Heading up the first instalment of kapnikon nights, two December evenings that recast The Cube stage as a warming hearth of midwinter music, is hugely revered Yorkshire singer-songwriter Michael Chapman, joined by Hastings guitar polymath and Qu favourite James Blackshaw. Laura Cannell rounds of an amazing year by playing The Cube for the first time.

It’s high time Michael Chapman and James Blackshaw hopped on the road together. Each deploys the oft-prosaic tools of folk music to construct their own transcendental, technically astounding tapestries of string and melody. Both Michael and James boast back catalogues and show histories unrivalled in their respective spheres: Chapman is the Scott Walker of the UK singer/songwriter mode, from his formative late-sixties‘Rainmaker’ full-length on Harvest all the way to his latterly-formed touring/releasing bonds with Thurston Moore and output on Light In The Attic and Blast First Petite; Blackshaw has amassed a singular body of guitar works on labels including Important and Young God, through to his recently released, Yann Tierson commissioned ensemble soundtrack album on Tompkins Square, regular tours with Swans and as a member of Current 93. The reference points orbiting around them, both in terms of influences and those influenced, map out quite some musical galaxy.

Playing fiddle, overbowed fiddle, double recorders, sometimes percussion and other rarefied wind instruments, Laura Cannell is a young woman drawing on ancient transcendental and earthly musics. Her sense of space, dynamics and working with acoustics is super sensitive. She explores the spaces between ancient, traditional and improvised music, often utilising a fragment from a medieval theme to her own end in a manner that embraces the apparitional, historical or the otherworldly.

FAT PAUL plays some wild medieval musics in the bar.

TICKETS: http://www.musicglue.com/whats-on/?q=kapnikon+nights or from Bristol Ticket Shop