Joanna Newsom is an American harpist, pianist and singer-songwriter from Nevada City, California. Convincing her parents at a young age that she wanted to play the harp, she started learning and 'loved it from the first lesson onward'.
Newsom's first EPs, Walnut Whales and Yarn and Glue, recorded on a Fisher-Price tape recorder, were not intended for public distribution. At the suggestion of her boyfriend at the time, however, she burned several copies to sell at her early shows. One of her friends then passed on of these CDs on to Will Oldham (aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy) at a show in her home town. Oldham was impressed and asked her to tour with him, and also gave a copy to his record label, Drag City, who later signed Newsom and released her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, in 2004.
Newsom's early work was strongly influenced by polyrhythms, as heard in the second album Ys. After this album she began to lose interest in them, however, stating that they 'stopped being fascinating' and 'started feeling wanky'. Her music has sometimes been described as being prominent in the the modern psych-folk movement – but Newsom prefers to make no ties to any particular music scene. She has described her own voice as 'untrainable', with her vocal style incorporating shadings of folk and Appalachian shaped-note timbres.
In 2009 she appeared in the music video for the song Kids by the group MGMT, and she recently performed at Matt Groening's edition of All Tomorrow's Parties. She has also recently been the feature of a tribute book, Visions of Joanna Newsom, released by Roan Press.
OH Productions is proud to present a rare Manchester appearance by Newsom - her first since January 2007. Support comes from folk legend Roy Harper, who hails from Rusholme, Manchester.
Josh Ritter was born in Moscow, Idaho in 1976, to two neuroscientists. As a teenager, after hearing Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country on his parents' copy of Nashville Skyline, he attempted to write songs on a lute that his father had built, before abandoning it and buying his first guitar at K-Mart.
Ritter started following in the family footsteps by studying neuroscience at Oberlin College, but later changed to the self-created American History Through Narrative Folk Music. Throughout his music career Ritter has been compared to the likes of Bob Dylan, Brice Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, but with each new album release, it is becoming more pointless and lazy to make such comparisons. In 2006, Ritter was named one of Paste Magazine's '100 Greatest Living Songwriters'.
While not receiving the mainstream attention that others have seen, Ritter has been steadily rising, courting fans for the long haul by spending inordinate amounts of time with them. He has been playing for over a decade now, with songs built from simple folky patterns or sprawling Whitman-esque meditations, winning over many critics in the process. He hit a writers block for a while, but forced himself to find inspiration by exploring local museums – and finally succeeded in overcoming it, to the extent that one of his stories could not be contained within a song and has since been developed into a novel, Bright's Passage.
OH Productions presents Ritter, with his 'Royal City Band', in the intimate seated surroundings of the RNCM Theatre. Support comes from Dawn Landes & The Hounds.
Having spent years at the forefront of underground hip-hop, DOOM (previously MF Doom) will at last embark on a debut UK tour this October. The DOOMSDAY tour will feature DOOM’s first ever shows outside of London and are a rare chance to catch the mask-wearing maverick in action.
The tour follows a triumphant, one-off UK date at London’s Roundhouse venue this March. 3,000 tickets were sold in under three weeks and those lucky enough to attend the sold out show witnessed DOOM performing classics from his extensive arsenal of recorded material.
DOOM’s various and ongoing musical escapades include output as alter-egos King Geedorah, Metal Fingers and Viktor Vaughan, in addition to co-creations with Madlib (as ‘Madvillain’), Danger Mouse (as ‘DangerDOOM’), and a cameo on the Gorillaz multi-million selling Demon Days LP.
The rapper and producer’s most recent studio album, Born Like This, is a tour de force of thrillingly intricate, diabolically original songwriting and has been hailed as one of the essential hip-hop LPs of recent years.
The Manchester leg of the DOOMSDAY tour takes place at The Warehouse Project, the city's internationally acclaimed temporary music space under Piccadilly Station. The line-up includes DOOM, Hudson Mohawke, Jamie xx, Dels, Illum:Sphere and Hoya:Hoya DJs - sign up at DOOMS-DAY.COM for updates.
Guillaume Yann Tiersen, most famously known for composing the soundtrack the hit 2001 film Amélie, was born on the 23 June 1970. His musical style, particularly when using toy and folk instruments, combines folk-influenced tunes with waltzes and operatic themes and chansons. He moves easily from accordion to piano to violin, and on to more unusual instruments, sometimes employing two at once – while his more serious work is closer to that of people like Philip Glass, Frédéric Chopin, Erik Satie or Michael Nyman. His unique style stems from having received classical training at several musical academies as well as being influenced in the early 1980s by the post-punk culture of bands like Joy Division or the Stooges. Tiersen's music seems both traditional and new, familiar yet surprising. It seems to spring from folk music and popular song, with a sprinkling of French cafe or street music, and a touch of the avant-garde.
Being relatively unknown outside of France, Tiersen rose to fame with the release of his score for Le fabuluex destin d'Amélie Poulain (or Amélie for short) in 2001, which was a mixture of new and previously released material. Since then, he has composed a variety of other soundtracks, including the score for the recent film Good Bye Lenin!, which featured tracks reminiscent of Glass and Nyman. He has recorded background music for a number of plays and short films such as La Vie Rêvée des Anges (1998, Erick Zonca), Alice et Martin (1998, André Téchiné) and Qui Plume la Lune? (Christine Carrière, 1999).
His live performances vary greatly. Sometimes he is accompanied by an orchestra and several guest collaborators such as Dominique A. At others, he offers the more frequent minimalistic sessions, usually accompanied only by a drummer/bassist and a guitarist, with Tiersen switching seamlessly between piano, accordion, and violin for his lighter songs, and electric guitar for his louder pieces (where his avant-garde music meet some rock sonorities). Lately, he has almost banished piano, accordion and violin and focused more on his electric guitar instead.
OH Productions presents Yann Tiersen at Leeds' cavernous Cockpit and in Manchester's medieval cathedral, which dates back to 1421.
Cowboy Junkies are a Canadian alt-country/alt-rock/blues band with a jazz twist, formed by three siblings from the Timmins entertainment family in Toronto in 1985. The band’s name was simply a random choice as they approached their first ever gig, but it has come to perfectly represent their sound. (Some sources may credit Townes Van Zandt’s song Cowboy Junkies Lament as the source of the band’s name, but that song was written specially for Cowboy Junkies several years after they coined the name.)
Their first two albums were recorded using an ambisonic microphone, with the first album Whites Off Earth Now!! being recorded in the family garage. Their fame spread with their second album The Trinity Session, which was recorded in one sitting at the Toronto Church of the Holy Trinity. Their unique blend of blues, country, folk, rock and jazz, as well as the fact that they again recorded with an ambisonic microphone, earned them both critical attention and a cult following. The Los Angeles Times named the recording as one of the ten best albums of 1988. The Trinity Session also included a unique cover version of the Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane, which Lou Reed reportedly liked more than his own, and so began performing their version in concert. The band was nominated for Group of the Year at the Juno Awards in both 1990 and 1991, and in the early 1990s vocalist Margo Timmins was named one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world by People Magazine. With over 20 albums to their name, Cowboy Junkies have followed their own particular muse, resulting in songs that are outwardly pretty, but inwardly prickly.
The group has continued to tour North America, Europe, Japan and Australia with extensive North American and European tours following album releases in 2002 and 2004. In 2008, they released Trinity Revisited in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the original recording of The Trinity Session. Their latest album, this year's Renmin Park, is the first volume in the Nomad Series.
OH Productions is proud to present a rare Manchester appearance by Cowboy Junkies. This show takes places at Gorton Monastery, a 19th-century former Franciscan friary. In 1997, the Monastery was placed on the World Monuments Fund Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites in the World alongside Pompeii, the Taj Mahal and the Valley of the Kings.
Since the release of 2008's Ferndorf, Düsseldorf-based pianist Volker Bertelmann's career has blossomed. As Hauschka, he has developed a reputation as an entrancing live performer, playing at festivals from Ether to Roskilde and SXSW, plus hand-picked shows alongside Tortoise, The Necks and Michael Nyman. A prodigious collaborator, he has performed with musicians from Múm's Hildur Gudnadottir to classical violinist Hilary Hahn, and played six shows this year with James Blackshaw and Nancy Elizabeth, including London's Barbican Hall. This, alongside film soundtracks (Carl Dreyer's Vampyr), multimedia collaborations (Jeff Desom's Ghost Piano), arrangement duties (Frightened Rabbit), and theatre scores, gives you a sense of his restless creative impulses.
Hauschka's music can be microscopic in detail and quietly entrancing, or wide-screen and cinematic in scope and feel. A suite of songs can take you on a journey into the world of the piano and all it can conjure for the listener. Hauschka performs beautiful post-classical chamber works drawing on minimalism and laced with the spirit of Fluxus, bringing to mind the expansive open-endedness of The Necks, Nico Muhly's post-minimalist compositions or Eric Satie's sense of mischief.
Channelling the spirit of John Cage's prepared piano, Hauschka opens up his instrument and playfully performs public operations on its innards using guitar strings, gaffer tape and other bits of junk in search of new colours and textures. The melodic and harmonic properties of the piano, so often dominant in piano music, are set against the homespun clicks, scrapes and rattles of the internal mechanisms when certain keys are played. Harnessing the percussive potential of the instrument and wrapping this around his keen melodic ear makes Hauschka an auteur of the ebonies, as well as an alchemist of the wood, string and metal.
To coincide with the release of new album Foreign Landscapes on FatCat Records, OH Productions has organised a special intimate event in the lush surroundings of the Presidential Suite at Manchester's five-star Lowry Hotel. These two performances will be prefaced by a gathering in the hotel's private bar, followed by a trip up to the suite, with the evening skyline of Manchester providing the perfect backdrop for Hauschka's set.
Behind the name The Tallest Man On Earth is Kristian Matsson (born 30 April 1983 in Dalarna, Sweden). His career as The Tallest Man On Earth started with the self-titled EP released in 2006, introducing to the world a singer with that familiar croak, a song-writer with a 'folk-revival' sensibility and a guitar player with an impressively agile finger-picking style.
In 2007, Shallow Grave, his first full album, was released and expanded upon the ideas of the EP, rounding them off and emphasising beautifully evocative songs. He is known for his bold vocal style and his intricate acoustic guitar work, and as such has drawn many comparisons to Bob Dylan. He himself has made a few specific nods to Dylan in his latest album The Wild Hunt, in songs such as King of Spain where he references boots of Spanish Leather.
While coming from Sweden, his influences lie in the folk and rock sounds of the American South. On a break from his duties as the front man of the Montezumas, Matsson has won rave reviews as The Tallest man On Earth as well as gaining exposure from touring with Bon Iver after the release of his first album.
'After the war my father Loudon II came home with his bride Martha. My parents had sex and nine months later I was born, albeit almost backwards.' And so, Loudon Wainwright III came to be, on September 5 1946. After seeing Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, Wainwright was inspired to play the guitar. He dropped out of drama school in 1967 and set off for San Francisco 'where all the other long-haired lemmings were bound'.
He was one of many young folk singers tagged as the 'new Dylan' in the early 1970s, but his musical reputation runs much deeper. This comparison was later ruefully satirised in his song 'Talking New Bob Dylan', from History (1992). Using a witty, self-mocking style, Wainwright has recorded over 20 albums on 11 different labels.
He made three appearances on the popular 1970s TV show M*A*S*H as the singing surgeon, and gained the number 1 chart spot in 1972 with the song Dead Skunk. Since then he has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, had Johnny Cash cover one of his songs and appeared in numerous films including The Aviator, Big Fish, Elizabethtown, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. He came to the attention of British population in the 1980s when he appeared as the resident singer with comedian Jasper Carrot.
Loudon Wainwright III is famously the father of musicians Rufus and Martha Wainwright. All three have covered and made regular guest appearances on each other's songs, and performed together live.
OH Productions presents a rare outing by one of America's greatest folk singers at Bristol's Colston Hall. The venue, which dates back to the 1860s, has previously played host to the Beatles, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan.
