Delaware Road LIVE review

Photo: Alan Gubby

The Delaware Road live gig reviewed by DJ FOOD and Shindig! magazine HERE

Photo: Victoria Forbes

" -  a night of radiophonics, tape loops, vintage synths and spoken word we braced ourselves for an eight band line up held together by a narrative from Dolly Dolly. Seated at a table under angle poise lamp to one side of the stage for the entirety of the gig and looking for all the world like a broadcast announcer of old he was a revelation, holding the audience captive between acts as the night and story unfolded. Written by Dolly aka David Yates and label manager Alan Gubby, the tale of The Delaware Road is loosely based on two members (‘the man’ and ‘the woman’) of a sound studio reminiscent of the Radiophonic Workshop. The clues are all there, the BBC being referred to as ‘the corporation’, and the tale includes shades of The Stone Tape Theory, the occult, the swinging 60s, orgies and demonic powers released through sound recorded on cooper wire."

DELAWARE ROAD trailer featuring Dolly Dolly

DELAWARE ROAD

A rare chance to see Dolly Dolly and many others preforming live this year on Saturday 14 November 2015 in Reading, Berkshire. 

BUY TICKETS HERE


London. 1968. Two pioneering electronic musicians discover a set of unusual recordings. Fascinated by the seemingly occult nature of the tapes they conduct a studio ritual that will alter their lives forever. 

 

The Delaware Road is a psychological thriller & an audio-visual treat for fans of archived electronica, far out jazz & haunted folk grooves. 

 

Compere: Dolly Dolly

 

Live: Howlround, The Dandelion Set, Ian Helliwell, The Rowan Amber Mill, Robin Lee, Loose Capacitor, Tim Hill, The Twelve Hour Foundation & Revbjelde.

 

DJs: Jonny Trunk & The Séance (feat. Pete Wiggs from St Etienne)

 

Tickets £15 advance, £13 concession; £16 on the door.

Price includes free poster & advance download code for 'The Delaware Road' compilation album on Buried Treasure Records.

INSTADOLLY

Why not follow Dolly Dolly on INSTAGRAM?

*All the cool kids do.

#fairground

A photo posted by David Yates (@dollydollydavid) on Apr 7, 2012 at 7:19am PDT

A photo posted by David Yates (@dollydollydavid) on Jul 31, 2012 at 6:29am PDT

A photo posted by David Yates (@dollydollydavid) on Aug 15, 2015 at 11:34am PDT

A photo posted by David Yates (@dollydollydavid) on Aug 5, 2015 at 9:19am PDT

A photo posted by David Yates (@dollydollydavid) on Aug 1, 2015 at 1:19pm PDT

*Apparently 

NEW MUSIC MIX from KIT RECORDS

 

The ever lovely KIT RECORDS very kindly asked me to make them a music mix. Which I did. 

This is what they said:

" We love the work of English surrealist musician, spoken word artist and beekeeper Dolly Dolly (sometimes known as David Yates). Bunches of words, unnerving tangles of the stupendous, gruesome and mundane, wind through scattered atmospheres, radiophonic ploinks and the occasional piano ballad. David’s mix ties mournful folk and sound experiments together into one mesmerising, scary whole."

This is what I said:

" This mix could quite easily double up as the soundtrack to a 70s children’s television programme or one of those ‘folk’ horror films from the same period. Here Musique Concrete becomes the unlikely bedfellow of pastoral a Capella English folk. The juxtaposition seems to highlight the strangeness of each. For reasons I can’t really explain this mix reminds me of a weird school assembly.
Have a listen and see if you agree."

You can go to the website  and see the tracklisting here or keep it a surprise and listen below:

Kit Mix #97 // Dolly Dolly by Kit Records on Mixcloud

 

TIMGLASET MAGAZINE

The first issue of the Swedish/English magazine TIMGLASET is now out and ready for you to buy!

Contains an exclusive (and slightly pornographic) weird tale by Dolly Dolly called (S)EXIT and an interview with frequent Dolly collaborator, the English abstract painter and electronic musician Time Attendant.

Worth the cover price alone!

GET YOUR COPY HERE

XPYLON

Once upon a time there was a radio show, then there was a series of live gigs and events. Eventually, there was a record label. They were all called Exotic Pylon. There was one man who was the creator, curator and driving force behind all these things: a man called Jonny Mugwump. Jonny is as close to a raging Darwinian force of nature as you could ever meet. He's a whirlpool of creativity and enthusiasm. He was the pied-piper and we all followed him, sucked in by his strange gravitational pull towards an event horizon of his own making. Once you were there inside the Pylon universe, anything could happen.

The first year of the radio show on London's Resonance FM was a scattershot affair. It was if the contents of Jonny’s brain were jammed into a blunderbuss and shot into the mic. As the years went on, he was joined by various ne'er-do-wells playing live, who filled the tiny studio to the brim, often times spilling out into the station's carpark outside. Paul Snowdon (Time Attendant) began to co-host after a while. You would think this would have had a stabilizing effect on Jonny and the show (Paul Snowdon was and remains the single most laid back man in creation), but no. They spent many a time broadcasting throughout the night, widely improvising madcap electronic soundscapes to anyone who happened to tune in at 3am. The show was as eclectic as they come. Anything and anyone came and went. It started to become a hub for eccentrics to ply their wares or just hang out while Jonny somehow seemed to hold it all together by the skin of his teeth.

It seemed only natural for the show to move into the live arena and there then followed over a year of live gigs in London. They were, like the radio show, ramshackle affairs where anything could happen from one show to the next. There was never anything uniform about Exotic Pylon. It was never pin-downable. It was always on the move. Always moving. Always exciting. There were nights where magic would happen. Where you would see combinations of acts that could’ve only been programmed deep inside Jonny’s hyperactive brain. There was nothing like it. And I don’t think there ever will be again.

The record label became a combination of all that had gone before. Each release was completely unique. There was no through-line of sound. No label aesthetic. The one thing they all had in common was they had nothing in common. From torch songs to folk, from electronica to spoken word. All human life was on the label (assuming the human life was slightly lop-sided and walked with a limp).

The one thing that united everyone on Exotic Pylon was a sense of comradeship. We were all proud to have been involved in some way or another. We were all members of the same invisible college. Almost without exception we all kept in contact with each other once the label had died. It may have disappeared but its spirit has remained.

So, with that in mind, we present XPYLON, a compilation of ex-Pyloneers. Each track is brand new and exclusive to the release. There are supergroups, individuals and collaborations, all of which evoke the heady days of the once great Exotic Pylon.

AVAILABLE TO BUY HERE

Every year, one in four of us will experience a mental health problem. But hundreds of thousands of people are still struggling.

All proceeds from the album are going to Mind, the mental health charity.

Mind believe no-one should have to face a mental health problem alone. They will listen, give you support and advice, and fight your corner.

NEW ALBUM RELEASE - 16th May 2015

 

This album came about via a death.

The elderly have a habit of popping off when you least expect it. One minute you’re having a chat about the weather, the next they’re face down in their soup. It’s a sad fact of life that death is not dignified. It’s rarely pleasant. What is nice, however, is when you get left nice stuff after they’re gone. Some people get whole estates, some people get houses, some people get priceless Ming vases. Not me though. I got given a cassette tape. The widow handed it to me and said ‘He knew you liked jazz and would’ve wanted you to have it’. The tape was unmarked. The only clue I had to it’s contents were three words written on the paper inlay. They are now the name of this album. As far as I could make out it was filled with A and B sides of old 45s from the 1960s and early 70s. Some I recognised, some I didn’t. I would listen to it obsessively in the evenings. The soundtrack to my life. I don’t think I listened to anything else for a whole month. It became a ritual. Cassette tapes make a lovely rattle when you shake them. They’re the most physical of storage mediums. Every time I took it out of it’s clear plastic case I would give it a little shake. It became as much a part of the sound of it as the actual music. You could press the FF and REV while the PLAY button was on and it would feel like you were recomposing it with it’s own noise. By sheer coincidence I was given a couple of other tapes while I was making this album, a handful from the chap who runs our local Oxfam shop. I was chatting to him about the project. He couldn’t sell them because they were home recorded and unmarked. I’d not been given a cassette for over twenty years and all of a sudden I had a drawer full. It was serendipity. The vocals were collected over ten or so years as I magpie-like snaffled anything that ticked my fancy or just made me laugh.  I sampled the tapes, cut-up everything up, looped them and sampled them all over again. They started to sound as if you'd fallen asleep listening to the radio in the middle of the night and had a partially strange repeating dream. Perfect. The whole thing seemed to fit together quite nicely. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Since sampling the original tape for this album it has sadly died. Cassettes a have habit of popping off when you least expect it too. One minute you’re listening to a drum solo, the next it’s wrapped around the spindle, crunched and snapped and dead. Sad really.

Anyway.

You can buy it from the Dolly Dolly Bandcamp page on 16th May 2015

Dolly Dolly

EXCLUZIVE DOLLY DOLLY TRACK ON EKOPLEKZ FACT MAGAZINE MIX

 DOLLY DOLLY featured on EKOPLEKZ's FACT magazine mix

 Dolly Dolly & Gloria Gloucestershire – Contak (unreleased)

DOWNLOAD

FREE DOLLY DOLLY AUDIO BOOK

 

Complete reading of the text from the short story (S)EXIT printed in TIMGLASET magazine.

ADULTS ONLY

DOWNLOAD

NEW EP

Prufrock is a collaboration between multi-instrumentalist Steve Christie and artist Dolly Dolly (David Yates). After playing on Dolly Dolly’s debut album Antimacassar the pair decided to work together on the short series of tracks included on this EP. Dolly recorded sounds from his garden bird table, a grandfather clock, a 91 year old lady who recited a poem from memory, but sadly died two weeks after the recording was made, a group of adults with learning difficulties and a walk though Old Town Hastings towards the sea. Steve used an old school Steinway Grand Piano, a Lowrey DSO-1 Heritage Deluxe organ, a 19th Century Pipe organ, a cello, a violin, a recorder, and a bit of computer, and mastered it on an ex-BBC Pebble Mill Studer B67 tape machine. The project has been over a year in gestation and the pair are currently working together on a full length album.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Campylobacter

Dolly Dolly’s first official book.

20 full colour pages of original collage art and words by Dolly Dolly. 

Introduction by writer and broadcaster Ken Hollings

Printed with heavy card stock covers

Limited to 100 copies.

Each copy comes with an exclusive signed Dolly Dolly art card only available with this first edition.

£6 + Postage.

AVAILABLE FROM HERE
From 21st Nov 2014

Dolly Dolly Reads Richard Brautigan Aloud

The Weather in San Francisco read by Dolly Dolly

A short story taken from Richard Brautigan's collection Revenge of the Lawn.

FREE download HERE

LIVE with the Time Attendant @Krets Art Gallery, Malmo, Sweden. August 2014

Filmed byDeath and Vanilla, 5th August 2014

Hello, I'll be playing a joint set with The Time Attendant at the achingly cool KRETS gallery in Malmö in Sweden on the 5 August 2014.

Also playing are the beautiful and hugely dapper Language Timothy! and dashing Jonas Fust.

More details HERE should you want them.

Oo, here's review I missed first time around from the very smart The Big Takeover magazine.

Kind words.

An “antimacassar” is the doily placed over the back of a chair or on the ends of the armrests to prevent soiling, a practice that began in Victorian England with the popularity of Macassar oil, the contemporary hair grease. For his debut album, poet David Yates, aka Dolly Dolly, uses this out-dated piece of cloth as a metaphor for English life, upon which he comments in a series of twisted spoken-word pieces.

Essentially, Antimacassar plays like a Burroughsian meditation on English culture. Yates speaks his words with multiple personalities: an Anglican priest delivering a sermon, a demonic entity laughing at the priest or the psychotic parishioner trying to make sense of it all. Pieces like “Wattle and Daub,” “Lace” and “My Queen Is Dead” describe the English experience through imaginative wordplay, which continues even when things get dark, as in “Corptoepose,” a description of an autopsy that literally sounds like Jack the Ripper making a phone call. Death in general is very much prevalent, mused upon in “Fix Death” and “Horrible News” while coming alive in “GONE,” a tape cut-up assembled from the voices of two old men. Several tracks also contain background music from the likes of Position Normal, Regal Worm, Time Attendent, Moon Wiring Club, Steve Christie, Ekoplekz and Language, Timothy!, adding to the unsettling nature of the words.

Spoken-word can very easily devolve into self-indulgence and pretension. Fortunately, Dolly Dolly is just off enough to make it work. Listen toAntimacassar before a trip to England just to understand the country a little better. The lessons may not be abundantly clear, but they will make sense in the end.

EXCLUSIVE FREE DOLLY DOLLY NON-ALBUM TRACK

DOWNLOAD

Review from FREQ by J Simpson

Antimacassar, the debut LP from Dolly Dolly (the alter-ego of David Yates) explores the three -realisms of the 20th Century – surrealism, irrealism and magickal realism – with a combination of spoken word, sci-fi electronics, sound collage and avant-classicism. The result is punker than punk, heavier than heavy metal and manages to creep-out, illuminate and inspire; and thus subvert normalcy. Antimacassar also features some of the current electronic scene’s blackest lights, with contributions from Ekoplekz, Moon Wiring Club, Position Normal, Time Attendant and more.

a symbol by which to dissect Englishness

An antimacassar is a lace doily, placed over the back of armchair in Victorian drawing rooms. Dolly Dolly uses this image of antiquated British life as a symbol by which to dissect Englishness. It starts off with “Wattle & Daub (with Position Normal)”, a not-entirely flattering homage:

England my England / You flickering island of endlessness upon endlessness / A cold mist of your fibrous trolleys stifles the sun/ and the arrow aimed at your heart fidgets with smoky spasms…

half-strangled uncles stuffed with crisps…

your weather like underdone mutton…

…and her dress is made of unwound clockwork.

This gives you a hint of the unsettling language you have in store on this 19-track soliloquy.

the sinister surrealism of the everyday and flourishes into monstrous

Antimacassar is rooted in the sinister surrealism of the everyday and flourishes into monstrous, fleshy perfumed gardens, rife with decay and potential. Look at the short “Among,” in which coins come to life, “they wriggle, bright and alive, in my palm.”

There is a mission, here; and a message to be unburied, like those coins.

There is a disturbing tendency among “extreme musics” to label and commidify, thus negating their threat. It is a simple, but dangerous, mind twist, with over-privileged suburbanites getting to feel tough and street by co-opting revolutionary and antagonistic music like hip-hop, punk rock, noise and black metal. It could be said that to name and codify these musicks is to rip out their fangs with rusty pliers, making them safe, drooling house pets for the status quo.

Dolly Dolly does not come out and tell you what he is up to. With the somewhat light-hearted cover art, David Yates catches you off guard, and shatters yr world view like a blunt force trauma, like a 4X4 to the temple.

Antimacassar also reminds us of the ritualistic power of listening to an album – a whole album, from start to finish. You fall under its spell; it takes you on a journey. The album tells you something, transferring some hidden wisdom. In that way, the spinning stylus calls the circle; and the ritual is underway for as long as it spins. In a very unexpected way, Dolly Dolly reminds us of the real purpose of ritual and magick, to shatter consensual reality, to re-imprint society’s hold upon our minds. Traditional ritual used a grab bag of methods to produce extreme states, from love to terror. It was designed to place you in unfamiliar territory, to make you think for yrself, to become yr own master.

accumulates to produce a terrible gnosis, a feeling of potency and possibility

There is a gradual decay of waking life and mundane thoughts as you listen to Dolly Dolly’s dream dialogues repetitively. The streets seem to open up and swallow you whole, as the possibility of something rising from the ocean, with carousel horses swimming for their lives. All of this surrealism and morbidity accumulates to produce a terrible gnosis, a feeling of potency and possibility, which then erupts in “Everbecoming,” which is a serious, no-joke dissertation on post-Thelemic occult thought. There’s not even any music – it might as well be a fourth way lecture.

Adept – a man who by conscious effort of will is able to free his being from the influences who condition the human being, and thus attains possession of superhuman power and knowledge.

In a wonderful piece written by Mark Fisher, the esteemed K-Punk, for ElectronicBeats.net, he wrote, “Old New English Library paperbacks become occult manuals, full of esoteric philosophy. It’s still possible to transform ourselves, to transport ourselves, and Dolly Dolly shows us how.”

a harrowing journey that doesn’t pull any punches

A direct line from banality to full-blown imagination, from modern life, through irrealism, to mystical enlightenment. It’s a harrowing journey that doesn’t pull any punches. During Antimacassar‘s brief existence, you will be subjected to your own autopsy, (“Corptoepose”), reflections on death (“Gone”) and your father’s ghost spilling out into the street as newstype stains your hands (“Horrible News”). Amidst the phantasms and the memento mori there is wonder to be found. Boring, horrible, soul-grinding reality is shattered for good – leaving room for something more.

Antimacassar is beat poetry for beatheads. In one fell swoop, he reclaims the threat of poetry and sound collage, making something truly challenging and thrilling. Dig beneath the surface – you’ll never be the same.

Freq also reviewed The Time Attendant's Treacherous Orb EP and Ekoplekz's Unfidelity. Both of whom feature on Antimacassar.

Customer review on Amazon UK:

The Strangeness of Familiarity
Customer rating 5.0/5.0
29 Jan 2014 By Tee Double You Bee Esq


Imagine Betjeman schooled in Burroughs, Ballard and Crowley - you're on your way to 'Anitmacassar' and what a wonderful trip it is too. Throughout this spoken-word journey (accompanied by field recordings/found sounds/electronic whizzery) lies an all-pervasive otherness; the comfortable fear of your grandparents' house as a child (all ticking clocks and musty smells), the sad tale of an extinct beehive and a mother with three thumbs.

Distinct English ephemera, from seaside atmospherics to Sooty & Sweep, colours these evocative missives from an inventive poet. 'Green Man's cut-and-paste, manipulated names of trees rubs shoulders with a cold, robotic account of autopsy. 'Gone' repeats the chuckled existential resignation of a kindly old timer next to the 'Shining' ambience of the genuinely creepy 'Horrible News'. I particular enjoy 'Lace' which is reminiscent (in sound at least) of Kerouac accompanied by Steve Allen. The titular track (Doily Doily, anyone?) is another superb meander through very English tropes and is thoroughly entrancing.

Where this triumphs over many other, please excuse me, 'hauntological' releases is in that it manages to side-step the slightly camp silliness. 'Antimacassar' is genuinely unsettling with a strong whiff of the occult snaking around suburbia. What's more is that it bears repeated listens with the supple word-play and excellent musical accompaniment from such luminaries as Position Normal, Moon Wiring Club and The Time Attendant.

Highly recommended for a leap into the uncanny. 

Review of Antimacassar in Wire magazine dated Jan 14:

"Dolly Dolly’s Antimacassar is a mostly spoken word album leaning towards the surreal rather than the mystic. He shifts from reeling off Victorian naturalist’s specimen catalogues to Dalek-toned accounts of sinister medical procedures, with references to lace curtains and pub snacks tossed in to balance the familiar with the strange. The references are always distinctly English. Musically, songs slide from jazzy stronk with xylophone to synthesiser slithers worthy of Coil. “Noctambulist” builds over a musique concrete last used to soundtrack a gaudy parade of market stall goods and egg breaking machines in the 1967 film The London Nobody Knows.

If anything this album calls to mind a contemporary take on Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy, the 1975 album of poetry by multimedia artist June Campbell Cramer, who was the connecting point between Ivor Cutler, Brain Eno and members of Gong and Soft Machine. Dolly Dolly’s words draw together collaborators from a roster of the Exotic Pylon label and the Outer Church club nights: Time Attendant, Position Normal and Moon Wiring Club, among others. Dolly Dolly deals with hive mind half dreams that collapse in the absence of community. English eccentricity, it would seem, abhors a vacuum."