When: 7.30pm on Saturday 26 January 2019
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with Irma Vep again – this time, with his band – plus guests Handle!

Irma Vep is a loner, a joker, a roamer, a ribald construct riddled with both earnest anxiety and mercurial songwriting talent birthed by a young Edwin Stevens in Llanfairfechan, North Wales. Thrust into life after his mum bought a four track recorder for him, Edwin started recording for the cathartic process rather than the outcome.

Having since fully grown into Irma Vep and now residing in Glasgow, Stevens’ discography has expanded to document every aspect of his music, from ecstatically free group experiments to bare, sparse songwriting that cuts to the quick, shorn of ornament or pretence.

Stevens moonlights in several other groups (Sex Hands, Klaus Kinski, Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, Yerba Mansa…), bringing with him an instantly recognisable guitar language. However, it’s in Irma Vep that his most life-affirming, troubling and thrilling music is made. Much Irma Vep feels like what ‘classic’ music should feel like if it weren’t so Classic. Each record, each song and each performance exists as an evolving drama.

Edwin has toured the West Coast of America after being invited by Chris Johanson to play his Quiet Music Festival of Seattle and Portland. BBC 6 Music regularly spin his work. He tours the UK and Europe ‘butt loads’.

Irma Vep’s latest offering Evil talks of repression and the consequences of repression, channeling Edwin’s influences of ‘The Rebel, Lou Reed, Katherine Dunn, Dennis Cooper, Michael Yonkers, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Cat Power, Smog, Henry Flynt, Nico’.

‘A wiry, minimalist piece of guitar pop, the surreal word play lends an outsider feel, a true dose of weird-pop that thrills at every turn’ – Clash

‘A stellar piece of wonky psych-pop’ – The Line of Best Fit

‘A bowerbird of outsider music that makes awkward compositions designed to tear you down just to build you up again… explosively euphoric’ – The Quietus

Main support comes from Handle – a new project featuring members of D.U.D.S. and B.E.T.H, offering post-minimal pre-sloppy Latin functional proto-samba. Handle’s EP comes out soon on Absolute Fiction.

Opening the show is Secret Admirer, the solo project from Nick Ainsworth of Former Bullies and Dinner Party fame. In 2016 he released a 20-song self-titled tape via Belfast’s CF Records. He will be playing solo here.

This show is a co-promotion with Comfortable On A Tightrope.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from the bar (no booking fee), Vinyl Exchange, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook