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THE HIGH LLAMAS + Soy Un Caballo

Sat 7th Nov 2009

Electroacoustic Club presents
THE HIGH LLAMAS
+ Soy Un Caballo

7.30 Doors

8.15 Soy Un Caballo

9.15 High Llamas

£12.50 at WeGotTickets, TicketWeb, SeeTickets
14 door

For the uninitiated, The High Llamas have exerted a significant influence on left-of-centre pop music worldwide since their inception in 1991. The founding members Sean O'Hagan, Jon Fell and Rob Allum were joined by Californian Anita Visser and Marcus Holdaway. The Idea was to make melodic pop in opposition to the dull grunge obsessed UK and US orthodoxy of the early 90's. Drawing their own influence from The Beach Boys, Robert Wyatt, French pop, Tropicalia and other Brazilian musical forms, their melodic but gently psychedelic pop has rubbed off, whether indirectly or through hands-on production, remixing or arragement work by members of the band, on music by Stereolab, Doves, Super Furry Animals, Cornelius, The Boo Radleys and Turn Brakes, amongst others.

"What clearly sets the High Llamas apart, however, is O'Hagan's tendency toward retro-futurism, which results in the unique confluence of string quartets with hi-fi lounge-pop instrumentation (organ, vibraphone, clarinet), occasionally drifting toward exotica, the late-50s big band- and Latin-influenced instrumental music that attempted to evoke lush, tropical, and faraway imagined lands. The danger of this approach, of course, is that High Llamas songs are often (especially lately) overburdened, with excessive ingredients outweighing songcraft. Thankfully, Cladders avoids this crutch, and consequently emerges as the most enjoyable High Llamas record in over a decade." - Pitchfork

"Over their fifteen-year tenure, The High Llamas have written some of the most richly constructed and oddly affecting pop music since The Beach Boys' disarmingly humble pop fantasias on Friends and Surf's Up, or the post-Tropicalia sweetness and modernist impulses of Brazilian artists like Marcos Valle, Joyce, Milton Nascimento and Lo Bôrges. The group have also drawn on 1950s pop arrangements, English jazz and Canterbury prog, 1970s singer-songwriters, German electronica, Italian soundtrack music, French pop and American post-rock to create a self-styled universe where songs are pliable, mutable sculptures." - Signal To Noise

Main support are Soy Un Caballo: Take a Belgian couple who write and perform songs of exquisite fragility, record them in Brussels with an amazing line up of musicians such as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (Will Oldham), members of Raymondo, Jesse Vernon (Morning Star), Kate Stables (This is the Kit), and producers Sean O'Hagan (The High Llamas) and Charlie Francis (R.E.M., The High Llamas, Turin Brakes producer), and you have the duo Soy Un Caballo (Spanish for "I am a horse").

Last year Aurelie Muller and Thomas Van Cottom released their delightful debut album, titled "Les Heures De Raison" - you may have already caught a glimpse of them featured in Blogotheque's "Take Away Show", or previously you may have heard Aurelie's collaboration with Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst.

'Call it global village music: on "La Chambre", Belgian boy/girl duo Soy un Caballo (Spanish translation: "I'm a horse") and Louisville's Will Oldham sing entirely in French over what is essentially indie-fied bossa nova. Backed by nothing but an acoustic guitar, a Rhodes piano and a brokedown rhythm preset, Oldham and Aurélie Muller sound weightless and content, their half-sighed verses resolving into sweet choral refrains. Of course, the language doesn't hurt either; it's downright charming to hear Oldham's woodsy Kentuckian palette wrap itself around a French lyric.' - Pitchfork Media

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