Team Brick are one of the acts Portishead chose as a Ones To Watch in Issue 29 of Clash magazine, read more and download a free compilation of the tracks here.
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His live show is just brilliant
Completely unique, Team Brick has bowled over Portishead with his maverick style; a one-man band innovation of noise whose live shows see him enveloped in a semi-improvised trance where no gig is the same.
“We are about to release his album but it is a lot different from his live shows. His live show is just brilliant,” Geoff Barrow says. “He’s really difficult to watch because he’ll do these amazing soundtrack pieces of music that are all chance and loops. Nothing is ever the same. One night is different to the next.”
The self-proclaimed “racket” he makes incorporates all kinds of instruments; Team Brick himself says: “I have a very basic and minimal pedal chain set-up, usually next to a floor tom and a clarinet and some bells. Sometimes I use violins, tinfoil, pencils, CD racks, guitars, synths, wood, hammers, glass, etc which I use to make a largely unpleasant racket for about twenty minutes until I get tired.”
His vocal offerings range from throat singing, speaking in tongues to cathartic off-mic bellowing, activating the acoustic properties of his whole body. Singing in English from time to time, he is also known to recite a couple of lines of his favourite prayer in Latin. (“En ego campana, Nunquam denuncio vana” which translates to “Behold! I, the bell, do not speak of vain things!”)
Speaking of his album, Team Brick says: “It’s all a lot more composed, and usually less noisy, but I’m working on a new noisy album for a friend’s CDR label, except it’s going to be quite pleasant noise, just kind of hissy because it’s all recorded on dictaphones.”
“For one man to create music out of noise and to actually be musical as well with his voice and instruments is brilliant,” Geoff concludes. “You get lots of people that write soundtracks and modern classical but he is really something special. I respect his ability to write different music everyday live with no restrictions really. To just decide to go down one path and that was that for that gig and never to be repeated.”
Listen to: his debut album, ‘Alogon’, which is scheduled for a release on Invada later this year.
Fact: He likes to play air drums whilst cycling.
