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.

Support tonight comes form a brand new collaboration between Joe Howe’s Meteor Rodeo beats and Mercuro-Chrome; the tin-foiled alter ego of the >CHOKE< poet, artist and musician Jamie Bolland!

Saturday 18th April , 2pm

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

Following the 100th edition of Tony Bevan’s acclaimed series “Help Me I’m
Melting” on 28th of December at “The Old Hairdressers”, Renfield Lane, Glasgow, the series
marches into the future.

Tony Bevan (saxophones, Harmonicas) with:

Mick Beck (Saxophones, Bassoon)
Seth Bennett (Double Bass)
Paul Hession (Drums)

Sunday 26th April, 7.30pm

£15 on the door or limited £10 advance tickets available HERE

“Over the past six years or so, drummer Chris Corsano has proven to be one of Bill Orcutt’s most reliably flexible collusionists. Regardless of whether Bill is cluster-busting electric guitar strings, weaseling around with cracked electronics, or playing relatively spacious free-rock, Corsano is able to provide the proper base for his aural sculpting. A lot of Orcutt’s instrumental work has traditionally felt hermetic even though he’s exploring caverns of explosive ecstasy. One often got the impression Bill was operating in the way John Travolta did in the classic 1976 ABC television drama, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Orcutt’s actual interaction with collaborators emerged not from communication so much as pure observation. While he was fully cognizant of his musical surroundings, his reactions to it were walled off. This approach did not encourage sonic dialogue so much as parallel streams of discourse. These streams could interact with each other, but not in particularly standard ways. On Brace Up! , their first ever studio release, this precept has changed considerably. Whether it’s a function of emotional familiarity or an intellectual choice I dunno, but there’s a whole new kind of duo exchange going down on this record. Bill and Chris are clearly playing off each other’s moves throughout the album. And it really raises the level of the music to an all-time high. From the cop car see-saw of ‘Poundland Frenzy’ to the mutual pummeling of ‘Paranoid Time’ (possibly a Minutemen tribute?) to the lazychicken- gets-stung-prog of ‘She Punched a Hole in the Moon for Me,’ the sounds on Brace Up! display a constant flow of ideas and instantaneous conjugation of newly forged verbs. As great as Bill and Chris’s previous duo records have been, this one’s greater.” — Byron Coley

Listen to the album BRACE UP!

Tiny Mix Tapes INTERVIEW

ASUNA (Asuna Arashi, Japan) uses large collections of multiples to explore interference and drones in installations and live performances. Evolving from previous projects EACH ORGAN and 100 Keyboards, the current tour ›100 TOYS‹ uses many tiny cheap toys to creates a multilayered and fascinating plastic universe of drones, loops, sonic moire and occasional pop implosions. ›100 TOYS‹ is like watching in a strange amusement park sitting in a  ferris wheel. 

Watch ›100 TOYS‹

Saturday 2nd May, 7pm

🌳 dual tree presents 🌳

Ceschi: Sans Soleil 
Ceiling Demons: Nil 
Eli Hermit: Half Truths 

£10 + booking fee Ticket available HERE

Following the release of 2019’s critically acclaimed albums; Sad, Fat Luck and Sans Soleil, we’re immensely proud to be bringing DIY indie-rap maverick, Ceschi to Glasgow for the very first time! Support comes from gloomy Yorkshire folk rap punks Ceiling Demons and Glaswegian alternative hip hop producer/wordsmith Eli Hermit!

Ceschi Ramos is a rapper and singer from Connecticut (US) who has been hopping genres and spilling guts for the better part of two decades. He has been seen outside venues at 3am in Germany playing an acoustic guitar and singing to people that didn’t want the show to end. He has written poems to fans from behind bars whilst locked up on bogus marijuana charges. He has suffered a spiral fracture of the humerus while arm wrestling a marine in Hawaii. He has recorded with and toured alongside some of independent rap music’s most influential figures, including Sage Francis, Busdriver and Astronautalis. He has been in bands described as hardcore, crunk rap, lo-fi synth pop, Latin progressive and psych-jazz-rap. He has crafted abstracted and personal narratives mining the depths of depression and heights of hope. He has slept on countless floors when hotels weren’t in the touring budget and lost girlfriends and jobs all for the love of creating and performing.

Ceschi was born with four fingers on his right hand, which served as partial inspiration for the name of his DIY record label, Fake Four Inc. Those who have worked with him describe Ceschi as one of the most artist-friendly labelheads out there, a rare breed who values art over profit almost to a fault. Since 2008, he has curated a roster of wildly original and critically praised talent and put out albums from the likes of Open Mike Eagle, Buck 65, Serengeti and Sadistik. He has done a split album with cult folk-punk artist Pat The Bunny and released a number of critically acclaimed solo records including The One Man Band Broke Up, Broken Bone Ballads and last years Sad, Fat Luck and Sans Soleil respectively.

An engaging, theatrical live performer, Ceschi Ramos has treated entire venues like a stage, viewing the middle of the audience or an empty barstool as good a place as any to perform a soul-baring folk song or tongue-twisting rap track. Ceschi once described himself in song as “a martyr at most… a failure at least” and said that, “In the eyes of history I’ll be no more than a leaf on a tree.” He knows what it is to suffer for his art and is aware that music exploring the ugliness and sorrow of the human condition will always exist on the fringes of a game dominated by disposable escapism and expensive publicists. Yet he still pours everything he has into his craft, and on any given night you can find him tracking vocals at his cousin’s New Haven studio, warmly greeting fans and friends at a dive bar merch booth or rapping double-time in Japan or Europe for audiences that often don’t speak his language, but are able to see the giant heart at the core of it all.

Monday 11th and Tuesday 12th May

Tickets £7 available HERE

Book & Lyrics By Joseph Trayno. Music By Dominic Irving

THE NEIGHBOUR is a new musical comedy in the vein of classic thrillers like DIAL M FOR MURDER, REAR WINDOW, ROPE and VERTIGO

THE NEIGHBOUR tells the story of a young man driven to murder and the lengths he will go to cover up his nefarious crime. Little does he know that on this quiet street someone is always watching

She is the gossip at the cash register…The nosey old woman at the front door…The nagging crone who tells you to look both ways before crossing the street…She is THE NEIGHBOUR

Facebook event

Following a sell-out run at 2019s Edinburgh Fringe, award-winning writer and spoken word artist Cat Hepburn (featured on BBC6, BBC The Social, BBC Scotland, STV, Loop, Sonnet Youth) presents her debut solo show #GIRLHOOD.

Join GIRL, as she journeys through the experiences that challenge and shape her, including an awkward teenage romance, her first holiday without her parents, and a toxic relationship. Punctuated by seminal pop music from the ’90s and ’00s, Hepburns performance deconstructs and satirises the milestones, conventions and pressures that girls and young women face. #GIRLHOOD is ultimately about finding those people who will help you survive the lows, and dance in celebration with you on the highs. Simultaneously nostalgic, hilarious and heartbreaking, it puts a young, female voice to the forefront.

Followed by a post-show discussion.

Age 14+
Warnings: Sexual language, references to sexual violence, swearing

“Humorous yet poignant  The Feminist Fringe
“Scarily relatable”  Broadway Baby
“A rite of passage of Spice Girls, girls trips and awkward teenage fumbling”  Edinburgh Festivals Magazine