Brown Wimpenny at Matchstick Piehouse - London

Broadside Hacks and Folk of the Round Tables presents Brown Wimpenny + support.

A collective who mine the transcendental collective power of traditional folk music, Brown Wimpenny, split between Manchester, London and Liverpool, are bringing communities together to celebrate that rich catalog of folk songs owned by no individual in particular bar humanity itself.

Get Tickets https://link.dice.fm/D8c49661f321

https://youtu.be/uUhUCiy67BA

Taking their name from a distant 19th century relative of tenor banjoist Seth Lockwood’s, Brown Wimpenny began with informal get-together Sunday jam sessions in his Manchester living room. Growing as large as 25 members before being whittled down to its current number of 11, early gigs saw the band take up half the capacity of the room they were playing in, lyrics being passed around to attendees too, as part of a broader ideal of reducing the gap between audience and performer. They have already won praise from The Quietus for the “energy, eccentricity, communion and joy” of their early live performances.

Taken from a forthcoming debut album due later this year (more details to follow), the collective share their experimental take on famous Irish folk anthem ‘Raglan Road’ - out today (3rd March) via Broadside Hacks Recordings (Sam Grassie, Milkweed, Goblin Band).

First hearing the song in pubs performed by members of the Irish diaspora in Manchester, the song bridges the gap between the Modern and Medieval, between experimental art and traditional song, as they explain:

The song never fails to make somebody cry and is regarded as one of the finest, most complex love songs in Irish folk music. It's a tough song for a young band to tackle, but we wanted to do a version of it because of the mad, experimental, Joycian lyrics

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First penned by Patrick Kavanagh in the 1940s and put to the truly ancient tune 'The Dawning of the Day' by Luke Kelly (whose version remains unsurpassed). It's really a tragic song about loneliness, an existential sort of heartbreak that we think speaks well to the loneliness of our generation, where love is sometimes seen as a painful risk ~ futile, bound to disaster and best avoided. But It's also about joy, memory, and the wonder of being in love.

Few folk songs have emotional reach like this. We created a dense wall of sounds that tries to capture all that sonically. Our arrangement probes the relationship between cacophony and beauty; attempting to show that by sitting with chaos and perpetual change, we can find a new cohesion.


YouTube: https://go.evvnt.com/3576916-2?pid=2874

Category: Live Music

Artist: Brown Wimpenny