Lise presents: Alpha Maid + Daisies Ants Bumbledeer

South East London guitarist and songwriter Alpha Maid brings her album “Is this a queue” to the Balzaal! Daisies Ants Bumbledeer completes the line-up. Expect a kind of artsy shoegaze, very atmospheric and fresh. 

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About Alpha Maid

Beginning from a sense of frustration at the predictable and boring narratives and systems that we live under, and the feeling that such rules were the rules of the universe, Alpha Maid formed an interest in particle physics.

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“We only know 4% of the universe, there is hope in that and the unknown 96%. I found excitement and wonder in that. The theories I was reading about relied more on the conditions of the present moment, and it made the idea of living in the moment feel more accessible. It started to be possible to see present time from all these different angles, and to have infinite more options to choose where to be next.”

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Written across many years and different places, the LP documents a journey and the people Alpha Maid met while moving around, collating moments of the present. Her guitar remains a constant amongst an array of sonic influences throughout: from dub which honours her Jamaican heritage and the Windrush Generation, to the twinges of an emo love song in On Smoke.

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“Is this a queue” revels in the magic of that which we cannot see and coherently understand, and the narratives that have been shrunk down to fit. Remembering, continuing, forgetting, paying attention, building, navigating, contributing, time.

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For fans of claire rousay, Chino Amobi, Olan Monk, OKO DJ and Susu Laroche

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The album is tough and steely, offhandedly chucking in a Giggs reference or industrial clang for every jangly riff.

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About Daisies Ants Bumbledeer

Daisies Ants Bumbledeer is Daisy Ray and Robbe De Pestel’s occasional sonic outing. A kind of “non-project” that started a little over a year ago with the recording of a mixtape set to release somewhere in December. However, their first real collaboration took place during an hour-long recording session at Daisy's studio in Brussels. It’s the kind of thing that sounds a bit awkward in its first-encounter-ness but is glimmering with the sense of two people meeting in creative energy for the first time and finding their counterpart in some ways.

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Since those first moments, D.R. and R.D.P have been working alongside each other, visiting each other’s studios, and sharing in music and art a love for the original idea of DIY in folk outings of both mediums. In essence there, both artists have a love for things that are made from scratch and with whatever’s at hand. The noise takes on a shape and gets dipped in a color. 

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For the show at the Balzaal, Daisies Ants Bumbledeer is bringing self-made instruments to offset the remoteness of their jumpy vocals and oddball electronics. And just about anything that’ll go with that to make a kind of head-to-toes music, wary of all foreign objects that drift there. The bodies, sewn into pieces of colored cloth and sworn to the relics stuck to them, memories gathered, red and yellow leaves from the walk, a feather, pieces of rock and gold shimmers, words as the shapes, too.