From Now On 2015 - Joy Collective Review

"avant noisescapes, cartoon garage pop, microtonal glitches and brain-bashing punk rock" Joy Collective Review

From Now On 2015 - WIRE Review

“Cardiff should feel privileged to host such an event” From Now On 2015 has been reviewed in this month's WIRE Magazine:

Them Squirrels at From Now On 2015 by Joe Singh. Full album on the 2015 tab above. Thank you to all performers, audience, the sound team and everyone at Chapter for helping make it a wonderful couple of days. See you next year.

Artist Profile No. 20 - Y PENCADLYS

Not just the best hugger in Cardiff, Haydn Hughes is also the tall, imposing figure behind Y Pencadlys, a one man electronica factory of deranged quality. A handful of singles on the reliably ace Peski label have shown a talent for brooding, booming vocals dispatched over squelched and thumping acid-electro, while live the ratatats are ratcheted up with fist-pumping, inclusive exuberance. Get down the front, and ask him when that bloody debut album is out. https://soundcloud.com/ypencadlys

Artist Profile No. 19 - ROHAME

Exploratory, semi-improvised drones and glacial space rock atmospherics from a London collective with a single two-track cassette release (Winter 01, for the Faux Discx label) that arcs around the same glacially meditative orbit as Harmonia or Rothko, and a string of live aktions dating back to 2006 in which they explore spooling feedback and amplifier hum to splendidly disorientating effect. Members also play in the Telescopes, Tropics and Narrows, while Jodie Cox has worked with Earth's Dylan Carlson and Anji Cheung has a formidable catalogue of bleakly psychedelic minimalist out-drones of her own. The mind-altering psych-noise band the monolith from 2001 would have formed. https://www.facebook.com/rohameuk

Artist Profile No. 18 - WINTER VILLAINS

Swooping, multi-layered orchestral folk-pop, a pleasingly reserved and stately take on Efterklang's twinkling balladry and stirring rococo epics. Their 2013 debut February landed a spot on the Welsh Music Prize shortlist; its follow-up, Once There Were Sparks, Now There Are Ashes, will appear later this year and is another nuanced, beautifully arranged set of shiver-inducing chamber folk that sounds full and grandly ambitious but never overblown. A collective formed of former or current members of Lucky Delucci, Little Arrow, Evening Chorus, Fredrick Stanley Star and The School, they balance multi-part harmonies, fluttering brass and string arrangements and elliptical slivers of stuttering electronica with poise and warmth. https://soundcloud.com/wintervillains/

Artist Profile No. 17 - GIANT BURGER

An East London four-piece two seven-inch singles old and with a full menu’s worth of disparate musical ingredients, Giant Burger style themselves as ‘Doom Meat Pop’. If they’ve got a secret recipe, it’s probably because it’s impossible for them to replicate; stylistically all over the map, a fiercely enjoyable dayglo mash-up of cheapo keyboards, countrified surf twang, frenzied post-punk yelping and stop-start prog weirdness that might remind you of the Cardiacs or The Mae Shi or Devo. Fairground organ and silly voices and fragmented hooklines that burrow their way into your subconscious and make you grin and flail. In a healthy way. https://giantburger.bandcamp.com/

Artist Profile No. 16 - VENA CAVA

Swarming, blissfully seductive collision of psych/space rock atmospherics, shuddering doom riffs and hazy, elliptical shoegaze tendencies from a Bristol duo whose debut album, recorded with Charlie from kindred spirits Thought Forms on drums, is due out early in 2015. Teasingly drawn-out, gloriously loud epics of crackling, fuzz-heavy guitar meandering, ominous bass rumbles and frayed, thundercloud drumming that weld Bardo Pond’s skyscraping ambition and Grails’ mystical, slo-mo ambience to the swooning power of My Bloody Valentine. Epic, desert-dry and powerfully effective stuff to lose yourself in. https://venacavabristol.bandcamp.com/

Artist Profile No. 15 - THEM SQUIRRELS

Them Squirrels have taken a leisurely journey towards the debut album that finally emerges in 2015. The Them Scribbles EP (Shape Records), way back in 2009 now, was effectively a solo-with-friends bedroom enterprise from frontman JT (also of Islet), a cut-and-paste patchwork of stuttering rhythms, jabs of ticklish guitar, thickets of mangled synth and tape noise and JT’s keening, folkish vocals. Their intermittent live appearances transfer the approach to a full band, a jumble of percussion, violin, frenzied tempo shifts and knotty prog/pop wonder. Epic album taster ‘Echo Chant’, previewed last year, touches on Do Make Say Think and airy Krautrock across ten blissed-out minutes. Awkward and cuddly in appropriate measures, and always hugely welcome. Words by Will Steen, Joy Collective https://themsquirrels.bandcamp.com

Artist Profile No. 14 - MEILYR JONES

Ex-Race Horses frontman and a recent collaborator with Euros Childs (as Cousins) and Cate Le Bon (as Yoke), Meilyr Jones’ second performance as a solo artist will be at From Now On. He’s linking up with a series of guest performers to play unique one-off shows based around a single song – drawn from a batch of new compositions – both in collaboration and with the guests performing separately. His London debut saw him joined by the Ligeti String Quartet and Patrwm among others contributing strings, percussion, vocals and electronics; an off-the-cuff orchestra with Jones at its giddy, inventive centre. http://www.meilyrjones.com/ https://www.facebook.com/meilyrjonespresents

Artist Profile No. 13 - OH PEAS!

Oh Peas! is Rosie Smith, one half of excellent streamlined post-punk duo Totem Terrors. Her solo debut Shades of Intolerance, drawn from a clutch of utterly great Soundcloud demos, was as essential as it was unexpected; a dreamily playful cluster of ticklish robo-pop and unpicked lo-fi sketches that were utterly charming, sparklingly witty and catchy like a summer cold. There’s a lightness of touch to her writing that allows her to be brittle and poignant while remaining casually offhand and caustically funny, never more so than on the title track of her follow-up EP Year of the Horse. Think Marine Girls, Courtney Barnett or the Raincoats. https://ohpeas.bandcamp.com

Artist Profile No. 12 - MOWBIRD

Almost a North Wales cottage industry over the last few years, Wrexham's Mowbird interrupted a stream of singles, EPs and zines to release their debut album 'Islander' last year on Shape Records. A culmination of their spiky, lo-fi zeal, it's a short and resolutely sweet 26 minutes of fuzzy, surf-punk earworms, a smile factory that throws Pavement, Times New Viking and Grandaddy onto the beach, and brushes sand off them. Delicious, addictive. https://mowbird.bandcamp.com/

Artist Profile No. 11 - WRONGS

Cardiff's reclusive heroes of creeped-out scuttling and post-punk moodiness, Wrongs are Simon and Rich, who in a previous life were in underrated guitar yowlers King Alexander, and who now make brilliantly dark music that throbs with ghostly thrills and sporadic noise. Lush, unsettling, addictive: their two Bandcamp EPs will burrow enjoyably into you. http://wrongs.bandcamp.com/

Artist Profile No. 10 - DOPE BODY

This Baltimore quartet offers a fangs-bared, wired, kinetic take on muscular 90s noise rock (think Jesus Lizard, Mudhoney, Girls Against Boys) streaked with the jagged, strobing crunch of Liars or HEALTH. They’ve honed their attack and sharpened their teeth across three albums, and if their debut Nupping is still the most brashly, brutally efficient then subsequent efforts have diversified while retaining their power; strung-out and greasily visceral on Natural History, or a bleak, grunge-paced crawl recalling Pissed Jeans on 2014′s Lifer. It’s a brawny, sweaty noise dominated by battering rhythms and Andrew Laumann’s slurred half-croon, half-bark of a voice. Easy to get into and hard to second-guess, the most complex that grubby, in-your-face fun can get. https://dopebody.tumblr.com

Artist Profile No. 9 - MURRAY ROYSTON-WARD

Last seen in South Wales throwing instruments into the crowd and wrapping audience members together with duct tape, Murray has many years' experience deep in the experimental underground, as promoter of ace leftfield gigs (The Rusty Trombone Of God), as label runner (The Lows And The Highs) and as solo and band musician (Failed NASA Experiment, yajé, Lustfaust, Fredrick Stanley Star and more). Now resident in Nottingham, this rare appearance could be anything, and will be something. http://murraysroystonward.tumblr.com/