When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 16 March 2022
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be welcoming Group Listening back to Manchester!

PRAH Recordings is pleased to announce the first new music from meditative heavy hitters Group Listening who have been working on a follow up to their stunning debut.

Group Listening’s first album, Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol.1, was a haunting, reflective and lovingly considered selection box of musical reworkings. It featured reimagined tracks by the likes of Arthur Russell, Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt. But it was also much more than that. In making their own record of reimagined musical works, the two musicians were doing what all music fans do: comparing favourite tracks, turning each piece over for new meaning and developing a musical understanding of each other in the process.

Fast forward a couple of years, and with a remix album of Vol.1, a 12” featuring a reworked version of the Fatima Yamaha club staple What’s A Girl To Do?, a radically re-composed remix for Lambchop and an EP of re-arranged works from Cate Le Bon’s LP Reward, under their belt, the duo started Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol.2 from an altogether different vantage point. ‘We’ve done a lot more together now and so have developed certain ways of working. Because these processes have become norms, it’s spurred us on to push things a bit further and to avoid repeating ourselves,’ they say.

While their first record was put together over an intense three-day period in a studio, Vol. 2 saw the pair of Stephen Black and Paul Jones take over the latter’s living room and gradually put its ten tracks together between September 2020 until March 2021. They would record one or two songs over a couple of days then pause for the week, building and ruminating on ideas; it allowed the music to take on a more ambitious nature but also allowed in bits of chat, traffic noise and other creaks and squeaks associated with home recording. ‘I feel that’s part of the album’s essential character; recorded on and off throughout the pandemic in a domestic environment out of necessity; a testament to how it was possible to work at that time,’ says Jones.

‘I like to think that Vol. 2 starts where Vol. 1 ends,’ Black says. ‘Paul and I allowed ourselves the time and freedom to explore and experiment with the recording process and the song selection itself.’

As a result the overall tone is thought provoking and engagingly unique, retaining an air of abstraction that permits the mind to wander, wonder and dream. The pieces are presented as points of stimulus, ports from which to embark on a journey towards other musical landscapes.

The pair are constantly seeking to subvert the minimalism of their sonic palette, creating a subtle but constant tension that every now and then catalyses’ the music to somewhere unexpected. Take their bright arrangement of Laraaji’s All Of A Sudden, and the addition of a drum machine that adds a sprightly propulsive edge; or their take of Niger synth pioneer Mamman Sani’s 500 Miles, which brings into focus the original’s psychedelic queasiness through the use of old answerphone messages and environmental noises, even as the instrumentation behind it is stripped right down.

Then there are moments where they use the original work as more of an initial structure from which they alter, borrow and re-work. For example, the album’s opener is Black and Jones’ own arrangement of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s gracefully euphoric Sunset Village. It has a far looser feel than the original; the piano rolls through the track hypnotically while the clarinet takes the melody and weaves in and out rather than sitting across the top as Copeland’s vocal does. In the cross-bleed and blurred edges of its sound it’s an altogether different prospect than the track they took inspiration from – and yet it keeps Copeland’s sense of peacefulness and hope.

It’s in the way that Group Listening are able to prod, probe and contort the self-defined parameters that they’ve set themselves that makes Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol.2 such an intriguing listen – and it’s the love and care they’ve taken over it that makes these versions entirely their own.

Local support comes from Seamus Og. Seamus Og is an Irish singer songwriter hailing from Belfast. After releasing his first album Best Masala Tea (2015) with double bassist Andy Patterson, they have now merged worlds with cellist Awen Blandford and Anna McLuckie on clàrsach (harp) – two very talented and established Welsh and Scottish musicians. This Manchester-based quartet is a beautiful blend of instruments intertwined in rich harmonies, and stories full of heart, that will have you swept into a dream state and lingering on adventures taken, and mapping those to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSa2zoaVdts

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

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