An exciting double header exploring experimental expressions of the ballad form.

Eric Chenaux is a purveyor of jazz, folk, and pop-inflected avant-garde balladry juxtaposing a warm, honeyed & worn singing voice with noise & improvised amplified semi-acoustic guitar in a perpetual state of overlaying, languid & fluid structures where love songs drift from the luscious & woozy to a cascading & decomposing electronic fuzz.

Though residing in Paris for many years now, Eric was a fixture of DIY and experimental music in Toronto throughout the 1990s and 2000s, notably with legendary Toronto punk band Phleg Camp and then towards the further reaches of improv, avant-folk & contemporary jazz.

A dear old friend of The Cube, Eric has visited on a number of special evenings including a 10 day residency for our playthecube series in 2014. He has collaborated extensively across disciplines including film, sound installations and contemporary dance. Notable collaborators include Eric Cazdyn, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Pauline Oliveros, Han Bennink & Josephine Foster.

RÓIS is a composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and electronic artist from Fermanagh, whose songs breathe new life into a forgotten Ireland. Blending elements of folk, sean-nós, electronics, and jazz harmony, RÓIS constructs a sound world where the ancient dissolves into the new in confrontation & ecstasy.

Debut album MO LÉAN is a collection of songs and hymns based around the concept of death, life, mourning and catharsis. RÓIS re-imagines the tradition of keening in Ireland that goes back to pre-christian times; a practice in which women, or bean caointe, would keen a lamenting wail at the side of a coffin during a wake. The Guardian gave the album 4* and proclaimed RÓIS ’a startling singer’ & ‘an arresting new talent’ creating an ’animalistic...dark, electronic pop epic’. The Quietus celebrated ROIS as ‘a powerful and shapeshifting vocalist with astonishing potency’.

With the live spectacle, the crashing drums, pulsing visuals & synth darkness takes the form of an electro ritual with RÓIS’s voice echoing the emotional heights of the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser & distorted shimmer of Dead Can Dance.

A Bristol debut special in the intimate Cube auditorium.