Bill Orcutt / Jessica Rylan / Cian Nugent Band / Posset (Tusk in London Day One)

Event information

The first of two London dates shooting off from the epic four-day Tusk Festival championing unclassifiable music in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These two shows feature two rare appearances by former Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt - both solo and in duo with Paul Hession, Jessica Rylan's unique combination of outsider songform and DIY synth-wizardry, Sheffield junk gamelan ensemble The Hunter Gracchus, post-takoma guitarists Steve Gunn and Cian Nugent (playing with a full band) and Newcastle's Posset, who twist samples into a gloriously ramshackle collage of psychedelic noise.

DAY ONE : FRIDAY 14/10/11

BILL ORCUTT
JESSICA RYLAN
CIAN NUGENT BAND
POSSET

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BILL ORCUTT

Bill Orcutt first became widely known as guitarist for Miami noise-rock trio Harry Pussy. Their sonically unruly performances quickly earned them a reputation as a wildly unhinged band whose violent and sexually charged shows were lauded by the likes of Thurston Moore and Lou Barlow.

Still highly influential despite having dissolved in 1997 (drummer Adris Hoyo has been cited as a major influence by Chris Corsano), Harry Pussy went their separate ways and Orcutt seemed to disappear for a while. Then in 2009, an album appeared entitled 'A New Way To Pay Old Debts', a glorious collection of apparently stream-of-consciousness guitar playing with sporadic and involuntary vocalisations that sounds like they were recorded to tape in his Californian living room, with the window slightly open and the phone even ringing at one point.

The album is visceral and exhilarating and sent the leftfield music bush telegraph all giddy with reverie. The vinyl quickly disappeared, was re-issued on cd by Editions Mego and followed by a small flurry of tour only vinyl. This will be his first London appearances since returning to the stage.

JESSICA RYLAN

Jessica Rylan could be simply pigeonholed as a noise artist, but she's so much more than that, its almost an insult. Rylan runs Flower Electronics, a business producing her own line in compact analog synth modules and noise flingers of various models, and as Jessica Rylan and also as Can't, she has produced a string of often very personal and liberated/liberating releases that can hurtle from caustic sound projectiles to blissful, sometimes childlike a cappella experiments and back.

She first excited our ears in 2006 with her gleeful excoriations on the album Key Cutter (Load) - a clash with Bill Nace and Chris Corsano's Vampire Belt that saw her circuit abuse dueling grandly with guitarist Nace and producing a satisfyingly exhausting listen. Further investigations reveal Rylan to be wonderfully unbound by the conventions of the genre she finds herself in, citing Voice Crack's Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang as influences and striving for an almost hand-moulded feel to her static emanations.

She's also collaborated with Jackie O Motherfucker, C. Spencer Yeh, Kevin Drumm, Mike Shiflet and more, and toured with Emil Beaulieu and John Wiese, but remains a beguiling and very individual artist.

CIAN NUGENT BAND

Cian Nugent has that tender touch. A young guitar player from Dublin who draws on a rich mix, suburban/coastal blues, traditional musics, late 1960s & ’70s singer-songwriters, jazz ambitions, 20th century composition and the Takoma school into a deeply personal style.

POSSET

Newcastle’s Posset flesh out collections of miniature collages, dictaphone rants and blends noise and non-music components into captivating oddball songs. However odd they may sound, there’s an easyness and an everyday feel to these folks.

"Skittering crackles over regular rhythmic squelch and sonar blip." (Brainwashed)

Posset on Myspace