Having seen Alex Neilson stretch his musical arms even further this year it's a pleasure to have him back at the festival. He'll be performing a suitably different set from last year (that duo is now known as MOTOR GHOST) in the current Directing Hand line up of Neilson on drums/psaltery and Vinnie Blackwall on improvised vocals and harp.
Biography
Building a reputation as one of the most forward thinking free percussionists in the UK, Alex has an impressive amount of releases raising much praise from key publications and musicians alike. Alex has played with amongst others JANDEK, TAURPIS TULA, WILL OLDHAM, RICHARD YOUNGS, and ALASDAIR ROBERTS. He is also one of the leading hands behind the now seperated SCATTER.
'Directing Hand began as a corollary to drummer/vocalist Alex Neilson’s growing interest in the original folk music of the British Isles . Initially, the group was set to amplify the early experiments in form that he had undertaken as a founding member of the Scatter ensemble, chasing the Ur-drone that lay at the heart of much UK folk while forging alliances between feral, untutored forms and extended avant garde technique. But as the project grew, the connection between earlier forms and current praxis became increasingly circuitous, with Neilson joining the dots between seemingly mutually-aggressive musical strands such as dilated big-band improvisation ala Globe Unity Orchestra and Taj Mahal Travellers, the fractured experiments in time of The Shaggs and Henry Flynt & The Insurrectionists and the spontaneous breath poetics of Patty Waters, Keiji Haino and Charlie Feathers. The current Directing Hand line-up – consisting of Vinnie Blackwall on improvised vocals, cello, harp and harmonium and Neilson on drums and psaltry – represents the group’s starkest and most all-devouring incarnation to date. Blackwall is a classically trained vocalist, though she rarely makes a move that could be associated with any particular school. Sure, there are moments of tongue pressure that orbit the coronal art trance of early Meredith Monk or Julie Tippett’s work with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble circa One Two Albert Ayler but there’s also a ton of mystery in the way that she seems to incorporate snatches of mellifluous choral and early music melodies in between full-body soundings and vegetable wordage. When you first catch it, it’s as shocking as an Australian in cut-offs, but as you surrender your brain to the glorious see-sawing command with which she pilots the furthest vectors of her body into sound it seems to have the same connection to free jazz form as the divine madrigal stylings of Dolly Collins on Anthems In Eden and Love, Death & The Lady had to the triumphal melodies of the Albert Ayler Orchestra. Neilson’s playing is at its most formally aggressive throughout, detonating time by exploding any notion of accompaniment, response or precognition in favour of a profound simultaneity. Drummers have always been the revolutionary agents of musical change; switch up the beat and you reconfigure time, reconfigure time and you re-draw reality. In Neilson’s playing there is truly no past or future, simply Now over and over. Just one movement of his hands and then the next. And in a historical/cultural moment that feels as oppressively 4/4 as 2007, it feels like a fucking revolution'.
David Keenan, Glasgow , May 2007
"Despite the presence of two classic British folk ballads, "Hangman" and "Lowlands", there is little about Bells that translates as traditional folk. Instead, Directing Hand use these ballads as points of entry into their ecstatic, unclassifiable improvisations, much in the manner of experimental Finnish collectives like Avarus or Kemialliset Ystävät. (Enough so, in fact, to suspect that Neilson might perhaps have some Finnish blood in him somewhere.) Behind these ballads' slender vocal melodies, the ensemble uses a spectacle of ragged strings, bowed cymbals, and shepherd's horns to refract the songs' lyrical, melancholic longing into distinctive and uncommonly tactile new forms.
Prior to these ballads, Directing Hand walk other medieval avenues, as on the solitary drone of the opening invocation "Beamsley Beacon", or the splintered Harry Partch rattle of the extended "Black Herman". Another peak is reached on "Tongue of the Bell", an 11-minute epic that stands as perhaps the purest distillation of the group's peculiar communal power, incorporating skronky European jazz, shimmering vocal chants, and sky-wide metalwork drones into its motley bedlam. Throughout the album, Neilson and the rest of his ensemble perform with the loose, soft-focused attention of a medium awaiting further instructions from beyond. And while there are obviously certain structural limits to this manner of automatic composition, Bells For Augustin Lesageproves Directing Hand capable of tremendous shamanic heights, whoever its ultimate spiritual author might be". Pitchfork
Website Resources