I've just got back from what I reckon is one of the best gigs I've accidentally walked into in quite some time. Olivia Moore (for this is the name of the lead fiddle player) and her band were playing at Matt and Phreds tonight where I ended up after the regular jam night at the Kings Arms. I walked in the door and they started (after slagging off the audience for being noisy bastards) with what must have been thier third set of the night in a kind of folk-dub vein. Man can they play. Boy can that guy drum. Jeepers they are simulating tape-echo-machine acoustically! Shitsticks! DUBPLATE!

Okay so the instrumentation is: drums, double bass, guitar and fiddle. That's it. Go directly to myspace and listen to their stuff.

The set continued in an evolutionary manner with plenty more razor sharp drumming and wonderful slidey sitar-esque guitar sounds just building and building. It's hard to make comparisons but we were going pretty Popol Vuh here. Olivia's violin/viola/thing sang sweet melodies and the bass thwacked us all (in a very relaxed way) directly to oblivion. Really, check this out, it's brilliant. They are playing all over Manchester (and Sheffield, Ambleside, Halifax) over the coming months so there are no excuses.