BEATRIX PLAYERS
End Pt. III
Light, Inner Darkness.
VKyros.
Moon Safari
Lover’s
The Aaron Clift Experiment.
Lonely Hills
Unified Past isiting the listed Hoxton Hall is like heading back a century or two, to a time when the world of music was very different. This renovated Victorian music hall, complete with velvet drapes and solid wood flooring, is the perfect
Outer relief as it crests a wash of menacing guitars and Tool-like growling basslines.
Made up of personnel from Unitopia, Southern Empire, UPF and Resistor, U.N.I.T. dB from Australia are the surprise guests of the festival. The band deliver one of the standout performances of the weekend, with music taken mostly from Unitopia and Southern Empire’s back catalogue, earning them several standing ovations from the crowd.
The Neal Morse Band close out Saturday night with a tour de force performance of the album The Similitude Of A Dream. Fresh from touring in Europe, the sheer scale of the material and the delivery by the band are breathtaking. Everybody involved is relaxed yet engaging, even joking with one another and the audience during a technical outage, before launching full throttle back into the set without a second thought. Morse is an artist famed for his ambitious arrangements, but the tunes on display are alive with nuance and grace.
This is progressive music at its very best.
Sunday morning’s ‘church lot’ is occupied by London’s The Fierce And The Dead. Their brand of intense instrumental post-rock/punk proves a huge hit with the crowd, who are treated to a performance filled with ghostly guitars and vicious rhythmic onslaughts. It’s a ferocious but magnificent US debut.
Nashville’s Evership provide the weekend with its most overtly theatrical performance, location for London-based chamber poppers Beatrix Players, whose elegant, progressive sounds make the most of its old fashioned ambience and high ceilings.
There’s been a real buzz surrounding this all-female trio recently, and tonight the reason for it is revealed: their captivating performance and tremendous stage presence silence the audience and they immediately capture the imagination of all present. Keyboard player and project mastermind Shane Atkinson presides over proceedings like a paternal steampunk version of Vangelis.
Edensong have spent the last decade crafting an epic yet dynamic sound. Here the New York-based outfit offer an intriguing set, filled with delicate drops of catchy dissonance that deftly give way to heavy red-meat riffing.
Neoclassical behemoths Änglagård continue to push the boundaries of what’s compositionally possible with every show. There’s a focus and intensity in tonight’s performance that’s hard to deny and absolutely impossible to forget. They inhabit a sonic landscape devoid of technical mediocrity and hold the audience rapt throughout, before hauling them to their feet and providing the festival a resoundingly epic finale. from the opening bars of the powerful Rushlight until the close of their set.
The warm sound and beautiful vocals make it hard not to draw comparisons to Tori Amos and Kate Bush, as well as the classical-inspired Mediaeval Baebes and iamthemorning. Every member of the audience is transfixed when Amy Birks hits the high notes in Never Again, and caresses the intimate All That Thinking with a softer tone. Add Jess Kennedy’s piano and Amanda Alvarez’s cello and the result is pure perfection.
This evening, their sound is made even grander by musicians on French horn, double bass, violin and drums, allowing the ensemble to faithfully recreate tracks from their sparkling debut Magnified.