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Jana Hunter And Phosphorescent

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Fri 18 April 2008 // 20:00

JANA HUNTER AND PHOSPHORESCENT
With support from Silver Stairs of Ketchikan
(fri 18th / £7/6 adv / 8pm)

Two raw, compulsive singers, yearning to connect the fateful, the joyful - songs that surround and envelop, seeping into the skin until they are a part of you.
Jana Hunter comes from Texas via New York, writing and performing her dark, sparse and beautiful songs. Since her last visit to the Cube, where she played alongside the Castanets, Jana has guested on albums by CocoRosie and Metallic Falcons, and played at the Devendra Banhart-curated All Tomorrow's Parties. Following the release of Jana’s second full-length, There’s No Home, on Gnomon song (a label founded by Banhart and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic), finds Jana exploring ever so slightly poppier tunes.

Phosphorescent is Matthew Houck. Raised in Alabama, Houck has always made music steeped in the Southern-gothic tradition, filled with hallelujahs for both grace and tragedy with songs, like Will Oldham, that swung from ramshackle and joyous to broken and pleading in the space of a prayer. But something magical happened while recording his new record, Houck picked up sticks and moved to Brooklyn. He began channelling something more mystical and haunting, offering up a dark, meditative set of songs that is all the more spiritual-sounding for its restrained tone. His achingly cerebral delivery recalls Arthur Russell. These are poems uttered in an empty field, punctuated by shouts and hollers, as if from a singer either abandoned or possessed. The lyrics are Houck's strongest ever, wrapped in washed out choral etudes that could be channelled from a rural French chapel or a solemn African tribe in prayer. Achingly beautiful.
With support from Silver Stairs of Ketchikan, an unreal Thoughtforms solo side project, who produces star crossed narratives from fragments of
guitar/vocal/violin. Angelic.