Still House Plants, Dawuna, Alan Licht

Still House Plants’ Finlay Clark, David Kennedy, and Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach began to write music together during their second year at the Glasgow School of Art, later joining the eclectic scene surrounding the city’s Green Door Studio and undertaking a six-month residency at London’s Cafe OTO. Factor in a semester spent living with an emo band in Chicago and the intimate aggregation of the trio’s sound heterodoxy—an astonishing cohabitation of fractured R&B, wistful sensitivity, and harmolodic guitar—begins to show its strands. With punk autonomy, Still House Plants cite the cut-up affect of UK garage as the impetus for their sparse treatment of chords and words as samples; stuttered, fragmented, and permuted by living drums, guitar, and Hickie-Kallenach’s unmistakable husky voice. On their last release, Fast Edit (Blank Forms Editions, 2020), things sit on top of each other, fall over one another, or click into place, with hearts on sleeves and spirits in motion. As part of their long-awaited first tour of the United States Still House Plants will be in residence with Blank Forms for two nights at 411 Kent in Williamsburg alongside Melvin Gibbs, 7038634357, Dawuna, and Alan Licht.

Ian Mugerwa Byenkya, known as Dawuna, was raised in Kenya and Virginia, where he trained in cello before experimenting with digital audio mixers and electronics in high school, leaving home soon after to join Richmond’s DIY scene. In 2019, he decamped for New York. Mugerwa Byenkya recorded his first album—the raw, transcendent Glass Lit Dream (2020)—in his Brooklyn apartment, quietly self-releasing the record online to word-of-mouth acclaim before it was picked up, remastered, and distributed by London label O___o? the next year. Glass Lit Dream conjures a nocturnal feeling and naturally flows from gospel, soul, and R&B to more ambient, electronic, industrial sounds. Dawuna’s lyrics drift in and out of these gloaming soundings, oscillating between incantation and confession.

A vanguard of the literary, critical, and musical scenes of New York City for the past two decades, Alan Licht is a key figure in the pantheon of experimental solo guitar players born in the late '60s. As a guitarist and improviser, Licht has lent his talents to dozens of collaborations with the likes of Jim O’Rourke, Rashied Ali, Jandek, Keiji Haino, Michael Snow and Loren Connors and has performed in such revered bands as Title TK, Blue Humans, Text of Light, and Arthur Lee’s Love.