GUESTS (album launch) + DUNCAN MARQUISS + MALLET SPACE

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0	GLASGOW: The Old Hairdressers
P	Thursday 16th May, 2024
N	7:30pm

Event information

Album release party for Guests' LP "I wish I was Special" (World of Echo). feat. Guests, Mallet Space, Duncan Marquiss + Edwin R. Stevens Welsh pop DJ set

GUESTS

Guests are Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine of Glasgow, UK, both formerly of the bands Vital Idles and Mordwaffe. Using (amateur) electronics, singing, speaking and field recording they make songs which blend the rhythms of popular music and contemporary approaches to collage, sampling, improvisation and repetition. “I wish I was special” is their debut record, and with it a chance taken to explore terrain not previously covered by their other groups. The ideology of DIY practice appears integral to these eleven compositions, side-stepping virtuosity in favour of instinct and impression, unafraid to press unknown buttons and walk head first into mistake, finding inspiration where convention might not otherwise allow one to tread. The results are confoundingly fresh, sharp-of-mind, and unusually intimate. There’s an obvious intelligence at play here, and no little humour of course, but crucially there’s also a sense of the personal, a first-thought/best-thought (auto)didacticism that celebrates shared understanding and implicit trust. What, ultimately, we might view as the fearlessness in radically being yourself around another. It’s an approach that draws some comparison with the private musings of Flaming Tunes, Idea Fire Company’s domestic electronics, or perhaps even Annea Lockwood’s framing of emotional connection within avant garde structures.


DUNCAN MARQUISS

Artist and musician Duncan Marquiss’ solo (ad)venture finds electronic guitar manipulations intertwined with wandering acoustic ambience. With one foot in 1970s Germany and the other in the woods, rivers and mountains of northeast Scotland. From tender yet sweeping acoustic moments to experimental electronic guitar manipulations, his debut album Wires Turned Sideways in Time feels like a ceaselessly sprawling exploration of texture and tone. Marrying earthy, textural acoustic instrumentals that feel rooted in open landscapes, with those that capture the pulse and hum of a populated metropolis (Marquiss resides in Glasgow). The album was recorded in Aberdeenshire in Marquiss’ parents' garage. There’s a cosmic touch tracing back to 1970s Germany (Michael Rother solo, Cluster, Harmonia, Popul Vuh soundtracks) that infiltrates much of the album, alongside some of its more pastoral textures, with Marquiss citing a wide range of listening habits. These include Bruce Langhorne's The Hired Hand, Jim O Rouke's Bad Timing, Arthur Russell and Laurie Spiegel.


MALLET SPACE

“Composed of three guitarists, a bassist and a drummer, lead singer, bongo drummer and violinist, Mallet Space’s sound could well be messy and overcrowded. However, they manage to nail it – giving each instrument and player their individual time to shine and then coalescing to create an incredible and unique sound. 

Mallet Space formed after a drunken performance at a blues bar, with all the members being GSA students and friends beforehand. When I asked where the name came from, I was told it was their term for the moment in a cartoon where a character pulls a (previously invisible and unknown to the viewer) mallet out of thin air. The influence from all members being illustration or animation students is clear here, but that also penetrates into the music, which definitely had moments inspired by cartoon sound effects.”
— Glasgow Guardian