MUCKLE MOUTH

Tartine De Clous + Mike Gangloff & Matt Peyton + Lunatraktors + Patrick Best + London Sacred Harp

7PM

£10 ADV (CLICK HERE) / £12

Muckle Mouth returns to The Horse Hospital for a mega-event spanning French harmony singing, Appalachian traditional music, shape note singing and acoustic drone, with vocal trio Tartine De Clous, a very rare visit from the US by Mike Gangloff with Matt Peyton & Patrick Best solo (Pelt, The Black Twig Pickers), Lunatraktors and London Sacred Harp choir.

TARTINE DE CLOUS

A modern history where a young lad from the Charente countryside and two from Saintonge meet in "the city". It is in Poitiers that Geoffroy, Guillaume and Thomas decide to unite their voices to interpret traditional music. Previously, their ears drank at the sources of the Beatles, Velvet Underground, Brassens, Sun Ra or Perotin. Starting from this end of the world without folklore where they grew up, they end up borrowing paths full of brambles following the seventies harmonic imprint of Melusine. Modal music, rural nonchalance and medieval reminiscences are the essential elements of their concert appearances, sitting in the midst of the audience, around a table. The intimacy then created allows an attentive listening of the stories in French of these living texts but also to be embodied with these rhythms and catchy melodies.

"Their research goes deeper still, drawing on sources such as the work of 19th century poet/folklorist Achille Millien, who collected tales, legends and songs in the Nivernais region, and composer Joseph Canteloube, who collected folk songs in the Auvergne in the early 20th century. Yet the trios sound has a vitality and freshness all it's own, doubtless the result of a deep passion for the music, and an determinedly individual approach"

Alasdair Roberts, fRoots Magazine, 2016

MIKE GANGLOFF & MATT PEYTON / PATRICK BEST

Mike Gangloff and Patrick Best are on these shores because their long-running drone-improvisation-deep-listening band Pelt just completed a short run of UK shows. With the other band members already returned to the USA, Gangloff and Best are playing one more show here to showcase some of the musics they explore outside the Pelt circle.

Pelt made its mark in the ‘90s as a full-on, fully electric band, with Gangloff and Best wielding electric guitars alongside the late Jack Rose. Then, 15 or so years ago, Pelt went acoustic – but with unusual instruments and extended techniques that defied labeling.

In their own sets, Best and Gangloff have dipped back into electronic waters. Gangloff, who also fiddles in the Virginia old-time band Black Twig Pickers, is working his traditional Applachian side but stretching those sounds far, far past the square dance, amplifying his fiddle and playing duets with Matt Peyton, who filters a theremin – and a mountain dulcimer – through primitive electronics. Best revels in solo electric guitar pieces and extended harmonium/vocal interval workouts, mixing gleeful sonic mayhem with reverent trance.

LUNATRAKTORS

Founded in Prague in 2015, launching in the UK for 2017, Lunatraktors are performance art duo Carli Jefferson (percussion) and Clair Le Couteur (vocals). Weaving together traditional English, Irish, Scottish and Australian ballads with influences from contemporary experimental music and theatre, Lunatraktors strip folk music back to its raw elements to rediscover what is possible with the voice, the hands and the feet. The result is a dark, polyrhythmic landscape of overtone singing, body percussion, queer culture, tapdance, archival trance, live looping, and channeling, guaranteed to raise your spirits.

LONDON SACRED HARP

London Sacred Harp continues an old a cappella community singing tradition from the American South. This music is sung in four voice parts and preserves forms, devices and harmonic tastes that were swept away in Europe as classical choral and sacred music evolved – it has been described as ‘hillbillies singing Renaissance music’.

They sing from ‘The Sacred Harp’, which has been in print continuously since 1844. This music – part of the wider American shape note tradition – has a fascinating history. Like America itself, it has historical roots on this side of the Atlantic but it has undergone a sea - change. The many generations of development in the New World have transformed it into something unique and indisputably American.