Still House Plants + Ashley Paul
Experimental three-piece STILL HOUSE PLANTS return to London in support of the release of their debut LP, ‘Long Play’ (Bison Records). [http://bisonrecords.co.uk/] Combining visual strategies, free improvisation, garage and punk, Still House Plants build melodic hierarchies scaffolded around ambiguities and intimacy. ‘Long Play’ collects the group’s raw guitar-drum-vocal palette and stretches it to include violin, piano and home recording. Ranging from seconds-long to seven:minute:somethings, the album coagulates to form a heady meld of rudimentary phrases, kinetic repetition and malleable samples. Experimental songwriting is rarely so forthcoming, emotive, or approachable.
Still House Plants are Cafe OTO x Jerwood Foundation Artistic Development fund recipients 2018/19, and have also been artists-in-residence for the CCA/AC Projects Music Residency and at The Pipe Factory in Glasgow. The trio have performed internationally too, touring with Mette Rasmussen to perform at Ultra Eczema’s 20th Anniversary, Fasching Jazz Club with Rasmussen and Richard Dawson, as well as at KRAAK festival.
https://bison-records.bandcamp.com/releases
ASHLEY PAUL is an American composer/performer whose intuitive process integrates free form song structures with a focused approach to sound and clatter. A complexity of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, prepared strings, bells and percussion create a delicate palette, uniquely her own. Her solo albums have received critical acclaim being chosen in The Wire: Top 50 Albums of 2013, Pitchfork’s “The Out Door” best experimental sounds of 2013, number one on Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s “Tongue Top Ten” in Arthur Magazine. Paul’s recent LP on Slip, ’Lost In Shadows’, is a bewitching, expansive, deeply personal excavation of recent motherhood, told through songs dissolving and re-crystallising at the threshold of free improvisation. At the LP’s heart is Paul’s mercurial multi-instrumental style, which renders the primal wails, clunks, and twangs of clarinet, saxophone, percussion, and guitar uncannily melodic, alchemised by frank, vulnerable vocals. The deft negotiation of the fragile and the coruscating evidenced on Paul’s ‘Line The Clouds’ (2013) and ‘Heat Source’ (2014) has now reached a kind of hesitant sublime.
