Marissa Nadler + Kathryn Sawers + Claire Hamilton - Sat 11th June 05

[chilli]

The Tunnels & interesting music are delighted to announce a fantastic evening

of ALL FEMALE entertainment:-

Saturday 11th June 2005

The Tunnels-Aberdeen

Doors 8pm

Entry 5

Marissa Nadler (USA)

Kathryn Sawers

Claire Hamilton

Marissa Nadler

On stage, clad in black shawls and cascading tresses, Marissa Nadler performs with an intricate finger-style on the guitar, ukele, and 5-string banjo. Yet it is often her voice that is a shuttle towards another time, a soprano reverberating with melancholy and longing. From her earliest incarnations, Marissa appeared with music that was unique and gorgeous skillfully and simply hinting at the songs of the sea, the haunting chansons of maidens, the cowboy ditties of ranchers, and the funerary processions of mourners. Her many early, homemade CDs, lovingly decorated and inscribed to her nearest and dearest brought the attention of Eclipse Records in Arizona. Ed Hardy, who has gained a reputation for releasing beautiful, eclectic music, released Marissas first LP Ballads of Living and Dying in 2004

www.marissanadler.com

just a few press reviews, see her website reviews for some amazing write -ups.

David Keenan, THE WIRE

"Nadler first came to notice as one of the wildcards on last year's Tom Rapp tribute put together by Secret Eye, and as her inlcusion there makes clear, she favours dark folk ballads that reach far into the blackest areas of space. Her debut album Ballads of Living and Dying is a beauty...The LP's back cover fearures some cryptic artwork that looks like a nod towards Current 93's epochal Swastikas for Noddy album, and references to other decadent fantasists and folkloric topes dot the record, culminating in her setting of Edgar Allen Poe's Annagelle Lee for acoustic and electric guitar. Buit it's her own compositions, with titles like "Stallions" and "Box of Cedar", that leave the heaviest afterimages in the air; beautiful hybrids of dark-hearted Bert Jansch-style folk, and drugged, wieghtless psych."

Uncut Magazine: Four Star Rating

...Marissa Nadler's music betrays a scholarly appreciation of the most resonant of folk traditions, the death ballad. Ballads of Living and Dying revels in the arcane and gothic, filled as it is with allusions to Poe and songs called 'The Undertaker' and 'Box of Cedar'. A tad hokey on paper perhaps, but these 10 finely crafted songs are gorgeous in practice. Nadler's tone of faraway melancholy is utterly convincing and, accompanied largely by her own perfumed strums, could be being broadcast from a candlelit nook in Topanga Canyon circa 1971. A benchmark of sorts, for the new psyche folk underground.'

The Guardian - Kitty Empire

New York folk player Marissa Nadler lives in our times, but she recalls some lost siren of the mystic Sixties or a heroine of the high Romantic period. Her willowy songs are concerned with death and doomed love and she goes as far as to quote Edgar Allan Poe (on 'Annabelle Lee') and Pablo Neruda (on 'Hay Tantos Muertos'). These ballads are uncommonly lovely - unshowy, but hard to get out of your head. Nadler's voice, as delicate as smoke, swirls distantly over her picking and strumming. She uses guitars, banjos and ukuleles, but the atmosphere here is less hokey than haunted, as though the songs were oscillating, suspended, between this world and the next.

Kathryn Sawers

Kathryn Sawers is another original performer. Her intense performance style is a double edged sword. Akin to Tori Amos with similarities to Cerys Mathews yet in truth comparable to no one. Her husky, stark breathless vocals accompanied on piano playing which is at times melodic and at other times brutal. She sits serenely, beautifully at the piano, she looks like an angel. And then she starts, she stares at the audience, shes staring at you and it is frightening! Try and avoid the witchy eye contact, shes going to get you. Last year Kathryn recorded one of the greatest unreleased albums of all time which if it ever see the light of day would surely establish her as one of our most unique singer/songwriters.

"Scary, but as special as buttons"

Claire Hamilton

Claire Hamilton is a singer/songwriter based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She has been playing in and around the City for the last three years, and has, in that time, built up a solid body of perceptive, heartfelt songs about love, life and loss. In February 2005, she released her White Demo, a free cd manufactured and distributed by Clear and Bright Records, to raise awareness of her upcoming gigs.

Claire started playing guitar at age thirteen when, on a family holiday with no tv, her dad taught her how to play the beginning of Here Comes the Sun to pass the time. It wasnt long before, much to his chagrin, Claire surpassed her fathers ability with the guitar.

Over the next few years, Claires confidence and abilities increased, leading her to play with various bands; after flirting with a variety of stylesfrom the stripped-down punk of Paralysis to the melodic rock of Dark MosaicClaire struck out on her own.

www.clairehamilton.co.uk