Sat 22 Aug: Duke Garwood & The Ladywoodsmen, Cafe OTO

Duke Garwood

Gravid Hands presents:

Duke Garwood & The Ladywoodsmen
The Exploits of Elaine
Sixtoes

Duke Garwood plays a haunted contemporary blues music, by turns evoking windswept plains and the hive-like emptiness of inner city estates.

He drags the downtrodden spirit of plantation blues forward through time to linger in shopping malls and empty train stations.

As if to emphasize this juxtaposition, Duke left his home in South London to record his last album, Emerald Palace, in a Surrey log cabin.

The resulting music twists the blues template thoroughly, with rasping acoustic guitars exploring ethereal tonalities as they clamber over rattling, syncopated percussion.

Metallic tones and eerie drones imbue country idioms with the alienating clamour of the city. Duke’s voice ranges from a well-worn gruffness close to Sprechstimme, through plaintive melodies, to a feral howl.

The effect is at once beautiful and disturbing, familiar and alien. Duke’s next LP, The Sand That Falls, will be released on 10th August through Fire Records.

PLAN B – “The South London blues, according to charismatic travellin´ man Duke Garwood, is a clanging, loping blues, all pots and pans percussion and monotone Tom Waits growl via Trout Mask Replica and Deptford post-punk mavericks This Heat.”

INDEPENDENT – “It’s like traditional country blues subjected to a barrage of 21st-century urban noise, with something of the guitar-improv abstractions of the late, great Derek Bailey thrown in.”

Saturday 22 August at  Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin Street Dalston E8 3DL

£6/£5 cheaplist available in advance; register names at gravidlist@gmail.com

Sixtoes