B Is For Blog

Manchester always assumes a new guise when the evenings begin to draw in and the Christmas markets arrive. The city is a bundle of activity right now (I’ll post a round-up of impending events coming soon), and preparations/fundraisers for our instalment of Ladyfest have been well underway for months.

From November 7th until November 9th, The Zion Arts Centre in Hulme will play host to boundless amounts of friendly carnage and positive (audio) vibrations with music from stalwarts The Slits, Ladyfest veterans The Duloks, Truecore favourites The Bobby McGees, local nutpots Hotpants Romance, ex-Bis laydee Manda Rin and Plan B darlin’ Envy.

There’ll be workshops a-plenty to embroil yerself in, with talks on DIY music promotion, zine-making, self defence and car maintenance, alongside film installations (they’re still taking entries, budding directors!), visual and performance art.

If you want to make and do rather than just go, there’s still time to get involved: Ladyfest general meetings have been taking place every Wednesday for the last few weeks and there are still ones to come on October 29th and November 5th.

For more information (and details of how to help out), head here.

Two fascinating new records unearthed by Drag City-affiliated labels, both those that could fit the ‘outsider’ bracket, if that is your wont. The first is a collection by one JTIV, aka John Henry Timmis IV, a cult musician from Chicago who reportedly had a pretty tough time of it (short summary: put in an institution by his mother, lived on the streets, struggled with drug and alcohol abuse) but still got it together enough to cut a handful of self-funded records in the early Eighties. (more…)

Galvanised is a London-based noisefest of ‘other music’ and sound art that’s now in its second year. For 2008 it’s all about (a) drumming and (b) audiovisual mashups of various kinds - righteous pastimes both. Here’s what’s going on:

Tuesday 7 October
Curated by Kevin Quigley (ICA’s The Experiment), an evening of drum-orientated acts, with five groups of musicians exploring percussive and drumming composition. Café Oto will be adapted to form a visual installation with five uniquely lit performance areas. Acts include headliner Charles Hayward (This Heat,Camberwell Now), Temperatures (Thurston Moore’s favorite London based improv electronic/drum duo), Blood Moon (Manchester’s Cage-ian free rock drum duo) A middle sex (Manchester’s This Heat-inspired proto-punk band) Bromancer (London’s Chaos vs Cosmos spawned primeval drumming). (more…)

Soul Jazz Records are to publish Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture this Autumn, a new book documenting the birth of one of the most important, innovative sounds of recent times. Billing itself as a “visual history”, through the photography and words of author Beth Lesser it details the creatively explosive meeting of politics, technology, drugs, fashion, and violence that characterised Jamaican music in the early Eightiess. Artists such as Prince Jammy, Nitty Gritty, Gregory Isaacs, and Eek-A-Mouse all make appearances.

The book will be followed out the blocks by a new Soul Jazz CD compilation charting similar territory.