Irregular Folks have teamed up with The Listening Room from the wonderful Arts at the Old Fire Station to produce this evening's inspired pairing. It is a specially curated music night that gives us lucky Oxford folks just another opportunity to listen to the very best sounds from acclaimed and emerging artists from Oxfordshire and beyond on the reg. Both Broderick and Dare are signed to Erased Tapes, an independent record label founded by Robert Raths that has been nurturing the best of the avant-garde from around the world for the past decade.

Douglas Dare, golden shirted with peroxide slicked-back locks, is a Bengal cat of a man. His hands stalk the piano elegantly, his head arching back as he sings in his rich and distinctive voice to accompany the lilting notes of his instrument. Inspired by the likes of Portishead, Elliot Smith and James Blake, Dare’s lyrics are both timeless and truly of our time, encompassing all of the minutiae of the modern day; love, heart breaks and city breaks, self-destructing dives into the unknown. I wonder if they will stand the test of time, and if through them, future generations will understand that their own joys and pains have been experienced before, in the same way as we do when we listen to the likes of Bob Dylan.

It is this ability to make grandiose the individual human condition that shows true talent. Weirdly, in this sense he really reminded me of the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, someone else who picks up on individual elements of our tiny little lives and universalises them (see S.S. Hangover, shown at the 2013 Venice Biennale for a nice example). Our lives our so small yet so important. Sometimes we need to be reminded. ‘Swim’ and ‘Red Arrows’ were stand out songs for me. Dare ended his set with the latter, a stripped back a capella soaked in traditional folk, the lyrics encapsulating a sleepy, childlike confusion. This song exemplified the power of Dare’s voice, and casual depth in his poetic ability.

This gig was one of just three UK dates for the multi-instrumentalist, genre-defying Peter Broderick. Broderick is wonderfully surreal, managing to bring his audience back from the brink of alienation by his down to earth anecdotes, and a very obvious capability for laughing at himself. One of the first compositions he played for us was a beautifully monotonous tune composed through the eyes of a factory farmed chicken. This melancholic comedy certainly set the tone for the next hour- inspired covers, virginity loss stories, attention-grabbing violin recitals, and gifting apples to the crowd before playing the quietest song he has ever written. Never have apples been eaten with so much concentration. Never with such an exquisite musical backdrop. Some of Broderick’s music tears you open at the seams, allows you to clasp onto something indeterminate, of such beauty, just for a moment until he’s off again with the humour, the stories and the slightly dour clowning, and it is snatched away...

Since reading more about Peter I realise this: he is a man of such extreme talent, creativity and thought, who cares if they have paid a tenner to watch him sing a song about a factory farmed chicken? We Oxfordians had been given the opportunity to see first hand a rare, rare mind. A mind that loves and is fascinated with life, and has the talent of making us all want to live it deeper. And for this reason, I want to end with a quote from Peter himself (borrowed and paraphrased from his Facebook page);

‘I love all music…I also love lots of other things along with music. I love food and I love to cook. I love books and all forms of poetry and storytelling. I love all living things from donkeys to dandelions and I also love things in which life is sometimes not so apparent to us humans like stones and mountain. I love the parts of our lives that are impossible to describe, the very subtle things that we feel that are so fleeting and amorphous and which there simply are not words for. I love the idea that perhaps no matter how many words we invent, no matter how much we dig to understand our experience, that we’ll never be able to understand it all, and that maybe the best way to describe this vase intergalactic-multidimensional-neverending-neverbeginning-mishmash-kalaidoscope-of-life is with no words at all. I love the great mystery.’

Thank you Irregular Folks and The Listening Room for bringing these musicians into our lives and for reminding us of human nonsense, and human beauty.