theoldhairdressers

KB & The Raskals welcome you to Old Hairdressers in Glasgow to launch their debut ep ‘Prologue’ alongside Studiomonks (GLA) and Day Drunk (AYR)

Now in it’s fourteenth year, the Second Sunday Sipping Sounds Series is surely one of the longest running amplified ‘ukulele residencies in the greater Strathclyde vicinity. Come gather ’round the hearth of the Old Hairdo for an enveloping early evening of the “innovative, heavily amplified, individualistic, boldly teetering on the brink of oddity” sounds you crave as you bask in the gentle flickering glow of some obscure visual fodder.

Now in it’s fourteenth year, the Second Sunday Sipping Sounds Series is surely one of the longest running amplified ‘ukulele residencies in the greater Strathclyde vicinity. Come gather ’round the hearth of the Old Hairdo for an enveloping early evening of the “innovative, heavily amplified, individualistic, boldly teetering on the brink of oddity” sounds you crave as you bask in the gentle flickering glow of some obscure visual fodder.

Now in it’s fourteenth year, the Second Sunday Sipping Sounds Series is surely one of the longest running amplified ‘ukulele residencies in the greater Strathclyde vicinity. Come gather ’round the hearth of the Old Hairdo for an enveloping early evening of the “innovative, heavily amplified, individualistic, boldly teetering on the brink of oddity” sounds you crave as you bask in the gentle flickering glow of some obscure visual fodder.

Now in it’s fourteenth year, the Second Sunday Sipping Sounds Series is surely one of the longest running amplified ‘ukulele residencies in the greater Strathclyde vicinity. Come gather ’round the hearth of the Old Hairdo for an enveloping early evening of the “innovative, heavily amplified, individualistic, boldly teetering on the brink of oddity” sounds you crave as you bask in the gentle flickering glow of some obscure visual fodder.

With Radio Hito, Zen My Nguyen has spent the last two years adapting a poem by Claude Royet-Journoud, « L’usage et les attributs du cœur » (POL, 2021). A ten-sequences song cycle for soundfonts and voice and an Italian libretto which had evolved over the course of about 80 concerts, from Galicia to Kazakhstan, before finding their recorded form. Her project is experiential and based on principles of economy of performance, simple words, forms and contexts; if poetry is a ‘profession of ignorance’ according to Claude Royet-Journoud, then Radio Hito would gladly be a hobby that strives to know.

DOn stage, the project was adapted for prepared piano, electric keyboard, fm radios, church organs, Philicorda and visuals in Europe and Asia featuring on special occasions: Suzan Peeters (Accordion), Alex Andropoulos [able noise] (Drums), Arthur Chambry (Percussions/trumpet), David Bennewith and Omar Cheikh (Visuals), Fera (electronics), Adrián de Alfonso (FM amplification), Lieven Dousselaere (Sound).

‘L’uso e gli attributi del cuore‘, a song cycle is forthcoming on March 2026 on Maple Death Records & Meakusma.

Guests are Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine of Glasgow, UK, both formerly of the bands Vital Idles and Mordwaffe. They have been closely tied with DIY music, art and publishing for over a decade. Using (amateur) electronics, singing, speaking and field recording they make songs which blend the rhythms of popular music and contemporary approaches to collage, sampling, improvisation and repetition. As inspired by film and art as they are the legacies of twee underground and avant garde experimentalism, their loose, domestically twinged compositions explore feelings, atmospheres and moments which are hard to articulate and the quite literal notion of being a “guest”.

“I wish I was special” is their debut record, and with it a chance taken to explore terrain not previously covered by their other groups. The ideology of DIY practice appears integral to these eleven compositions, side-stepping virtuosity in favour of instinct and impression, unafraid to press unknown buttons and walk head first into mistake, finding inspiration where convention might not otherwise allow one to tread. The results are confoundingly fresh, sharp-of-mind, and unusually intimate. There’s an obvious intelligence at play here, and no little humour of course, but crucially there’s also a sense of the personal, a first-thought/best-thought (auto)didacticism that celebrates shared understanding and implicit trust. What, ultimately, we might view as the fearlessness in radically being yourself around another. It’s an approach that draws some comparison with the private musings of Flaming Tunes, Idea Fire Company’s domestic electronics, or perhaps even Annea Lockwood’s framing of emotional connection within avant garde structures. More so, Guests represent a compelling continuation of DIY post-punk experimentation that values intuition over prowess, and with it guides the listener into unexpected spaces that somehow comfort as much as they challenge.

Glasgow based artist and writer Giuseppe Mistretta works with synthesis and field recordings to create atmospheres for others to inhabit. He is interested in what can unfold in the present moment and how different variables can help to shape it.

Cambridge’s acclaimed psych-folk quintet Fuzzy Lights return with their fifth album ‘Fen Creatures’, set for release in November via Meadows. Following 2021’s critically lauded ‘Burials’, the band have created their most conceptually ambitious work to date – a meditation on environmental crisis that uses the folklore and history of East Anglia as a lens to examine humanity’s fractured relationship with the natural world.

Where ‘Burials’ explored personal trauma and environmental collapse, ‘Fen Creatures’ expands this vision into something far more sweeping and interconnected. The album operates across multiple historical timelines, from Iron Age hill forts to medieval plague houses, from Byron’s Romantic-era environmental warnings to the immediate threat of rising sea levels, creating a temporal tapestry that weaves ancient stories with contemporary concerns. “In the world we live, with the challenges of environmental devastation and change, it’s really important to reconnect to our history and the land around us,” explains vocalist Rachel Watkins. “We need to learn lessons from the past and try to live with the landscape rather than changing it to f it our needs. The album calls attention to environmental change while exploring how folklore ties to the landscape and our connection to our ancestors.”

Musically, the quintet, Rachel Watkins (vocals/violin), Xavier Watkins (guitar/electronics), Chris Rogers (guitar), Daniel Carney (bass), and Mark Blay (drums), have pushed deeper into experimental drone territories while maintaining the crystalline folk sensibilities that have become their signature. The result is their most atmospheric and immersive work to date, with vast sonic landscapes that mirror the fenland geography they’re documenting.

PRESS – FEN CREATURES (2025)

”…pitched somewhere between Pentangle and Black Sabbath, Superb stuff.”
UNCUT 9/10 ( plus We’re New Here feature)

“…the musical equivalent of Sandy Denny starring in Hammer Horror film Blood On Satan’s Claw.”
MOJO ★★★★
“Spellbinding stuff These are stories worth reading as well as hearing”
SHINDIG ★★★★

“Sprawling , uneasy and rather compelling”
RNR  ★★★★

Pea Sea is Chris from Les Cox Sportifs who plays modern day Border ballads with a side of wry or earnestness or both depending on the weather. The third album is fresh from the can and may be consumed raw as a serving suggestion.

Lil’ Caligual is the alter ego of Alex Rex… the ‘ghost-rock’ project of Alex Neilson (Trembling Bells, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Shirley Collins, Current 93 et al). Inspired by Greek Tragedy, Barbara Streisand and Alex’s own internal critic, Alex Rex perform songs of love, loss and loathing that make the detestable whistleable.

Charlie Butler is a Lanark based artist who began a series of solo releases in 2021 exploring psychedelic, ambient, heavy and hypnotic sounds based on looped guitars and keyboards. He has had work released by Cruel Nature, Feral Child, Eggy Tapes, Weird Beard, Oscarson, Brachliegen Tapes and Panurus Productions.

Sunik Kim is a musician, writer and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. Their recent work attempts to unfold problems of perceptual and temporal distortion through computer-generated sound. Their writing on subjects ranging from Korean communism to Conlon Nancarrow has been featured in The Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, Tone Glow and elsewhere. Their latest album, Formenverwandler, was released on London-based label Feedback Moves in 2025. Drawing from her extensive research on composer Conlon Nancarrow, Formenverwandler sees Kim exploring the time or tempo canon, which can pull and project the listener’s senses, melting the temporal and spatial perception of presented sounds. As in previous works such as 2022’s Raid on the White Tiger Regiment and 2023’s Potential, Kim deploys patches and tools she has designed for SuperCollider, which take raw, utilitarian General MIDI notes and multiply and spray them into frenetic webs and networks of spiraling sound.

John Wall is a London-based composer who has been active since the early ’90s, when he acquired his first sampler, a Casio FZ-1, at the age of 40. Beginning with more recognizably plunder-based sampling works, he has gradually scraped and scoured his sound to a razor’s edge, reducing his basic material from the “block” to the fragment, the sliver, the millisecond. Wall’s meticulous, constantly morphing process has resulted in works that bend and warp an astonishing complexity of raw sound materials into dense, arcing auditory constructions riven with contradiction: between the highest and lowest frequency spectra, between concussion and stasis, between near-silence and the klaxon. In his work we hear the constant working-through of a problem, the ever-torturous escape from the terminal trap; process, thought, is laid bare just as it is obscured and folded into that at-times brash, at-times austere, always agitated torrent of organized sound. (Tone Glow)

Scott Gordon will be performing the debut show with his new RADIAL instrument which he describes as a texture sequencer.

RADIAL uses 4 CV controlled  motors  to produce tones acoustically via friction, impact and vibration. Each motor has interchangeable “Voices” from internally textured tubes with swiping blades to spindle mounts and rubber blocks…  Contact mic’s pickup the range of sounds From Hi frequency smoother vibration tones to low frequency juddering  deep quaking bass textures.  It operates like a polyphonic friction based, acoustic pulse generator -of sorts.  Interacting with the motors physically also modulates the tones and the Radial is played this way.  This adds a secondary level of control to the sound,  adjusting  the interaction between the spindles and the rubber mounts or blades and tubes etc, whatever its set up with. 

At the heart of Scotland-based producer, composer and instrument maker Scott Gordon’s Metals is his custom-made, self-built SPI (Spinning Plate Instrument), an instrument he constructed from industrial scrap metal bars, which are hung from a large vertical wooden frame, the metal struck by mechanical beaters driven by small motors. The bars spin when played – manually or by MIDI – emitting warmly resonating drifts of sound, sympathetic tones that resemble electronic sources, tintinnabulations in an electroacoustic lineage with Harry Bertoia’s architectural sound sculptures. The SPI is not tuned, or cut to scales, so each set is a study in pitch, rhythm and texture via unexpected objects and instruments.

Gordon works across experimental music, AV projects & sound objects, but was inspired to build the SPI and began recording Metals after experiments recording metal, car springs, pipes, and sheets. He describes the SPI as being like “a big vertical glockenspiel”. Previously to this release, he has released on Editions Mego as one half of Oto Hiax, a collaborative project with Mark Clifford of Seefeel (Warp Records), as well as a series of EPs and an album under his Loops Haunt alias via the Black Acre imprint. 

Fresh from a sell-out residency at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the new and acclaimed show embarks on its 2026 tour. Award nominated stand-up and improviser Jon Hipkiss brings together the ultimate celebration of comedy and fandom. Based solely on your suggestions, Jon will improvise an entirely new Star Wars film all by himself. He’s all the trailers, all the characters, all the music, the ships, everything. Expect beautiful chaos! “Very funny, clever and totally entertaining” – “I was doubled over laughing for the whole show” – “Fantastic show for Star Wars fans or not” – “Genuinely brilliant. Clever and inclusive, whole family loved it” – “Fantastic show, we laughed all the way through” – “Hilarious and fun with a highly skilled performer” – “A complete delight” – EdFringe.com Audience Reviews.

Isle of Lewis born musician Iain Morrison returns to Glasgow to play The Old Hairdresser’s. With Joe Smillie (drums) & Gordon Maclean (bass).
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