Daylight Music - Sweet Billy Pilgrim + Manière des Bohémiens + Transept

FREE ENTRY midday - till 2.00pm

Daylight Music is a dazzling idea presented by the Union Chapel to open up their amazing gothic venue to a shiny new daytime crowd and provide a rather exciting platform for artists. Produced by Arctic Circle and supported by The 405.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim

Sweet Billy Pilgrim, led by their main singer songwriter Tim Elsenburg, are the critically acclaimed purveyors of British atmospheric beauty, have been holed up finalising on their as-yet-untitled third album, the follow-up to 2009’s Barclaycard Mercury Music Prize nominated ‘Twice Born Men’.

Often compared to Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Talk Talk or Elbow, Sweet Billy Pilgrim achieve a sublime balance between their hooks and their moods, their ambitions and their humility.

The music of Sweet Billy Pilgrim is first and foremost, staggeringly beautiful. But it’s a shy beauty – a lingering ambience and a distant clicking in the night, church windows built from littered glass, love songs that look to the day when even the children are forgotten. Strangers tell you their heartbreaks. Fountains toss back their coins. And just when you start to feel skeptical, in shambles singer Tim Elsenburg – shaggy and dour, wringing joy from his melodies with a bashful croak and a glorious croon.

Elsenburg has explained his strategy: “I like it when a piece of music seems to grow from a number of points, with no one sound becoming the focus necessarily; everything carefully feeding the texture and the atmosphere. That way, when something does leap out of the mix – like a voice, say – the impact is all the greater.”

http://www.sweetbillypilgr​im.com/

Manière des Bohémiens

Manière des Bohémiens play improvised Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli influenced Gypsy Jazz and Eastern European swing. They are the most debauched, ecstatic and downright amazing live band you will have seen for a long while.

Gypsy jazz played with the jaunty abandon of a misspent youth, an abusive PE teacher and a broken heart and arranged for 6 young virtuoso musicians who travel around playing the violin, guitar, double bass and accordion whilst dipping in and out of Parisian alleyways and absorbing pieces of the colourful lives they meet along the way.

They've been played on 6music several times and have been included on Tom Robinson's 'best of Introducing' podcast. They also recently played the BBC introducing stage at this year’s (2010) Hockley Hustle. Manière des Bohémiens continue to play regularly, gaining new followers as they go and introducing improvised gypsy-jazz to a new, younger generation. Their new Album 'When the Road Bends' was out on 6th June.

http://www.myspace.com/manieredesbohemiens

Transept

'Heroically defying contemporary rock fashion with an Arts Council grant and an underground lab full of noise weapons, Transept are an experimental trio of neo-prog post-rockers from East Anglia. Quaking with cosmic thunderclaps and howling solar winds, their debut shudders and throbs like a Betamax version of the Large Hadron Collider.'

http://trspt.net/