Reviews are coming for Barn Owl’s new record ‘V’. This time around the drone doom duo are exploring the use of synths and you can hear them perform this new material at their show at the beautiful St Paul’s Church in the Jewellery Quarter.

“…there’s a much larger keyboard profile on this new album. This moves Barn Owl’s basic architecture away from the colleagues in the string-drone division of the sub-underground, and closer to some of its more kosmische technicians. The Wire

“V comes as a spellbinding corrective, with vast synth banks lending a woven-wire near-dub framework to Evan Caminiti and Porras’ guitar drones.” MOJO (4/5)

Review of the track ‘The Long Shadow’:
“Echoing menace, layers of desolate synthesisers and looped guitar minimalism from the San Francisco drone duo of Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti” Uncut (6/10)

Tickets are available for Saturday 27th April from www.theticketsellers.co.uk, support comes from Grumbling Fur and Ex Easter Island Head.

We’re currently enjoying the video for the track ‘Void Redux’

Barn Owl – Void Redux from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

If you’re not on our mailing list you’ll have missed our monthly playlists, highlighting some of the sounds coming from our office and the artists performing at forthcoming Capsule events.

March’s playlist featured Demdike Stare, Sleaford Mods and Free School as well as Barn Owl, Ex Easter Island Head and Grumbling Fur who you can catch performing at St Paul’s Church on Saturday 27th April.

Watch this space for April’s playlist, or sign up to mailing list – there’s a link on the homepage.

Coming up at Capsule

Saturday 27th April
Barn Owl
Grumbling Fur
Ex Easter Island Head
St Paul’s Church, Jewellery Quarter
www.theticketsellers.co.uk

Wednesday 26th June
I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE: Film, stories & images from the Mississippi Records and Alan Lomax archive
Vivid Projects, Digbeth
www.theticketsellers.co.uk

Clash Music have premiered the new Barn Owl video for Void Redux. Click through to watch in full.

“Unfurling as slowly and effortlessly as the track itself, the visuals seem to point towards the relationship between humanity and the often quite brutal beauty of the concrete world in which we inhabit” Clash Music

Tickets for their Birmingham show at St Paul’s Church on Saturday 27th April with Grumbling Fur (Daniel O’Sullivan and Alexander Tucker) and Ex Easter Island Head (for fans of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham) are available via theticketsellers.co.uk

We’re thrilled to announce a wonderful event in partnership with Vivid Projects. A presentation of amazing footage from the Alan Lomax archive and Mississippi Records, featuring rarely seen film shot during Alan Lomax’s North American travels between 1978 to 1985 and Mississippi Record’s own enormous library of folk blues, gospel, esoteric, international and punk music. I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE takes place on Wednesday 26th June.

Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records will be present and will screen a film of musicians associated with the Mississippi Records label such as one man band Abner Jay, angel channeling Bishop Perry Tillis, Rev. Louis Overstreet and his four sons, legendary folk singer Michael Hurley and many more. Each film segment will be introduced with brief stories about the musicians. There will also be a short slide show that tells the story of the underground music industry and Mississippi Records.

“Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was one of the great American field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax also produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the U.S and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. During the New Deal, with his father, famed folklorist and collector John A. Lomax and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.”

“Eclectic independent record label named after the record store located in Portland, Oregon, Mississippi Records specializes in vinyl reissues of American roots, blues, gospel, art punk, and world music, among other recorded obscurities. “

This event takes place on Wednesday 26th June at Vivid Projects. Tickets are £5 and available via theticketsellers.co.uk

Our friends at Small but Hard Records return to Birmingham on Tuesday 9th April. Devilman and new signing Walter Gross perform at Hare & Hounds, Kings Heath – thoroughly recommend!

Facebook event page with ticket link here

The forthcoming Grumbling Fur album ‘Glynnaestra’  will be released on 22nd July 2013 by Thrill Jockey records.

“As their history attests, this is a group unbound from the restrictions of traditionalism and unafraid to shed the pretence of pure abstraction. There’s a tradition of subterranean Englishness at play, harking back to This Heat’s Deceit and Eno’s Another Green World. In their first fully realised album as a duo, the process and texture ripple with a kind of electro-gnosis. Glynnaestra herself (an archaic goddess divined by Tucker and O’Sullivan) presides over the record, transcendent and sphinx like: an apt muse for an album of such lovely and powerful music.” Thrill Jockey

You can see them perform in Birmingham on Saturday 27th April with Barn Owl and Ex Easter Island Head at St Paul’s Church. We can’t wait. Tickets are available now via theticketsellers.co.uk

Highlights of the new Library of Birmingham’s four-month Discovery Season, which will run from the opening on Tuesday 3rd September until 31st December, are announced. Arts Council England support for the Discovery Season was confirmed earlier this year.

Taking its inspiration from the Library’s internationally-important archives and special collections, the Discovery Season will include:

Playground of Discovery – a specially-commissioned Cabinet of Curiosities created by multi-award- winning artist, Morag Myerscough, housing a rolling programme of creative residencies throughout the Season. Capsule are taking applications for the residency programme until Monday 29th April, learn more here. The Commentators from Stan’s Café, the Birmingham-based artists’ group, will be broadcasting from the Playground of Discovery, as the first of the creative residencies, in the opening week.

In a collaboration with Flatpack Festival, a weekend of cabaret and cinema to celebrate Birmingham’s long and colourful association with Early Cinema and the development of the Magic Lantern with a focus on the Library of Birmingham’s archive of 60,000 lantern slides dating from around 1890 to 1940

Theatre Jukebox by Stand + Stare

A trail of artworks will be situated across the building, each making reference to the Library’s rich collections and archives. To include Theatre Jukebox created by Stand + Stare using the Library’s Wingate Bett Transport Ticket collection, an arcade-style cabinet installation that plays stories instead of records housed on the Library’s fourth floor

The Library of Lost Books – an exhibition celebrating the history of the book, with related workshops, featuring contemporary artists and printmakers, inspired by and breathing new life into books that have reached the end of their natural lives

Carol Ann Duffy and Lionel Shriver will appear at October’s Birmingham Literature Festival (formerly the Birmingham Book Festival)

Reference Works, an exhibition of Birmingham’s largest ever photography commission which has seen four photographers – Michael Collins, Brian Griffin, Andrew Lacon and Stuart Whipps – create work in response to the building of the Library of Birmingham

Volume, the Birmingham Art, Book and Print Fair in December has been created as a unique event for the Discovery Season by bringing together existing organisations in collaboration (Writing West Midlands, Birmingham Zine Festival, An Endless Supply, BCU Typography Hub, Grand Union and Eastside Projects). Volume will open with a keynote speech from artist, musician and writer, Bill Drummond.

The Discovery Season is being produced on behalf of the Library of Birmingham by Capsule and is supported by Arts Council England.

The Season will throw a completely new light on the Library’s collections and bring to life the library’s stunning new spaces with installations, events, performances, workshops, and music and dance for every age and interest.

Robinson Crusoe, The Clever Cats & Co. (1881) London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Parker Collection

The Library of Birmingham have been releasing images from the Parker Collection via their website and we must say, a lot of them are right up Capsule’s alley (animals in clothes you say?).

We’ve just announced a number of opportunities for artists to develop and exhibit work as part of the Library of Birmingham opening season. One opportunity is to develop a number of illustrative characters to be displayed in the Children’s Library. Artists might draw inspiration from the Parker Collection of Children’s Book and Games and can find more information via www.libraryofbirmingham.com/parkercollectiongallery

More information on this commission, as well as the Creative Residencies programme can be found via www.capsule.org.uk/project/library-of-birmingham-opening-season where you

can download the briefs and assessment criteria.