“Nights on the folkway” — Demi Spriggs & friends
Accompanied by Gerasimos Lorandos (bass), George Smak (drums), Einar Stenseng (piano) and Yannis Chatzistavris (violin), Demi Spriggs (voice, guitar) presents a blend of singings and melodic structures from the British isles and US country-folk mixed up with fx and textured vocal loops, taking ‘folk’ soundings and reshuffling them. Demi usually plays alone, using scarcity to create a sense of the uncanny that she calls ‘tales for and of the weary’, but for the concert at KET, she is integrating a full band with a (bore) jazz, prog, and noise aesthetic, taking the legacy of UK folk music to a different energetic sphere. Influences lead to Bill Faye, Bohren and der club of gore, Aldous Harding, and other champions of slow-evolving weirdings. Running parallel with her November single: To Miroloi (the lament) this concert is the first in a series of shows running to the March release of her full album “Nights on the Folkway”. The full album and her EP, ‘A Boy called Ear’, are both on the small indie label Team Love (NY) and produced at Electricity Sound Studio (Athens, GR).
Becka Wolfe opens the concert with a solo set.
● Demi Spriggs works at the interface between art and anthropology, and is concerned with what ethnography can be as a performative modality. She makes interactive and mixed media installations that play between the ‘fake’ and the ‘real’. Her current interest is sound as a way of knowing-feeling.
She has participated in a number of arts collectives between Athens and London, and is a member of a rolling performance group based in Vienna.
Contested Editing is her publishing platform where she helps authors develop their volumes.
www.demispriggs.squarespace.com
● All players compose their own projects. Gerasimos Lorandos is the lead guitarist for the cabaret kitsch band Wild Flora, has his own solo project, and an electro pop duet Zwepps (album out in spring). Einar Stenseng is a pianist and composer, and has written and released three full albums. Yorgos Smak deals with his own musical theatre project and has released two folk-pop albums, and Yannis Chatzistavris is the co-composer of Demi’s EP ‘A Boy Called Ear’.
● Originally from the UK, Becka Wolfe started her traditional music journey in Scotland, learning jigs and reels in the bars of Edinburgh. The violin slowly transformed into a fiddle, arias into murder ballads and sea shanties. Although this is where she began, it is not where she stayed, straying far from the British Isles into the Balkans, France, the Appalachians and the Mediterranean, particularly Greece, Ottoman music and the Arab world.
Photo: Giorgio Zavos