AKA & Friends play the songs of Anthony Moore
KEITH RODWAY, aka one-third of AKA, sees Anthony Moore and band return to the Beacon for another adventure in sonic wonderment.
Visitors to the venue for last year’s show will know to expect more than the unexpected. This will not only be a rare performance, but also a unique exploration of songs written by an artist with an intriguing, diverse and enviable career in music, sound and noise since the late 1960s.
AKA (Amanda Thompson, Keith Rodway and Anthony Moore) and friends (Olie Brice – double bass, Tullis Rennie – trombone and Richard Moore – violin, all of whom Moore has collaborated with extensively in recent years) will perform material from Moore’s extensive, and highly individualistic catalogue. Numbers will be drawn from albums and projects spanning the last 50 years: songs released in 1974 by Slapp Happy, numbers from Moore’s early solo albums Out and Flying Doesn’t Help (both recently re-released on Drag City), and from World Service (1981). Also performed will be songs recorded by Pink Floyd on A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), and on Rick Wright’s solo LP, Broken China (1996), plus new treatments of material as yet unreleased.
Of AKA’s idiosyncratic approach to both recording and performance, Moore says, “AKA are an unholy trinity, a pagan family of sound-worshippers hailing from that unholiest of all places, Hastings, home of Crowley and Turing. Like them, AKA have a passion for subverting pattern and number, factoring unlikely permutations arising from sea and horizon, green sward, the southerly aspect, the planisphere as half-world whose equatorial shore speaks of a planet of water and earth, fire and air… Their rhythm is the rhythm of waves; discontinuities are dissolved.”
AKA’s album Electromics, a long free-form improvisation, will be released this year on Moore’s own imprint, Half-Cat Records. It’s Anthony Moore’s “anarchive of dreams and schemes” (a doff o’ the hat to Bob Dylan’s radio show) – formed in collaboration with, and as a tribute to, his life-long friend Peter Blegvad (“two hip half-cats joined at the hep”). A further LP by Anthony Moore & The Missing Present Band, recorded at the Köln Stadtgarten, is coming out on Half Cat in 2024. In addition later this year Drag City will release Home of the Demo. Moore writes, “This project features a collection of songs mostly recorded during the late 70s & early 80s on dirt-cheap home recording equipment.”
AKA appear at The Beacon, Wednesday 24 April 7-10pm. Tickets for the show are available via Eventbrite and on the door on the night, price £10. As audience members from last year’s show will attest, this promises to be a unique event. Don’t miss it!
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