Joanne Robertson is heard as a fictional creation or a story to be revealed of a lost artist from another time who now comes to the present. But it’s all too real, Robertson belongs to now and uses that existence as a spell to draw the listener in, fitting them into an enigmatic puzzle of voice and guitar creations. The sensibility of Painting Stupid Girls, the album released in 2020 by the World Music, encapsulates the singer’s genuineness and mystery in six songs, with the naturalness of house sound and a DIY spirit that carries the delights of folk singers of the past, linking Joni Mitchell to Sibylle Baier in an emotional way. She has a knack for conjugating the field of the real with the stuff of dreams. She carries the earthy into the dreamlike, and vice versa, moving folk tradition into the experimental/avant-garde, while expanding her voice into infinite time and spaces. It may be that it was this gift, this voice, that can be heard as if it doesn’t exist in any one place or time that won Dean Blunt over, and that convinced him to let Robertson be a presence that comes to mind as soon as one thinks of Black Metal or Black Metal 2. Speaking of Dean Blunt, one would also advise the album they recorded together, Walhalla, on Textile, where they openly experiment with what each can give the other. It is no accident that the delicacy of folk, the absent-present voice of Joanne Robertson, is reminiscent of Arthur Russell. It belongs to the mythical, the eternal discovery and the fascination of experiencing something that no longer seems to exist. But here it exists, it’s very real, and that gives it a whole other dimension.
She lived in London for a long time, but now lives in Glasgow with her husband, Jasper Baydala, or Kool Music, who will be opening the evening. AS

Kool Music is the mask that guitarist Jasper Baydala has chosen for his compositions that elegantly blend touches of Japanese experimentalism, the expansive language of Jim O’Rourke, and the breathy playing of Derek Bailey. Zen Guitar, out in 2020 on Primordial Void, takes on these influences with a healthy casualness in three-minute songs. AS