Still House Plants, Melvin Gibbs, 7038634357

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.

Grammy-nominated bassist, composer, and producer Melvin Gibbs has lent his extraordinary chops to jazz, rock, metal, hip-hop, and fusion groups, both as a bandleader and as a sideman, for more than four decades. A Brooklyn native who is still based in the borough, Gibbs came up in the downtown New York music scene of the 80s and 90s. His bass sound is full and heavy, holding down immense grooves which he often manipulates with pedals and effects into crunchy, punky, unexpected sounds. His most recent solo release, Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave (Editions Mego, 2022), voyages into the terrain of sound design while retaining his focus on the lower frequencies. For The Wave, Gibbs drew on decades of conversations about Black art and aesthetics with filmmaker and collaborator Arthur Jafa, the editing strategies of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, and the possibilities inherent in Symbolic Systems Kyma software and hardware. 

7038634357 is the alias of Neo Gibson, an electronic musician living in New York City. Their highly emotive music derives from a lifelong interest in melody, distortion, and precision. Previous releases can be found on Shanghai's Genome 6.66 Mbp and on their website, waiting-all-my.life. Blank Forms will release their record Neo Seven later this year.