Concert
ULRIKA SPACEK
- Witloof Bar
Extra information
19:30 doors open (Witloof Bar)20:00 Ulrika Spacek
The English quintet is back with their unique musical universe
When
Tue. 6 Jun, 2023Where
- Witloof Bar
Doors
19:30Organiser
Botanique"Making full use of their expansive five musician line up, the band inject an artful air of the unexpected into the psychedelic format."
Close to five years on from their last transmission, Ulrika Spacek resurface from self-imposed exile with their third album, Compact Trauma, a collection of songs that function as a chance treatise of sorts for our current collective condition. With a title like that arriving at this point in time, it’s tempting to interpret the record solely in the context of the global events of the past few years, but the roots of these ten songs arc back much further in time, charged with their own personalised internal damage.Trauma, in its myriad forms, is often hard to qualify, even harder to rationalise. When something begins to go wrong, how do you gain perspective? What is a temporary roadblock, and what is unmitigated disaster?
In its first phase of life, Compact Trauma was a document of a band striving to perfect an idea while the universe around them seemed to want to shut down. And then, at an impasse of sorts and with a record halfway complete, it suddenly did. If Ulrika Spacek were a band in need of the breaks applying, it was the force of a global pandemic that made it happen. As the world stood still, Compact Trauma was filed away, unfinished and unheard by the wider world, possibly to remain that way forever. And yet, there was to be a second act.
If mutability is our tragedy, it’s also our hope, clearer days slowly began to emerge as the bad slipped away. The wound, as the saying goes, is the place where the light enters you.The prolonged break enforced by myriad lockdowns may have separated the group but it also afforded the five time to reflect on what had already been committed to tape.. As the lights came back on and the shutters up, they found themselves drawn back towards Compact Trauma. What they rediscovered was a record that seemed to preempt the shared grief of a global pandemic. Even if the specifics were different, the themes were uncannily similar. Addressing existential freak out, displacement, substance reliance and encroaching self-doubt, these highly personalised songs suddenly took on a wider significance, speaking in part to a bigger narrative.
Extra information
19:30 doors open (Witloof Bar)20:00 Ulrika Spacek