Skip to main content

Devin Hoff: Voices from the Empty Moor review – stellar lineup for the twists of Anne Briggs

(Kill Rock Stars)
The experimentally minded bassist and star guests including Sharon Van Etten and Julia Holter create these unusual reimaginings, though the vocals don’t always suit Briggs’s songs

Motivated by Bikini Kill to pursue a musical career in the 1990s, bass player Devin Hoff has spent the past decade inspired by another radical artist, the folk singer and songwriter Anne Briggs. In the 60s and 70s, Briggs revived English, Scottish and Traveller songs and wrote her own lovely, twisted compositions before retiring to rural Scotland. Hoff is a long-term experimentalist and collaborator who has worked with Yoko Ono, Cibo Matto and Sharon Van Etten – the last of whom is one of several stellar guests on this unusual set of reimaginings of Briggs’s work.

Julia Holter and drummer Jim White appear too, but Hoff’s bass should command the most attention. It sets the scene majestically on opening track She Moved Through the Fair: layers of long, low, scraped notes creating shuddering, rumbling textures, suggesting a door to the underworld opening up (and perhaps the arrival of “the dead love” in Briggs’s version of the ballad). It’s similarly commanding on The Lowlands and Maa Bonny Lad (on which the saxophonist Howard Wiley provides fractious but fascinating accompaniment) but best on The Snow It Melts the Soonest/My Bonny Boy: simple and beautiful. Accompanied by oud player Alejandro Farha, Hoff unfurls the tunes in expansive new ways.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3nTdgsz
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more