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Category: The Goose Presents

Categories
The Goose Presents

‘Live the Dream’: Wayzgoose x DH1 Records

‘Live the Dream’: Wayzgoose x DH1 Records

By Ed Osborne.

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I thought I was late as I rushed up the steps and into Osbourne’s cramped-but-cosy bar. The synth drones and saxophone that filled my ears as I approached surely meant the start of the night’s music, and the failure of my job to record the night on paper. Luckily, my worries were calmed when the hiss of feedback and the rearranging of a microphone assured me this was only a soundcheck; still, it was the coolest soundcheck I’d ever heard.

The three acts booked for Sunday’s collaborative gig between DH1 Records and Wayzgoose magazine sounded about as far apart as you could get, a quirk which speaks to both organizations’ commitment to supporting anything out of left-field, and fostering a creative spirit in Durham which is often steam-rolled by ABBA-playing DJ’s and drunk people requesting Wonderwall. Luckily for the audience, there was to be none of that in Osbournes tonight.

Little did I know, I’d got my first taste of V.C.O. as I arrived, a never-before-seen Durham 3-piece who were about to show the crowd just how weird a saxophone can sound. After their protracted soundcheck, they took to the stage for real. Keyboardist Sam Shepherd started us off with a programmed drum kick and a synth drone. I was confused – they have a drummer, why do they need a programmed kick? But once Freddie Krone’s drums and Alex Wardill’s sax kicked in, I understood. Free from having to keep the collective’s rhythm, Freddie’s sticks were free to wander round his kit, sometimes mirroring the beat, others creating textures of sound woven out of the metal of his cymbals. Alex’s saxophone was layered in effects, producing an otherworldly sound that covered multiple octaves as he improvised around Sam’s washes of synth chords.

I can’t really write about the set in terms of V.C.O.’s different songs, because the whole thing was basically a long-form instrumental, loosely structured with healthy doses of improvisation. It speaks to the skill of each musician involved that they could pull this off and still keep it interesting. In fact, as the set progressed it only got more unique; Alex swapped his sax for first a clarinet, then a flute, which sounded even more psychedelic, sometimes akin to an organ. To compliment this Sam’s keyboards oscillated between spacey chords, competing melody lines, and occasionally the odd laser sound effect. I felt like I was listening to the instrumentals from Bowie’s Blackstar, if they’d been performed back in his drug-taking days. I can honestly say I’ve never heard anything like it, especially in Durham: V.C.O.’s experimental set was incredibly fun to witness and something I won’t forget for a while.

Throughout the night I saw placed around the venue various pieces of art, provided by Wayzgoose’s many talented collaborators and creators as a fitting companion to the equally creative music being played. One I found particularly interesting was a series of photographs provided by Honor McGregor, which depict unromanticised realistic scenes of British adolescent life; post-industrial scenery, a figure sprawled on a park bench, and – my favourite – some punk youths with hairstyles I will forever envy. The eclectic mix of art perfectly mirrored the diverse group of musicians who were performing.

 Speaking of that – back to the music.

Next up was Clark Rainbow (Gabby Alvarez), a solo vocalist who sports distinctive pilot’s goggles every time she takes to the stage. Her use of backing tracks allowed Clark Rainbow to display her voice’s full capabilities; her catchy art-pop sounded like a fusion of Billie Eilish and Lily Allen. Opening with a forthcoming single, the funky instrumental went a long way towards disguising the disturbingly dark lyrics, a contrast I really enjoyed. Another highlight of the set was ‘Tycoon’, an upbeat girlboss anthem brilliantly self-aware in its materialism and begging to be danced to. Clark Rainbow closed their slot with ‘Find Me’, which has over 1000 streams on Spotify; the production (all done by Clark herself) brought out the best qualities of the eerie vocals, which were very Eilish-inspired. The song then disintegrated into a noise-pop bridge which threatened a further breakdown, before Clark Rainbow calmed the audience with one last chorus, leaving us forever wanting more.

Lord Emu, the heaviest act of the three, were thus the natural headliners. The 4-piece began with an amusing cover of ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ with a punky twist, which got the crowd immediately lively. Their next few songs showed the Emu’s knack for writing some catchy riffs as well as impressive solos, courtesy of lead-guitarist George Brown. He also gave the audience the occasional backing vocal, which never failed to improve a chorus. Martin Screen’s steady bass playing and “the sweatiest man in Durham” Luke Pocock’s fast-paced drumming kept the group tight, making sure they’re equally competent at speedy punk songs and catchy alternative rock tunes with choruses that veer towards power ballads. The star of the show, though, was frontman Dillon Blevins; he strummed and sang with furious intensity, bare-chested underneath a tweed blazer. Their showmanship and passion were embraced by the crowd and made the band’s cover of ‘What’s new Scooby Doo?’ even funnier – it’s “what you all came for,” according to Dillon. Lord Emu’s final song was another cover, this time of Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’ – perfect for the venue, which hosts one of Durham’s only queer club nights. Despite their focus on covers at the end of the set, I won’t forget how strong Lord Emu’s originals are; they tease that they are recording a studio album as they leave the stage, and I can’t wait to hear it.

The crowd, now in full clubbing mode, were more than pleased when DH1’s Jack O’Donovan took the stage for a DJ set. His up-tempo fusion of garage breakbeats and house music was perfect as the hours got later and the drinks got lighter. With the crowd in full swing a drunk man on his way out told me to “live the dream”. They were fitting words for the night, which felt like an indulgence in unashamed creativity – an experiment in what the whole of the Durham music scene could sound like, if we all listened to a lot less ABBA. Unfortunately, I have to return from this otherworld now, to my regular realm of summative deadlines and dingy kitchens, and hope we can do this again soon.

 

Instagrams:

@DH1recordsofficial

@bourbaki_music (V.C.O.)

@clarkrainbow

@lordemuband

 

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Categories
Culture The Goose Presents

Hands that Help – A night of poetry for the people

Hands that Help -
A night of poetry for the people

By Alex Kramskaya.

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“Give me hands that help over lips that pray” says poet Asa Williams, gripping the microphone and staring down at the audience of poetry goers, friends, and bookshop employees huddled together on the shop floor, some holding blankets, others tin G&T’s, leaning against each other to listen to a night of poetry written by the people of Durham, hosted by The People’s Bookshop as their first event since lockdown. 

The shop itself is hidden away, and climbing up its winding staircase becomes a moment of ritual before arriving finally at the top floor. It’s small, no bigger than an attic, with books crammed in at odd angles, out of print copies and antiques sat under biographies and pamphlets, and the scent of coffee being freshly brewed dense in the air, making it feel close, looking down at the fog and the streets below. The shop, to the unacquainted, is a bewildering, secret place, and the volunteers – on any given day a mix of students, locals, and professors – are its trusty guides, presiding over the only radical bookshop of its kind in the Northeast.

The arts community in Durham is a close one, where word of mouth is the main means of communication, and news spreads like a ripple in an instant. Think of it like a large, confusing, extended family except with less group dinners and more conversations over an open notes app on someone’s phone. Word got round the family fast, and suddenly the quaint shop was overrun to bursting point with writers, guitarists, fellow poets, and Bob Dylan enthusiasts, all there to support to support not only the growing movement of art in Durham, but also The People’s Bookshop which actively encourages and fosters creative expression outside the university setting.


          Drowning in your hair and your eyes,

          Giving head in a moonsoaked bed,

          Whilst your housemates watched the spilt sunrise.

          There were a thousand words said in the dark,

          And maybe half of them were true my love.

          After your read Rimbaud to me at Wharton Park

          Till one day you decided you’d had enough.

                         – Asa Williams, ‘The Avenue’


The lineup saw poets such as Eden Ward, Izzy Gibson, Ariana Nkwanyuo, Alex Kramskaya and Asa Williams, each bringing a unique poetic voice and style to their works – some funny and melodic, others aggressive, words landing on the downbeat like drums – it was a wide and wonderful cacophony.


          ‘Through cracks in penthouse windows,

          blowing through paper deeds to land,

          we feel hope prickle the nape of our necks

          in a language we can all understand.’

                         – Izzy Gibson, ‘Political Manifesto of an Iceberg Lettuce’


I’ve often tried to locate the origin of poetry, I think it lives in some quiet place between the ribs and the diaphragm, burying itself deep inside the chest and smouldering like ashes – heat radiating onto the page and fire burning on the lips of those who read it. It’s outrageous, like a secret being performed, there’s an element of the forbidden in it – the audience leaning in close to listen to words scribbled in a fit of rage, a moment of passion, cooling the embers for a moment. A group of people become bonded, sitting around a campfire listening to the echoes of love on the avenue, feeling the memory of a hand brushing past theirs – the world opens up for a moment. 


          ‘Perhaps it is the sweetness of June.

          Perhaps is is the warm shoulders pressed against mine,

          the palpable love of how dawn breaks over my best friends faces

          The moment is so perfect I want to hold it in my palms.’

                         – Eden Ward, ‘Sunrise over the observatory’


          ‘But if I could tell them, that I had seen the stars and met the moon.

          That I had indeed danced with the cat and laughed with the spoon.

          That the universe was bigger than they’d ever known- 

          More profound than their very own.’

                         – Ariana Nkwanyuo, ‘Silk Ear and Sow Purse’


Words and a sixteen wheeler truck have more in common than you’d think – both can hit you all at once, rearranging your insides and leaving you floored, picking yourself up if you are able. Poetry is unforgiving, and thus lends itself well to protest – it gives voice the effervescent and the indignant, the merciless and the aching. ‘The People’s Poets’ displayed the way that art becomes action and action becomes impact, the small shop atop Vennels blazing bright for an evening, illuminated by a community that huddled close together to sing the body poetic.

 

          ‘And passionate words 

          And quarrelsome lips

          Blaze harder and brighter in between sips.’

                         – Alex Kramskaya, ‘Whiskey Poem’

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Categories
The Goose Presents

Rock on the Hill

Rock on the Hill

By Asa Williams.              

Photography by Izzy Gibson (@youfreezeishoot)

A great elevation and celebration of Durham’s alternative music scene took place on October 7th-9th as Rock on the Hill returned. In collaboration with The Goose Presents, Rock Soc, and Canary Records, the best live music and poetry from Durham and beyond found a home in The Angel Inn, Fabio’s, and The Library Bar. Asa Williams – Durham graduate, PhD student, professional punk poet, and backbone of Rock on the Hill – reflects on this ethereal weekend:

The stars shook in a midnight-blue sky, the last bastions of a universe still warm with the blood of creativity and all the words not yet said. If there is ever a monument that our ilk does not tear down with our hands, then it will soon turn into the dust made from our bodies. Meta-space meat to be. Made of stardust and covered in glitter. But, back to the stars, the ones leaking upon an inky canvas of sky-vellum and slowly, one by one, fading into oblivion. But how they shone bright.  

Rock on the Hill, much like the stars, will one day fade. For now however, and for a long time to come, it will be able to stake a claim as Durham’s biggest and best independently run festival so far. 

On Friday night, you could hear the joy of the Angel’s crowd in the shortness of their breath, in the chanting symposiums harking back to the death of the rockstar, anthems for anemoia. The patron saint of the anti-establishment, Arthur Rimbaud himself, darted between the long hair and sang along to the chandelier-sparkling hymns for the disenfranchised. As the bodies writhed in united repulsion of whence they came, souls ventured in their true form to see the stars as they are for the first time. Durham was washed away in a river of music, the ebbs and flows of which bought unadulterated, alternative music for perhaps the first time. The driftwood was claimed and brought to a stage; There, an altar was built and the maelstrom of humanity moshed names into it. Void State, The Blacklist, Mirror Image and Elvet. Four-letter words and constellations were draped across their bodies and the ceilings, plastered by the ongoing crush of humanity. Glued into place, the music had nowhere to look but the Heavens, the great starry vortex where chaos rules over us all. 

As the voices of Angels quieted, a Call to the Faithful had begun across town. The floor of Fabio’s shook to its first ever mosh pit. Whirring in a furious excess of energy, bass unplugged and accepting that the only good system is a sound system, the nightclub melted and shook the graves of the longdistance dead. In her place instead was a sacrosanct tribute to the sacred memories of the DIY ethos and passion of Punk and art. And all the while the Canary Records flag flew, held by duct tape, the voices of the prophets and the prayers of men across long distant oceans. Call to the Faithful rocked the hilly city, stoning the unbelievers with rock and punk distilled from the essence of riot and discontent. Lord Emu, a collage of glam and grit, reeled the crowd on four pink strings and soaring guitar-skateboards. Elvet became the anti-sandpaper as the prince of precision divided his time between the riverside and mirror world. Caravaggio melded the crowd with time travellers and agony’s ecstasy was forged onto the visage of the gutterpoets. 

The final night belonged at three in the morning, in a raindrop thudding against the face of a window in late 1960s Montreal, played in the minor key. Inky pens scratched the heartbreak of existence, the sad eyes of Oscar Wilde’s dog, onto the full moon hovering on the top shelf of a disused garage, next to the empty tube of glue and the partnerless glove. The poets assembled and spoke of the pavements on which they laid their heads to look up to the stars better. Bethany, Eden, Izzy and the cathedral’s grizzled poet laureate, Asa, drew their words in every shade of magenta along a drizzle-filled skyline. Mushroom dreams grew from a garden just around the corner, sending Moonstags trampling across the crops of Organic Lemon Sugar. At the same moment, Orchard Thieves were interrupted by the saddest prophets that ever leaked from Surrey’s and Yorkshire’s puddles. And there they dripped from the ceiling, their condensed forms a tribute to every poem never written and the library of unfinished existence that the cemetery gates enclose. 

Rock on the Hill ended as the universe had begun, somewhere between rock’n’roll and Jesus Christ doing the dishes (humming a soft tune from an old folk-punk band that he had once known under his breath, sometimes stopping and trying to remember if the words playing on his mind were from an old Van Morrison song or perhaps a Walt Whitman that had been read to him as a small boy). Hallowed charities were lifted upon the shoulders of music and poetry paraded for the great festival of art. 

Rock on the Hill has built itself an enduring legacy, totally separate from the university, who it sees as being an anti-art establishment, one where tradition and convention trump creativity and artistic freedom. 

Rock on the Hill had three simple objectives at its creation: firstly, to have fun, secondly to support a charity, thirdly, that the music being played would be at least alright. It seems to have succeeded. All for the price of a ferret and a time traveller or two. 

Still the stars shone.


With many thanks to:

Rock on the Hill https://www.instagram.com/rockonthehill22/

Asa Williams https://www.instagram.com/litttleasa/

Durham Rock Soc https://www.instagram.com/durhamrocksoc/

Canary Records https://www.instagram.com/canary_records/

The Angel Inn https://www.instagram.com/theangeldurham/

Fabio’s https://www.instagram.com/fabiosbardurham/

The Library Bar https://www.instagram.com/thelibrarydurham/

Call to the Faithful https://www.instagram.com/calltothefaithful/

Void State https://www.instagram.com/void.state/

The Blacklist https://www.instagram.com/theblacklistband/

Mirror Image https://www.instagram.com/mirrorimagedu/

Elvet https://www.instagram.com/elvet_music/

Lord Emu https://www.instagram.com/lordemuband/

Zani XR https://www.instagram.com/zani.xr/

Moonstag https://www.instagram.com/moonstagofficial/

Orchard Thieves https://www.instagram.com/orchardthievesdurham/

Organic Lemon Sugar https://www.instagram.com/organiclemonsugar/

Eden Cain https://www.instagram.com/ede.cain/

Bethany Blackwell https://www.instagram.com/beth.blackwell1/

Izzy Gibson (aka. ‘You Freeze I Shoot’) https://www.instagram.com/youfreezeishoot/ https://www.instagram.com/izzycgibson/

WAYZGOOSE (n.)

Pronunciation: ‘ˈweɪzɡuːs

An annual festivity held in summer by the members of a printing establishment.
wayzgoosemagazine@gmail.com

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