Third Night

Roly Porter, Cindytalk, Alexander Tucker and Lata play the penultimate night of the Exotic Pylon festival 
at The Vortex 23/03/12.
Lata by the way is Jacob Burns who does the electronic trickery with Cindytalk.
This might well be his first ever gig as Lata (he was previously bass-player with Edinburgh "disco-punk" band Damn Shames.) 
Exotic Pylon/Cindytalk

Nightflight To Chaos

Bambule dj set from Antagony, London, September 2010

Wave-Bright Naniwa

                              　Heart of Osaka

Firelights

2012.2.17.fri KANASHIBARI & an0n presents [Kali Yuga Vol.Ⅱ] Cindytalk(from the UK)  The National Grid (DJ an0n solo project) Kanashibari Drowning in Sand Sarry Dance Missing Tilt DJ Jeckyll (from Drowning in Sand) OPEN: 18:30 START: 19:00 Adv. 1500yen Door. 1500yen

                                                                                 AT HOKAGE  Osaka

Unsound and Ever Black

 Pontone Mixed Tapes 

Presented at the final day of Unsound (16th October 2011) during The Information Pylon showcase in Klub RE.
Here’s the first one played between shows by The Haxan Cloak and Ekoplekz .
First track in the mix is Cindytalk's In Dust To Delight (“Hold Everything Dear” Edition Mego, 2011)

Unsound Reminiscences Vol. 1


Blackest Ever Black mix containing a fragment of

Cindytalk –

To The Room

Blackest Ever Black – The Scold's Bridle

Caer Odor

Cindytalk & The Chasms vs Bristol...

"I promised myself I wasn't going to gush too much while I wrote this post, I'm going to try my best anyway...

Twenty five years ago I first heard Cindytalk. They changed me.
Twenty five years later I was finally in the position to ask Cindytalk to play a gig with us.
They accepted.
Erm...
I'm a little bit happy about this.

Cindytalk have been one of the most consistent bands in my life over the last quarter of a century. I mean that on two levels. For one, they've always been there around about my stereo, never too far out of reach to be played when they're needed. And secondly they've always, without exception, released stunning records. I really don't think I can describe their releases in any other way. Simply stunning.

So this gig is going to be just a little bit special for me (and hopefully you too).
Not only are we playing with Cindytalk in one of their very rare excursions outside of London (not counting outside the UK), but there is also local band Eftus Spectun on the bill.
And if that wasn't enough towards the end of their set Cindytalk will be interacting with Blackmass Plastics [Manx born DJ living in Bristol], who will carry on after the band and finish the night off in grand style.
And all this will be taking place in one of the best locations for a gig in the UK, The Cube Cinema in Bristol.

So to recap, I'm a little bit happy about this."

Visit - Cindytalk
Visit - The Chasms
Visit - Eftus Spectun
Visit - Blackmass Plastics
Visit - Cube Cinema
Visit - Graeme Swinton - Artwork & Design

Simon
X

Gambol

Cindytalk concerts early 2012 :

Thursday 9th February
NAGOYA – K.D JAPON

http://www.testtonemusic.net/TTM/Live_info.html

Friday 17th February
OSAKA – HOKAGE

http://www.kaguraenterprise.jp/hokage/

Wednesday 29th February
OSAKA – NUOOH

http://nuooh.com/?m=20120229&cat=1

Inland Journey

"The second in a series of limited edition subscription releases from Lumberton Trading Company, A Question Of Re-Entry contains two tracks of delicately elemental electronic manipulation and spare, melting icicles of piano. The pace is slow, the development considered and the overall effect quite gorgeous. ‘Nanook mit Uentshukumishiteu’ on Side A creaks like a wooden boat rocking gently on the shore, the sun dappling on calm waters as birds fly overhead in the cloudless sky. As the track nears its end the first signs that there are possible dangers afoot begin to manifest themselves. You can almost feel the sky cloud over and the air become colder. The birds that once called above begin to disappear and a dark, desolate sadness prevails. Night falls.
‘A Wolf In Wolf’s Clothing’ is like the morning after. The electronics become almost ear-piercingly sharp at times and evoke the idea of bright sunshine reflecting back off snow. The miniature, granular tinkles that form the track’s backdrop sound like your breath freezing in front of your face and dropping on the compact snow. There’s a very definite shift in tone and texture. Elements of menace encroach from all sides – the deep rumble of glaciers on the move; the barely perceptible whistles of wind biting away at your skin. If ‘Nanook’ was a refreshing exploratory wander along the shoreline then ‘Wolf’ is the perilous journey inland.
As a whole, despite only containing two pieces of music, A Question Of Re-Entry provides an enthralling twenty minutes and showcases two artists working in perfect harmony."

Review of Cindytalk & Philippe Petit, “A Question Of Re-Entry” 
by Steve Dewhurst for Foxy Digitalis

(Cinder photo by Spaewaif) 

Vinyl-sound postcard accompanying the release.

Dust and Lights

"The last three Cindytalk records have been the best, most assured releases of Gordon Sharp’s 30-year career. Issued by Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego, it’s hard not to hear them the triad as a culmination. Like most British men of a certain age (even in far-flung West Lothian, Scotland), Sharp first came to music via post-punk’s decree; to this day, The Freeze remain woefully underrated (especially their two sessions for John Peel). Much overrated, however, was the Peel session that led to Sharp’s association with Ivo Watts-Russell’s This Mortal Coil. “Kangaroo” notwithstanding, there was something about 4AD’s bourgeois glossolalia that just didn’t suit the fractured upbringing of this lad from Linlithgow. As I’d soon discover, that wasn’t all Gordon Sharp was not suited for.

Indeed, Sharp had been fucking around with gender roles (mostly on stage, mostly in Europe) for quite a while. Of that, I was aware. I pegged it as some vestige of transgression leftover from his more “industrial” days. But then I heard 2009’s The Crackle of My Soul — the first in the trinity for Pita’s imprint. The tune “Transgender Warrior” said it all without saying a single word: “Gordon” would now be called “Cinder.” Up Here in the Clouds soon followed, and while there was nothing as startling or revelatory as “Transgendered Warrior,” it was a beautifully damaged record all the same. I pegged that as Cinder finally being comfortable in her own mortal coil.

By the time The Crackle of My Soul saw release, Cindytalk collaborator Matt Kinnison had died of cancer. In the years post-“Kangaroo,” Cindytalk had dwindled steadily down to a one-man/trans-woman band. By the year 2000, on record anyways, it was really just Matt and Cinder. Hold Everything Dear, named after the John Berger book, is thus a lamentation. But make no mistake, a maudlin marche funèbre this one’s certainly not. The electronics are simply too intense, the field recordings processed too abstractly. First cut “How Soon Now...,” with its Teutonic child’s play soaked in sheets of feedback, sounds equal parts Stockhausen c. Gesang der Jüngling and Sutcliffe Jügend’s power electronics. There’s an isolation evinced in a track like “In Dust To Delight,” it’s perfect intervals slyly referencing Wagner’s opening to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. On the other hand, Cinder’s sparse piano stylings never sounded so deliberate, as if every note was an ode to Kinnison.

Whereas before Cinder seemed content to let the samples do the talking, for the first time on the Mego discs, she physically intervenes here, tightening the contextual reins by adding that most fundamental of musical elements — rhythm. But because this is Cindytalk, you’ll not hear a quantized break or beat. Apropos for a tune titled “Floating Clouds,” forward motion actually starts from the ground up; there’s a teeming of organic life (winds and percussion, most prominently) underneath the sepulchral drone. In the interstitial pieces here, the piano often tolls pentatonic, perhaps a nod to the Japanese studio where much of this one was laid to tape. Developmentally, as with most of Cindytalk’s recent work, the happenings macro are still very much protracted. But what do you expect from an album named Hold Everything Dear?

Finding out precisely what is dear has occupied the majority of Cinder Sharp’s life. You may think because you are … but what are you, exactly? Male, female or some third party in-between? Re-listening to the records Cinder made as Gordon, you can almost hear him searching. It’s more than a crisis of style. Having found both a label for herself and for her music now, Cinder is finally free to look for other, perhaps more philosophical answers. Yes, life sucks, and then you die. But what happens to the ones you leave behind? Well, if you’re Cinder Sharp, you’ve come to know a thing or two about rebirth. And here, if you’re lucky enough to be in Cindytalk, ultimately, you make the greatest record of your second lease on life."

By Logan K. Young for Dusted Magazine .

"A muddy green or staring blue..."

I never loved a dear gazelle
"We’ve been quite taken with Cindytalk‘s brand of slow and fogged-out synthery since hearing Up Here In The Clouds and The Crackle of My Soul, both released for Editions Mego. On Hold Everything Dear (EDITIONS MEGO 122), the solo effort of Gordon Sharp has been supplemented with contributions from Matt Kinnison, the record was recorded in Japan, London and Essex, it took them five years to complete it, and it’s got some connection to the work of John Berger, the polemical left-wing writer and broadcaster. None of this might actually be relevant to the music we hear, but it bears Sharp’s signature traits: layered, slow-moving blocks of processed sounds, informed by a sense of authority and sternness of furrowed brow that verges on the severe. More romantic moments do intrude in the form of short and distant piano music fugues, and little excerpts of field recordings such as the voices of children which open the record. Yet for some reason, these glimpses of hope serve only to add to the abiding sorrow of this record, which seems to be taking universal pessimism about the state of the world into a metaphysical dimension; titles like ‘Waking the Snow’, ‘Hanging in the Air’ and ‘Floating Clouds’ are laced with the sort of cryptic symbolism you’d associate with an ascetic philosopher who has virtually withdrawn himself from all human intercourse and retreated into a world of private signs and meanings. Far more than producing vacant droning, Cindytalk manages to invest his work with complex undercurrents and overtones. Where the Droneskvadronen All-Stars are content to issue largely non-associative sounds which allow listeners to project their own delusions and fantasies, Cindytalk constructs his music to deliver all the intellectual content of an essay from a Marxist journal from the 1970s…also exists as a double LP set."

Ed Pinsent review for The Sound Projector.

I never loved a dear Gazelle–
Nor anything that cost me much:
High prices profit those who sell,
But why should I be fond of such?
To glad me with his soft black eye
My son comes trotting home from school;
He’s had a fight but can’t tell why–
He always was a little fool!
But, when he came to know me well,
He kicked me out, her testy Sire:
And when I stained my hair, that Belle
Might note the change and this admire
And love me, it was sure to dye
A muddy green, or staring blue:
Whilst one might trace, with half an eye,
The still triumphant carrot through
(Lewis Carroll)

Code 39

Rewind 2011 - Top 50 Releases of the Year

39. Cindytalk: Hold Everything Dear

See complete list HERE .

Rose Bonbon

L'ambiguïté sexuelle chantée à La Villette
26.11.11

"Ne dites pas à Susanne Oberbeck, alias No Bra, "sans soutien-gorge" en anglais, que ses performances bousculent la frontière entre les genres. Peu importe que la jeune artiste allemande soit programmée dans le cycle masculin/féminin de la Cité de la musique, à Paris. La programmation, éclectique, mêlait, jusqu'au 26 novembre, des concerts revisitant les voix de castrats, des danses sacrées de l'Inde du Sud où les hommes interprétaient, autrefois, des rôles de femmes, etc.
Vendredi 25 novembre, la scène underground était à l'honneur. L'occasion de découvrir des artistes à la marge dénichés par l'association parisienne In Famous, sensible aux questions de genre. No Bra, donc, chanteuse et vidéaste, s'est taillé une réputation de provocatrice. Parce qu'il lui est arrivé de se produire avec une fausse moustache. Parce que sa voix descend dans des graves insoupçonnés. Androgyne ? "Je ne suis pas transgenre, je suis juste moi-même", dit-elle en partageant une bière dans sa loge, avant de monter sur scène.

Jambes interminables fourrées dans un jean, cheveux blond vénitien aux fesses, yeux bleus et teint de rousse, elle rejette toute étiquette et déjoue les codes. "Dans les années 1970, note-t-elle, on ne rangeait pas dans une case l'ambiguïté sexuelle de David Bowie ou de Patti Smith..." Démonstration quelques minutes plus tard, sur scène. Monokini, godillots, chaussettes à paillettes, elle dévoile la courbe voluptueuse d'un sein sous un tee-shirt troué. Chante d'une voix monocorde, façon Nico, des histoires de la vie ordinaire. Et pourtant... Est-ce sa longue chevelure qui l'habille, ou son beau visage grave ? On ne sait par quel miracle elle évoque soudain une version moderne de La naissance de Vénus du maître italien Botticelli (vers 1485). Un ordinateur portable en lieu et place du coquillage. Alors, garçon manqué ou concentré de féminité ? On ne le saura pas, et c'est très bien.

En deuxième partie, place au crooner rose bonbon. Blond devant, brun derrière, robe courte et talons. L'écossais Gordon Sharp, du collectif Cindytalk, a trente ans de scène et de collaborations artistiques derrière lui (Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil...). Il a traversé les genres musicaux (post-punk, dark-wave) et semble avoir trouvé sa voie dans la musique ambient-industrielle. Après s'être frotté les mains au whisky - ou au brandy ? - et bu quelques gorgées de cet élixir, Gordon Sharp ferme les yeux, et improvise. Utilise sa (belle) voix comme un instrument qui ne s'arrête jamais et s'écoule dans une veine poétique et mélancolique. A côté de lui, Robert Hampson explore les limites de sa guitare tout en réglant les nappes électro.

Au-dessus, un film à la beauté expérimentale donne à voir quelques flashs d'Anna Karina dans Vivre sa vie (1962) de Jean-Luc Godard. Un clin d'oeil pour cet artiste qui a très tôt choisi de vivre la sienne en toute liberté, en explorant son genre à volonté. "Gender Freedom !", résume-t-il après la représentation. "Je suis un homme biologique, j'assume ma part de masculinité. Mais dès l'âge de 9 ou 10 ans, j'ai voulu explorer mon côté féminin. Je peux être parfois très mec, ou très fille, cela dépend des jours et de l'hume ur." Dans son album Transgender Warriors (2003), il a voulu rendre hommage, dit-il, aux personnes transgenres qui luttent pour exister. Des héros ordinaires qui font la "révolution" chaque jour, qu'il s'agisse d'affronter le regard des passants dans la rue ou de retirer une lettre recommandée à la poste, en jupe mais avec des papiers masculins.

Et l'on se surprend à fredonner "Cherchez le garçon/Trouvez son nom", le tube des Taxi Girl. Le genre, c'est une vieille histoire sans fin."

Clarisse Fabre for Le Monde

Photo by bladsurb

Art à part

Masculin/Féminin

CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE- Masculin/Féminin - Transgender Warriors
VENDREDI 25 NOVEMBRE 2011, 20H
AMPHITHÉÂTRE
Transgender Warriors

Première partie
No Bra
« Entre la performance, la musique et les questions de genre, sans soutien-gorge, mais avec la moustache, elle se produit quasiment nue, vêtue d’une minijupe rose riquiqui. Immense et longiligne,elle psalmodie, impassible, des dialogues fictifs, absurdes et hilarants [...] sur fond de déflagrations électroniques. » C’est ainsi que Les Inrockuptibles décrivaient Susan Oberbeck, alias No Bra (littéralement : sans soutien-gorge), lors de l’un de ses passages à Paris en 2007. La jeune artiste expérimentale allemande, installée à New York, fait tout pour déjouer le carcan de l’identité sexuelle.

Seconde partie
Cindytalk
Cindytalk est né en 1982 des cendres du groupe punk new wave The Freeze.
Gordon Sharp, qui porte le nom et le projet du groupe sur les cinq continents de l’électronique, se produit seul pour son premier passage à Paris. Sa performance – des plages sonores « sculptées en une série d’atmosphères », dit-il, dans lesquelles se glisse sa voix improvisée et du piano – s’inscrit dans le sillage d’un album
récent : Transgender Warrior (« Guerrier transgenre »), album publié par le label autrichien Mego.

Cindytalk voix, électronique, piano
Invité spécial
Robert Hampson guitare

Tarif C : 25 € (1re catégorie uniquement)

Cité de la musique
221, Avenue Jean-Jaurès
75019 Paris

There will be a Cindytalk radio session/interview on Ouvert la nuit (France Inter) on Thursday 24th November between 9-10pm (continental time.)

Re-entries

Lumberton Trading Company,the sister label of Fourth Dimension,founded in 2005 by Richard Johnson and Hassni Malik,releases LUMB017 CINDYTALK with PHILIPPE PETIT A Question of Re-Entry 12”

Limited to 300 and featuring two incredible collaborative pieces by France’s prolific Philippe Petit and Cindytalk built around piano, electronics, voice and that kinda trans-dimensional murmur and crackle we already love both of them for.
Out in late November 2011.
Available to pre-order HERE !

As Close As We Can...

Interview with Gordon Sharp by Gianmarco Del Re for FLUID RADIO

Open publication - Free publishing - More cindytalk

OTO : SOUND

Cindytalk - live at Cafe OTO from Gianmarco Del Re on Vimeo.

Cindytalk Live at Cafe OTO performing with Julia Kent on cello and Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo on electric guitar and electric viola - 18th October 2011

"Third act of the night was the eagerly anticipated Cindytalk. Before coming on stage, Gordon Sharp told me he had prepared a noisy set. Having recently delivered a stunning trio of albums on the Mego label, home to Fennesz and Bill Orcutt, which saw him plunging into uncharted waters to develop a radically new language for Cindytalk, it was difficult to guess how that would translate into a live setting especially one tilted towards the noisier side of the spectrum. Starting off in a suitably sombre mode, more abrasive than melancholic, Cindytalk quickly captured the stage with an assured presence, which indicated that the transgender warrior was not willing to take any prisoners. And yet there was no posturing and nothing confrontational in Cindy’s voice. On the contrary it was immediately apparent how delicate and fragile Cindytalk’s sound was even if coated in an armour of steely dissonance. Performing with his eyes firmly closed as if cocooning himself as one does when inhabiting a non-space as described by Marc Augé, and only occasionally glancing towards the audience or to the back projection onto which spilled images pertaining to the feminine, I felt like an intruder eavesdropping on a very private conversation.

It made me think of a passage from a Don DeLillo novel The Body Artist. “That night she stood outside his room and listened to him whimper. The sound was a series of weak cries, half cries, dull and uniform, and it had a faint echo, a feedback, and carried a desolation that swept aside words, hers or anyone’s. She didn’t know what it meant. Of course she knew. He had no protective surface. He was alone and unable to improvise, make himself up. She went to the bed and sat there, offering touches and calming sounds, softenings of the night. He was scared. How simple and true. He was there in the howl of the world. This was the howling face, the stark, the not-as-if of things.”

Granted that there is no whimpering in Cindytalk sound, it is just the primeval fear I felt creeping up on me that brought me back to this passage, the feeling of loneliness echoed by Anna Karina’s face flickering on the screen. But it might have easily just been me projecting. Whatever it was, I was left trembling until, like softenings of the night, Julia Kent and Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo joined the proceedings halfway through Cindytalk’s set tracing the contours of a possible path leading towards the light. Without holding onto the helm, Cindy let them gently steer the boat within reach of the shore but still refusing to drop the anchor. The pervasive sense of displacement so intrinsic to Cindytalk’s music remained intact. Never going for the easy option Cindy sat at the piano like someone trying to articulate in a foreign language something deeply personal.

Having prepared myself to a barrage of noise I kept loosing my footing taken aback by the sparseness of the sound enveloped by Julia Kent’s cello and Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo’s electric guitar and viola with murmurs of appeasement. It was a performance that subverted my expectations. Once again, I will borrow from Don DeLillo’s novel to voice my feelings. There is a passage where he writes about the wind, which sums up my experience “There is something about the wind. It strips you of assurances, working into you, continuous, making you feel the hidden thinness of everything around you, all the solid stuff of a hundred undertakings-the barest makeshift flimsy.”

In the end I was left with more questions than answers, and that to me is always a good sign."

Gianmarco Del Re for FLUID RADIO

Rebirth in Autumn

Just as nature lulls itself into its wintry sleep,the official CINDYTALK WEBSITE has been upgraded.
Walk through the rustling leaves...

Kalyug

Cindytalk (solo) will be playing in Berlin tonight (Friday 7th october)
alongside C-drik Kirdec and others.
KALYUG FESTIVAL .
VENUE .

Of Heart And Silence

Cindytalk interview for French blogzine  D-Side Web ,"De couer et de silence".
Hold Everything Dear review HERE .
Original interview in English:

Open publication - Free publishing - More cindytalk

"A taste of ash with the scent of burning embers..."

Heady times indeed to be a Cindytalk fan, this is their third album in as many years after quite a few out of circulation. Gordon Sharp completes his trilogy of recent works in grand style and surprisingly enough, there's even some prettiness to it. This latest incarnation of the band have taken the concept of abrasion as art to it's limit, alienating a lot of the fans who have been waiting and waiting for a return to their darkwave roots of the 80s. 'Camouflage Heart' is the one I'm speaking of, kids, an album of viciously forceful rhythms and almost psychotic vocals. 

These last three albums have pushed the extremities of Cindytalk's sound relentlessly in wildly confrontational ways. You can not ever know what kind of record you're going to get from this bunch, they don't do repeats and they most certainly don't take requests. Just listen through this act's discography and it will soon become apparent to you: Cindytalk do what they damn well please and as for the muse which inspires them... 'Transgender Warrior' is more than just a single. 

Sharp gives us quite a few excellent impromptu piano bits throughout but never do they become pompous or overbearing, they accent like ice water on one's back in the searing summer heat. You'll feel a quickening of breath as you're pulled through the ghastly sonic landscapes of what sound like eviscerated hymns twisted and bent by the cruelest of means in the name of creative exorcism. There have been some comparisons made between this one and a film score he composed back in 1988 entitled 'The Wind is Strong...' which are not without merit, however, instead of doing short and sweet little cues Gordon extends and enhances the spiteful nature of his work to new heights. This is not a feel good release nor is it going to make anyone's party playlist; it will raise the hairs on the back of your neck and send chills down your spine. You decide which you prefer, I'll be wearing a scarf. 

It's a taste of ash with the scent of burning embers that 'Hold Everything Dear' imparts as I play it and for being the length it is, you won't even notice any time has passed. How Mr. Sharp manages to pull this off is quite beyond me, I've played all three one right after the other even changing up the order but the potency of what's going on here is not diluted in the least. Here's the genius part of it, when played alongside those infamous 80s works, this material clearly shows much more range; an indefinable depth which never could have been achieved if this bunch had stuck with the pre-determined path their brief flirtation with pop music (This Mortal Coil) was beckoning with. It's all the more impressive to know that this kind of work has an outlet and with any luck a new generation of fans who will fearlessly embrace the uncompromisingly unique style of a band who's existence is similar to a viral form: just because there aren't any symptoms does not mean there isn't continual activity and sentience lurking outside the scope of vision. Waiting. 

Before I go, I'd just like to add that Cindytalk have been a continual source of inspiration and one of the few remaining bastions of originality to me for well over twenty years. I feel it only proper that I thank you, Gordon, for making so many blindingly visionary records throughout your career and hope there are many more to come.

Peter Marks
13 Sep 2011
Reproduced by kind permission of  Brutal Resonance-Hold Everything Dear review.