When: 7pm on Sunday 16 October 2022
Where: YES Pink Room, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

We welcome Jake Xerxes Fusell to YES’s Pink Room, following a sold-out show at Gullivers in May!

Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) ‘folk’ songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia. By recontextualising ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. In all his work, Fussell humanises his material with his own curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways.

‘… Fussell is the rare contemporary to approach folk in its pure form, shunning self-penned compositions about bummer relationships to concentrate on material handed down from bygone, hardened times’ – The New Yorker

‘(Jake Xerxes Fussell) is, to me, maybe the leading interpreter of American folk music right now’ – Ann Powers, NPR

‘For (Fussell) a song is no older than the last time it was sung. His fourth album, Good and Green Again, is his most thoughtful, his most elogquent, and his most poignant explication of this idea’ – Uncut

‘He has the charm of the best bar raconteur, a storyteller who can sell fantastical yarns in a companionable way’ – Mojo (4 stars)

Special guest is Chris Brain. Bound to Rise is the debut album from Leeds-based, Yorkshire-born artist Chris Brain. Recorded onto analog tape, the album consists of 10 live performances that offer an enthralling meditation on nature, with glimpses of the confessional. Recorded at The Nave in Leeds with producer Tom Orrell (Koyo, Weirds, Wandering Monster), Bound to Rise is a debut that captures the shoulder-to-shoulder warmth of a live setting.

Firmly rooted in place, from the choice of recording location to its lyrical content enveloped in soaring figures from the natural world, Chris Brain renders a work embedded in folk tradition and the pastoral, with a contemporary resonance. Glancing off The Nave’s eaved ceilings, each track arrives in an alternate tuning and uses distinctive fingerpicking patterns that place Bound to Rise on the shelf right next to the likes of Pink Moon and London Conversation.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are also available from Dice.fm, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

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