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LINKS [AB-OC-19] DIRECTING HAND - Bells for Augustin Lesage  CD only SALE! $9 USA; $12 World 1. Beamsley Beacon 2. Tongue of the Bell 3. Black Herman 4. His Precious Blood 5. Hangman (trad) [MP3] 6. Lowlands (trad) The debut from Glasgow's Directing Hand, led by free-drummer Alex Neilson. Alex played drums for Jandek's first-ever live performance; and he has also recorded and collaborated with a whole host of folks such as Richard Youngs, Alasdair Roberts, Vibracthedral Orchestra, Ashtray Navigations, Black Forest/Black Sea, Lucky Luke and Mirror, not to mention his own superb band, Scatter. Alex created Directing Hand as his "solo" vehicle, but its no surprise that so many important underground musicians joined in, as well. Featured on this CD are current and former members of Charalambides, Scatter, Belle and Sebastian, One Ensemble of Daniel Padden and Scottish psych-folk darlings Lucky Luke. Following a few UK-only CDRs, this is the first proper Directing Hand CD (and the first world-wide release). Directing Hand is the must-own CD of the season - an impressive collection of musicians creating an entire universe with their hands and throats. This is the stuff. REVIEWS "The Glasgow chapter of the free folk underground's latest gift to the world is The Directing Hand, with free drummer Alex Neilson at their epicentre. Personnel here include alumni of Charalambides, Belle & Sebastian and Lucky Luke. From the single swelling chord of "Beamsley Beacon" to the closing Celtic raga-drone of the traditional "Lowlands", with its massed choir of frail voices and incessant chimes, The Directing Hand inhabit a world of crude, simple elemental forces transmuted into poetry and art. It is both a homage and a quest in empathy with the album's hero, Augustin Lesage, a miner turned painter who produced a repetitive and obsessive canon of outsider art that caught the attention of the surrealist elite in 1920s Paris." - Nick Southgate in The Wire "Multicolored textures all droning like the seesawing of eternity scraping it's boot heels across our silly temporal preconceptions. Like the collective multitude of instruments is trying to speak in some kind of prehuman language. Free jazzy turbulence unleashes tiny ravenously hungry demons. Folkish clusters of molecular agitation disturbs the surface of the lake. Overheard incantations, fumbling movements over sustained droning, or nearly-folk songs in places. The songs win out in the end, and leave their scuffed heel marks on the floor." - Dream Magazine "Alex Neilson has been getting so much loving recently he better hold tight to what flesh he has left. Although there has been little recorded evidence to date, Neilson is actually a profoundly inventive thinker across a wide assortment of instruments, from bells and bongs through electronics, traditional acoustic git-fiddles and pure throat joy. Directing Hand is his new solo project. Here Neilson applies an orchestral armoury to the bent of his own brainwaves and the results are fucking gorgeous. Parts of this sound like early Japanese freak-out ensembles like Group Ongaku and East Bionic Symphonia, while others take up the kind of mediaeval horse-hair folk of groups like Third Ear Band, Nijiumu or even Vibracathedral Orchestra at their creakiest and most nocturnal." - Volcanic Tongue 
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