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Review: 'Juffage Cauldron Ensemble'
'Stop Making Music (Live at Fell Foot Sound 2014)'   


-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '15th July 2015'

Our Rating:
Recorded music is dead. The live experience, that fleeting moment, is the purest expression and the most vital. Bill Drummond more or less postulated the same idea in his book ‘The 17’ (2008), writing ‘Recorded music has run its course. It has all been consumed, traded, downloaded, understood, head before, sampled, learned, revived, judged, and found wanting.’

His words seem even more salient in the climate of 2015, when streaming apps like Spotify, which pay artists fractions of a penny per million plays are the most popular means of accessing music. Small wonder artists find themselves becoming increasingly reliant on the sale of peripheral merchandise at live shows, and any income from actually playing live (a notoriously difficult means of making money after travel costs, etc.) simply to eke out the most meagre of existence.

The track’s title not only echoes Drummond’s sentiment, but the idea behind the Art Strikes of Gustav Metzger (1977-1980) and Stewart Home (190-1993), but seems to have been something Smith has himself observed in some capacity. Juffage – the musical vehicle of Jeff T Smith – hasn’t made any music since 2011’s ‘Semicircle’. It’s fitting, then, that this should be a live recording of a track from that last album, completely reworked with a live ensemble, comprising Leeds musicians Katie Harkin (Sky Larkin, Sleater-Kinney, Wild Beasts), Tom Evans (Vessels), and Jenna Isherwood (Invisible Cities), and that it should emerge but a few weeks before a string of tour dates..

It’s a gloriously skewed slice of oddball pop that builds to a magnificent crescendo. Chances are, it would have been even better if you’d been there, but still, it’s a cracking musical work in its own right.

Juffage Online
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Juffage Cauldron Ensemble - Stop Making Music (Live at Fell Foot Sound 2014)