Black Magician / Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell UK Tour – Now Booking – Please Help!!

The Sleeping Shaman in Association with Future Noise has the pleasure to announce that we are now booking dates for the up and coming Black Magician (Shaman Recs / Burning World) and Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell (Rise Above) UK Tour.

The tour is scheduled to take place between Thursday 11th OctoberSunday 14th October 2012 which is only a few weeks away and we need to fill the Thursday, Friday and Sunday nights so if you think you can help, please drop Lee an email at lee@future-noise.co.uk and the tour schedule is as follows:

Thurs 11th October: TBC
Fri 12th October: TBC
Sat 13th October: Leeds
Sun 14th October: TBC

Here’s a little bit of info about each band…

Black Magician

Black Magician (Shaman Recordings/Burning World)
In an age when music tends towards the derivative, the mechanical, the over-produced, Black Magician cast their attention backwards, and then back some more. The result of many a long discussion in country pubs, and long rambles through the more isolated areas of the English countryside, they formed through mutual appreciation of 70s prog, eerie folklore and a good real ale.

While they confess to being just as influenced by the late 60s British folk scene as by the old guard of heavy metal and doom, there’s no hippy-drippy philosophising here. Black Magician’s ideology is firmly rooted in the sinister. The brooding landscape of Arthur Machen, the haunted countryside of M.R. James, is where they reside most contentedly.

Black Magician distance themselves from the current trend for pseudo-occult rehashed doom posturing and clichéd horror film imagery. What you can expect is something much more sincere, a genuine fascination with the darker side of British history.

Monolithic cosmic-nod-inducing riffs, swirling Hammond organ and dark acoustic passages are the ingredients in this alchemical brew, the resulting concoction a grim incantation, an ode to anti-urbanism, a very English darkness.

Quotes from the press…

“Black Magician are the perpetrators of this demonic, nightmarish world as they take the core foundations of doom metal and twist it into an acrid smoke filled epic fantasy” – The Ripple Effect

“This isn’t your fusion doom, or your experimental doom, this is doom doom – traditional doom with heavy, slow riffs, glacial jams echoing across black tundras, emitted by bearded men, with SGs and Orange amps, playing at fucking Stonehenge” – Bearded

“They play slow, heavy, obsessive riffs that exude a malicious intent unusual in the style. They occasionally inject a subtle guitar melody here or there when absolutely necessary but for the most part this is one of the most foreboding sounding records I’ve heard in a while” – Metal Ireland

“Black Magician gives us a classic doom Metal platter onto which has been bolted a profound interest in eccentric occult film and literature” – Metal Talk

http://www.facebook.com/Blackmagiciandoom

Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell

Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell (Rise Above)
The closest I can get to describing hearing Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s music for the first time is that it was akin to the aural equivalent of stumbling into an 18 year-old male’s bedsit in 1973.

Status Quo, Budgie and Black Sabbath albums are piled on top of the hi-fi; torn centrefolds from Playbirds and Whitehouse are Sellotaped to the walls; Richard Allen’s Suedehead, William Burroughs’ Junkie and Francis King’s Sexuality, Magic & Perversion tumble from the window sill; crushed Courage Light Ale cans and Players No 6 packets form a tower in the corner; filthy, tight-fitting T-shirts and patched-up denim bell bottoms are strewn all over the floor. And there, in the centre, like a Biblical king surveying his domain, is the music lover – a stick-thin, back street Jesus, engrossed in the rolling of his last spliff, flowing hair all but obscuring his chops, the opening bars of The Groundhogs’ ‘Cherry Red’ blowing from the speakers around him like a sucker-punch from Heaven.

Get the picture? Good. The Shovell, as their friends and fans know them, belong spiritually to a time and place we’d all like to believe still exists somewhere – maybe that’s why their no-nonsense take on the progressive metal sound of the early-mid ’70s is so damn accessible. You don’t need a degree in doom-rock or a Masters in metal for their incorrigible clatter to strike a (power) chord – you just need ears, feet and some appreciation of what makes bands and music GOOD.

Some statistics: the Shovell are named after a 17th century English naval commander; Bill Darlington plays drums and is too thin, Louis Comfort-Wiggett plays bass without his glasses falling off and Johnny Gorilla plays guitar and shouts, both loudly; they have been together as a band since 2008 and mates for donkey’s years; their lineage includes more neo-psych, garage, freakbeat and powerpop combos than you could shake a stick at; there are people in Catalunya, Spain still recovering from the Shovell’s May 2009 tour there; their 2011 Rise Above 7”, ‘Return To Zero’/’Day After Day’, sold out instantly and now commands up to £100 a copy; their debut long-player will tear your face off and put it back on inside out, using spit.

OK, so that last bit may be open to conjecture but make no mistake – Don’t Hear It… Fear It! (available on CD and gatefold vinyl with bonus “Euro style” 45 – oh yes) finds the Hastings threesome delivering the kind of greasy hard-rock thrills rarely heard in this climate of blind nostalgia and misjudged authenticity. It’s hard ’n’ heavy, without the marshmallow; it’s old-fashioned yet so NOW that it hurts; it has three songs on side one and four on side two; it has yer actual Tony McPhee off of the aforementioned Groundhogs on it – it’s a rock ’n’ roll album made by people who give two shits and who’ve earned just a little “me” time in the company of your ears. OK?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Admiral-Sir-Cloudesley-Shovell/192159784156971