A two day residency from experimental songwriter Kiran Leonard. With solo and full band performances on both nights. Friday features support from The Sprigs, and Saturday will feature Olive Wreath.
Doors 7pm
Tickets: £10-14 Sliding Scale
Two Day Pass: £20-25 Sliding Scale
Kiran Leonard’s unique and ambitious body of work spans more than a decade of releases on labels such as Memorials of Distinction, Moshi Moshi and Them There, limited-run noisy DIY fare, and everything in between. The adolescent guitar/chamber prog of early records such as Bowler Hat Soup (2013) and Grapefruit (2016) earned praise from Pitchfork, BBC 6Music, The Guardian and The Quietus. More recent work has seen Kiran attempt to synthesise interests in situated/home recording, collage, his live practice, and a combination of songcraft with graphic scores, as documented on the monumental (i.e. two-hour-long) and abstract Trespass on Foot (2021), and River Holds Peace, Some Live (2023), a collection of new and old material arranged for an ensemble of multiple electric guitars, cittern and double bass.
Kiran’s newest LP is Real Home, his first album of songs with choruses in half a decade, which in spring 2024 was named by The Guardian as one of the best albums of the year so far. In April he released Small Brown Bed/With You Waltz, a double CD compiling live recordings of his newest group, the so-called No Tailgate Group. Named for an unfortunate car accident sustained by the band while exiting the A40 last November, the band features members of caroline and Shovel Dance Collective.
Both nights at the Horse Hospital will open with a solo performance by Kiran, followed by a TBA support act in the middle, and then a full group performance.
PRAISE FOR “REAL HOME” AND LIVE SHOWS
“Leonard rather pre-empted a swathe of other British artists playing his kind of theatrical chamber-pop (Black Country, New Road; caroline; Blue Bendy, etc), and the timbre and direction of his voice, flitting from perch to perch, remains unforgettably gorgeous. Real Home is one of his most easily lovable LPs, full of beautiful string arrangements and stirring dynamics, but there’s nothing ordinary about the directions his songs take.” - The Guardian (The best albums of 2024 so far)
“There's always a sense that a deluge of emotion and noise is right around the corner, the unabashed romanticism of 'My Love, Let's Take The Stage Tonight' or a disorienting decay into abstracted noise that closes the final song 'He Had Always Led'. Inspired by the Greater Manchester-born musician's move to London, it captures the city's great overwhelm in all its beguiling brilliance, volatility, fitfulness and flux.” - The Quietus
“An album of dizzying detail, delivered in a manner more open and accessible than pretty much anything in Leonard’s excellent back catalogue. It is spiky and literate and humane, and although it navigates some extraordinarily varied terrain, it never strays too far from its theme or from its ultimately melodic musical core. Real Home is an object lesson in combining experimental substance with accessible style.” - KLOF Mag on ‘Real Home’
“Kiran Leonard and his band nail down their place as one of the best live bands around. His new record Real Home is the best thing I've heard all year…good God, him and his band are incredible tonight…The sound has the dexterity and angular playing of math-rock but is so much more loose and ragged, with a swooning Dirty Three romanticism at its core. Leonard himself is a livewire presence at the centre of it all, gnashing, wide-eyed, totally consumed by the song. He has this propensity for wrenching his body and face with every syllable, as if every line is being torn from the very centre of him…One can only hope this new immediacy means his work finally gets its dues at a broader level. Whether it does or it doesn’t, Leonard remains a class apart in the British music scene, and his band one of the best you could hope to see.” - ***** The Skinny (live review)
The Sprigs, bursting from the cold damp earth and into the light for a short while. Slap-dash free-folk from south of the river Thames with one CD-r released via Infant Tree in early 2021, and not much else to show or tell. Characterised by Time is Away as a ‘Beautifully scrappy meeting point between diaristic real-world clatter and a particular strain of folk-pop romanticism’.
“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”
Olive Wreath is watching a picture-in-picture livestream of the back of your head. Olive Wreath is based in London and working on her music. Olive Wreath has left her keys at your place. Olive Wreath blends cursive electronica with a voice from outside and the scraping on the door. Olive Wreath is dragging herself around like a sick dog.
