Event Details:
A heady 4 hr cocktail of Electro-House-Techno-Acid-Disco with a smattering of classic 80’s pop. Tickets on sale www.wayahead.com/

HANGEDUP
POLMO POLPO
ELIZABETH ANKA VAJAGIC
+ JUST A FIRE (ex members of Hoover/June of 44/Sweep the leg
Johnny)

The label’s travelling showcase will encompass the sublime maudlin of Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, Hanged Up’s see-sawing rhythm outfit and the powerbook reconnaissance of Polmo Polpo, joined on this tour with a full organic band arrangement. With the showcase rotating bill and dynamic sense of participation there’s never been a better time to check out the next generation of artists on this most exquisite of record labels.

HANGEDUP has released two stunning albums on Constellation. The duo mixes punk, improv and European folk influences to form blistering instrumental music for drums and viola. Eric Craven is an incredibly inventive and kinetic drummer, beating out rhythms very much in the spirit of Dog Faced Hermans and The Ex, and incorporating percussion implements of his own design to fashion a totally distinctive sound. Genevieve Heistek rigs up her viola with looping pedals and bi-amplification to create huge swirling layers of chugging rhythms and dense drones. Hangedup have toured Europe twice in 2003, including an enthusiastically-received and critically-acclaimed opening slot for godspeed you! black emperor, and an appearance at the K-RAA-K festival with Tony Conrad, where they were proclaimed by many to be the festival highlight. This truly unique band puts on an amazing live show and rocks very hard.

POLMO POLPO released its debut record on Constellation in the fall of 2003, after a string of self-released 12″s. Using samplers, filter banks and various live instruments (slide guitar, accordion, double bass), Polmo Polpo creates full-spectrum drones and adds layers of melodic playing, resulting in a highly-evocative and emotionally-resonant hybrid of electronic and organic elements. With an approach to saturated sound similar to Fennesz and Pan Sonic, Polmo Polpo has a distinctive sense of melody anchored to submerged, pulsing beats. This will be the first European tour for this critically-celebrated artist, and will include a live band.

ELIZABETH ANKA VAJAGIC is a singer and songwriter with a raw, uncompromising voice in the same league as Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Siouxsie Sioux. She delivers a true gothic folk/blues music, with modern dissonances and noise textures, and is set to release her brilliant debut record on Constellation in spring 2004. Fans of everything from Cat Power to Mazzy Star will make a serious connection with this intimate, cathartic music.

LIGHTNING BOLT (USA)
ENVY (JAPAN)
ESQUILAX

The future of music has arrrived! Lighting Bolt will be landing in Birmingham while in between shows at this years ATP festival. With just drums and bass, trainspotters will name check similarly staffed outfits like the Ruins and Godehead Silo.

Prepare yourself for much moreÉ The massive, chunky noise violence that emits from bassist Brian Gibson and drummer Brian Chippendale onstage makes for an intensely visceral experience. Chippendale’s vocals transmit via a contact mic rigged to his mouth inside a weathered, striped ski mask. Their amps alone are about the height and size of a large-scale yurt, and when they’re turned up all the way, the sound is both hypnotic and physically exhausting.

Noise and commotion, dance floor fury and intracite symphonies to washing machine squeaks. New music, guarenteed to include every citizen of Earth in a scrambling race to the finish line of complete sound! It is rare the sounds of the future are so appealing to all life forms. Their hyper-humanoid percussion matched with bowel loosening bass is sure to please.

Lightning Bolt has played with folks like Melt Banana, Ruins, Locust and Arab on Radar and share a similar sense of uber-absurd rockulism.

for further info check:
http://laserbeast.com/

ENVY
For over 11 years, they have been creating the most intense fusion of emotive ballads with ferocious teeth gritting screaming hardcore. They have created their own sound with their speedy guitars, loud pounding bombastic drums, heavy screams in Japanese, and pummeling fretless bass lines. Think somewhere between Yaphet Kotto to Mogwai.

ESQUILAX
“Shiny party plastic new wave avante-garde pop terror group” – possessed by Devo, raised by Agoraphobic Nosebleed

HECKER
PITA
HIAZ
RUSSELL HASWELL
VD_MOTH

Event Details:
The Austrian label MEGO started in 1994. Regarded as one of the most respected label’s of its time, due to the extreme effort that is put into packaging and artwork, as well as a glorious disregard for being pigeonholed into any one genre… It is the aim that Mego releases and ideas should be collected and experienced for many years to come and not be seen as some fodder for hopeless fashion victimised disc jockeys.

Four MEGO artists present real-time material at this event. Label boss Peter Rehberg [PITA] states: “its a game of 2 halves really: One half improvised ‘in patch’ audio work outs using SC 2.9 and 2.10 patches developed by Andreas Pieper for Mego, one half playback and manipulation of own and other persons audio works”. The Britsh Artists Russell Haswell uses generative audio software to create audio so physical as to provide a collapsing sculptural like experience. The German Florian Hecker [HECKER] Uses the Computer Hard and Software enviroments, live demonstrations include a broadband mix of historical as well as most recent computer synthesis and file manipulating techniques. [HIAZ] A founding member of Farmersmanual a pan-European, multisensory disturbance conglomerate that had a stream of concerts and performative events since 1995, continuously expanding their performance practice towards environments where the public becomes an essential part of the work. His latest work focuses on creating synesthetical experiences presenting an interconnected, holistic view of the world by cross activating sensual stimuli.

For further info check – www.mego.at

CAPSULE IS A MEMBER OF THE LOGARYHTHM CONSORTIUM, A NEW NATIONWIDE INITIATIVE FOR ELECTRONIC MUSIC
http://www.logarhythm.org.uk — 

DJ FOOD (Ninjatunes)
PRAM (Domino Records)
DEGO (4 Hero)
SCREE

films and cake

Event Details:
Capsule and Leftfoot present an evening of music, film and cake as part of the Birmingham Screen Festival 04 spread over 3 rooms at the Custard Factory. Top live acts and audio-visual experiments, shorts and music videos courtesy of 7 inch cinema, and an exhibition of beermats from some of the country’s top designers and illustrators.

DJ FOOD (Ninjatunes) with a live 3-deck remix of psychedelic classic HEAD;

Birmingham retro maestros PRAM (Domino Records) perform an instrumental set with specially-prepared visuals;

DEGO (4 Hero) Leftfield music pioneer DJs: Adam Regan/Smile/Capsule Girls/Dr.lies

Films include: Cuts from the new Ninjatunes DVD ‘ZEN TV’; Local mash-up collective PIRATEHAIRWAVES premiere their jazz odyssey; Latest work from promo whizkid RUBEN FLEISCHER; Graphics and animation from Birmingham and beyond.

Exhibition: 95mm2

Capsule presents 95mm2 a collection of 8 beer mat designs produced by the following artists: Steven Barich, Chu, Tom Gauld, Sadim Habib, Andrew James Jones, Ben Javens, Al Murphy, Otonashi (artists collective). Since the first series of 95mm2 in 2002 the Medicine bar has expanded into a range of venues under the Art and Music umbrella, this second series with be exhibited across all 4 venues. The artists have all been selected with their individual relevance in mind, each are a reflection of the alternating activities and audiences that pass by and take place within the various venues. Designs from each artist have been reproduced as beer mats, a limited run of 500 per design will be “exhibited” within The Bulls Head (Moseley/B’ham), Medicine Bar / The Kitchen (Birmingham) The Halfway House (Wolverhampton) for at least one month. Each of the venues as exhibition spaces obviously provide sphysical restraints on the type of work that can be displayed. 95mm2 offers a creative response to exhibiting artworks in non-gallery environments.

Steven Barich – USA Chu -UK Tom Gauld – UK Sadim Habib – UK Andre James Jones – UK Ben Javens – UK Al Murphy – UK Otonashi (artists collective) ®¢ UK/Japan 
 

 MONO (Japan)
BLACK GALAXY (ex scorn/napalm death)

Event Details:
Mono. What these four, angular Japanese twenty-somethings in thrift-store garb unleashed on the perfectly unkempt gathering of hipsters at Tonic that night was a pure, unadulterated exercise in ritual guitar execution. Bloodless, yes, but no less scarring. Knees buckled, teeth rattled and eyes rolled back in perfectly coiffed heads as a musical apocalypse-a magma throw-rug-was draped over the audience. Even as members of the crowd tried to jam clinched fists into their ears to muffle the cattle call of Armageddon, they couldn’t bring themselves to leave the tiny hall. If this was death-or deafness at the least-then they were satisfied having the soaring, battering, bone-jarring guitars of mono supply that final ringing in their ravaged ears.

When a band from Japan detonates the place like Mono did that night, certain parallels are unavoidable. So here goes: Mono are not the bomb, they are a bomb.

Formed in 2000, Mono is Takaakira Goto (guitar), Tamaki (bass), Yasunori Takada (drums) and Yoda (guitar). Their first full-length record, Under the Papal Tree, was touched by the hand of John Zorn, who put the disc out on his Tzadik label.Papal Tree found a home amongst the post-rock minions of Japan, but received little fanfare in the fare-skinned corners of the world-thanks in large part to the heavy swaths of Sonic Youth and Mogwai-style pyrotechnics that dominate the album.

But on their ominous sophomore disc, One Step More and You Die, mono has conjured up their own version of pummeling guitar rock: and it is pitch black. Layering eerie, vapor trails of ambient white noise, with napalm waves of primordial guitar, mono creates a nightmare dreamscape where sound takes on physical form, makes a fist and buries it into your gut.

Need proof? Check out album centerpiece “Com(?)”. An epic 15:57 long, listening to it is like standing in a roaring wind tunnel, guitars whipping up a maelstrom, drums throwing sucker punches in your face, bass exploding in your brain pan. You could swear the flesh is being peeled from your bones in excruciating strips. A Matisse dipped in pig’s blood and painted over with the ink-blotted tails of cobras, Mono is beautiful; Mono is violent.

“When the audience gets smaller, we get more violent, ” says Takaakira…”we try to kill them by sounds.”

Links:
http://www.mono-44.com – more info on mono

• Bogdan Raczynski
  
• Astrobotnia
  
• The Bug

Event Details:
In November 2003 REPHLEX, the legendary label started 12 years ago by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James aka the Aphex Twin, celebrates 12 years with the 17 November release of a 19 track compilation album ÒRephlexions – A Compilation of BraindanceÓ and a 14 date UK tour in association with LOGARHYTHM. The tour is the fourth Logarhythm organised tour this year, and follows previous tours by WARP RecordsÕ Mira Calix and Chris Clark, WARPÕs Req One & Invisible SpiesÕ Kid Acne, and the late September 2003 dates from Austrian label MEGO. The Rephlex / Logarhythm tour will feature BOGDAN RACZYNSKI and ASTROBOTNIA live, with special guests including THE BUG 

BOGDAN is the samurai man-child who dreams from Grand Prix bed sheets and can play a tuneless trumpet like nobody’s business. His compositions may be termed hardcore by some standards, but they display an amazing sensitivity and are at times quite romantic. .

Although known for more noisy music, on his fourth album myloveilove Bogdan took the music his music into uncharted audio with crying accordions, broken-hearted beats, wallowing trumpets stolen from an anonymous grade school, flutes, solid-wood guitars and a vocal repertoire reminiscent of the fall season in nagoya (when birds sing gently, yet rain pours).

Bogdan live is almost cacophonous, his music sounds as though it is performed on contact miked bins and sick instruments, full of feed back and disharmony, with Bogdan’s trademark bass and something sounding like a chicken trying to bark everything at a zillion beats per minute, somehow, again it all sounds gorgeous.

ASTROBOTNIA
Aleksi Perala was born in Finland in 1976 and grew up with his family in on the border of Lapland. He started making music way back in 1989, but first released music on Rephlex in the late nineties under the name Ovuca, after he sent in strange demo’s of odd noises, like some new creature was trying to contact Rephlex with an important musical message.

His recent releases have been under the name Astrobotnia, a name that suggests an inspiration from the starry nightime sky. It’s extremely deep, sophisticated detailed electronic music, ideal for wrapping yourself up in on a cold night. His most recent release is collaboration with another brilliant Rephlex artist called Cylob, it’s music that falls into place after a few listens then becomes highly addictive!

THE BUG
Under various guises (Ice, God, Techno Animal, Curse Of The Golden Vampire), Kevin Martin aka The Bug produces an exhilerating mutant ragga,dancehall,techno mash up.
www.rephlex.com

CAPSULE IS A MEMBER OF LOGARYTHM

www.logarhythm.org.uk

Drawing together, via a co-operative network of some of the most innovative independent promoters, artists and labels, and sponsored by THE ARTS COUNCIL OF ENGLAND, LOGARHYTHM aims to readdress the balance between the UKÕs pool of pioneering and creative talents, and the under-representation of electronic music, particularly in the live arena, with a series of events, workshops, tutorials and concerts that will serve as a focal point for the UK’s electronic music scene.

Interview with THE BUG aka Kevin Martin

THE BUG [interview with Kevin Martin…]
Medicine Bar Saturday 8th November
by Martin Longley

The undoubted highlight of Capsule’s summer Supersonic festival was The Bug, who delivered a manic set of full-on speed-ragga dancehall antics. Kevin Martin’s pre-insectoid incarnation has seen him enjoy a 15-year involvement with God, Ice and Techno Animal, acts more known for their intense walls of guitar noise than any kind of syncopated dancefloor sense.

For a decade now, Martin has had a significant working relationship with Birmingham’s Justin Broadrick, a wild guitaring man who founded both Napalm Death and Godflesh. “We love the idea of evolution and mutation,” Martin explains. “Morphing into different identities, because we’re so obsessed with music and sound.

” The pair’s last Techno Animal gig (again at the Medicine Bar) was a strobe-lighting spectacular. “The reason we do that is because we don’t really feel there’s a live show, there’s just two guys manning machines. That was okay, but generally there’s even more smoke or fog than that. You shouldn’t be able to see the person next to you. The idea is to totally disorientate people, to submerge them in sound.”

Martin and Broadrick’s latest band is Curse Of The Golden Vampire, with their Mass Destruction album recently released on the US Ipecac label. “It’s probably the most extreme album Justin and I have ever done. He plays guitar on it, ultra fast, ultra violent: loads of screaming. I lost my voice for two weeks. Absolutely insane!”

Tomorrow night, The Bug performs as part of the Capsule team’s Rephlex Records night at the Medicine Bar, in the company of Bogdan Raczynski and Astrobotnia. This is Martin’s first solo incarnation. “Since working with Techno Animal, we’ve been increasingly drawn to the dancefloor, towards clubs.”

This all started when the Animal toured with DJ Spooky, Alec Empire and Porter Ricks. “It was a revelation for us. We’d been playing in noise bands or free rock bands with crap sound systems, and suddenly we’re playing to a thousand ravers a night, through really amazing sound systems with a massive amount of bass. If there’s one thing that’s consistently brought together everything I’ve ever worked on, it’s dub,” says Martin. “Not just dub reggae, but the idea of dub as a way of navigating through music. I love what dub does to music, the random-ness, the chaos, the way songs are infinite as opposed to finite, open-ended as opposed to closed.”

Martin was inspired by the dub reggae soundclashes that he attended upon arriving in London at the dawn of the 1990s. He was completely taken by their minimal set-up and huge bass presence, with only a few lightbulbs dangling over the speaker stacks. “The sound basically massaged my internal organs for three hours, and I’ve never recovered from that experience.” Martin’s Bug identity has only been in effect for just over a year, beginning when he created an alternative soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie, The Conversation. Kevin usually starts building up a track from a bassline or a drum pattern, employing a mixture of laptop manipulation and live instrumentation. As with his last visit,

The Bug will be working behind three MCs: Warrior Queen, Mexican and Ras B (the latter being a regular with Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound crew). The Bug appears tomorrow as part of Capsule’s Rephlex Records night at the Medicine Bar, Digbeth, from 9.00pm onwards…

MARTIN LONGLEY

Review of the night

Rephlex Records was formed 12 years ago, by Richard D James (otherwise known as The Aphex Twin) and Grant Wilson Claridge. They’re celebrating this longevity with the release of a Rephlexions compilation disc and a 14-date tour. Rephlex has always been dedicated to the extremes of breakbeat culture, sounds that have descended distantly from drum’n’bass, but often so fast or so disconnected that the act of dancing becomes problematic. So, the floor was overtaken by a certain sense of uncertainty, as Bogdan Raczynski largely subsumed the usual bass obsessions in favour of low-tech keyboard sounds and dinky playroom melodies, all lopped into brief spurts, before a different rhythm stepped in or booted out. Disorientation was even stronger once The Bug took the stage. Kevin Martin likes to use extreme strobe-lighting effects, which is kind of perverse when he’s got a live crew of MCs toasting along to his deranged version of Jamaican dancehall ragga. Since that monumental (but mostly just mental) July appearance at Capsule’s Supersonic festival, The Bug had taken his own music apart and ripped out its innards. I was dancing non-stop on that first occasion, but this time the momentum was frequently interrupted by misshapen stretches of headbanging, sudden shifts of tempo and breakdowns into completely abstract white noise. This is at once interesting and refreshing, but failed to deliver last time’s stomping abandon, boasting the curious spectacle of MCs Ras B and Warrior Queen singing fairly conventional ragga lines into a blizzard of discombobulated extremity.

• Melt Banana
• Trencher
• Esquilax

Event Details:
This time they will present their new album ãCell-Scape” (A-ZAP Records / REVOLVER). MxBx toured Europe and USA several times. The audience is getting bigger and bigger even MxBx’s music is not that kind of music you would expect to hear on daily radio-charts. But what you can expect for sure is a live show that you will never forget.

Many fans been melted by the ear-nuking, brain-microwaving, head-exploding music that YaKo (vocal), Agata (guitar), Rika (bass) and an excellent, precise drummer (for this tour it’s Dave Witte from US-band Burnt By The Sun).

YaKo is Japan’s punk rock empress, whipping out her razor-sharp vocal like a bondage-queen she-devil from the hottest harem in hell having the kind of climax that, erm, melts bananas.

Guitarist Agata gets so many sounds out of his six-string you’d think he had a synth, two turntables and a couple of screaming Tokyo schoolgirls stuffed in his underpants. He rustles up what sounds like radio feedback, sirens, pistol-shots, crucified kittens, you name it, it’s somewhere on Agata’s fretboard.

Bassist Rika wrestles with an instrument twice her size and always gets the better of it. Let’s give you some “cool” names now: They’ve been engineered by Steve Albini, mixed by Jim O’Rourke, free-jazz guru John Zorn produced their live album on his labal TZADIK, which was engineered by Robert Musso; they did a radio session for legendary British DJ John Peel, and Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafro is a huge fan, leaping on stage to add his vocal when the Banana crew did a cover of DK song “Government Flu” at San Francisco and Florida gigs. Mike Patton is a huge fan and seems like very, very influenced by MxBx.

Links:
http://www.parkcity.ne.jp/~mltbanan/ – melt banana official site
http://www.jonsonfamily.com/bands/bands.aspx?bnd=10 – Trencher info

Review in th Wire Magazine

MELT-BANANA
BIRMINGHAM MEDICINE BAR UK
BY MARTIN LONGLEY

This was the Tokyo combo’s fourth European tour, acting as a hearty push for their recent Cell-Scape disc. After a decade’s activity, it’s only their fourth album, although Melt-Banana have also issued a compilation of cassette obscurities, a live set and a healthy 19 EPs. Their reputation (at least in my own subjective life) has been forged via massive exposure on John Peel’s show, not least their staggering series of Maida Vale live broadcasts.

The line-up remains YaKo (speed vocals), Agata (panoramic guitar) and Rika (contortionist bass), with Burnt By The Sun’s Dave Witte guesting on drums. The instrumentalists come out first, setting up a rolling momentum for YaKo’s purposeful entrance.

Agata swoops everything up full, stroking, hitting and slamming his guitar to produce broad swathes of multi-layered distortion, or alternatively, tight stutters with in-between razor spaces. He uses bottleneck to race up and down the frets, sometimes toying with outbreaks of what sound like accelerated boogie woogie or sludgy bar-room blues. Rika’s bass is weighty but nimble, fingers slapping hard, but unwinding convoluted lines that repeat and intertwine with Agata’s wall-of-noise. Witte is constantly changing rhythmic direction, nailing down these sudden shifts, with all four Bananas perfectly attuned to the communal dynamics of each stunted-length number. Melt-Banana have become such a bonded unit that they can ride these rapids with ease, maintaining a level of rapt attention in the audience that doesn’t let up over their hour-long set. The entire experience is one of intense compaction: extremely short songs that manage to communicate their separateness, like a series of micro-suites.

YaKo sways gently against the unrelenting bombardment of her bandmates, reeling out her microphone lead like she’s about to measure up a bespoke suit, tilting her head slightly as if to coax out the finest nuances of yelping precision. No matter how hard, how dense, how speeding or how intricate these truncated songs are, she’s reeling off staccato lines with an unerring rhythmic attack, keeping hold of her melodic sense, always singing rather than spewing guttural shouts. YaKo, eyes darting left and right, seems to be in a quiet sphere of her own, partly oblivious to the surrounding aural overload.

After the first encore, music’s piped through the PA, but the crowd keeps bellowing for more. Just as everyone starts to drift away, the Bananas return for another one-minute assault, an almost ludicrously brief return for these masters of new headbanging complexity.