REVIEWS
"Alex Neilson has been getting so much loving recently he better hold tight to what flesh he has left. Although there has been little recorded evidence to date, Neilson is actually a profoundly inventive thinker across a wide assortment of instruments, from bells and bongs through electronics, traditional acoustic git-fiddles and pure throat joy. Directing Hand is his new solo project. Here Neilson applies an orchestral armoury to the bent of his own brainwaves and the results are fucking gorgeous. Parts of this sound like early Japanese freak-out ensembles like Group Ongaku and East Bionic Symphonia, while others take up the kind of mediaeval horse-hair folk of groups like Third Ear Band, Nijiumu or even Vibracathedral Orchestra at their creakiest and most nocturnal." - Volcanic Tongue
"The Glasgow chapter of the free folk underground's latest gift to the world is The Directing Hand, with free drummer Alex Neilson at their epicentre. Personnel here include alumni of Charalambides, Belle & Sebastian and Lucky Luke. From the single swelling chord of "Beamsley Beacon" to the closing Celtic raga-drone of the traditional "Lowlands", with its massed choir of frail voices and incessant chimes, The Directing Hand inhabit a world of crude, simple elemental forces transmuted into poetry and art. It is both a homage and a quest in empathy with the album's hero, Augustin Lesage, a miner turned painter who produced a repetitive and obsessive canon of outsider art that caught the attention of the surrealist elite in 1920s Paris." - Nick Southgate in The Wire "Multicolored textures all droning like the seesawing of eternity scraping it's boot heels across our silly temporal preconceptions. Like the collective multitude of instruments is trying to speak in some kind of prehuman language. Free jazzy turbulence unleashes tiny ravenously hungry demons. Folkish clusters of molecular agitation disturbs the surface of the lake. Overheard incantations, fumbling movements over sustained droning, or nearly-folk songs in places. The songs win out in the end, and leave their scuffed heel marks on the floor." - Dream Magazine
Record Label
memoirs of an aesthete, chocolate monk, secret eye
ALEX NEILSON DID AN INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT McKEATING HERE;
http://brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6728&Itemid=91
Directing Hand is made up of Alex Neilson and Lavinia Blackwall. Their music is freely improvised around folk melodies and medieval songs, lavinia on vocals, harp, organ, psaltery and harmonium, alex on drums.
HUMAN BELL (THRILL JOCKEY) : Nathan Bell (ex-Lungfish) and Dave Heumann (Arbouretum, Cass McCombs, Bonnie "Prince" Billy) dispense sun-baked, primitive blues instrumentals.
C JOYNES (BO'WEAVIL) : English heavy, thumb-lead finger-picker salutes dustbowl country, ragtime ragas and the Takoma school.
FUZZY LIGHTS: Cambridge trio combine ethereal drone, brushed folk and quantised cacophony.
Other upcoming shows:
Tuesday 20 May, 2008 (in collaboration w/ Chaos vs Cosmos)
STARS OF THE LID Lichens James Blackshaw
St Giles-in-the-Fields Church, 60 St Giles High Street, WC2 8LG Doors 7.00pm ~ £12
tickets are available from: SECOND LAYER RECORDS, 323 Archway Road, Highgate, N6 5AA, 07855 140 992 ROUGH TRADE WEST, 130 Talbot Road, W11 1JA, 020 7229 8541
Hi Alex Thanks for inviting me to be a friend here! I look forward to seeing you and Lavinia play and hope you can get a little further down south! Oxford would be lovely - let me know if there is anything I can do to help. All the best
