Ditte Elly - 'You Find It Easy' Single

Ditte Elly has been modestly resting her music in the nooks of the necks of North-East music lovers (and others) over the last few years, and it has been fitting rather snugly. 

Moving up to Sunderland from Oxford, Elly was welcomed to her new home with the help of good friend Matt Stalker, who not only invited her into his own band, singing and playing keys, but also supported her solo music; finding the right venues for these sensitive songs. This wisdom to carefully choose places that compliment her work, (intimate spaces like the The Old Cinema Launderette, resonant rooms such as the Sunderland Minster,) Elly can, to this day, make the incredible claim that she has “never had a bad gig."
 

Music had been in Elly’s life for a long time, but it was when she attended the Catweazle Club in Oxford in 2011 that she felt the attraction to songwriting and performing. This local hotspot offered a place for musicians to perform one song (two, if the host was impressed) to an enthusiastic crowd. Feeling the buzz in her bones from this interaction, Elly set forth, striding into this awakened passion, returning to play with new songs in tow.

Some of these songs culminated in her first EP in 2012, We’ll Meet Again. It was with this endeavour that Elly formed a recording relationship with Newcastle-local, sound-engineer Liam Gaughan. Elly explained that completing an album following the debut took time due to balancing studying Fine Art at University alongside its writing. Finally completing the set this year, the songs were rehearsed over two months with fellow musicians, before the group travelled up to a Farmhouse in Jedburgh, with Gaughan and his portable studio, to reside in each others pockets for a week; living the recording of Elly’s new album. “It was an idyllic setting away from civilisation that allowed you to switch off and concentrate on the music.”

Gaughan’s nature brought the best out of this singer-songwriter. “Liam has incredible patience, and a way to make you feel completely comfortable in front of the ominous red recording light. He doesn't normally work with quiet, folky stuff, he's in a funk band and he does lots of crazy loud rock stuff, but the point is he has this amazing ability to just get the absolute best of songs. He has a great sense of the essence of music, I think.”

Welcoming these new melodies to the world, ahead of the long-play, is You Find It Easy, a sorrowful reflection that highlights Elly’s textured vocal tones, and the sound of her nylon-string guitar playing.

You Find It Easy will be released on 5th December. The full album will follow in the new year, due to be released in the springtime. Live performances allow a special glimpse into Elly’s relationship with her songs. It is her concern for them that is so palpable and gripping to watch. You can next see Ditte Elly play at the Scrumpy Willow Cafe, Newcastle on 20th January.

[2015.11.04] for NARC Magazine.

Kate Edwards - 'Every Key' Single

For playing music live in Newcastle for the best part of a decade, you will most likely recognise Kate Edwards; either from her singing and keyboard melodies in local pride, Brilliant Mind, or from her own writing and performing (often with other musicians) under the moniker Agerskow. Over the last year of so, Edwards has relaxed her performance schedule to allow natural changes in her relationship with her music to take place, and to hone this new centre from which to work from. Now, she is ready to come out from the chrysalis.

Highlighting this change, Every Key is Edwards’ first release in her own name. Entering a whirlwind of culture surrounding music in the heart of Newcastle at a young age, Edwards has stood strong in that weather, with her sustained passion to play music, rolling with the blessings and the challenges alike. She has melted these experiences into the foundation of her strength, which has now, at last, brought her the confidence to release music as herself, undisguised. Edwards explains how this latest song mirrors some of her own feelings about the searching she has done with her music. “That feeling…” she ponders. “You start somewhere, and you go around the houses, and just experiment; doing this, that… discovering everything, and trying out everything, and then, eventually, you realise, you kind of had it before anyway. It was always there.”

This restoration of self-belief is tangible in the flow of this track. Every Key starts measured and careful, with sparse piano chords, and Edwards’ lilting and crisp voice laying forth the central dilemma, but as it travels, bass guitar and Tom-Tom percussion add a determined heartbeat to the texture and become a thrusting march for our singer. As sustained backing vocals and glissando chiming join the orchestration, the spirit is risen to the finish. Every Key came from a progression Edwards recorded onto her phone and “just sort of forgot about” but when returning to her voice-memo’s she kept stumbling upon it, and realised “that’s really catchy, I’m going to have to develop that more.”

Accompanying this release, is Sticky Strawberry Blood, a wonderful peculiarity which takes full pleasure in suspending its melodies over shimmering guitar patterns, with playful pizzicato violin and percussion tempting the melodies to the tonic at the refrains. 

These tracks were recorded by The Mistakable Sound Of - a portable studio, run by Marc Bird, and mastered by Edwards’ brother Alex. In this latest phase of creativity, Edwards’ energy has catalysed the capture of more recorded music already. She has set aside these songs, which explore different moods, for a release next year.

Every Key will be available to download from 4th December, but Edwards will be having an intimate launch for the single at The Ouseburn Farm on Sunday 6th December. Support will come from local troubadour Trev Gibb, and Patrick Lawrence, who is commonly known for playing violin in many bands around Newcastle, but here you will get to hear him in focus. 

[2015.11.02] for NARC Magazine.

Lyn Hagan - The Mexican Mafia and Me

Unveiled last October, Lyn Hagan’s latest work, The Mexican Mafia and Me, has been on display at The Laing Gallery since then. Around the time of the exhibitions opening, I was fortunate to discuss this audacious mixed-media presentation with her. Though the final piece of work involves pencil drawings, slow-motion film, interview footage, magazine articles, and a deeply haunting embroidered bridal dress, the scope of this exhibition grew dramatically from Hagan’s initial want to satisfy a more straightforward desire.

“I didn’t begin this as an artwork. It was simply just an exchange of letters. I had pen-pals since I was seven years old, and I’ve always been against the Death Penalty, so at some point those two things combined and I decided I would write to someone who was on Death Row.” That someone became Anthony Hernandez - a man on Death Row, for murder, at San Quentin prison. “I felt safe because this guy was in America… and he’s not going to get out.”

From these written exchanges grew a unique relationship which inspired Hagan, accompanied by her boyfriend, to travel out to California twice; to meet Tony in visitations, as well as his family. Tony was on Death Row because he shot someone on behalf of the Mexican Mafia. In an attempt to further her understanding of a culture where something like this could happen, Hagan went to a range in California to experience shooting a gun for herself. "It's in a country where it's legal, it's their culture, I'm a tourist in that culture, and I'm trying to explore this guy's personality, and he killed someone, so gun's are a really big part of his personality." A film of this session, with a target customised by Hagan, has been included in the exhibition.

    "What we were doing was quite risky, because it was a flammable dress, we're shooting bullets at it, so we had to do it really quickly. We asked the guy who ran the shooting gallery if we're okay to do this, and he said ‘Be really quick before my boss comes back!’ It's a thill. I was quite nervous though. You can see in slow motion my hands are going like this [wobbling her hands] - I'm so nervous. And the guns are so heavy." For Hagan the capture of the shoot “represents what it is like for a body to be shot, without it being this cliched, Hollywood thing."

Though “initially the fascination was with the women” who wrote to Tony, Hagan was keen for this exhibition to focus more on him, what surrounds and surrounded his life. “ [Tony] was private school educated, he’d had a really good start in life and he got to about 15… he’s half-Mexican and half-White, … so he’d start to identify … up until then [the people she interviewed would] describe him as this average white suburban kid, into Eminem and skateboarding, and then he identified with what he perceived to be his Mexican side, and that was actually, in that area, a lot of drug-dealing and a lot of violence. So he went to prison when he was 17 for a really minor offence. He robbed an ice-cream truck! So he got sent to this Level 4 prison… I don’t know why he got sent to this high-level security prison but he did. He was a 17 year old boy and, for survival, comes under the protection of the gang in there, which is the Mexican Mafia. So from that part on, they’d got him by the balls. ”

Whilst abroad visiting people involved with Tony and case, Hagan filmed more, not knowing quite where it would lead. Though various interviews, including one with The District Attorney for Tony’s case, went on to inspire the libretto for a mini-Opera Hagan collaborated on a few years back, with this recent exhibition she chose to present the original footage intercut across large screens. She uses this material to show the difference between America and the UK, and why they have the Death Penalty and we don’t. “The level of violence is at this peak and [the US] have this technology readily available. What linked Tony to the murder victim was DNA.”

One thing that was revealed in their written exchanges was Tony’s interest in art and drawing. This lead to Hagan supplying him with materials, and he created pencil drawings. These surreal portrayals of himself are also eatured in this exposé.

Hagan admires documentary filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield and Louis Theroux. The influence of the latter’s playful side comes through in perhaps the exhibitions most humourous inclusion: a Pick-Me-Up magazine article convinced of Hagan’s passionate love-affair with the prisoner she was writing with.
    

“ [Tony] gave me the letters of lots of women who would write to him and what I did when I first came back was… on a whim, because lots of people were asking me ‘Are you one of these women?' all the time, …I kinda sent a picture of me and him, and a false story through the news release Wire, and it got picked up by Pick-Me-Up magazine, you know - those women's mags, and they published a story. They came and did a photoshoot. I basically role-played … I gave an interview as if I was one of these women. 'Our first kiss was in a cage,' that kind of thing. They wrote the story themselves. It was very much dramatised. I gave them the smallest bits of information and they wrote this huge, kind of Jeremy Kyle-style story, it was great, I loved it.”

Hagan’s exhibition, The Mexican Mafia and Me, will be concluding its run at The Laing Gallery on Sunday 7th February 2016. With this peculiar work speaking to a range of fascinations as discussed, I would recommend you go and see this collection for yourself, and piece together the complicated world surrounding Anthony Hernandez. 

[2016.01.18] for NARC Magazine.