ACTIVE CHILD / MAN WITHOUT COUNTRY - SOLD OUT
Monday 20th February, 2012
St Giles In The Fields
60 St Giles High Street, London, WC2H 8LG
7:30pm / £9.50
Map /
For Pat Grossi of Active Child, the last two years have been nothing short of enriching. Musically, Pat has worked within and appropriated a number of styles into his sound, from his early days singing with that heavenly voice as a choir boy to his more recent forays into laptop-assisted indie-pop made in his bedroom, best exemplified on 2010’s acclaimed Curtis Lane EP. His sound is so wide-ranging that he has found himself touring with many notable acts of differing genres, including dubstep producer James Blake, dreamy synth-pop of School of Seven Bells, and the indie-rock bands White Lies and White Rabbits.
Nothing quite prepares you for the leap that Pat has taken with his debut album, You Are All I See, out on Vagrant records. Recently, he has expanded his sonic ambitions and turned the studio into an instrument for a record that sounds cosmically huge and yet intimate all the same.
Reflecting on the album’s finished product, Pat says “I think more than anything, I see this debut release as a bridge towards something bigger and truer. Something I can look back on and think, ‘damn, you really did it’.” When you finally hear You Are All I See you’ll think the very same thing.
MAN WITHOUT COUNTRY
MWC are a thrilling modern duo with tour de force dynamics yet a lingering afterburn in both sound and vision. Their intensely atmospheric sonic palette combines manic and eerie synth pulses, glacial guitar ripples, heavy bass and haunting vocals that describe a relentlessly compelling world view - uneasy, heavy, confrontational. As MWC’s Tomas Greenhalf says, “You don’t know whether to dance to us or just listen to it, and wallow in it.”
Greenhalf and Ryan James don’t think they’re alone in presenting the dark/uplifting paradox; they namecheck a handful of Scandinavian artists, such as The Knife, When Saints Go Machine and The Field. But none of them place such an emphasis on lyrics as MWC, and certainly none of them grew up inWales. The way Man Without Country don’t belong in any one camp begins with their name, chosen because of a shared, “sense of not belonging.” Coming from remote parts of South Wales Greenhalf and James felt isolated and alienated by small-town life, and it was only after meeting on a popular music degree in 2006 that they discovered they weren’t alone. In fact, both admit the reason they were taking the course, they say, was, “to find other musicians.”
From stormy to subtle, swooning to haunting, scorching to soothing, Man Without Country are many things. Yet they stand alone in modern music.
All tickets for this show are now completely SOLD OUT
