Willkommen Collective’s “The Mariner’s Children” and “Tristram” are both heading out on tour together as well as releasing new EPs on Broken Sound. The Mariner’s Children have just relased a video for It Carved Your Name Into The Ground and you can catch a recent session Tristram did for Bandstand Busking below:
The Mariner’s Children
Tristram
Tour dates
OCTOBER
25th: Stereo, York
26th: Oporto, Leeds
27th: Dulcimer, Manchester (headlined by The Climbers)
28th: The Bicycle Shop, Norwich
30th: The Hope, Brighton (Willkommen show headlined by The Climbers – tickets here)
NOVEMBER
4th: Mr Wolf’s, Bristol
5th: Miss Peapod’s, Falmouth
6th: The Bike Shed Bar, Exeter
7th: The Cellar, Oxford
Then The Mariners’ Children go on to play an EP release show (without Tristram) with support from Pete Roe at the Luminaire on November 11th. Tristram’s EP launch show will be announced soon.
The Mariner’s Children Bio:
The Mariner’s Children are a 7 piece alt-folk band who’ve been a long time in the making. Not ones to rush the pursuit of discovering & defining their sound, their time has been spent evolving and experimenting through an ever-increasing lineup- all the time honing their skills to create something that is rooted in their individual and collective musical loves, and upon which they’ve built a sound that is unique and identifiably their own. Their sound draws on their influences and sees an alliance with the immense instrumentation of Arcade Fire, yet not set apart from the subtleties of the likes of Iron & Wine and Bonnie Prince Billy.
The band began life in Brighton, where Benedict Rubinstein and Daniel Matthews shared a house and spent most of their time bonding over Bert Jansch and Pentangle records. Through time, different musicians were slowly brought into the fold. As of only a few months ago, the final lineup was set – including a mix of musicians from friends’ bands Peggy Sue (Broken Sound/Wichita), Sons of Noel and Adrian (Willkommen Collective) and Alessi’s Ark (Bella Union).
The Mariner’s Children have recently finished recording their debut EP ‘New Moore Island’ (out November 1st 2010). Recorded at 2kHz Studios – a converted church – and produced by Ian Grimble (Communion, The Manic Street Preachers, Beth Orton, McAlmot & Butler). The songs drift from sparse, delicate understatement to thunderous intensity in the blink of an eye. Lyrically, Benedict Rubinstein artfully creates incredible confessional tales, often with an underlying darkness. “There’s no more coal for the fire my love, but I’ll gladly burn myself” (Coal).
It’s a rare thing to find a group of musicians who aren’t in a hurry to launch themselves into the public domain. The Mariner’s Children seem to have known what they wanted to create all along, and when it would be ready- New Moore Island is a perfect example of the good things that come to those who wait.
Tristram Biography
Tristram are a 4 piece London-based band who’ve forged a sound which was rooted in folk, and built upon it by incorporating their combined loves of more powerful and complex instrumentation and arrangement. The result is music which creates a sense of old world drama and romance transposed into a modern context- a hypnotic mixture of the familiar and the unexpected. Drawing on their loves of post punk and post rock, they find a way to deliver a vocally delicate tone, underpinned by dramatic bursts of powerful experimental arrangement.
Tristram Bawtree, Becca Mears (of Peggy Sue – Wichita) and Tom Heather (of Kristrin McClement – Willkommen Collective) met in Brighton whilst studying art, and bonded over shared loves of something musically and visually different. The three moved to London, where Tristram began playing solo sets at warehouse parties, and encountered multi-instrumentalist Greg Griffin (of The Lofty Heights). Gradually, what began as a solo offering became a rare find – 4 individuals all contributing their own unique styles in equal measure. It’s this genuinely collective approach to their music which makes for such an unexpected, yet perfectly fitting sound.
Finding a balance between such varied influences, and to give weight to each is no small achievement. Tristram explains the source best- “I’ve always loved post-rock bands like Silver Mt Zion/Godspeed You! Black Emperor and post-punk bands like Joy Division. I like to incorporate some of the power and scope of that kind of sound into what we are making. By contrast I am also a sucker for anything involving harmonies, and for the simplicity of old folk songs. If the music we are making is folk music, I think it’s appropriate that folk has always evolved and changed to suit the needs and situations of the people singing it, and their surroundings.”
Tristram have recently finished recording their new EP ‘Accidents & Artifice’. It was recorded in a basement home studio and is set for release on November 15th. The freedom of recording in this way has resulted in an EP which feels natural, honest, and unrushed. Closing track Coelacanth was written whilst the others were being recorded, a nod to the spontaneous nature of the band.
Tristram have found a way to tie together the worlds of the experimental and the accessible with beautiful clarity. These are lyrically honest songs, with a sideways approach to universal themes (love, lack of love, histories, politics and so on). What was rooted in one sound, has now become something so reformed that its origins are blurred. A true, natural evolution.
More here: Broken Sound Music