Sullow and The Greater London Banjo Trio (featuring members of Shovel Dance Collective and Milkweed) join together for an evening of experimental folk music.
Doors 7pm
Tickets £10-12 Sliding Scale (NOTAFLOF)
During the early years of the 20th century there were up to 100 banjo manufacturers in Britain – most of them in London - ranging from individual craftsmen to factories employing scores of workers. By the 1990s only the devotees of the B.M.G. Federation, the Banjo Times and Banjo Broadsheet, and Reading Banjo Festival kept the dying flame flickering. The old London Banjo Club, by now renamed the Westminster Banjo Circle, was also in extremis. In January 1992 the Banjo Circle began publishing their journal and decided that the way forward was to present the banjo to the public at every opportunity. To this end they commended holding regional banjo rallies. Thirty years later, The Greater London Banjo Trio was formed.
Sullow are an improvising trio of intersecting Venn membership with the Banjo Trio: Jacken Elswyth, Daniel S. Evans and Joshua Barfoot of Shovel Dance Collective. Inflected and informed by traditional music, they negotiate an improvisation that has been variably described as ‘farmyard’ and ‘rodeo’. Repeated patterns rise and fall in quick attacks, short decays and dense bursts of momentary composition.
Hedgehog is a Manchester based quintet plumbing the depths of neurodivergent post-folk. Listeners will spot the sounds of noise, free improvisation and children's music, hiding within the cracks of poetry and song.
It is a soundtrack to the laughter, love, heartbreak, and hunger of personhood, carefully excreted by saxophonist/singer/guitarist Louise Brown, talker/glockenspieler/guitar El Garrard, violinist/bassist/emailer Arthur Bickers, guitarist/pedal machine Flynn Mchardy and drummer/drummer James Hawdale.
The result teeters on the boundary between eloquent portrayals of humane and natural beauty and the collapse of language in favour of pure visceral expression.