An evening of landscaped and intimate traditional music & song from France & Wales.

Part II of The Song Has No Ending: Spring in April two concert series (see Part 1, Nick Hart & Linus Vandewolken on Sunday 13th April).

Tartine de Clous

A real privilege to welcome the return of the brilliant French vocal trio Tartine de Clous to The Cube, the first time since the wonderful playsthecube residency with Alasdair Roberts & Neil McDermott back in 2017. 

Growing up in the department of Charente in Western France, Tartine de Clous have shared friendship & song since their youth. Storied songs are presented in an uplifting & moving communality which encourages close listening & trust that unfolds, as Alasdair Roberts notes, ‘with a patient confidence’.

Part of a lineage that includes some of the great French folk revival groups of the late 20th century, they sing predominantly a repertoire of unaccompanied three-part harmony arrangements of traditional songs. Their new album Compter les dents, recorded in the home of late musician & ethnomusicologist Claude Flagel, is a collection of songs from the Vendée department on France’s Western seaboard, ‘songs of love and war, life and death, played out on land and sea’ (Alasdair Roberts).

As Chiz Williams, writing on the recording of Au Cube, notes, the songs hold a deeply sensory & transportive power - ‘to taste the stews we ate, the stories we swapped, the technology we manipulated and the people we touched’. In the eloquent simplicity of Alasdair Roberts, the songs of Tartine de Clous are ‘songs passed down and sung by ordinary men and women, gracefully delivered with the poetic economy which unites the folk song of all peoples’. Stories told through a song that contains no ending.

Tonight’s show is part of a UK tour and will close with the collaborative end notes of a first musical meeting between Tartine, Toby & Aidan.

‘extraordinary intimacy, an atmosphere quite unlike that of a standard gig - it’s as though you’re being regaled with songs by a few high-spirited locals in a French tavern,’ David Mckenna, The Quietus.

Toby Hay & Aidan Thorne

Toby Hay has ploughed a singular path with a lightness of touch across a number of instrumental records, grounded in a focus on the natural world, deeply framed by his Welsh heritage and the landscape where he has lived all his life. He operates his own cottage works record label, Cambrian Records, & has also released a collaborative guitar record with Jim Ghedi on Topic.

Aidan Thorne is a versatile double bass player who explores the intersections of traditional music, jazz & classical Indian fusion with a highly developed sensitivity. His bowing earthly drones & warm, considered finger work has brought a weighted musical expanse across many projects.

In 2021, Toby & Aidan headed to the studio to make an album of new music, the inspiration being the things they missed most due to the restrictions of the pandemic. They focused on improvisation and the timbre of acoustic instruments, catching the heightened charge of musical conversation in live performance.

After a pause is imbued with the pandemic silence though it is much more than that; the record concerns reflections on place, memory & a peopled landscape. It is as if Aidan’s resonant double bass aches with the history of creaking doors in an old home, dances across wooden floorboards and shifts with the colour and light of changing seasons. A drifting, spacious, yet intimate and familiar landscape with shimmering open tuned grace & the finger plucked ring of Toby’s arpeggios & glissando guitar strings.

‘Toby Hay’s mid-Wales cottage industry…reaches its highest peak yet with After a Pause.’ Jude Rogers, The Guardian

‘beautiful music: that gathering of feelings that go by the untranslatable Welsh word hiraeth…the world’s dew gleams on this music, but the world’s dust swirls through it too.’ Robert Macfarlane