Two Thousand and Heng

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:21:32 -0800

We're here, we made it. After scraping through the last desperate months of 2009, The Audacious Art Experiment has finally blasted into it's second Gregorian earth decade. If i dared to sit down and think about where this all started, where it's taken us and changes we've all been through during, i'd probably have to take a week off work. However, to focus too much on the past is to not see the future hurtling towards you. After saying in the last post that the 'musical cows in our shed aren't really mooing at the moment', it seems that a massive swagger of a fox has just barrel arsed right in that barn and started whipping up a hell of a hoe down. We appear to have bands again and those bands seem to want to play gigs. Here's a bit if a run down of whats cooking in our kitchen and also a few things we're enjoying cooking too.

CRASH OF RHINOS



Putting the midlands back on our musical map is Crash Of Rhinos. For reference sake they feature nearly every member of The Little Explorer and The Jesus Years in some way or other, though it's a reference they'll soon be shaking off as they're very much a band in their own right. Genre freaks will pop em somewhere around driving melodic punk/emo still but there's something else brewing inside them i don't think even they've fully nailed down yet. The innocent, twidly, downy fluff of their past projects has been shed, giving way to a massive musky flowing mane. Manifested in the form of 2 guitar, 2 bass, 1 drummer and 5 toasty vocals, Crash are doing a small tour with Wooderson in February before slying off to Italy to record an album with the guys from Fine Before You Came.  Fingers crossed it should be out by spring, until then you'll just have to catch em live if you wanna hear em.

CrashFace
MyCrash


ELK



Elk are very much a new band, made out of a few tattered old hats. Over the last couple of years, each stitch of these poor boys creative lives had carefully and maticulously been unpicked, the various components (brim, ribbon, cardboard, wicker, whatever) were sent back to the factories in Luton and Stockport and largely forgotten about. That was until recently, when Glenn and Ritch (who the more astute of you might have noticed, played the characters of the same name in the bands Andy, Glenn and Ritch and The Green Acre) met up with their old friend Tom and decided to dig out the dusty craft box. For months on end they practiced their art in a secret location. Some say it was a disused pigment factory in Lincolnshire, once famed for it's ability to make the natural resource known as 'white'. Others hark at this and state they've merely been 'dossing' in a ramshackle unit off the A180, with only Super Nintendo and cans of Tennents for inspiration. Where they craft and how they do it, no one will ever know. What we do know is that they are about to emerge, all three of them, proudly wearing the largest, coolest and most exotic top hat you have ever fucking seen.

One True Elk
FaceElk
ElkSpace


WOODERSON



Lets face it. They're a bunch of idiots. Vanessa Feltz once wrote in the sectarian newspaper The Daily Mail "Wooderson are the evil that lurks on the shop fronts of every town in this country. They're the kids that trod on the back of your shoes as you walked home from school, pausing only to hear your plea for mercy before kicking your lunch box across the green like a '94 issue coca cola football". In parts i agree with Vannesa and generally wish they weren't my friends, but like the smell of your farts or the town on your birth certificate, they are what they are and they're never going to change. Wooderson have been grafting away now for what seems like a small lifetime and some of that effort seems like it might finally be starting to pay off. The EP they've been recording since autumn last year is finally about to surface on Sea Owl Recording and i can tell you it's gonna have been well worth the wait. They've got a shed load of gigs coming up including a short tour with Crash Of Rhinos in February, you can check them all out at the bottom. Hell knows they might even manage a new release for us by 2011! Check out their new song 'Clive Mendonca, Nigel Jemson' on the first of what hopefully will be a load of BRITISH WILDLIFE PODCASTS. Your mum.

WooderBook
MySon

RYAN GIGGS

As much as we try to whip up a trifle on the internet, there's no substitute for getting things going in the form of bands playing live in your face and ears. Here's a list of whats going down in the next couple of months.

Sat 16th Jan - The Constitution, London - Ox Scapula - Rip This Joint - More
Fri 22nd Jan - The Cremorne, Sheffield - Fast Point - Deal With It - Cold Ones
Sat 23rd Jan - The Stockroom, Sheffield - Bilge Pump - Coal Train - Crash Of Rhinos - Elk
Fri 5th Feb - The Stockroom, Sheffield - Wooderson w/ Rotary Ten
Sat 13th Feb - The Fenton, Leeds - Elk
Sat 13th Feb - Venue TBC, Canterbury - Crash Of Rhinos - Wooderson
Sun 14th Feb - The Fighting Cocks, Kingston - Crash of Rhinos - Wooderson - Saturday's Kids
Mon 15th Feb - Tiger Lounge, Manchester - Crash Of Rhinos - Wooderson
Tues 16th Feb - Cardigan Arms, Leeds - Crash Of Rhinos - Wooderson - Saturday's Kids

Right, this took far too long to write as it is so i'm gonna have to leave some other bits. Until then, lets all just get a little bit excited about the new Field Music Album and hope Grimsby Town muster a win this year.

Field Music - Them That Do Nothing Video

Weee aaaare evil,
Luke.


*Header photo by Matt Baker*
*Wooderson photo by John Mohajer*