Music / americana
Filmic Folk Noir series launches in Bristol
Americana duo The Handsome Family play St George’s on March 13 as part of the Folk Noir series of concerts in this year’s Filmic festival.
The festival, which launched on March 4, takes place at Watershed and St George’s Bristol and looks at the relationship between music and film.
This year’s offering is inspired by a rich and deep exploration of Folk Noir – a whole mess of contemporary sound and screen-culture, including Nick Cave’s The Proposition, Badlands and The Wicker Man, with three intimate and hand-crafted live music experiences in the grand surrounds of St George’s.
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* The acknowledged masters of this kind of ‘country-through-a-post-modern-lens’ approach are The Handsome Family, who launch the Filmic 2015 season of Folk Noir with a concert at St George’s Bristol on Friday March 13. Overnight stars (after 20 years) thanks to their title music to mega-hit mini series ‘True Detective’, their typical method is to take impeccably researched details culled from the ordinary exotica of American life and turn them through 360 degrees
* The Furrow Collective, who appear at St George’s on Saturday 4 April, are folk noir writ large. A quartet of singer-songwriters from both sides of the Scots-English divide, including the hugely talented Alasdair Roberts, they formed with the express purpose of singing the darkest and most fatalistic of dread-filled traditional ballads.
* Howe Gelb, who brings the short Folk Noir season of concerts to a close on Wednesday 8 April, is a total one-off: a singer-songwriter, and producer from Tucson, Arizona whose very various work offers a wobbly bridge from lonesome US cosmic-cowboy laments to European indie and art-rock. His St George’s Bristol performance will be a unique combination of music and film, with Howe playing a full, 70-minute solo show in the first half, followed after the interval by the European premiere of ‘Out of the Desert: The Giant Giant Sand Film’, introduced by its director.
Phil Johnson, Senior Programme Producer for St George’s and Filmic’s co-curator, says: “The influence of cinema is so all-consuming that music can appear ‘filmic’ whether an actual film is involved or not. We’re trying to look beyond the usual film scores and soundtracks-angle to present really interesting work from a variety of contexts. The range of music on offer – from True Detectives’ The Handsome Family to Arizona’s Howe Gelb – is very rich and very different, and that’s the festival’s strength.”
Full programme and ticket information can be found at: www.watershed.co.uk/filmic
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