THIS MATERIAL MOMENT - RELEASED!

27 June 2025

Today… Upset The Rhythm are proud to release Me Lost Me’s astonishing new album ‘This Material Moment’. MOJO recently described it as “a reassuringly complicated fusion of Björk and Richard Dawson with intense mid-’70s Virgin Records vibes”. It’s a miraculous exploration of the fabric of being and artistic motivation set in non-linear vistas of electronic folk idiom.

‘This Material Moment’ was written and woven by Jayne Dent, but performed with a core band of John Pope on electric/double bass, Faye MacCalman on clarinet, and for the first time Ewan Mackenzie (Dextro/Pigs x7) on live drums. The album was recorded by Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle, who also worked on its immense predecessor ‘RPG.’

You can hear the whole album streaming everywhere now, plus it is also available on CD and as a limited radiant red LP from all the best shops. We have copies available on Bandcamp and our own webshop too.

ANCIENT SUMMER

29 May 2025

'Ancient Summer' by Me Lost Me, is the final single taken from their forthcoming album 'This Material Moment', out June 27th on Upset The Rhythm. “It’s about stepping back to think on our connectedness, the things humans have made, our structures, our civilizations, our innovations, and also our rituals and beliefs, our relationships with one another - all in one overwhelming moment” Me Lost Me.

FOREFOWK, OUT NOW

23 May 2025

Upset The Rhythm are delighted to release Quinie’s superb album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ today! The Guardian have kindly made it their folk album of the month, describing it as “alive with ideas, holding the past like a cauldron, broiling bewitchingly”.

There’s also a brilliant interview just gone up on The Skinny too, well worth your time.

‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ is available now digitally and from all the best shops. You can also buy the LP from us directly through Bandcamp and our own webshop too. Limited edition black vinyl, with riso-graph insert + beautiful art-book option.

We have two launch shows coming up for the album too, next Thursday at Mono in Glasgow, and next Friday at St Pancras Old Church in London, see you there!

QUINIE - SALLOW BUCKTHORN

2 May 2025

It’s almost obligatory to release a folk song on May Day, but here we are on May 2nd still bringing in the May! Enjoy Quinie’s evocative new single ‘Sallow Buckthorn’ out now. It’s a mesmeric sea of swirling sound and Scots poetry.

“Ye micht o thought the sallow buckthorn, Ne’er a hairst could hain” ("You might have thought the buckthorn would be so pale, that no harvest could hold it.”)

‘Sallow Buckthorn’ is featured on Quinie’s forthcoming album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ out on Upset The Rhythm on May 23rd. Available to pre-order on LP with a risograph lyric print + magical book.

A PAINTING OF THE WIND

29 April 2025

Me Lost Me returns today with the second miraculous single from their forthcoming album ‘This Material Moment’ (out June 27th through Upset The Rhythm).

‘A Painting of the Wind’ is an astonishing song that we’ve loved in Jayne’s set for a while, it grapples with how artists try to express the inexpressible and how art is used as a means of escape and fantasy. The track is streaming everywhere now and is accompanied by this exquisite landscape portal of a video filmed at Raby Castle by Amelia Read.

‘This Material Moment’ can be pre-ordered on Bandcamp and our very own webshop too. We all love to be carried away!

QUINIE - COL MY LOVE

9 April 2025

Today we’re sharing another soaring single from Quinie’s new album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ (out May 23rd). ‘Col My Love’ is the very first track on the album, and it’s a powerful song to sing, accompanied by some epic pipes too.

Quinie explains that the words “warn of the dangers of being close to the shoreline. I thought it would be a good fit with this footage of me and Maisie trying to navigate one of the challenges on one of our walks. Perhaps not quite as scary as being jailed on a cliff top, but nevertheless an adventure.”

PERFECT HIT! OUT NOW

4 April 2025

Buffet Lunch’s new album ‘Perfect Hit!’ is out now on Upset The Rhythm. This record positively zings in the sunlight, whilst its pleasingly imperfect pop songs dazzle to the same degree.

‘Perfect Hit!’ was recorded in the West Highlands, in the shadow of the UK’s Biggest Ben, during Leap Year week 2024. The lo-fi amblers built this album from bricks, ideas and plots, melodies and hooks, each stacked upon the other. It’s a proper expedition of curious turns and dizzy dimensions taking in parenthood, face tattoos, conkers and historical consciousness as subject matter.

This meandering masterpiece of observational charm and offbeat fancy is available to listen to digitally now, the stunning yolk-coloured 180g vinyl can be found in all the best shops and our very own website here.

Buffet Lunch will be performing for us in London next Friday (April 11th) for their album launch at The George Tavern, accompanied by Lerryn and Sassyhiya too. Can’t wait to hear these songs played live! Tour dates incoming:

09/04 - Delicious Clam, Sheffield

10/04 - JT Soar, Nottingham

11/04 - The George Tavern, London

12/04 - The Holloway, Norwich

03/05 - Settlement Projects, Edinburgh

24/05 - The Glad Cafe, Glasgow

ME LOST ME - 'THIS MATERIAL MOMENT'

28 March 2025

What a day to announce this breathtaking new album from Me Lost Me! ‘This Material Moment’, the fourth full-length from Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent, delights in songwriting, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully push the boundaries of genre. Today we’re sharing ‘Compromise!’, a stunning lead single concerned with the notion of ‘performing’ a life, rather than ‘living’ one.

Concerned with physicality, interpretations, and, yes, materiality, ‘This Material Moment’ is an album akin to rummaging through a box of long-forgotten trinkets. With each song, Me Lost Me unearths something and asks us to consider it from every angle.

‘This Material Moment’ will be released on June 27th through Upset The Rhythm, a limited 180g ‘brilliant red’ vinyl version is available to pre-order from all the best shops, and Bandcamp here.

WHITSUN SOUND

19 March 2025

'Whitsun Sound' by Buffet Lunch came out today! Another wizard single from the band's forthcoming album 'Perfect Hit!'. This track is all about hobbies, leisure-time, waiting and repetition.

Huge thanks to the fine people at Raven Sings The Blues for premiering the creeped-out video, made by the talented Joshua Roland.'Perfect Hit!' comes out on April 4th, we’re throwing an album launch in London on April 11th at The George Tavern too.

ACTUAL EARTH MUSIC

7 March 2025

Earth Ball just cracked the planet! ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ (out today on Upset The Rhythm) presents two caustic, zoned-out live sets from Canadian noise-rock entropy hunters Earth Ball.

Side A features Earth Ball live at The Fox Cabaret in Vancouver, supporting Wolf Eyes in 2023. Here Earth Ball whip up a vortex of thrashing wild energy, and the ecstatic release is off the charts. Volume 2 occupies Side B, showcasing a collaborative summit at London’s Café OTO last year. This recording features pivotal UK improv luminary Steve Beresford on piano and free-jazz phenomenon Chris Corsano on drums.

This is ‘Actual Earth Music’, sharing Earth Ball in their element as they conjure sound from the unknowing ether. ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ is out now digitally and as a limited 180g black vinyl pressing.

QUINIE - 'FOREFOWK, MIND ME'

4 March 2025

We’re so excited for you to hear Quinie's wondrous new album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ (out May 23rd on Upset The Rhythm)! The first song from the album, ‘Macaphee Turn the Cattle’ escaped into the wild this morning, thanks to Klof magazine for premiering the video.

A singer working from the Scots song tradition, Quinie brings an approach that is both reverent and radical—exploring authenticity not as an exercise in preservation, but as something lived, questioned, and continually reshaped.

'Forefowk, Mind Me' can be pre-ordered as a 180g black vinyl LP w/ risograph lyric print. There’s also an option to order the LP with a stunning accompanying art book too!

Also… for those of you in London, we’re hosting a special launch party on May 30th at St Pancras Old Church.

RATTLE RELEASED

28 February 2025

Rattle’s entrancing new album ‘Encircle’ is released today!

With this hypnotic third album, Rattle have emerged from the chrysalis with four mutable songs of drum and vocal patterns. They build-up and disintegrate, existing in two places at once, tracing the circle’s edge. What a stunning achievement!

‘Encircle’ can be streamed on all digital platforms now, it is also available on vinyl (pink, black versions) and CD from all the best shops, as well as our Bandcamp and webshop here.

PERFECT HIT

25 February 2025

Buffet Lunch’s new single ‘Perfect Hit!’ is released today! It’s a snappy anthem of clunky guitar, casio wobble and percussive clatter. Teaming up themes like relationships, limbs and an actual swordfish sighting off the Scottish coastline (yes really), Buffet Lunch pack a wonky punch and are not afraid to modulate through multiple key changes.

The accompanying video was filmed on location in Portobello Town Hall where the band also shot the album cover for ‘Perfect Hit!’ - the album (out April 4th on Upset The Rhythm). Is this the birth of Nu-Music Hall? Glimpsed between long Edwardian red curtains? Quite possibly so! Now let’s learn the dance moves.

GET TECTONIC!

4 February 2025

UTR172 has just erupted! ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ presents two caustic, yet alluringly unreal live sets from Canadian noise-rock entropy hunters Earth Ball. Following on from the group’s head-turn of an album ‘It’s Yours’ (Upset The Rhythm, 2024) this new LP captures the band at the peak of their powers, playing live, composing spontaneously.

These two live sets demonstrate how intuitive and inventive the group are when they keep cresting the moment. This is ‘Actual Earth Music’, sharing Earth Ball in their element as they conjure sound from the unknowing ether. ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ will be released on Upset The Rhythm on March 7th digitally and as a limited 180g black vinyl pressing.

BUFFET LUNCH'S 'PERFECT HIT!'

29 January 2025

Well, I never! Art-pop amblers Buffet Lunch have embarked on their blue period. Released today, new single ‘Blue Chairs, Blue Floors, Blue Folders’ is the first track to sally forth from their forthcoming album ‘Perfect Hit!’, out on April 4th through Upset The Rhythm.

‘Perfect Hit!' is built from bricks, ideas and plots, melodies and hooks, each stacked upon the other. It is available to pre-order now on 180g yellow vinyl from all the best shops and our very own website here.

RATTLE'S RITUAL!

22 January 2025

Rattle return today with their hypnotic cascade of a new single 'Ritual'! 'Ritual' is a song of summoning, a waltz pulled out of the earth, a swirling mist and a spell spoken into a mirror.

Available now digitally and featuring on the duo's forthcoming album 'Encircle', out Feb 28th on Upset The Rhythm. Pink vinyl, black vinyl and CDs all available to pre-order from UTR and all the best shops.

DAILY TOLL are nestled between the sonic worlds of folk song story telling and off kilter, angular rock. They are a Sydney-based band born from a curious seed, the self taught project of artist Kata Szász-Komlós alongside Jasper Craig-Adams and Tom Stephens. Seemingly coming with an unmistakable charm and yearning. Mapping the band’s existence through their recorded output is to bear witness to the flux of three people learning to respond to one another and gently ossify into a collective vision. Early recordings reflect a band imagining themselves into being whilst new release, A Profound Non-Event (Tough Love), observes a clear shift in conviction.

GUY BLACKMAN is a songwriter’s songwriter. His deftly constructed songs deal frankly with issues of love, sexuality and commitment. If Serge Gainsbourg, Tim Hardin or Kevin Ayers wrote songs set in gay go-go bars or on adult camming websites, you might get close to an idea of Guy’s approach. ‘Out Of Sight’ is Guy’s first solo album in nearly 20 years (out June 13th), a belated follow-up to his well-loved 2008 album Adult Baby. Guy is also the co-founder of the very excellent label Chapter Music.

THE SPATULAS share a percussive, unshadowed presence, a steady, clear-voiced clop. Every note on their debut record ‘Beehive Mind’ (out now on PPM) is a little bit sad on its own but then they're organized in a way that you don't actually notice. The songs breathe in warmth and patience, they are immediate and sweet. And then they start to meander. To address the weight of the world without speaking of weariness. To march the song to breathlessness but loosen your grip when the band wanders. To tell all your secrets but shield your loved ones from vulnerability. To dress up in the charm and temptation of the pop song but maintain a core of peculiarity, of a single voice trying to navigate this world. This is the project of the Spatulas. Think of the few songwriters who know they’re the only ones in the world who could write their songs. The ones who sing in the confidence that the song couldn’t exist without them: Peter Jefferies, Jenny Mae, Ron House, Heather Lewis. Jonathan Richman? Put Miranda Soileau-Pratt of The Spatulas on this list. Miranda will be performing solo at this show.

DEERHOOF seem to thrive on collapse, so it’s simply amazing that this US/Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t seen them live—the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom. This music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, carrying an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom.Deerhoof is defined by such paradoxes.

For this pair of shows in London, Deerhoof will be performing different sets each night, featuring material from ‘Noble and Godlike in Ruin’ (their 19th studio album) alongside epic tracks from their extensive back catalogue!

CHRIS COHEN was always a quiet kid. In fact, this introversion was one reason he began playing music as a toddler—to communicate without speaking to identify with others without the direct representation of words. It has worked, too, with Cohen’s terrific stint in the mighty Deerhoof and his own captivating art-rock act The Curtains, preceding production and session work for the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren, and Marina Allen. Somewhere along that long way, Cohen started writing lyrics. He found that, though it didn’t come naturally, the process offered a new sense of self-discovery and reckoning, a way to see himself and the world from unexpected angles. His three twilit albums of casually complicated pop during the last decade radiated these epiphanies: handling family strife, navigating advancing age, and understanding social woes.

But Cohen has never had as much to sing so directly as he does on ‘Paint a Room’, his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen’s meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. There is the endless miasma of state violence on the subversively melodious opener “Damage,” the existential exhaustion of modernity on the horn-traced jangle “Laughing”. With ‘Paint a Room’, Cohen’s music feels like a warm spring breeze, easy to love and gentle to feel. But it’s often carrying something heavy, as if blowing in from some unseen storm cloud.

THE CINDYS are a Bristolian outfit united through a shared love of Alex Chilton, The Clean and The Feelies. Birth child of Jack Ogborne (aka Bingo Fury) and with help from Naima Bock, Finlay Burrows and members of Belishas, the group fronts surrealist imagery and infectious hooks at a pace that’ll give you butterflies. Their yet to be released debut album was recorded across the west country, between the vault of the Cornish Bank in Falmouth, Rockfield studios in Wales and the cellar of legendary venue The Louisiana in Bristol throughout 2024. The album includes production and engineering contributions from Joe Jones (Aldous Harding, The Cure, Teenage Fanclub) and Sam Stackpool of Holiday Ghosts, who also features on guitar. The album can be expected later this year.

MICHAEL BEACH is a Melbourne-based and Californian-born musician. On his fifth LP, Big Black Plume, Beach reveals the vitalizing power of connection in an often hostile world. Equally informed by the songwriting of Bill Fay and Peter Laughner, the minimalism of Tony Conrad and Terry Riley, and the rock and roll heart of the Goner Records roster, Big Black Plume provides deliberate compositions adorned with genuine madness. The songs on this album range from spare, textural ballads, to spiraling psychedelic overtures connected to a propulsive cosmic pulse.

The songs here aren't stick-and-poke songs that will dry and fade on the skin, aimless prayers for jams; Beach has been making deliberate things for decades. Big Black Plume is a record about connections, mercurially curated, transforming individual contributions into something strikingly communal. For years, Beach has been carefully fostering musical connections - for Big Black Plume is out July 25th, 2025, on vital independent labels Poison City (Australia) and Goner Records (US / Rest of World). Beach will support Big Black Plume with headlining tour dates and festival appearances in Australia, the United States, and Europe, including Gonerfest in Memphis, TN, Rising in Melbourne, Dark Mofo in Tasmania, and Binic Folks Blues Fest in France.

ME LOST ME delights in experimenting with songwriting and storytelling, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully weave together disparate genres, drawing influence from folk, art pop, noise, ambient and improvised music. In 2023 Me Lost Me released the critically regarded album 'RPG' and toured extensively in support of the release. On Me Lost Me's fourth full-length, This Material Moment - arriving on Upset the Rhythm on 27th June - she has created an "emotionally raw" album, her most honest and vulnerable yet. Me Lost Me presents sound reaching in opposite directions, straddling time towards the archaic and timeless traditions of folktales, and towards the possible and potential futures of pastoral Britain and the world at large.

Concerned with physicality, interpretations, and, yes, materiality, ‘This Material Moment’ is an album akin to rummaging through a box of long-forgotten trinkets. With each song, Me Lost Me extracts something from the box and asks us to consider it from every angle. "This is an album which uses words as a material, a playful tool for experimentation, full of metaphor, abstraction and analogies." Jayne says, "it has softness and anger, humour, hope and despair, intensity of feeling in all directions expressed as textures, objects, places."

‘This Material Moment’ was written and arranged solo, but played with a core band of John Pope on electric/double bass, Faye MacCalman on clarinet, and now with the addition of Ewan Mackenzie (Dextro/Pigs x7) on drums - bringing in live drums and electric bass for the first time. The album was recorded by Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle, who also worked on RPG.

THE SILVER FIELD is an Oram award-winning project built from the sound world of Coral Rose Kindred-Boothby. Voice, tapes, bass, samples, synthesis, strings, reeds, drums, small sounds, big sounds, sunlight, moonlight, a lot of water. Using her modular synthesiser and other self-built electronic instruments, Coral weaves together song-soundscapes, creating a rich and dream-like tapestry of sound that draws from folk music tradition, experimental electronics and psychedelia.

WALT McCLEMENTS is an accordionist, multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles. His solo compositions focus on processed accordion, creating patient and emotional meditations that nod to drone and ambient music. His debut record, “A Hole in the Fence” was released in 2021 on American Dreams, and utilized a minimal palette of accordions treated through guitar pedals to create glacial soundscapes and odes to hidden worlds. On his latest record and first for Western Vinyl, “On a Painted Ocean”, he expands his sonic tools to include lush synths, droning pipe organs, and spirited horns, creating a vibrant journey from solitary stillness to community exuberance. The record also follows last year’s “Rain on the Road”, a collaborative album with harpist Mary Lattimore, released on Thrill Jockey.

Prior to releasing music under his own name, McClements has been a touring member of Weyes Blood, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and Dark Dark Dark, as well as leading New Orleans art-punk brass ensemble Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship? and one man band Lonesome Leash.

JACKEN ELSWYTH is a London-based folk musician, banjo player, and instrument builder. In her music making she is focused on exploring traditional tunes, developing extrapolations on folk styles and techniques, and investigating drone, ambience, and improvisation within and beyond folk music. Her debut album At Fargrounds (Wrong Speed Records, 2024) was described as a ‘folk-thesis for our times’ by The Quietus. Jacken also organises the Betwixt & Between split tape series, and plays in Shovel Dance Collective too.

SIR RICHARD BISHOP is renowned for his mercurial guitar-playing for 26 years with Seattle ethno-delic legends Sun City Girls, but he has wrought a distinguished solo canon as well. He combines soulfulness and advanced technique with a panache that’s nearly unrivalled among today’s guitarists. Bishop strums spiritual with incantatory ragas, free-folk excursions, crystalline flamenco flourishes, ruddy Appalachian folk, Middle Eastern-tinged fantasias and gypsy arabesques. This is eclecticism done with respect and third-eye-dilating filigree; his compositions attain a sepia-toned wistfulness and a psychedelic complexity.

Bishop’s first solo record, Salvador Kali, was released by John Fahey’s esteemed Revenant Records label in 1998. Locust Music issued his second record, Improvika (2004), which consisted of nine extemporaneous pieces for solo acoustic guitar. More recently Tangier Sessions, was released by Drag City in 2015. It consists of a series of improvisations recorded in Tangier, Morocco in 2014 using a 19th century parlour guitar of mysterious origin. Bishop's latest album, Oneiric Formulary, was released by Drag City in 2020, whilst a new LP is expected later this year.

PROLAPSE formed in Leicester in the early 90s and are now spread across the UK and Scandinavia. Still pursuing their own path of repetition and twisted melodies, they merge influences from post punk to krautrock and even folk. Their previous releases have included numerous singles and four albums on various labels, including Cherry Red and Radar. They feature vocalists Mick Derrick and Linda Steelyard, whose intense dueling vocals combine with ferocious triple guitar assault and pummeling rhythms.

Their releases have included numerous singles and four albums on various labels, including Cherry Red and Radar, as well as recording four Peel sessions. The band has received critical acclaim, including singles of the week on the Radio 1 evening session and NME. They have also toured and shared bills with a diverse array of bands, including Stereolab, Sebadoh, Arab Strap and Sonic Youth.

The fifth Prolapse album “I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face” will be released on Tapete Records at the end of August and marks the bands first new recordings since their last album, “Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes”, released 26 years ago, but in some ways it feels like there hasn’t a break at all. From the opening incessant riff of ”The Fall of Cashline”, Prolapse set their stall out, hammering the message that they’re back, over and over again.

JOHN MAUS is a truly enigmatic musician. Broadly cut from the synth pop cloth, he’s fashioned the frosty minimalism of its fabric into a cloak of infinite meaning, genuine grace and absurdist humor over the course of four defining albums since 2006. His music is a highly mutable affair, whilst often described as retro-futurist on behalf of the 80’s drum machines and synth sounds employed, John’s music is more personal than the nostalgic re-tread implied. There’s a cinematic quality to his songs, with pathos conjured through propelling bass-lines, trailing arpeggios and of course his deeply resonant vocal. Moroder helped map out the territory but Maus is more interested in seeking cadence through his love of Renaissance polyphony and the experimentation behind post punk. It’s an amalgamation of musical ideas as radical as its intent.

Maus is a ‘man out of time’ trying to make sense of the inhumanity of our world through his mobilisation of the language of punk rock. His aim is true as he reaches for the seemingly impossible. It’s a want to emerge as part of greater multiplicity, to appear, to become, to connect that powers his songs and the man himself. It’s now been 14 years since the widely lauded album 'We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves' (2011) appeared like a thunderbolt of maniacal energy and turned everyone’s heads. Now regarded as an experimental pop classic, Pitiless Censors was a huge breakthrough for Maus as a recognised artist and led to a vast reappraisal of his past work.

Two decades and seven albums into his career, Sept 26th sees John Maus release his most transcendent album yet: 'Later Than You Think'. Arriving via his new label YOUNG, the album explores themes of grief, justice, rebirth, transformation, and spiritual warfare - coalescing into a work of confession and confrontation: an aural metaphysics where affect, intellect, and spirit converge in search of the beautiful, the truth and the real.

PHEW is a legendary figure in Japanese underground music. Phew was a founding member of the legendary Japanese punk band Aunt Sally. After the band’s breakup in 1979, she continued her career as a solo artist, releasing a collaborative single with Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1980, and her first solo album, ‘Phew’, with Conny Plank, Holger Czukay of CAN, and Jaki Liebezeit in 1981. In 1992, her third album, ‘Our Likeness’, was released on MUTE (recently reissued), again at Conny’s studio, with Jaki Liebezeit of CAN, Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, and Chrislo Haas of DAF. Since the beginning of the 2010s, she has released a series of works that combine voice and electronic music, and has gained international recognition as a forward facing electronic artist. She has also released collaborative works with Ana da Silva (Raincoats), Yoshimi (Boredoms, OOIOO) and others. Phew's expansive ‘Vertical Jamming’ was released on vinyl for the first time via Disciples last year, whilst Mute recently released her stunning record ‘New Decade’; a stark, haunted album, populated by voices that intone empty pleasantries in English and Japanese, against a backdrop of fractured, dubbed-out electronics.

FREDDIE MURPHY is a sound artist and curator based in Torino, Italy. His sonic research has shifted from cathartic performances to express the Catholic sense of guilt to an intimate investigation on feelings of loss and acceptance connected with grief, using an approach to composition that is bound to visual imagery and concepts linked to rituality. His musical practice involves experimenting on the duality of natural/synthetic, using acoustic recordings processed into synthetic sounds, as well as mimicking natural sounds using analogue tools. As a founding member of the seminal experimental outfit Father Murphy he released a series of concept albums on labels such as Joyful Noise, The Flenser, Avant! and performed extensively across the world. Appearances include Venice Biennale and Santarcangelo Festival (IT), Dark Mofo Festival (Australia), Le Guess Who!? Festival (NL).

PROTOMARTYR’s taut, austere rock was incubated in a freezing Detroit warehouse littered with beer cans and cigarette butts and warmed, feebly, by space heaters. Short songs made for short practices, and the band learned quickly not to waste time. Despite the cold, Protomartyr emerged with a sound that is idiosyncratic but relatable, hooky but off-kilter.

There’s a temptation to call it garage rock, but that doesn’t quite fit. With respect to the local predecessors, this isn’t the primitive stomp of The Dirtbombs or The Stooges’ greasy roar. Punk works, kind of, even if it leaves the hardcore kids confused. Post-punk suggests something too retro; indie rock, something too precious. What Protomartyr is, is “stuck between the cracks.” If that’s the case, though, they aren’t alone. Protomartyr’s economical rock elicits comparisons to possible antecedents like Pere Ubu or The Fall as well as local contemporaries like Frustrations or Tyvek. Singer Joe Casey’s dry declarative snarl serves as a reliable anchor, granting his bandmates — guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard and bassist Scott Davidson — the opportunity to explore textures and reinforce the rhythm section.

Post-punk’s biggest inspiration, it seems, was its eagerness to demolish punk’s orthodoxy, to push against the arbitrary boundaries of genre — at least until it became one itself. For Protomartyr, inspiration usually arrives in the form of ideas or feelings, more than explicit musical references. By the time the band has shaped it to its needs, the source material is almost unrecognizable.

Protomartyr have released six studio albums since 2012, including albums on Hardly Art and Domino. This very special pair of shows at the ICA are taking place in celebration of the band’s 10th anniversary of their astonishing, landmark album ‘The Agent Intellect’.

PROTOMARTYR’s taut, austere rock was incubated in a freezing Detroit warehouse littered with beer cans and cigarette butts and warmed, feebly, by space heaters. Short songs made for short practices, and the band learned quickly not to waste time. Despite the cold, Protomartyr emerged with a sound that is idiosyncratic but relatable, hooky but off-kilter.

There’s a temptation to call it garage rock, but that doesn’t quite fit. With respect to the local predecessors, this isn’t the primitive stomp of The Dirtbombs or The Stooges’ greasy roar. Punk works, kind of, even if it leaves the hardcore kids confused. Post-punk suggests something too retro; indie rock, something too precious. What Protomartyr is, is “stuck between the cracks.” If that’s the case, though, they aren’t alone. Protomartyr’s economical rock elicits comparisons to possible antecedents like Pere Ubu or The Fall as well as local contemporaries like Frustrations or Tyvek. Singer Joe Casey’s dry declarative snarl serves as a reliable anchor, granting his bandmates — guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard and bassist Scott Davidson — the opportunity to explore textures and reinforce the rhythm section.

Post-punk’s biggest inspiration, it seems, was its eagerness to demolish punk’s orthodoxy, to push against the arbitrary boundaries of genre — at least until it became one itself. For Protomartyr, inspiration usually arrives in the form of ideas or feelings, more than explicit musical references. By the time the band has shaped it to its needs, the source material is almost unrecognizable.

Protomartyr have released six studio albums since 2012, including albums on Hardly Art and Domino. This very special pair of shows at the ICA are taking place in celebration of the band’s 10th anniversary of their astonishing, landmark album ‘The Agent Intellect’.