June 18th 2011

Cry Parrot and Tracer Trails present

Tenniscoats
Muscles of Joy
& Tangles

at Garnethill Multicultural Centre
21 Rose Street, Garnethill, Glasgow G3 6RE

Tickets £7 +bf from www.wegottickets.com or Monorail Music.

‘Tokyo’s TENNISCOATS celebrate all that makes song vital in our collective conscious – making music magical with the simplest of means. Matching emotive live performance against delicately psychedelic folk songs, the duo of Saya and Takashi Ueno (assisted by a plethora of floating members/”special friends”) are one of the most compelling units in the Japanese pop underground.

Key catalysts within that scene, Saya and Ueno have performed with Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Cacoy, Puka Puka Brians, Yumbo and others. They’ve also spread their wings more widely collaborating with Lawrence English and the ROOM40 label in Australia and the UK, Tape/Häpna in Sweden, and the OneOne/CanCan hyper-pop juggernaut with Satomi and Greg of Deerhoof. Two Sunsets, their long-awaited record with The Pastels was released via Geographic/Domino in 2009 and followed by a UK tour.’ ~ Cafe Oto

MUSCLES OF JOY are one of Glasgow’s best-kept secrets – an instrument swapping, largely vocal-led all female ensemble. Evoking the similar liberal femininity found in bands such as The Slits, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Kleenex/Liliput and The Raincoats, the band’s musical aesthetic is loose, abstract and emotively driven. Earlier this year we were luckily enough to get a sneak peak of their upcoming mini LP: A glorious collection of accidental pop, freak-folk, post-punk and avante garde songs, each with their own magical identity.

TANGLES: A solo project from Ricky Egan – also a current member of Happy Particles and Neighbourhood Gout. Utilizing guitar, vocals, an old drum machine an arsenal of loop, flange, chorus and reverb pedals, he creates soft, floating, ethereal songs that evoke dreamy nostalgia. Not afraid to note his influences – Robert Fripp, Vangelis and Cocteau Twins being a central few – Tangles feels as much like a trip to the stars as a night in listening to your favourite records.

May 29th 2011

Tracer Trails presents

Farewell to Benni Hemm Hemm
featuring Benni Hemm Hemm (big band)
Withered Hand (solo)
The Second Hand Marching Band
Emily Scott
& The Pineapple Chunks
plus additional special guests!

at Pilrig St Paul’s Church Hall
Pilrig Street, Leith

Tickets £5 from www.wegottickets.com.

Our good friend Benedikt H. Hermannsson returns to Iceland in June after a three year sojourn in Edinburgh. We will miss him very much, and so will all the many excellent Scottish musicians with whom he has collaborated during his stay here. On Sunday night we’re all getting together in one of our favourite Edinburgh venues to say farewell. Come and join us!

April 14th 2011

WH66Trails presents
Lone Pigeon
& The Pictish Trail
at Pilrig St Paul’s Church Hall
Pilrig Street, Leith

Tickets £8 from www.wegottickets.com or Avalanche Records.

Wh666 (in association with Tracer Trails) are very pleased and proud to announce a rare Edinburgh show for reclusive pop maestro Gordon Anderson aka Lone Pigeon.

He is playing only a tiny handful of UK shows, promoting the official Domino release of his boxset, Time Capsule; with over 159 tracks (!) collected over 7 discs (!!)

….who knows what he will play?!

Support is provided by the ever-so-cuddly sounds of Fence Records favourite The Pictish Trail. Fresh from a tour with KT Tunstall, this Trail is well worth following.

April 21st 2011

Tracer Trails present
Alasdair Roberts & Friends
plus special guest Jock Duncan
at CCA
(Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow)
8PM

Tickets (£7/£5 unwaged + b.f.) available NOW from www.wegottickets.com, or on the door.

ALASDAIR ROBERTS (Drag City) is Swabian-born, Kilmahog-bred alumnus of Appendix Out and single-handed re-reinventor of the Scots ballad tradition. He’s a recent Wire cover star, and has been hailed as ‘a genius’ in fRoots for his treatment of traditional tunes as well as for his songwriting, which, drawing on mythic motifs and ancient tunings, seems to reflect and distort the ballads he sings.

A keen collaborator, already this year Alasdair has recorded a Gaelic language album with Lewis singer Mairi Morrison; as part of the Archive Trails project at the School of Scottish Studies he’s been creating new work based on the folk play Galoshins; he’s recorded the soundtrack for ‘Dighty Burn’, a short film by Michael Windle and Edward Summerton; and is currently writing and arranging new material to be recorded later in 2011.

Fresh from a tour in Finland and Estonia, at this homecoming show he’ll be previewing some of this new work as well as performing songs from his most recent album, Too Long In This Condition, alongside an all-star cast of band members and collaborators.

“Some of the weirdest wordplay this side of Damo Suzuki, Doom or Scott Walker.” (The Wire)

Born on the farm of Gelliebrae by New Deer in 1925, our very special guest JOCK DUNCAN is a national treasure twice over. As a singer of the muckle sangs and bothy ballads of his native Aberdeenshire, Jock is a tradition bearer of great authority. He is also the patriarch of a family that has made an immense contribution to the Scottish musical tradition.

A musician all his life, in 1996, at the age of seventy-one, Jock recorded his first album, Ye Shine Whar Ye Stan!, followed five years later by Tae the Green Woods Gaen. A singer who can both captivate a small fireside gathering and mesmerise a concert hall audience, Jock was awarded a Herald Angel for services to ballad singing at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2000.

Don’t miss this rare Glasgow performance from the 85-year-old folk hero!

April 1st 2011

Tracer Trails present
Arrington de Dionyso’s Malaikat dan Singa
+ The Leg
at Forest Hall (upstairs at the Forest Cafe), in Edinburgh
8PM

Tickets £5 on the door.

ARRINGTON DE DIONYSO makes trans-utopian world music for a world that exists in fever dreams and hallucinations! Using performance and visual art, he traverses the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll! Ecstasy vs. Madness!

OLD TIME RELIJUN being presently on hiatus, De Dionyso’s most recent project, MALAIKAT DAN SINGA, is a trance-punk outfit featuring bass clarinet, guitars and his trademark wild vocals (multi-spectral harmonic throatsinging combined with grunts, yelps, and barks) – this time, all sung in Indonesian. In Edinburgh he will be joined by BEN REYNOLDS on bass guitar and OWEN CURTIS WILLIAMS playing drums!

Plus maverick, panda-masked vom-rock from Tracer Trails favourites THE LEG – can we expect Moonlight Shadow??

PS We’re planning a vocal workshop with Arrington in Glasgow for April 2nd! Come through and get Tuvan with us!

March 31st 2011

Tracer Trails present
Arrington de Dionyso’s Malaikat dan Singa
+ Pyramidion
+ Trees
at Nice N Sleazy
(Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow)
8PM

Tickets £5 from www.wegottickets.com, Monorail Music (soon!) or on the door.

ARRINGTON DE DIONYSO (K Records) makes trans-utopian world music for a world that exists in fever dreams and hallucinations! Using performance and visual art, he traverses the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll! Ecstasy vs. Madness!

OLD TIME RELIJUN being presently on hiatus, De Dionyso’s most recent project, MALAIKAT DAN SINGA, is a trance-punk outfit featuring bass clarinet, guitars and his trademark wild vocals (multi-spectral harmonic throatsinging combined with grunts, yelps, and barks) – this time, all sung in Indonesian. In Glasgow he will be joined by BEN REYNOLDS on bass guitar and ALASDAIR ROBERTS playing drums!

Support at this show comes from PYRAMIDION – teutonic euphonics / semi-improvised kraut-driven sonics featuring members of Moon Unit, Scrim, Boom Edan, Cheer and Lanterns – plus rootsy vibes branching off into woody tones from openers TREES.

PS We’re planning a vocal workshop with Arrington in Glasgow for April 2nd! Get Tuvan with us! Details t.b.a. very soon.

Waulking Song from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

Following our feature in the magazine, The Wire have been running a series of items relating to Archive Trails on their website.

Emily selected seven online sound archives for their Portal series, and then Aileen chose two Archive clips to be streamed – one audio, one video – this film of Kate Nicolson and friends singing a waulking song, and a brilliant recording of Mary Morrison singing pibroch and canntaireachd. Hear them at www.thewire.co.uk.

June 2nd 2011

Tracer Trails present
Charles Hayward (This Heat)
The One Ensemble
Capillary Action
+ RM Hubbert
at CCA 5
(Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow)
7PM

Tickets £6 from www.wegottickets.com, Monorail Music (soon!) or on the door.

Drummer, singer, conceptualist and composer CHARLES HAYWARD has a long and illustrious career spanning progressive rock, industrial, heavy fusion, minimalism, and the current British experimental and Avant Garde scenes.

For more than 30 years he’s played and recorded solo and with bands like THIS HEAT, CAMBERWELL NOW and the later incarnation of MASSACRE with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith, among countless others.

Committed to song ‘but the shapes have to change’, his current one-man show is an intoxicating mix of percussive attack, swirling electronics and lyrical fragment collage.

Support from…

THE ONE ENSEMBLE: a curious and strident brew of Eastern European folk, chamber music, a pinch of Robert Wyatt and some kind of earthy psychedelic primitivism.

CAPILLARY ACTION: an American all-acoustic avant-pop quintet, once described in The Wire as “Prokofiev re-arranging the Red Krayola.”

RM HUBBERT: ex-El Hombre Trajeado guitarist doing an instrumental acoustic sketch based around flamenco / samba rhythms and structures.

Archive Trails is in The Wire this month!

The photo, taken by Sandy Paton, is of Hamish Henderson recording Gaelic storyteller Ali Dall (Blind Alec Stewart) in Sutherland, 1958.

Peter Stampfel and Jeffrey Lewis played a sold-out show in Mono last night; this morning John Cavanagh came round to record a session with them for his radio show, Soundwave on Radio Six International. Three songs were sung and Peter explained why he looks so happy when he’s playing music. In this photograph Jeff is tuning up for ‘Black Leather Swamp Nazi’.