The Cardiff based male/female duo create harmonic, beautifully constructed music which both inspires and uplifts with more than a hint of the spirit of 1970s Laurel Canyon/ West Coast California singer/songwriters.
Zervas & Pepper join the wave of bands committed to song craft that both entertain and engage their audience. They find company in bands such [...]
Nigel Jarrett, according to Martin Amis, is someone he’s never heard of. Despite phone calls to all three, Julian Barnes, Germaine Greer and Clive James also admitted not having come across him or his work. To put this quartet of nobodies out of their misery (revise if they ring back -NJ), Nigel Jarrett won the [...]
Poet, musician and songwriter Rhian Edwards was born in Bridgend, Mid-Glamorgan. In her performance career, she has racked up over 300 stage and radio performances worldwide, including the Verb, BBC Radio 3, Latitude, Green Man, Ledbury, Ruigoord and Laugharne Literary Festival, as well as playing with her band at the Jazz Cafe, Camden Barfly, The [...]
Kai Lena is an emerging artist from the North West of England with a growing fan base. A forest pixie in essence whirlygigging around with vocal melodies and soaring piano and experimentation. Mermerizing and enchanting her audiences wherever she goes with her melodic tales and messages, she gets under your skin and alerts you to [...]
Holly Muller is an unpublished writer and postgraduate student at the University of Glamorgan, enrolled on the MPhil in Writing. She is currently working on her debut novel in between the day job and pool hustling. She also sings and plays violin in the band Hail! The Planes. Holly will be showing off her [...]
FACTS
Jamie Neasom is a relatively average size human male who has a face, arms, legs etc. He occasionally emits a soft hum in moments of changing atmospheric pressure or general tension, and uses his flexible limbs to signal distress or joy.
He is located in Cardiff at grid reference ST 1938 7731.
With little training he [...]
This is what The Joy Collective said about them in 2009.
‘What place do bands like Cats & Cats & Cats spring from? Hard to believe there was a group meeting where someone said “Let’s write songs that flit between shouty post rock, thumping waltz number, jinking indie and clattering noise every thirty seconds, with [...]
Delta Sleep hail from Canterbury, their music combines guitar driven melodies, held together by jazz influenced percussion and relentless bass, topped with sprinkles of left-field electronica. To coin Delta Sleep’s sound is a hard task indeed, but has once been described by a wise old man as an “enchanted battle between At The Drive-In and [...]
Richard Owain Roberts has two stories in the forthcoming Parthian Books anthology, Nu2, out in July this year. He blogs HERE. He lives in Cardiff. He is writing a novel. He is a stand up guy with many relevant skillsets.
Effort are a two-piece (duo sounds wrong) that are relative newcomers to the Cardiff music scene in this guise but veterans in their own right. Frost plays guitar and keyboards for The Automatic and Jen Long presents BBC Introducing In Wales on Radio One.
The band were formed in 2010. In early 2011 the band recorded [...]
“Kong might just be the best band in Britain right now. Ferociously powerful, stunningly inventive, and equal doses of scary and humorous.” Dirtyzine
Kong is not a name chosen by accident. It does not describe an effeminate collection of callow fuckers thrust together by a desire to look plucked or sound eager to please.
All are/were/shall [...]
Byron in his own words:
In this section I will be talking in the third person about how I’m well awesome and properly big time.
You heard me, not only will I be bragging, but I’ll be doing it whilst referring to my self as an entirely separate entity. I am utterly convinced that this is [...]
Brandyman comprise three members of Cardiff’s musical undergrowth: ex-Truckers Of Husk and FTSE100 man Ben Woods plays guitar, lankily; Matt Thomas, escapee from Joy Of Sex, is an equally good looking guitarist; while DC Gates, one half of Gindrinker and beloved as Billy The Seal round these parts takes up distressed caterwauling and acerbic one [...]
Chris Killen was born in 1981. He currently lives in Manchester. His first novel, The Bird Room, published by Canongate Books, is out now.
here are some blurbs:
‘Chris Killen’s first novel is either disturbingly brilliant or brilliantly disturbing. Whichever, I loved it.’ STEVEN HALL, author of The Raw Shark Texts
‘The Bird Room is [...]
This fantastic double bill marks an overdue return to South Wales for husband and wife team Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen who have been singing, writing, and recording together for well over a decade. They’ve performed to capacity audiences and critical raves all over the U.S. and Europe as a duo, and with their band, [...]
Magnolia Summer is a St. Louis-based rock band that has a rolling cast of members who also do double time in other bands (such as Grace Basement and the Bottle Rockets). Centered around singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist, Chris Grabau, Magnolia Summer has released three records (via Undertow Music) to critical acclaim.
Over the years, Magnolia Summer has toured throughout [...]
Opening the gig will be a short solo acoustic set from The Doublecross’ main player Jon Greenwood, a man so respected around the Cardiff area that he had more than 20 of Wales’ finest musicians play on his album Things Will Never Change. Springsteen, Hot Water Music, Evan Dando and Walter Schriefels influence his gruff, [...]
Simone Felice is a celebrated songwriter, author, and poet. Simone was born in 1976 in Palenville, New York, and grew up there along the creek that rushes down from the Kaaterskill Falls. Considered one of America’s natural wonders in the nation’s youth, this hidden Catskill Mountain waterfall attracted early landscape painters, transcendental philosophers, and [...]
Jeb Loy Nichols is an artist, writer and musician living a sustainable life in Wales. ‘Strange Faith And Practice’ is his new album.
Since moving to the UK from his native America and finding himself living in an East End squat with Neneh Cherry, Adrian Sherwood and Ari Up from the Slits, Jeb has variously been [...]
Deer Park is a rock n roll band based in London but from all over. Our debut record is out now. It features guest appearances from Paul Megna (The Oxygen Ponies), Randi Russo, Mark Andrew Hamilton (Woodpigeon) and Tom Lewis (Stagecoach). It was produced by Paul Hollingsworth and mastered by Billy Stull (Okkervil River, Midlake, [...]
I write about multi-culturalism, identity, personal integrity, and the evolution of culture and I’m also fascinated by the way we build relationships with that which is bigger than us; nature, society, the universe, God… My aim is to make music out of spoken word, with as much freedom to improvise as I can manage. Truly, [...]
Hi there, my name is Joe Kriss and Im a poet, workshop facilitator, editor and promoter. I run the ‘Word Life’ series of spoken word and music events in Sheffield. I have performed my work at venues nationally including the Tate Modern, Roundhouse Theatre (London) Theatre In the Mill (Bradford) Firth Court, Winter Gardens and [...]
I started taking poetry seriously when I found out it could be different to the poetry I was reading.
My first experience of the poetry I’ve grown to love was at the speakEasy in Bangor, hosted by Martin Daws.
I started to perform at the speakEasy around five years ago and then two years ago became involved [...]
Kayo Chingonyi is a writer, performer and creative facilitator. He read English Literature at The University of Sheffield where he completed an undergraduate dissertation on the American poet Saul Williams.
In a live career spanning seven years he has performed his work across the UK at such venues as Shakespeare’s Globe, Tate Modern, The University of [...]
In summer 2007 I wrote my first block of prose-poetry about some beetles I found in Italy, two years later I ran off with second place and the audience vote at the John Tripp Award for spoken poetry, and when the hangover wore off I was part of the Cardiff spoken word scene and one [...]
Matt Black writes poems for adults and children. His poems for adults are published in magazines such as Envoi, Fatchance, Magma, Obsessed With Pipework, Smith’s Knoll, The Interpreter’s House, and in his collection Swimmer (Upside Down Books). He has won awards and commissions, and has toured (with British Council and Arts Council support) in Germany, [...]
Thanks to everyone that contributed and performed at our 55 Ficto Slam at Undeb’s Cardiff Identity Festival.
Performed at Balloon: 20th June @ Cardiff arts Institute.
James Smythe was born in 1980 in West London, and migrated to Wales, where his maternal family lived. He has a PhD from Cardiff University, currently teaches in various places, intermittently performs in an improvised comedy group and has recently authored a book about Twitter. Hereditation is his first novel, and is about love and [...]
Tyler Keevil grew up in Vancouver, Canada. He first came to the UK in 1999 to study English at Lancaster University. Since then, he has received several awards for his short fiction and filmmaking. His stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, including Interzone, New Welsh Review, On Spec, and Plant: [...]
Rachel Trezise was born in Cwmparc in the Rhondda valley, south Wales in 1978. She studied Journalism and English at Glamorgan University and Geography and History at Limerick University, simultaneously writing her first novel. She graduated in 2000 and her semi-autobiographical novel In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl was published the same year.
Described as [...]
There’s not many people who’d turn down a ride in a musical time machine. Imagine being able to travel back into the past and watch all your favourite bands. The Broken Vinyl Club have invented that time machine and driven it straight back to the Sixties. They’ve brought back The Beatles’ harmonies, The Stones’ swagger, [...]
John Mouse is a singer songwriter from the Rhondda who previously worked under the band name JT Mouse. The lead single from his new album is called ‘The Last Great Rhondda Romance’.
Praise:
“Clusters bursts with originality” 8/10 Rock Sound
“John Mouse has been described at the Welsh Beck” Bethan Elfyn (Radio 1) [...]
Samuel Bees is an actor, director and writer currently in residence at Undeb Theatre Company in Cardiff. He will be directing the self-written short ‘The Boy Who Killed John Hopper’, a funny and ultimately shocking two-hander about young lust, shared shame, and Kung Fu. This piece was originally written for Undeb’s ‘Christmas Collaboration’ evening.
Performed at [...]
Jimmy Watkins is a former international athlete and still Welsh indoor record holder for the 800m. More importantly he is lead singer in Strange News From Another Star and guitarist in Future Of The Left. Rather annoyingly, he can also write and speak.
Check out Strange News From Another Star HERE
Performed at Balloon: 17th June 2010 [...]
Richard Milward was born in 1984 in Middlesbrough, by Caesarian Section. In 2007, his debut novel, Apples (Faber), was published when Richard was the ripe age of twenty-two, to great critical acclaim. Apples has been produced for the stage by Northern Stage and Company of Angels, and is currently on a national tour.
Richard’s second novel, [...]
Writer, journalist, editor, poet and film-maker – Susie Wild (at heart) is Mslexia‘s ‘Literary It Girl’, and she puts the bright into being one of Parthian’s Bright Young Things. Her debut offering of short stories, The Art of Contraception, is out as both an e-book and paperback on 1 September 2010. A co-organiser and performer [...]
Veering from harmony drenched, acoustic led tales of hope and heartbreak to swinging rock and roll at the drop of a chord, Lone Pine are a Cardiff based 5-piece taking the best bits of the booming americana and nu-folk scenes and dashing them liberally across a sound steeped in the traditions of classic rock.
Since [...]
Willy Vlautin is an author and the lead singer and songwriter of Portland, Oregon band Richmond Fontaine. Published in the US, several European and Asian countries, Vlautin’s first book, The Motel Life was well received. It was an editor’s choice in the New York Times Book Review and named one of the top 25 books [...]
The Easy Dream is a Mancunian named Karl Hall. There is only one thing Karl Hall loves more than music… Women. Karl has recently been diagnosed as a sex addict and is currently undergoing a course of treatment with Tiger Woods’ therapist to try and control his cravings. Prior to his illness, Karl used [...]
Originally from Manchester, Matthew David Scott is a novelist and playwright now based in South Wales. He has published two novels: ‘Playing Mercy’, which was longlisted for the EDS Dylan Thomas Prize,
and most recently ‘The Ground Remembers’, both with Parthian books. He has also had many short stories published in a variety of anthologies and [...]
Profile coming soon.
Visit Richard’s Myspace site HERE
Performed at Balloon: 19th November 2009 @ 10 Feet Tall.
Their current iteration sees The Satellites as a six-piece alt.country folk band, whose sound, in transposing the pastoral Americana of their influences onto the bleak but beautiful cityscapes of their native South Wales, is at once melancholy and affirming.
Jimi Alexander’s songwriting identity, however, can be traced back to a childhood spent in expatriation – themes of [...]
Mao Jones (otherwise known as Michael Oliver) is an x banker come poet. Due to large amounts of solitude and a love of the written word he spent most of his spare time reading and later writing poetry on the Garth Mountain where he used to live. When the credit crunch came, he saw it [...]
