miscellaneous

Preview: Eyes of a Blue Dog at Pizza Express Dean Street, Oct 19th

Rory Simmons writes about his new group Eyes of a Blue Dog, who are performing at Pizza Express on October 19th as part of the F-IRE festival. Sound clips from the new album on Babel  and link to photos below:

Eyes Of A Blue Dog is a collaboration between myself, Terje Evensen (drums/electronics) and Elisabeth Nygaard (vocals). If you don’t already know these two musicians, they are incredible.

Terje Evensen has been at the forefront of Norwegian electronic and improvised music for the last 10 years- working with Spin Marvel, PD Conception, John Paul Jones and Nis Petter Molvaer.

Elisabeth Nygaard is one of the most striking singers of her generation, sounding somewhere between Sidsel Endressen and Bjork. I have had the pleasure of working with her in Fringe Magnetic for many years but she can also be heard in Moov and Extended Corner.

Eyes of a Blue Dog came about through our work together with other projects, but also through our shared interests in musicians such as Sidsel Endressen/Humcrush/Matthew Herbert/Hanne Hukkelberg. Our debut album Rise is coming out on Babel in November. It is a record where we wanted to place simple shorter ‘songs’ sit next to landscapes of ambient improvisation but in a place where it all felt part of the same story. From a kind of post-Portishead bubbling blues to free flowing improv, we are really proud of this album . The name is taken from the 1950’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez novella of magical realism, perhaps this same dream-like quality is in the music at times?

So we are really looking forward to being part of the F-IRE Festival at the Pizza Express on October 19th. It will be a really exciting night of music, it will be our first opportunity to perform some of this music live- Elisabeth Nygaards poise and intensity is something truly special and Terje Evensen’s beautiful approach to textures and shaping will make this concert something really amazing. And of course, I am always massively privileged to share the stage with these people- I’ll be playing the trumpet (and maybe some other things too!). Hope to see you there!


SOUND CLIPS FROM BANDCAMP


– Some photos with this review.

Categories: miscellaneous

Leave a Reply