This month in that magazine!
Many thanks to Nick Southgate.
oMMM visual adventure at videodrome
and entirely deservedly too!
Will Clarke’s ace hypnotic video for Molly landing at the top spot on the video section of Germany’s awesome Electronic Beats online resource.
Category: EP12 - oMMM /
Slow Listener at Dark Entries
“At the same time there is the disturbing thought that, in the most unexpected moment, another disaster may occur.”
GREAT review by Paul Van de Gehuchte at the Dutch website.
Category: EP13 - Slow Listener /
Observances at Clubbing in Spain
Clubbing in Spain have got behind a bunch of Pylon releases so we’re mega-grateful to get support for Ed’s debut which has a typically nuts google translation, my favourite fragment being “atmospheres maintained and tear vocation”.
Read the full review here.
Category: EP16 - Shape Worship /
Shape Worship at Juno
“Observances is an exciting release, one that announces a novel and creative force in dance music.”
Great review by Tom Banham here.
Category: EP16 - Shape Worship /
City of Tales at Punkonline
1st City of Tales review up at PunkOnline by Gaz.
“So this really is an album of two halves. One I wanted to finish and the other I wanted to last forever. Talk about split opinions – something I hope the band of Holy Joy will continue to do for a long time to come.”
Category: EP19 - Band of Holy Joy /
New Release: Band of Holy Joy – City of Tales volume 1 & 2
a VERY FEW limited edition double cassette packs of this are still available on pre-order with digital (including 20 page PDF booklet) available from Monday and a special poster edition to follow in the future…
TRAUMA/DRAMA EAST/SOUTH LONDON 1985 – 2013
FRAGILE AND PRECARIOUS AND DON’T KNOW HOW TO ARTICULATE THE DISGUST AND WONDER…
Chance manifests in the shape of a black swan choked on dirty cash…
Summer 2012, London: the hyperreal cityscape seems permanently lodged in a fresco forged from David Peace’s worst nightmares. Anxiously compelled by their own relentlessly restless daemon Band of Holy Joy ditch the streets and hit the studio to sculpt a trash electronic sequel to their lost never-released 1985 cassette City of Tales. Brechtian cabaret is displaced by cheap Casio shamanism, beat machine, string screech, found sound, an extended scream – abject fury and world-weary vulnerability spun from endless late-night orbitals, riding the 149, their own strung-out history never once quelling a sense of murky misadventure. Johny Brown, Chris Brierly, James Stephen Finn, Jon Clayton, Inga Tillere. Ladies and Gentlemen we present: Band of Holy Joy – City of Tales (Volume 2).
Things get weird. Long departed original Holy Joy member, film-maker Brett Turnbull clatters fevered email: a discovery… a cassette. From way back. It’s a near won thing – a crack salvage job (tape baked in the oven rendering the sound into deformed bad-acid Hawkwind, tampons applied to the playback heads hand- held in place to reverse the process over one long night. Rider: REVOX, bottle of whiskey and some isopropyl alcohol – a deep labour of love to keep the speed from wavering). Songs saved, so what have we here?
Summer 1985, London: Brett, Big John, Martine, Max Davis and Johny Brown. Original JUNK shop mode and the darkest dark, Holy Joy holed-up in a New Cross squat puking soundscape, lost voices, cheap organs, slithering basslines, stuttering drum machines: pure drama and trauma a go-go. The similarities startling, the differences intoxicating. The 1985 model enacts a younger chemically fuelled pre drug-damaged séance – disturbing elements of psychotic glee lashing out within the fury, the kind that comes when you open the portal for the first time – when there’s unspoken hope behind the exorcism. The youngest member of the band, James Stephen Finn steps in to curate and a path is trodden to Brixton to master. What the fuck?! How can this be? Ladies and Gentlemen we present… Band of Holy Joy – City of Tales (Volume 1).
We get excited. We think cassette double pack. 100 only. Inga Tillere visualises stark fetish – hand prints booklets out of recycled 20 quid notes, ties up booklet-postcard bundles with the original tape. Business cards are made. Tales nailed.
2 volumes of disgust of bile of tenderness of lives lived, fucked over, redeemed, eternally lost . 3 decades of unflinching vision – Accumulated Accounts of the financial jackboot making miseries of mavericks. The song remains the same whilst Capital Gains. Time to balance the books redress history really LOOK at the food at the end of that fork see the Naked Lunch.
Band of Holy Joy live here and tweet here.
Category: EP19 - Band of Holy Joy /
NEW RELEASE: Shape Worship – Observances EP
Dropping on the 28th January on 12″ vinyl (with dload code) and digital but you can buy here now…
“Lush & mesmeric” according to Dummy Magazine here (streaming the entirely magisterial Quilt)
Written, recorded and produced by Ed Gillett, 08/2011 – 01/2012
in London and Chicago.
Vocals on Lavender by Hannah Gillett & Isobel Cope.
Mastering by Brian Pyle (Ensemble Economique).
Artwork and design by Kyle Gregg: http://www.kylegregg.co.uk/
Shape Worship is the solo project of Ed Gillett and Observances is his official debut release after a couple of tantalising homemade demo EP’s. In his own words, Ed is interested in “the creative use of repetition, open collaboration, the enjoyment of mistakes and sub-bass.”
Taking broken 2-step beats and early 90’s techno (think of those early Black Dog Production 12’s) Shape Worship exists in a richly expansive dreamscape – warmly haunting and strangely benign. This is a gently maximalist universe where machine rhythms mix with organic texture (glazed bells, strange strings, crackling sticks), hall-of-mirrors vocals and wide-eyed synth melodies.
Although Shape Worship never loses sight of the dancefloor these are beatific sonic mandalas – complex shifting structures causing temporal dislocation and unravelling emotion – you start here and now you are here and now you are somewhere else. I come back to them over and over again as I never can quite remember what happened the time before and also… this is healing music, a balm that bends the bodybrain whilst protecting it. And if I’m making it sound all too gentle you’ve got me wrong – there’s pure disorientation from start to finish – it’s just you’ll come out a better person for it.
Shape Worship lives here.
Category: EP16 - Shape Worship /
