Melting Vinyl: Bringing the cream of live music to Brighton.

Melting Vinyl presents:
Gruff Rhys + BitW + DJ Crome Yellow
on
Wednesday 11th September 2024
at Quarterhouse, Folkestone
Doors 7pm, Start 8pm

£25 full price + booking fee (SEE)/ £29 on the door
Over 14s welcome, under 16s to be accompanied by an adult

7pm Doors / DJ Crome Yellow
8pm BitW
8.30pm DJ Crome Yellow
9pm Gruff Rhys

As a Welsh musician, composer, producer, filmmaker and author. Gruff Rhys performs solo and with several bands, including Super Furry Animals, which obtained mainstream success in the 1990s. He formed the electro-pop outfit Neon Neon with Boom Bip. Their album Stainless Style was nominated for the 2008 Nationwide Mercury Prize He won the 2011 Welsh Music Prize for his album Hotel Shampoo, which was followed up by American Interior in 2014, accompanied by a film, a book and a mobile app. His most recent album, Sadness Sets Me Free, was released in 2024. He is considered a figurehead of the era known as ‘Cool Cymru’.

In a career that has taken him from the slate-mining towns of north-west Wales, down to the expat communities of Patagonia, up to the Mandan tribe of the Great Plains of North America and across to the Tuareg rock groups of the Saharan Desert, Gruff Rhys, one of Britain’s most beloved and successful singer-songwriters, has always been willing to follow an opportunity, wherever it may lead him. “At this point I quite like working with serendipity,” he says. “Not in a cosmic way, [but] I try to leave things open to chance encounters and chance geography. As I’m around 25 albums in, I’m always looking for ways to make a different-sounding record.”

And so it was that Gruff and his band – Osian Gwynedd (piano), Huw V Williams (double bass) and former Flaming Lips drummer turned Super Furry Animals archivist Kliph Scurlock (drums) piled into a van driven by the late, legendary tour manager “Dr” Kiko Loiacono and raced from Dunkirk, where they had just played the final show of a tour of Spain and France, to the outskirts of Paris in the early hours of a March morning in 2022. There, in La Frette Studios, a recording facility installed in a 19th-century house, Gruff and his road-hardened group tracked ‘Sadness Sets Me Free’ in just three days.
Backing vocals were added along the way by Kate Stables from This Is The Kit along with additional strings and orchestration and it was mixed between Marseille and Cardiff. What finally emerged from these intense bouts of cross-continental activity was Gruff’s most accomplished and beautiful record to date.

“Sadness Sets Me Free is… as with so much of what has gone before, it’s a finely balanced mix of melancholy and joy: heavy subjects and a lightness of touch” ~ The Guardian 2024 4 star review

Sadness Sets Me Free on Rough Trade Records is out now.

BitW is a member of Snowdonia’s premium surf outfit Y Niwl, he’s also played with H.Hawkline and Eleanor Friedberger. BitW music is full of hooks and musical charm. The resulting music on his debut is one that sparkles with that inherently Welsh tone, yet also feels much wider and all encompassing.