Three concerts marking the 15th anniversary of the eclectic Domino record label, worldwide home to Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Lightspeed Champion, The Kills and a host of iconoclastic and innovative artists.
Sat 4 October 7.30pm
Liquid Liquid + Junior Boys
Tickets £15/20/25
Produced by the Barbican
The first ever London show by the famed New York post-punk band – originally active in active 1980-83 – who carved out their own niche based on combining heavy grooves and funk influences with a punk/garage band approach. Their original records were pressed in very limited quantities on the 99 Label; their three EPs on the label acquired cult status and their music was frequently sampled. Famously, their classic bass line from the seminal track Cavern on the Optimo EP provided the foundation for Melle Mel's White Lines (Don't Do It), one of early hip-hop's biggest hits.
Liquid Liquid's Avant Garde spirit, echoing vocals and tribal beats have seeped into the sounds of Animal Collective and LCD Soundsystem amongst others, while one of the UK's hippest clubs, Glasgow's Optimo is named after them. The group has reformed after Domino re-released the original EPs and included 10 previously unreleased bonus tracks and live recordings.
‘A churning, clattering groove that is neurotically urgent’ - The Guardian
Support comes from Canada’s electro-pop duo of Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus, Junior Boys, whose new CD will be released on Domino in the new year.
Clubstage: Optimo DJs, whose new ‘home listening’ CD is released on Domino on October.
Sun 5 October at LSO St Luke’s 7.30pm
Juana Molina + Max Tundra
Tickets £15/17.50
Produced by the Barbican
The almost unclassifiable Juana Molina started out as a comedian in her native Argentina and has gone on to be a songwriter and performer of great inventiveness and individuality. Her music has been described as ‘like Astrid Gilberto undergoing dream theory analysis’ – for beneath some superficial Latin American effects lie highly original and discordant phrases and rhythmic patterns, creating a beautiful body of work full of repetition, rich harmony and beguiling mood shifts. Molina uses her voice as an instrument in the most abstract sense; live, flanked by a bank of synthesizers and delay effects, her performances are a three-way exchange between the artist, the audience and whatever the moods dictate. Juana’s glorious new ‘Un Dia’ album will be released on the 6th of October, the day after the St Luke’s performance.
Max Tundra – originally known as Ben Jacobs – was a self-taught pianist who, with the help of a Commodore Amiga 500 home computer and some cheap music software, began to explore the world of electronic composition. Triumphing over his meagre equipment, he released a single, Children At Play on Warp Records – the label having picked up on the lo-fi instrumental excursion when it arrived as a demo tape. Thus began a diverse and eclectic musical career in which time signatures, genres and instrumentation have been given a thorough shake-up. His debut album Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be and his subsequent singles for Domino have given the world a set of dense, multi-textured, emotionally-charged tunes, each of which has a different story to tell. His new opus, ‘Parallax Error Beheads You’ will be released on Monday the 13th of October.
Mon 6 October 8.00pm
Tricky + Wild Beasts + Skream
Tickets £15/20/25
Produced by the Barbican in association with Metropolis
‘Knowle West is where I was born. It's a white ghetto. I didn't know what racism was until I left. My family’s mixed race, so we don't see colour. But all of us there had something in common… we were poor. I realised that I'd never written anything for these kind of people’ – Tricky on the inspiration for his latest album.
Producer, rapper and composer Tricky, originally christened Adrian Thaws, is widely seen as one of the architects of trip-hop, though he professes to hate the term. In his teenage years he hung around with a Bristol sound system called the Wild Bunch, who later developed into the group Massive Attack. He rapped on Massive Attack’s famed Blue Lines album in 1991, and later met the honey-voiced Martina Topley-Bird, featured vocalist on his debut album Maxinquaye, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize and voted Album of the Year by NME in 1995. Tricky’s trademark sound owes much to his highly individualistic welding together of apparently incongruous slices of early hip-hop, 80s rock and plastic pop, as found on his recent ‘Knowle West Boy’ album, now available on Domino.
