Young People

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Sun 30 April 2006 // 20:00

(Sun 30th / 8pm / £5)

Young People are once intimately familiar and hauntingly unnerving. Melodically near to American traditional music but skewed off centre towards post-punk and noise. The raw minimalism of folk and country and the jagged screeching and dissonance of no-wave. With their influences taking in everything from free jazz to 60's sugar-coated pop; and from southern gospel to Broadway musicals, you might expect their music to be an eclectic mess, but the result is a far more restrained sound, one where not a note is wasted, and where so much is communicated in so few sounds.

Young People make the kind of music that completely transforms a room, whether live or on record, it's almost impossible not be become immersed in its baptism-like quality, where the warm and stoic sound of Katie Eastburn's voice seems to hold together not only the music, but also the walls to the floor and the building to the street.

Ana Da Silva, founder member of legendary punk band The Raincoats has produced a solo album, The Lighthouse (Chicks On Speed Records) as innovative and personal as anything she's ever done. Embracing digital instrumentation and recording, Da Silva's haunting voice is buoyant on a sea of gentle electronic beats, noises and melodies. Yet while her sound is definitely modern and challenging, her unmistakable voice and repetitive melodies are rooted in more traditional and primitive folk, koto and gamelan music.

Bristol's Headfall create a simple, fragile and personal music with nods to everything from tape-noise, free jazz and postrock to riot grrrl, punk and pop. Following the Bristol tradition of bands such as Crescent and Movietone (with whom they often collaborate), they use a variety of
electric and acoustic instruments, accompanied by half-sung words to
strip guitar music to it's most honest, intense and unpredictable form, often brooding, sometimes shambolic, but always completely immediete and engaging.