DScalations

As it's the penultimate issue, I have done two reviews for the May Nightshift, here's the first.

HARESS/ CARAUSIAS ARISE!/ CODIAD Y MÔR, Divine Schism, Common Ground, 9/4/26 

Codiad Y Môr is Ibs, a member of Spaceman & The Spaceband, space apparently being the driving force behind his acoustic guitar pieces. Each delicate instrumental is sparse and simple, referencing British 60s folk and US mountain plucking, but also perhaps the calm stillness of composers like Satie and Mompou. We’d call the spare opening piece the bare skeleton of a John Fahey number, except this makes it sound too sturdy and resilient. Maybe it’s American primitivism’s lymphatic system. Some will find the music too elementary, and a broken string seems to break Ibs’s concentration, but on this quiet, chilly evening the "If John Renbourn studied ikebana” vibe fits perfectly. 

At first Carausias Arise! continues the cold elegance, windswept synth sounding like a diffuse Vangelis piece. But it’s noteworthy that Dafydd Roberts resembles Harry Hill as Geography teacher, because there’s a lofi surrealism to the set. We get the approachable abstraction of 90s ambience à la Pete Namlook, and playfully wibbly improv electronica – a lovely section sounds like pitch-bent babies gurgling – but this is only half the story. One minute Roberts has a patch cable in his mouth, another he’s rubbing a handheld spring reverb device on a piece of slate, but it’s the vocals that are truly mystifying, being tremulous, high-pitched and stately, like a monk swallowing his tongue. When he intones “Take a seed, expose it to the sun” it’s like Scott Walker played by a Gregorian gonk. Two extra-musical moments sum up this set: someone takes photos from the crowd with a Nintendo DS, a self-consciously odd hardware choice, and at the set’s end an eerie drifting tone is drowned out by the venue’s creaky toilet door: absurd, yet slightly sinister. 

Shropshire’s Haress apparently open with ‘Variations on a Toilet Door’, a thicket of bowed cymbals and softly grating guitar tones, but they settle to a more straightforward post-rockers-do-folk structure. This is not to say that they are not excellent, layering malleted drums and entwined guitars over shruti drones – the second track boasts a lovely intricate guitar halfway between English folk dance and gnawa blues, a sort of Moroccan morris. Elsewhere we have folk rock with doom logic, as if we're at Zombie Cropredy. Vocals are added sparingly, and all the stronger for that. The last song’s the live debut of an outstandingly noisy bluster, dropping to a haunted but jaunty coda about “Somerset girls” which sounds like Bellowhead in the underworld. Get us a flagon of spectral scrumpy and a demonic DS charger, we don’t want this unusual evening to end.