Conquering Animal Sound

Event information

CONQUERING ANIMAL SOUND [http://conqueringanimalsound.co.uk/]
Straddling the divide between pop and the avant-garde ought to render electronica duo Conquering Animal Sound in a position of eternal compromise, taming their experimental impulses in the pursuit of pop truth. Yet, as their second album - and first for Chemikal Underground - demonstrates, Anneke Kampman and James Scott have little truck with contemporary music orthodoxy, from the process of composition and manufacture through to the multiple meanings that underpin the 11 proudly cerebral songs that make up On Floating Bodies.

A testament to the possibilities created by the machines and digital technology with which it was made, On Floating Bodies was created across a period of 18 months. The first stage was for the duo to assemble the musical vocabulary and sonic palette that would anchor the music to come, with Kampman sieving a plethora of lyrical ideas spanning cosmology, science, philosophy and semantics. Next, Kampman and Scott focused on constructing the skeleton of the record - texture, mood, rhythm, melody - before experimenting onstage. The record was completed in the studio, Kampman colouring unexpected spaces within the dense synthetic arrangements with her looped and layered vocal contributions, fully inhabiting the stereo picture.

The resulting music is fearless, futuristic and frosted, an alien landscape bookended by the sound of pulses, sea shells and a miniature tool-set dropping to the floor (Ultimate Heat Death Of The Universe) and a two-minute burst of queasy science-fiction (Inner/Outer/Other). This is 21st-century pop refracted through the prism of keen minds - atomised, deconstructed and reassembled; an ouroborous of ideas and ideals, endlessly innovating itself.

New album 'On Floating Bodies' is out now.

D_RRADIO [www.facebook.com/deathrowradio]
Newcastle's deathrowradio is Chris Tate and Paul Christian Patterson. The pair have worked together as d_rradio for the past ten years, wooing hearts and minds with emotive adventures in sonic strangeness and melodic melancholy. The band's largely instrumental output has varied greatly in style, from stuttering folktronics to orchestral drone, via ephoric electro synth dub, all the while maintaining their uniquely distinctive feel.

Bringing together elements of different styles and adding their own key ingredient is the deathrowradio approach, as their new album Yummy shows. Having now dropped the underscore from their name, the duo are also leaving behind the laptops and synthesizers to dive headlong into a more confrontational live concoction of trippy guitar riffs and pounding punk drums; raucous and wild, yet underpinned by hypnotic repetition.

SHIELD PATTERNS [http://www.shieldpatterns.com/]
Dusted with delicate vocals and rudimentary beats and loops, Shield Patterns' music is at once wintry and fragile yet suffused with a strong emotional warmth.

The newly formed project of Manchester-based artist Claire Brentnall, whilst still in its infancy, shows a sophistication beyond these early days. Her songs are born in sporadic, cathartic bursts, with subtle poetry inseparably intertwined with meandering piano phrases, tenderly blended strings, and hypnotic synth patterns. The understated sweetness of Brentnall's voice is gristled by subby bass-lines, creating unexpectedly textural songs that are inherently minimalist, yet infectiously hummable.