After twenty years with Tracey Thorn in the best-selling alternative duo Everything But The Girl, and ten as as international DJ and label boss of acclaimed electronic label Buzzin’ Fly, this year saw Ben Watt return to his earliest folk-jazz roots with his first solo album for thirty-one years. Entitled ‘Hendra’, it follows his 1983 cult classic ‘North Marine Drive’, and claimed the award for ‘Best ‘Difficult’ Second Album’ at the recent AIM (Association of Independent Music) Awards 2014 in London fending off albums by Anna Calvi and Blood Orange. Decorated with an array of four and five-star reviews on release, it features collaborations with former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and producer Ewan Pearson. This year has seen him tour with different sized line-ups but tonight he plays solo acoustic and electric). Expect songs from ‘Hendra’ plus old gems, wild cards and stories behind the music.
 
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“Undeniably moving as Watt reaches into unusally personal and profound places and makes sublime melodies sound effortless in the way the best songwriters can.” The Guardian
 
“Modest, pensive, backhanded, self-questioning, emotional yet elegantly restrained.” Jon Pareles, New York Times
 
“Absolutely brilliant … loved every moment.” Andy Welch (NME)
 
“What a beautiful journey Ben Watt took us on at last night’s show. Proved himself beyond doubt one of the great British singer-songwriters.” Jonathan Coe
 
photo credit: Edward Bishop

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Mauro Remiddi once ran away to join the circus. The circus was in Berlin and Mauro was 21 years old and at the time he was a street musician earning his living in Florence. Traveling with the circus he played accordion and percussion and violin while acrobats flew above the stage and magicians plied their tricks for the crowd.

Soon after this he found himself in North Korea, a visiting musical ambassador for Italy somehow shaking hands with Kim Jong-un in a display of state-orchestrated propaganda, an experience that drastically reconfigured his outlook for the rest of his life. Mauro remembers the astonishment of the people he encountered, none of whom had ever seen a Western face before.

To be a stranger in a strange land has been a recurrent theme across his career.

Born in Rome, his three decades as a journeyman musician have taken him from London to New York and now his new home of Los Angeles. His new EP as Porcelain Raft, Half Awake, was written and recorded in Greenpoint, mixed by Chris Coady at the legendary Sunset Sounds in Los Angeles and mastered by Heba Kadry. Half Awake will be available on Volcanic Field, Remiddi’s own new boutique art label.

Volcanic Field hails a new chapter for Remiddi ‘I felt the need to create a house for all my music and ideas. A sort of archive, a diary of my work in progress, for the sake to tell the story and tell it all.’

It’s about the different way we explore new sounds and how the format influences our perception of it. It’s about how to return to listening to music in a slow, deliberate and appreciative act and how he might prevent his work from being lost in the stream. Where algorithms make our choices for us and the act of accumulating music for its own sake is a compulsion that most of us don’t think about, not realizing our loss of agency in choosing what to pay attention to; to really listen.

Half Awake will be released digitally and physically on cassette. The limited edition cassettes come with a run of linoleum prints, each hand printed in Remiddi’s home studio in LA.

The format choice for this EP comes from a long-held reverence for the sound of cassette tapes. Remiddi made his first music as a teenager on a four track and continues to enjoy the aural textures of the medium, its sound is a comfort of sorts, like a constant.

The songs on Half Awake are about letting go; of places and of expectations. The EP came into being at a juncture when Remiddi relocated from New York to Los Angeles, and explores a compassionate breaking with past selves and the places they’ve lived. Familiar androgynous vocals glide beneath dreamy keyboard washes and infinitely recurring guitars chime above a protagonist who has “Something after me, whatever is after me, I don’t want to touch the ground.”

Half Awake is out through Volcanic Field on June 2nd.