Thursday 12th December

Saturday 14th December, 7.30pm

Tickets £7 Adv, £10 on the door.

Graham Dunning makes live performances using both Mechanical Techno and live coding (with TidalCycles) together. Each of the systems runs independently and is synchronised by ear; effectively like a DJ set with two turntables, except one of them is a rotating mechanical sequencer and the other is a text-based sample sequencer. Graham runs a label and radio show called Fractal Meat that focuses on process and experiments, releasing a recent tape for Coatic Sequence.

Coatic Sequence is a collaborative sound and visual project by Manchester artists Darren Adcock and Tasha Whittle. The project was debuted in 2017 after a collaborative commission for Manchester Science Festival. The pair utilise a hand built modular synthesiser ‘Glen’ to amplify drawing and improvise visual and sonic compositions. Each mark made has a sonic effect, each sound produced affects the way the drawing is created.

The work with Glen is playful, physical, chaotic, indeterminable, inclusive, improvised and falls in line with abstract expressionism. There is an infinite amount of sounds that can be synthesised from Glen and subsequently there are infinite ways drawings can be produced. Both senses (sight and sound) and disciplines (sound and visual) come together in one body of work and the pair are interested in the grey area where they meet.

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan has been living and working in Beirut for the last few years, but before that he was in Leeds playing in the best bands of the early UK 2000s: Please and Cleckhuddersfax. Tonight Keeby will be playing improvised percussion, building textures and developing the new work he started on Residency at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut.

Human Heads are Hannah Ellul and Ben Knight. Facing the future, if the future is a crude drawing of a figure whispering into a clam shell phone. ‘They brush a demure fringe to one side and look you straight in the face…worship me like you worship the distant buttery sunlight of youth, it seems to say!’ Joe Murray, Radio Free Midwich

Monday 16th December

BUDGEE
The project of Canadian born, Glasgow based, songwriter Celine Brooks. Taking influence from a range of styles from modern folk and Americana to classic pop, BUDGEE is familiar yet contemporary with an observational lyrical style.
The current incarnation of BUDGEE is a two-piece featuring Scottish musician Gareth Dickson (solo artist and guitarist in Vashti Bunyan’s touring setup over the last 10 years). The blend makes for a quiet yet funky collaboration, with threads of both melancholy and irreverence. The debut release ‘Swing the Barkley’ is a seven-track album inspired by reflections on home and place. LISTEN

Kotryna Ula Kyliulyte.
Amateur Botanist combines photogrammetry generated 3D models and underwater video footage to imagine and reenact some ways the plants may have travelled and spread around the planet. It hints at imperial expansions and is based on a narrated dialogue in between two non human species. This work explores notions of native and invasive, and tests the waters outside the anthropocentric world view
Looking into plant migrations the Cradle explores botanical gardens, herbariums and plant science in the age of the Anthropocene. The Cradle engages with the plant kingdom through amateur means: observing, recording, mimicking. It is a consciously non scientific meditation on migration, climate change, extinction and a search for new ways of coexisting in potential new ecologies. LISTEN

Dave Frazer
From the land of the long white cloud and now firmly entrenched in the bleak contrast of Glasgow – Dave Frazer’s music is both optimistic and depressing. A nostalgic spirit, his unique and slack baritone voice resonates over ambient guitar drones. An intimate and beguiling performer he uses simplicity and repetition in his music which undulates sweetly like an abandoned ship on an endless sea of nothing. LISTEN

Dj set by LUCO

Tuesday 17th December

£6 entry. 7:30pm doors

An evening of Graphic and Experimental scores by Henry McPherson, Claire Docherty, Gregor Forbes and Alistair Quietsch.

The pieces will be performed by a quartet made up of Scott Morrison, Mike Parr-Burman, Elena Inei and Samuel Bradley.

Friday 20th December 

Doors 7.30pm, Show 8pm, DJ 10:30, £5 admission

Sonnet Youth is a spoken word house party. A literary rave. A poetic piss up – bringing together poets, authors, rappers, comedians and musicians for a night of no holds barred performances.

Curated and hosted by Kevin P. Gilday – Writer & Spoken Word Artist and Cat Hepburn Write, we’re proud to present a night of non-stop entertainment from some of the most unique artists plying their trade in Scotland, and beyond.

For our X-mas special, how’s this for a stonker of a line-up?!

– A veeeery special guest, TBA shortly!

– Award-winning poet and lyricist from Derby Jamie Thrasivoulou Poet will be joining us on the bill.

– Hilarious comedian Susan Riddell, as seen on BBC Scotland’s The State of It will be delivering some top comedy.

– A jewel of the Scottish music scene Heir of The Cursed will be performing live.

– Well-loved author, poet, and all round literary Queen Kirsty Logan
is doing some readings for us.

Plus…

– We’ll be showcasing the amazing talent that is Haydn Park-Patterson

& to top the night off, we have the legendary Dan Monox (Dixon Avenue Basement Jams / Rubadub) spinning tunes until midnight!

Supported by Creative Scotland and The Old Hairdressers

Saturday 21st December, 7.30pm

Admission £5 on the door

Richard Youngs will be performing his debut record Advent in its entirety. A live piano set for the night of the winter solstice.

“In his liner notes for this edition, Youngs refers to Advent as “a record by an intense young man,” and after a few spins you’re unlikely to detect anything that’d persuade you to disagree. Essentially one 41-minute composition divided into three segments, the album’s primary distinguishing characteristic is a hypnotic, two-chord piano figure that pulses with limited variation throughout its entirety. This relentless piano phrase is in fact knotted so loosely that to call it a riff almost feels like an overstatement. As the album progresses the piano begins to scarcely resemble a manmade construction at all, seeming instead a simple, erosive fact of the landscape like a constant wind patiently carving an arch into sandstone or the steady drip of cave-water building a stalactite.

Over the course of the album, Youngs proceeds to stage three offensives against this piano’s impenetrable bulwarks. On Part I he makes his approach wielding only his plaintive vocals, repeatedly pleading “don’t fall apart,” in a manner that suggests he’s not directly addressing anyone outside his own skull. Though Youngs’ vocals have been frequently (and accurately) compared to those of Robert Wyatt, there is also a lonesome quaver in his singing here that recalls Jandek, a resemblance perhaps made more obvious by Youngs’ recent and unprecedented live collaboration with the elusive Corwood Industries representative.”  Matthew Murphy, Pitchfork.

Richard has invited special guest Mute Swimmer to perform this special show.

Mute Swimmer is the principal musical project of the Berlin based British artist Guy Dale. with a changing cast of collaborators and players he has described the project as being ‘governed by grace, doubt and sabotage’. as fascinated with extending the songwriting form as he is in dismantling it – his songs are approached with the tactics of an artist. intense, poignant and ironically funny by turns mute swimmer create beguiling music hewn from disparate strands of art, folk music and alternative rock in singular fashion. LISTEN

Saturday 28th December

2PM onwards

 “Glasgow is blessed to have this happening every two weeks” Stewart Smith, “The Wire”

The one hundredth edition of Tony Bevan’s acclaimed series “Help Me I’m Melting” takes place at 2pm on Saturday the 28th of December at “The Old Hairdressers”, Renfield Lane, Glasgow.  To mark the occasion Bevan will be inviting some of the many performers from far and wide who have played before, in a celebration of this unique venture.  No details of who will be performing will be released prior to the event! You’ll just have to be there!

Saturday 5th January, 7pm

Screening of Strange Bird: A short existential; horror film about one woman’s quest for the abyss. Directed by Laura Lee Bahr and written by Laura Lee Bahr, Chris Kelso

https://vimeo.com/350221948?fbclid=IwAR13CR3-Wgw8JbOHRbA9-nbAWTO0TCN9MiBwNYYdkilOGxASa2jhrodDAyU

Saturday 25th January

7.30pm £6

This Burns Night we’re launching 3 brand new releases!

GUMS! (album launch)
“think of them as current carriers of the torch. They’re doing Glaswegian indie as well as anyone else right now.” – The Sound of Confusion. Watch their latest video HERE

Callum Baird (album launch)
“drawing inspiration from artists old and new, local and international, and combining it with contemporary, sometimes political lyrics… set to ignite the British music scene.” – Glasgowwestend.co.uk

The Hector Collectors (EP Launch)
‘Clever, verbose songs casting a sardonic eye on what passes for modern culture’ – Maximum Rock N Roll

Saturday 11th April, 8pm

Tickets £12 Advance or £15 on the door.

Quelle Chris’s last album GUNS is one the best records released in 2019. It’s impossible to tell you how excited we are to have Quelle come play The Old Hairdresser’s, get your ticket early as this event is sure to sell out!

Every time a shooting makes the news talking heads pop up in small boxes and make loud arguments about how we shouldn’t rush to politicize what just happened. After all, the heads argue, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. But how true is that? Are the tools we use simply tools, innocuous until we give them meaning? Or are the things we surround ourselves with –– the things in our arsenal –– begging to be weaponized, for good or for evil? Guns, the new album from the critically acclaimed rapper and producer Quelle Chris, is a careful study of all these questions, an urgent record for urgent times.

“Guns is an arsenal of both sounds, styles, and subjects, Quelle says, taking a thorough look at “the words we say, what we fear, how we love, how we live, what we ingest, what we believe in, who we idolize, shit like that.” To this end, the New York by-way-of Detroit savant attacks his topics from multiple angles: there’s the jagged, minimal “Obamacare,” which plays like a confrontation, but there’s also “Wild Minks,” where Quelle and the enigmatic New Jersey rapper Mach-Hommy spin silk out of the softest textures in their parents’ record collections. In the service of examining big ideas with grave consequences, we get to hear a master technician deploying every piece of ammo he has.

In times that are often beyond parody, Quelle has never been a writer to shy away from the absurd. But Guns is dotted with references to the very real, painfully ordinary fates that might befall us –– be they getting gunned down in church on a Sunday or simply being forgotten by our friends after we’re gone. In preparation for both, Quelle lays his psyche bare. Maybe his identity is best summed up by the three-word descriptor he gives himself toward the record’s end: “handsome, black, and headstrong.”

Quelle handles the vast majority of production duties himself, with assists coming from Dane and Chris Keys. Guns covers sonic ground quickly: it opens with the skeletal creep of “Spray & Pray” and closes with “WYRM,” which is sweeping and contemplative. In between there are detours to the lush and playful (“PSA Drugfest 2003”) and to the grim and digital (“Mind Ya Bidness”). As always, Quelle delivers music that’s innovative and idiosyncratic without sacrificing the gut-punch of more commercial releases; in fact, there are moments when Guns rattles trunks like few rap LPs in recent memory.

Slated for release via Mello Music Group on March 29, Guns is Quelle’s third studio album in three years: each Quelle Chris album is distinct and fully-realized: see 2017’s Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often, an off-kilter probe into the ways we see ourselves, or see last year’s collaboration with Jean Grae, Everything’s Fine, which was biting satire for the dawn of a new dystopia –– and which was adored by critics, being named to ‘best album of the year’ lists by countless publications, including Pitchfork, The Wire, and Bandcamp, who dubbed it the best album of 2018.

Guns is not content to rest on those laurels. “My goal with this and all albums is to create pieces people can enjoy, start to finish, for decades to come,” Quelle notes, fully aware that in a fractured, streaming ecosystem, any shard of your identity released into the world might be the lone artifact that survives. This is a record that is constantly aware of the peril all around us, but instead of shrinking in the face of that knowledge, it reasserts its creator’s identity. Aided by excellent guest turns from the likes of Jean Grae, Denmark Vessey, Cavalier, Mach-Hommy, Bilal Salaam, and more, Quelle Chris has delivered perhaps the most pointed, most personal, and all-together perfectly crafted album of his career.