Nothing Ever Happens Here Presents:

Phantom Band 

If you’ve followed The Phantom Band throughout their career to-date then you’ll know two things of the Glaswegian six-piece: feast often follows famine, and you should never accept them merely at face value. Just as two wildly singular, diverse albums in Checkmate Savage and The Wants sprung up one after another between 2009 and 2010, before a period of quiet (solo projects notwithstanding), so the group’s more direct third record released in June 2014 – Strange Friend – more art-rock than rock-art – comes followed by seven tracks cut largely from the same recording sessions at Chem 19 in Blantyre, in the form of Fears Trending.

Lauded last spring pretty much across the board, Strange Friend’s instant hit to the senses was the sound of a band pulling a thread tight through their naturally wandering creative tendencies and affecting a sense of positivity, even amidst quiet doubts over living in a world simultaneously hyper-connected and disconnected through the internet. For those who saw through the likes of ‘Clapshot’s’ irrepressible anti-anthem swell, though, Fears Trending is a resounding confirmation that the band’s recent recording sessions also bore out something of a darker hue.

Main Support – Man of Moon

Support – digitalanalogue

When not making noise with Broken Records, digitalanalogue is the the name Ian Turnbull uses for his solo home-recording projects.  The name is a reference to the ramshackle hybrid recording set-up he started out with – acoustic guitar, cheap drum machines and transistor organ fed into a complex chain of old tape 4-track, minidisc recorder and long obsolete audio editing software.

His debut album “Be Embraced, You Millions! was released on Song, By Toad Records in March 2015, and is a response to the extreme highs and lows of a two year period in his life.   The excitement of first-time fatherhood and family life, touring, working on the third Broken Records album, all tempered by personal heartbreaks and overshadowed by the terminal illness and death of his mother. Each track on the album is about a specific person, place or event, and they come together to help form a musical memory of that time.  Almost entirely instrumental, the dense atmospheric drones, repetitive piano lines and found sounds take their cues from the likes of Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno, Gonzales,  Nils Frahm and RM Hubbert.