The Scottish composers Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman are out on a tour of the UK in support of their debut collaborative album Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On which was released less than a fortnight ago. After half a dozen shows in their homeland, Leeds is the first date on this tour south of the border.
Located 1.5 miles northwest of Leeds city centre in the unlikely surroundings of a former petrol station that was adjoined to a fancy dress shop, the Hyde Park Book Club has established itself as an integral part of the city’s vibrant live music and arts scene since opening nearly a decade ago. And just like the other independent grassroots venues on this tour, the intimacy and warmth of the HPBC lends itself to this entire cultural experience.
For this tour, Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman have worked with individual promoters to ensure that a different special guest will open for them each night, in their words, “writers, poets and musicians whose art we admire.” In Leeds, it is James Leesley, a songwriter and musician from Sheffield appearing here in the guise of Studio Electrophonique.
Speaking about his stage set-up with no little self-effacement and a reassuring twinkle in his eye, James Leesley tells us “It’s all very precarious and analog. It’s all pre-recorded to tapes so if it goes wrong, I’ve had it.” Hasten to say, it does not go wrong. Leesley’s songs may well run low on hope – at his own admission his most optimistic song tonight is entitled ‘I Don’t Think I Love You Anymore’ – but alternating between keyboards and guitar he delivers them with such a quietly understated confidence and charisma you cannot help feeling that he is going to be OK.
The Studio Electrophonique sound is invested somewhere between the melancholy of Bill Ryder-Jones and the more intimate side of the Velvet Underground’s pop classicism and as Andrew Wasylyk is to rightly observe a little later on, James Leesley “has a good thing going on.”
Entering the small stage with an audio-visual introduction – one that would not have been remotely out of place at the Unlimited Freak Out (UFO) club in London, c. 1967 – Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman proceed to perform material from their debut album. The music – inspired, Wasylyk tells us, by faith and how it evolves and manifests itself over time – is widescreen waves of experimental sound complemented perfectly by Perman’s stunning visual effects. Hand-painted by him onto vinyl slip mats and projected onto a huge white sheet draped behind both musicians they are a mesmerising, almost hallucinogenic accompaniment.
They open with ‘Climb Like A Floating Vapour’, the song’s title a strong indicator towards the sense of suspended animation created by the music. Driven along by Tommy Perman’s percussive beats, Andrew Wasylyk’s delicate piano traces a template for the song’s melody.
They close some 45 minutes later with ‘Be The Hammer’ – fittingly, the final track on Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On – wherein the pre-recorded words and voice of fellow Scots’ musician Aidan Moffat resonate around the compact room. In between these two magnificent staging posts we get the neo-classical and jazz confluence of ‘Blessing of the Banners’, the cosmic bliss of ‘Unrepeatable Air’, and the dance-heavy ‘Communal Imagination’, to name but three of the exquisite tunes they play.
Before the penultimate ‘Communal Imagination’, Andrew Wasylyk advises us that it will be “shooglin’ frae now on”, which, loosely translated, meant it was time to move around a little. The song captures the very essence of the pair’s collaboration, a synchronicity of innovation, creative inspiration, dynamism, and sonic abstraction.
A wonderful evening of sound and vision brought to us by Please Please You and Hyde Park Book Club
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos from this evening are HERE
