Pussy Riot – I remember being captivated by their story first appearing in the news, probably just over a year ago - it was a combination of the courage and persistence of the three women and the shock, as well, that we live in a modern world and this is still happening that inspired a lot of people, I think. If I'm honest, I stopped thinking about Pussy Riot as it disappeared from the papers and the news, and this is something I'm sure I'm not alone in.

Then, I was reminded last month at an Amanda Palmer show of all places, when Olivia, from online magazine Shatter Japan, spoke about a fundraising event that they are holding, to help and raise awareness for Pussy Riot.
.

I was curious, both about the Pussy Riot situation itself and why the British press has left such a gaping hole in terms of addressing it, so went and met Olivia in Manchester last week to talk about it.

The seventeenth of August will mark one year since Masha, Nadia and Katya were sentenced to two years prosecution for performing a “Punk Prayer”, to oppose Vladimir Putin’s policies, in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Olivia and her team at Shatter Japan are holding a two day commemoration festival in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, in two weeks' time.

Olivia explains to me that within this first year of Pussy Riot’s prison sentence, they’ve been constantly changing between prisons, and their legal team shifted completely. “Originally they were all kept in Moscow together, then it was decided they’d be sent to penal colonies. Masha was separated from Nadia, at the moment Masha’s being relocated again. There’s a real grey area in terms of where they are and what’s going on with them – I can’t tell you for sure, I’m not sure even if their lawyers can tell you. The rumours were even the lawyers didn’t have access to the reasons why Masha was being located. They are not together. It’s been implied that the reason they were separated was obviously so that they can’t communicate, and to break them down mentally and emotionally.”

For the team working on these events, the lack of communication and sense of disconnection has been a huge issue – a combination of there being cloudiness surrounding any political situation in Russia, as well as an added difficulty caused by the lack of participation from British mainstream media.

However, they got the chance to meet two members of Pussy Riot at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown in London, recently.  “That’s the first point I think that our team, having done all of this work, had a real sense of connection with them. There are so many activists and arts people down in London and across the country that have been working on other aspects of the Pussy Riot cause, but this was the first time we had direct connection with the women themselves, so that was good for us in terms of being able to say that this is a real issue, they’re really committed to releasing their colleagues.”

She’s very clear about the point that Pussy Riot have always thought of themselves as “media activists”, and that awareness is the main objective for them. “They pick a space that they want to perform in; there may be a reason for why that particular location, and then they perform. They’re not a traditional band in the sense that they have four key players, it’s this organic group of people who care about things, trying to make a point through their art.”

Olivia explains how the way the press have been only covering larger parts of the Pussy Riot story has left a considerable amount of gaps in most people's knowledge – recently, it has come seemingly out of nowhere that Masha is on hunger strike. “It’s just the sensationalist side of it that the mainstream press will leap on – you haven’t had any lead-up to that. The information coming from the prisons where Masha and Nadia are is really limited, it’s this really longwinded chain of information that finally gets back to mainstream British media. It’s partly to do with circumstance that that’s going on, but I partly think it’s because nobody’s really tracking what’s going on in the mainstream media, therefore you end up with a total gap of information – the most visible press not doing their job properly.”

She gives off a suspicion of editors making an active decision to ignore the cause – “I would even go as far as to say that the mainstream media are consciously ignoring it. Actively not reporting on it, actively not putting resources into that area. "

Another cause of the lack of severity in the way the British media are addressing the Pussy Riot story is how this situation is something those of us that are privileged, and free, literally cannot imagine – it’s almost like fiction, and the only way I could think of to describe it is “hilariously awful.” Olivia says that the comical portrayal of Putin is definitely an issue. “They haven’t realised that it’s a very serious situation, and when they announced the so-called Anti-Gay Legislations there were protests in the streets, these young kids – some maybe LGBT and some who weren’t, maybe colleagues of theirs, being harassed in the streets for protesting; blood coming off their heads, people being beaten up, people being hounded down alleyways, something that you now think don’t really happens. You don’t expect it to be happening within Europe or in the sphere of your world, but it’s happening, and it’s actually getting worse.”

But she expresses a hope in the role that smaller communities and especially the Internet play in raising awareness about Pussy Riot, though it doesn’t have the same power as a broadcast on BBC News or a headline from The Telegraph. “It’s where the bloggers come in, the activists, arts communities; social media is where the continuous flow of information is coming from. When something will come out, if you happen to be online at the time, then you might see that feed, but it won’t last for very long.”

“Revolution”, a two day festival taking place in Manchester’s Northern Quarter on Sunday 18th and Monday 19th of August, will be collecting funds for The Voice Project, one of the only legitimate organisations in terms of helping Pussy Riot and distributing funds directly to them (their website is really great and contains a lot of information about where the funds are going as well as merch/videos/messages from the girls.) Olivia explains the communication situation makes distributing funds to Pussy Riot a great struggle. “Originally when we did these events Pussy Riot had a different legal team, and we were in direct touch with that legal team and so we actually sent the funds directly to the lawyers. At some point at the end of last year the legal team was switched, so we’re no longer in direct touch.”

 “A lot of people have been put away in Russia, in other countries, and here as well, where you can’t hear their voices anymore. I don’t think anybody is capable of resolving this Pussy Riot issue. It’s a global difficult issue involving politics and religion and all sorts of things, but I think the idea is you just relate it to yourself – it’s up to the individual at the end to think about whether they want to know more.”

As well as donating and coming along to the event, the best thing that anyone can do is raise awareness - it's clear that social media, tweets, blogs, and real physical interactions like putting up posters, telling a friend, telling children - is one of the best ways to help Pussy Riot.

 “The easiest way to raise awareness to be honest is actually within our communities – student communities, writers, musicians, the arts community, politicians maybe. These are the areas that the people can raise awareness through without depending on the mass media. I do think that what we’re doing is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re giving people options to think about whether they care for something or not, and that’s important.” Hope, she says, is in young people, and in the Internet. "We really need to encourage young people to really be curious about what's going on in the outside world. Don't block information from them about this: keep it open, and create discussion. If you're in a band, talk about it."

But her most important message - and the message of Pussy Riot themselves - is that Revolution is bigger than them - it's about art, human rights, and most of all about freedom. This "Revolution" is about actively pushing ideas and discussion, not waiting for things to evolve.

 "We wanted to start the ball rolling and a little bit of discussion going, about how people want their arts communities to be and how artists want them, ideally. How you can hold events for free, in your community - you don't need to involve corporations and unethical people. There's a way of building that kind of arts industry. It's also about talking about LGBT issues - those issues are still very unresolved, even here. Obviously parts of Africa or Russia at the moment are really seriously in need of sorting out in that area, seriously needing help. And also we musn't forget that here there are lots of desparities in society - the pay gap between men and women is disgraceful. We want to take the template for what Pussy Riot are doing and put that into our own work. We'll do this event, and we'll bring as many people together as we can."


The event features local bands, as well as some travelling from London, Liverpool and Leeds, and the debut UK solo performance from Princess Century (drummer from the Torontonian electro-band Austra), as well as video messages from supporting artists all around the globe - this is very much not just for Manchester's arts community, but an international and hopefully world-changing thing.

You can buy tickets here, and if you're not Manchester-based, check out The Voice Project and Shatter Japan for much more information about Pussy Riot.