Preview

The Fujii

The Fujii is the collective name for the trio of Koichi Fujishima, aka 'Fuji', Paul Shearsmith and Shimaky Fumica, known simply by her second name. Fuji is a Japanese slide guitar player and singer, while Paul is an English player of pocket trumpet, tuned gas main, baliphone and founding member of Echo City, the group that plays plastic tube instruments. Fumica, also from Japan plays violin. Fuji is also a painter, photographer and essayist - a real renaissance man!

The band's unique line-up fuses deep traditional blues and extraordinary blues singing [in Japanese!] with various Japanese folk and classical music through the partnership of Fuji and Fumika. Meanwhile Shearsmith with his strange collection of pipes and tubes, brings an avant garde edge to the sound. The result is an extraordinary trip through the past and future of the blues, rooted in the sounds and textures of today's multi-cultural world.

Playing material from their two humorously titled albums, ‘So What Time Did You Wake Up This Morning?’ and the recently released ‘We Pray The Brooze’, this promises to be one of those amazing Talbot nights.

'Questions of authenticity are redundant with music this faithful to the Delta blues spirit' - The Wire

I had not heard such an intense blues performance since seeing Son House at the 100 Club in 1967.' - Charlie Gillett

'this extraordinary thing....a blues slide player from Japan and a bloke from Kentish Town who blows down a gas main. It's an unlikely combination, but it works...' - Andy Kershaw

Volenté

Having spent time on the music scenes in South Africa and Holland, this talented musician has been an established part of the Welsh music scene for the past few years. Volenté recently decided it was time to put her music on record, so she wrote, produced and arranged the album ‘Cold Clean’ - along with playing most of the instrumentation! The record was released in May this year, and tonight she will be showcasing some of the material from it.

Review

For the first half of a decidedly eclectic two-week Cambria Arts acoustic mini-season, tonight's music presented some marked contrasts, with accompanying challenges.

On her intriguing and commendably ambitious solo CD, Cardiff's Volenté (Lloyd) reveals herself to be a multi-instrumentalist songwriter of some originality, who fits neatly into the post-modernist Pixies- and Bjork-informed mould; the ex-Maniana singer is personable, lacks neither image nor determination, and her melodies have a suitably bleak structure, as befits our troubled 21st-century times. On tonight's evidence, though, in a live context it will take something more than her angular-strum guitar work and wayward voice to make a strong impression in a world already competitively peopled by urgently committed troubadours.

For sheer eccentricity, The Fujii really take some beating: but, with glowing recommendations from the likes of broadcasters Andy Kershaw and Charlie Gillett, and biographer of Captain Beefheart, Mike Barnes, all of whom know a good thing when they hear it, we reckoned they were a must-have, and we reckoned right. Taking the stage solo, Koichi Fujishama ('Fuji') kicked off with a blues that set the tone for the night - Son House in the Land of the Rising Sun, you could say ... Fuji's resonator slide guitar technique is straight from the Delta, it has all the drive and subtlety of the revered Mississippi bluesmen, and his voice has the grit and passion of his heroes, too (as well as an octave-split trick that's akin to throat-singing), but both elements are agreeably coloured by the folk and classical heritage of his Japanese homeland. The fact that he sings the blues exclusively in his native tongue only enhances the joy of this unprecedented mix. Joined by his accomplices Alison Blunt (standing in for the absent Fumica) on classical violin and Paul Shearsmith - a veteran of the notoriously challenging London 'free music' scene alongside the likes of John Stevens - on, amongst other things, pocket trumpet, baliphone, and tuned gas-main pipes (!), the trio proceeded to cast an enchanting spell on us all. With charming informality, 'Sun Down', 'Listen the Sound of the Creek', 'Under the Dry' and other selections from the current We Pray The Brooze CD (fine title!) came and went; with Fuji as the on-stage constant, both Paul and Alison came and went, too, in a gentle kaleidoscope in which the avant-garde and the ancients of three continents, strange bedfellows, coalesced to wonderfully refreshing effect. There were many moments of special magic: two such were Paul's 'Amazonian hand flute' (we've all got one) accompaniment to a blues from Fuji of almost meditational stillness; and, by contrast, the first set's quietly stomping closer, on which all three wielded Jew's harps (the dentist's friend) ... Alison had only taken up this device three weeks before the gig, but you'd really never know ... And next morning, as this happy little band, the epitome of what world music means, piled into Paul's appropriately ancient and battle-scarred Volvo and headed out to Bristol on another mission of enchantment, they surely left behind them memories for many of us of the fun and unexpected beauty to be found in the most unlikely of combinations