Tuesday 20 October 2015

The Barlow Index #2: Vicky Langan, Blood Stereo, Claire Potter, Ravioli Me Away, Charcoal Owls.

Sunday November 1st. 4pm - 10pm. £5 entry. Power Lunches, 446 Kingsland Rd, London E8 4AE.

Performances from:


Vicky Langan. A special one-off England performance by heroic sound/visual artist Vicky Langan, from Cork, Ireland. “Irish artist Vicky Langan has gained a reputation for raw and intense performances that are as likely to leave audiences feeling deeply unsettled as profoundly moved. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate physical theatre loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art.”- Daniel Spicer, The Wire magazine


Vicky Langan photographed at Cafe Oto by Moniek Darge





















Blood Stereo. Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance are a British institution, the sound complete immersion for people who don't immerse easily. Idiot twins Burchill and Slim may behave as though they own Sussex, but Constance and Nyoukis are immune to their surroundings, making livid eyes at confused glitter vixens up and down this squalid Isle.


Blood Stereo photographed in Cork by Patricia Klich



















Claire Potter is an artist and writer from Merseyside whose book Mental Furniture (2014) is published by VerySmallKitchen. At this event Claire Potter will perform Lads of Aran, an essay performance using two slide projectors. Inserting voyeuristic found photos of lads, into stilled scenes from Robert J Flaherty's 1927 ethno-documentary Man of Aran, Claire Potter moves through a series of notes, quotations and anecdotes in an attempt to decode the figure of the lad and consider its emancipatory potentials. Frances Morgan writes 'her urgent, prickly delivery reminds you of how infrequently such regional voices are heard in underground music and performance, especially when they belong to women, whose vocals are more likely than men's to be shrouded in reverb, made glassy and affectless… Potter's voice is inescapable, compelling you to listen to what the subject of her writing has to say.'


Formed at underworld lynchpin Digby Coroner's send-off, Ravioli Me Away have been turning heads with several releases of essential tracks, and those heads haven't looked back ever since in their pursuit of good-time racket and loveable Norfolk shit. Invisible chords and a barely concealed contempt for the powers that be are all fair game when RMA hit town. The lyrical content was pseudo political.


Charcoal Owls consist of Tom James Scott and Russell Walker and create music for the masses via a mixture of essential and non-essential tracks which are steeped in the peculiar traditions of Hayes neo-soul. Their releases include Tin Roof (2014) and Coventry Campbell (2015) and have a forthcoming double A-Side 7" appearing on I Dischi Del Barone in early 2016. This is only their third ever performance and the first since 2010.


The master of ceremonies is the divisive figure of the newly toned Mad Headed Octogram, whose musings on life come by way of a distinctly rockist filter.