Upset The Rhythm presents…
EVIL SWORD
SHAKE CHAIN
SPLIT APEX
Saturday 5 April
New River Studios, 199 Eade Rd, Harringay, London, N4 1DN
7.30pm | £8 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/B1970de44fb0
EVIL SWORD are Kate Ferencz and Ben Furgal from Philadelphia, USA. Their chaotic live shows combine elements of noise, cryptic metal overtones, performance art, and gallows humor and feature macabre props, flashing lights, stage sets and costumes. There are hardly any instruments in this group, but they make such a racket you’d never know it. The bass and the percussion sound like they’re having a great time, telling each other jokes. Then the words come in and it all locks together in these strange, hypnotic rhythms. I just listen to the stories and laugh and cry and get scared and wonder what they were ever thinking.
Recent album ‘Basket Fever’ (Magic Pictures, 2023) features electrocuted bells, backwards parts, rusty horns; I’m pretty sure I even heard a clarinet in there somewhere. There’s this one part where it all seems to come back around, where they took some gang vocals from the very first demo they ever recorded and slowed it way down. When they first started; I thought they were some goofy kids making music about the end of the world, back when that seemed a little further away, like it was going to be fun. They were all laughing and making these funny ghost sounds, but now everyone’s older and the ghosts are real, a great whoosh of bygone spirits and cold air. It’s bone chilling. There’s plenty to be upset about, but it’s not really an Evil Sword song until that grimace has been twisted up into a smile.
https://evilsword.bandcamp.com/album/basket-fever
SHAKE CHAIN have been busy demolishing audiences and expectations for the best part of the last five years. Vocalist Kate Mahony sets that standard by anything from crawling through the audience’s legs in a bright yellow raincoat to crying and washing her hands in a nearby toilet, as the rest of the band start the set. The four-piece from London are completed by Robert Eyres (Synth/Guitar), Chris Hopkins (Bass/Synth/Samples) and Joe Fergey (Drums). Shake Chain are built of nervy bass lines, twitchy guitars that jolt and jerk and tack sharp drums, overridden by screeching vocal slurs and sampled television. Kate’s singing is a unique embrace of flights of atonal fancy, head-first repetition and ecstatic frenzy. Opinion-dividing arguably, but singular in making Shake Chain dauntingly brilliant. The band’s debut album ’Snake Chain’ was released by Upset The Rhythm.
https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/snake-chain
SPLIT APEX are Jussi Palmusaari (guitar, electronics and percussion) and Peter Blundell (voice and bass). On their self-titled cassette (out now) release they combine restless sonic textures, oddball phrasing within barely-contained song structures held together by moth-woven threads. Seemingly governed by an unknowable gravitational pull that tugs hither and yon, the duo lays out their statement of intent through a brief suite of intimate nocturnes. The release marks the first work for Palmusaari since leaving his native Finland where he played with the band, Preesens, in the late-90s/early-00s. For Blundell, this new project exists adjacent to his current work with Dominic Goodman as Komare and previous endeavours in the band, Mosquitoes.
https://tinyurl.com/n8cf2jhf
