Tuesday 14 July
Doors 7pm

O2 Shepherds Bush Empire, Shepherds Bush Green, London W12 8TT 020 8354 3300

Of Montreal bring their consumate theatricality to the Shepherds Bush Empire this summer. Their songs soar and weave with energy and goodwill, daring anyone who hears them to walk away without a smile on their face. Listening to OF MONTREAL, you might think that singer Kevin Barnes is missing the angst gene. But the longer you listen, the more you start to realize that maybe missing the angst gene is a blessing. It allows Kevin to explore more fully his crazily creative ideas and to make wondrous music, drawing on influences from the Byrds or even the Mamas And The Papas; the group's songs are all sweet pop ditties, as suitable for campfire-singing as stage performance.

Tickets £15.50 from
www.ticketweb.co.uk
08700 600 100
www.seetickets.com
0870 264 3333

http://www.myspace.com/ofmontreal
http://www.ofmontreal.net

THE BIG PINK
23 April 2009
ICA, The Mall, London SW1Y

THE BIG PINK are Londoners Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell, two lifelong friends whose home studio experiments have bore some of the most inspiring British music of 2008. Entirely characteristic of The Big Pink’s unique furrow, the hope-filled darkness of their music points to both the digital hardcore and art-rock undergrounds, while Robbie’s trademark soaring vocal melodies and densely encompassing reverberation complete their entrancing formula. The at times stately drone and overdriven trebly crescendo nods to such sonic reference points as the shoe-gaze of my bloody valentine and brooding minimalism of Earth, but the track’s chiming chorus and tender melodic nuance allow it a fragile beauty of its very own.

TELEPATHE
93 Feet East, 150 Brick Lane, London E1
Monday 11 May

Tv On The Radio's Dave Sitek's favourite band are also New York's strangest new prospect. TELEPATHE veer from electric karaoke to instrumental noise-pop, happily cementing their position as 2008's most intriguing band… The Brooklyn three piece deliver a live set of eerie textural music and interweave into it a rhythmic pattern that pulls the listener in, which bring to mind such outfits as Can, Gang Gang Dance, or perhaps even Animal Collective in their most spaced out hypnotic mode…

Tickets from
www.seetickets.com
0870 264 3333
www.ticketweb.co.uk
08700 600 100

Eat Your Own Ears presents
SOAP & SKIN
plus guests

Thursday 2 April
Doors 7.30pm

Bush Hall, 310 Uxbridge Road, London, W12 7LJ 0208 222 6955

“There are some great female artists making laptop pop at the moment, but even in such company Anja Plaschg stands out. Not that she's one of the current spate of solo synth-girls, although much of her debut album, Lovetune for Vacuum, does find her programming sounds normally the preserve of glitch techno/clicks+cuts musicians or purveyors of IDM (so-called Intelligent Dance Music). The rest of the time she's singing self-penned atmospheric ballads that cry out to be described as eerie, haunting and fragile but are possessed of an almost neo-classical power and grandeur. The lovechild of a Sapphic union between Sinead and Björk, Enya on depressants or a Dead Can Dance for the digital age? Something like that.

Plaschg – who goes by the name of Soap&Skin is only 18. She was born in 1990 on a farm in the tiny village of Gnas in the south of Styria, and today lives in Vienna. Her music, a jarring juxtaposition of the delicate and dissonant, has about it such an air of mystery, drama and quiet insanity it's hard to separate the myth-mongering from the truth when it comes to the details of her life, but apparently her parents own a pig farm and the young Plaschg, instead of devoting herself to the joys of pork production, was classically trained in piano and violin while learning to navigate basic sound programmes on the computer from her brother. At 16, she began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna before uploading some songs to her MySpace, earning the attention of the Berlin underground – specifically, acclaimed techno-punk T Raumschmiere, who got her song Mr Gaunt PT 1000 released on the electronic label Shitkatapult.” GUARDIAN

myspace.com/soapandskin

Tickets £7.50 from
www.seetickets.com
0870 264 3333
www.ticketweb.co.uk
08700 600 100