The Sheep Dip is where every year LOTF show’s you tomorrow’s talent today.
With Chess Club Records hosting Friday, Moshi Moshi rolling out the best of their label and their mates on Saturday and Rock Feedback (you’ve seen them on the tinternet) finishing of the Sunday in a blaze of noise. We are delighted to announce the following bands will be rocking the Sheep Dip stage across the weekend.
D/R/U/G/S are free. The project of one Callum Wright, D/R/U/G/S craft some of the most euphoric, radical new music around. Made with the freeform attitude of synth visionary Oneohtrix Point Never, the fuck-you braggadocio of the Wu-Tang Clan, the cast-iron integrity of punk and the headlong desperate rush of rave, it’s untamed music for the moment.
This uncompromising attitude and bracing imagination brought him into contact with new Moshi Moshi imprint Tender Age, who will be releasing D/R/U/G/S’s first 12”, a three-song EP that cements Callum’s place as one of the UK’s most exciting new musicians. This is, first and foremost, dance music, but listen in and you can hear it’s made with the guts, impatience and imagination of the best British DIY music, from psyche rock to punk to rave to grime. These are grab-life-and-run tracks, sincere, furious and alive, endless and true. On email, Callum said of his process: “I write new music every day. If I’m in the mood to just write I’ll record all kinds of sounds. I know how I want my tracks to feel but I don’t know how to get there. No one does really. That struggle is what you hear, that’s the music.” It’s never going to stop, trust me.
With Michael Kiwanuka, it’s all about the voice. A voice that he describes as “hitting straight through to the core” with direct, emotional songs about love, yearning, comfort and belonging. It’s a voice that built him a following via MySpace and small London gigs, and led Paul Butler from The Bees to invite him to the band’s Isle of Wight studio to lay down these introductory tracks. Which makes it all the more strange, really, that what Kiwanuka originally set out to be was a session guitarist who maybe wrote the odd song for other people.
Now 23, growing up in North London Michael struggled at times to see where he fitted in. An avid England and Spurs fan, he found it hard to imagine a day when a name like Kiwanuka could sit comfortably on the back of a football shirt here. Nonetheless, when his parents took him and his brother back to the Uganda to visit family, he and his brother were immediately recognised as English tourists. Like most of his schoolmates, he liked bands like Nirvana and Blur, but it was only when he discovered that Jimi Hendrix was black that he was able to imagine himself picking up a guitar.
Written and performed by Michael Kiwanuka, produced by Paul Butler and featuring an assortment of Isle of Wight musicians as well as of course Michael on acoustic guitar, Tell Me A Tale, I Need Your Company and Worry Walks Beside Me are timeless songs that could only have come from Britain in 2011. Real, raw and achingly beautiful, they are just a taste of what is to come.
Visions of Trees are Sara Atalar and Joni Juden. They met in the end of summer 09 and started hanging out and jamming at a friend’s basement in Dalston, East London. They wanted to make electronic music. They believed that electronic music offers an endless spectrum of sonic and visual possibilities. Music and aesthetics coming together – both were hugely were important to the duo right from the start.
Sarah and Joni have been busy cutting their teeth on the gig circuit and have toured or played shows with the likes of Mount Kimbie, Everything Everything, Sleigh Bells, Neon Indian, Memory Tapes, Becoming Real, Actress, Bear In Heaven and Teeth, (amongst many more). They also nailed slots at Glastonbury, Camp Bestival, Bestival, Truck Fest, Offset and more recently, SWN.
If 2010 was the year for fiddling with other people’s music and drawing a live crowd, VoT are primed and ready to lay down and release their own vision in 2011.
If you think epic, widescreen pop can’t coexist with a keenly felt indie sensibility, then prepare to have that notion gloriously exploded by Kyla La Grange, a fearsomely talented singer who is fast establishing herself as a bewitching live act and profoundly thoughtful songwriter.
Kyla grew up in Watford, the eldest child of hippy-ish parents, and has been writing songs from the age of five. It was only while studying philosophy at Cambridge that she began taking her talent seriously though. There a friend played her Cat Power and Elliot Smith for the first time, “and they were unlike anything I’d heard,” she explains. “A lot of the music I’d listened to as a teenager was quite shit and always tempered by a need to be a certain style, or sell records. What I loved about them is just how raw and honest the emotions seemed.” Falling in love with their songs was the catalyst she needed to start performing her own music and she began playing small open mic nights around Cambridge. Back then, she explains, “I’d be really self-contained, just be looking at the floor, in my own mind.” Now however, with a full band behind her, she’s as spirited and captivating a performer as they come.
Consistently bombarded with claims of greatness, a singular genius is sometimes hard to hear through the noise. Marques Toliver is one such genius, a protagonist whose back-story seems inconsequential, as any personal encounter will give the impression that he fell fully formed from some distant and magical land. Yet the back-story remains compelling.
Born in Florida, the young Toliver was clearly a prodigious talent that escaped his family business of grave digging by entering into Stetson University’s Music School to train as a Classical Violinist. Frustrated in the institution, and keen to throw himself into the real world of music making, Marques travelled to New York City to seek his fortune.
Through busking and working in a vintage store in Brooklyn, he found his first introduction to that fantastical city and was soon a part of the Williamsburg set, playing live and on record with the likes of TV on The Radio and Grizzly Bear, before travelling to the UK as part of Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson’s band, where he met a warm response from musicians such as Adele – who blogged enthusiastically – leading to deals with Universal Publishing and Transgressive Management.
Musically, he cut his teeth supporting himself through busking with his violin and his unique Classical meets R+B songwriting, which have formed the basis of his live set today. Thematically intrigued with the concepts of escape, persecution and the realm of the unknown, in a reflection of mankind’s past and present. His new set, demonstrated on his game-changing debut ‘Butterflies Are Not Free’ EP, sees his ambition bring forth a suite of songs influenced by Bach and Beyonce, Gospel and the visual movements of Maya Deren.
The capabilities of Marques are immense, as the production and arrangement give us a glimpse into Marques’ fascinating and compelling world. Truly, a star is born.
