wyrd radio

The Storeroom, The Wynd, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, SG6 3EN.

Saturday 17th February 2024, 3pm - 10pm. 

Live performances from The Rebel, The Pheromoans, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, Malvern Brume, Paola Lesina, Possible Area and River Bodies.

Strictly limited capacity, suggested donation: £5 - £15. Drinks and snacks available all day from the wonderful Garden City Brewery next door. The venue is a 5 minute walk from Letchworth Garden City railway station (between Cambridge and London terminals). 

Poster by Kristian Day.

Performing live:

The Rebel

The Rebel is the alter ego of Ben Wallers, best known for being the frontman of the infamous / legendary / notorious / messianic Country Teasers. For fans of (all but not necessarily or): The Fall, Kool Keith, Brainbombs, and Dolly Parton. His most recent releases as The Rebel are "Mublat Pecnoc" double album on Free Cds, and "A Cretian Build-Up” on Wrong Speed Records.

“In Ben's live performances as The Country Teasers or The Rebel, sometimes people think he's trying to wind the audience up or whatever, but it's always important that the audience is there and you're never allowed to be a passive spectator.” - Jarvis Cocker

https://thequietus.com/articles/24032-ben-wallers-the-rebel-country-teasers-interview

The Pheromoans

The Pheromoans are 5 piece rock and roll outfit formed in Brighton in 2005 and have been operating on the margins of mainstream music ever since, lacking the ability and passion to fully assimilate. Their new album Wyrd Psearch, released March 2024 on Upset The Rhythm, is packed full of memorable indie-rock showstoppers. 

https://m.soundcloud.com/thepheromoans/the-pheromoans

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is a Southend-on-Sea based writer, artist and performer. Her ongoing investigations concern the magico-materialist temporality of place and the esoteric ground rock of comedy, in work distributed across text, cassette, sonic environments, lino prints and local newspapers. 

She is currently working on a book about landscape as the mythic substrate of the sitcom, read at the intersection of the arcane and the post-industrial. Her latest releases are the cassette album ‘Nuncio Ref!’ (Crow Versus Crow) and 'Orbit​-​Son'(Infant Tree) also featuring Adam Bohman, Sue Lynch and Jackson Burton.

https://www.sophiesleigh-johnson.co.uk/

Malvern Brume

Malvern Brume is Rory Salter, a musician, artist and technician living in London. He has released albums under various projects with Alter, TakuRoku, Infant Tree, Teeth, Zoomin’ Night, Are You Before, MAL, Bison, Kashual Plastik and more. His music is formed through experimentations with acoustic & electronic instruments, faulty technologies, cassette tape, feedback and voice; motivated by a relationship to changing and chaotic environments, objects and walking.

www.rorysalter.online

Possible Area

Possible area creates site-specific live improv sets and projects in sound using objects, texture, resonance and feedback. Based in Cambridge, recent activities have included site-specific sound installations in Cambridge and Waterbeach Barracks. Solo and group improv performances include a recent appearance alongside Steve Beresford and Dominic Lash among others.

https://linktr.ee/possiblearea

Paola Lesina

Paola Lesina is a multidisciplinary artist crossing sensitive layers from visual to sound. She creates intimates spaces and sonic collage for emotions to move, merge and ride. Hot Conversation, her debut album, was released in 2020 by Falt records, is an erotic / esoteric conversation with the surrounding nature permeated by a surrealist imprint. “Candor & Guts “ is now released on the UK label Infanttree. Constantly focused on movement research and deep Listening she is founder of MOSSA, a review of appointments related to dance and exploration practices.

https://paolalesina.com/

In anticipation of our soon-to-be-released album, The Pheromoans invite you on an immersive journey into the mysterious realm of our oeuvre...

news

The Pheromoans have started work on their fifth album in Lewes. Nobody knows when or by what method this album will come out.  New songs from it will be performed at a number of music festivals this summer including Kendal Calling, Electric Fields in Dumfries and Festival No. 6 in Portmerion. 

Sian Dorrer's portrait of  former spin Dr. Ali Campbell on BBC's Newsnight

Before this there is an imminent album being released by The Bomber Jackets on Alter - you can watch a video from the album here which features Sian Dorrer's painting above and Russell's picture of Sir Steve Jobs. Since the last blog update there have been a number of releases from the Sticks called Why Bother : The Charcoal Owls The Red Albums : and a Pheromoans split single on O Genesis.  

4 members of the Pheromoans outside the studio yesterday

January dates : Vinyl CD

Reviews etc.

Reviews of our latest Long Player here on the Quietus as well as Dusted and A Ship in the Woods.

Barlow Index #4

The Pheromoans are hosting the fourth Barlow Index on June 5th. Another afternoon start, for laid back leisure. No roast dinners available - no wellies. 

Live dates

Order the new Pheromoans album here.

Saturday April 23rd: Cowley Club, Brighton

Friday May 27th: Flying Duck, Glasgow

Saturday May 28th: Mining Institute, Newcastle

Sunday May 29th: Liverpool Sound City

Monday May 30th: Manchester details tbc

Sunday June 5th: Barlow Index #4 at New River Studios, London

New Charcoal Owls 7" EP

Released March 2016. Order here.

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.

Housebound & Proud

Charcoal Owls (Russell Walker and Tom James Scott) released their Tin Roof LP this year on Night School, with contributions from Rose Keeler-Schäffeler & Jean Noël Rebilly, and now bring you a brand new track not featured on the album, recorded as a free festive download.

Click here to listen or download.

Tom James Scott

Banned From The Foxy

Good afternoon thrill-seekers, I hope this finds you well. Unfortunately the Pheromoans are no longer playing the gig at Village Underground in London tonight as planned, as the headliners Foxygen have banned us from finishing the tour.
Their reason for taking this step was due to a paranoid theory developed by some of their session men, that someone from our band had either hidden, or stolen(!) some of their 'electrical cables.' As I wouldn't know an electrical cable from a Eagles cover band, I am a bit mystified by the whole affair. In our eight years on the rock circuit, we have never stood accused of stealing anything other than alcohol. And while I can't speak for the fellow members of my rock act, I for one have enough junk in my house as it is without adding someone elses musical equipment to it.

So anyway, once I was informed of this by their slightly sinister tour operator, I later received a message from someone calling himself 'Fort William.' Fort writes in quite a quaint, Sargeant Major-type tone, peppering his world weary wisdom about the pop world, with high-handed commands relating to some items that, in his mind, we had stashed away in a Manchester Premier Inn suite. Apparently something called a 'rock pedal' had been lost by one of the nine-piece's most prominent axe-grinders, no less (found it yet guys?)
'Howday Fort,' I replied, 'I realise you have a bee in the old bonnet regarding the way your lads keep losing their gizmos, but please do not accuse me of stealing, as I am a law abiding citizen.' Fort dismissed this as the typical words of a crook, and went to claim in his inimitable fashion (tissues at the ready now folks) that he was 'one of the only people in the world to care about the Pheromoans'! I must say this peculiar piece of information cheered me up no end, and has made the whole experience worthwhile. As the last two nights have not paid very well (I think some of their fans had got lost on the way to the venue), we were hoping that tonight's London hoedown would help to recoup some of the money we lost on travel and accommodation, but there you go.. if we have been able to contribute anything at all towards Fort and Foxygen's pursuit of the big time, then I can sleep soundly... no doubt while Fort drives around the Cadillac around his ranch, cackling and performing outrageous wheelspins, mentally adding up the dollars he has made from this tour, the Pheromoans on full blast...

Inégale interview

Click here to read an interview with Inégale magazine.