concert WGW 8 oktober Bob Drake & Kaspars Grošev
Schedule
Wed, 08 Oct, 2025 at 08:00 pm
UTC+02:00Location
WGW Zomerhofstraat 71 right corner, Rotterdam | Rotterdam, ZH
An evening with two interesting solo artists; Bob Drake , the man who gives americana/singer/songwriters a good name again (if ever). Bob just comes back from the UK, playing there on several Cardiacs-related events and this is one of the two dutch shows he will do. We payed a million dollars to get him, so please do show up or else we go broke. By the way: Bob lives in France so talk to him in that language if you want.Kaspars Grošev is the other soloist, also coming from experimental music, but in his case, more sound related. His show will be done with cassettes & their machines.
Bob Drake
American Bob Drake (1957) is a musician on the eccentric side of the singer-songwriter spectrum. Growing up in the American Midwest, he became addicted to alternative rock when he heard the British avant-garde group Henry Cow in the 1970s. He joined Thinking Plague, with which he made a handful of albums that received attention from the ‘Rock In Opposition’ or RIO, more or less an European movement with bands like Henry Cow, Stormy Six, Universe Zero and Etron Fou Leloublanc.
His economical situation in Denver (no jobs for sound people, no payed gigs for weird music) forced him to move to LA where he got a job on his first job application there as a sound engineer in a big studio, where he was involved in albums by George Clinton, Quincy Jones II, Shirley MacLaine ,Tina Turner and Ice Cube, among others. Meeting David Kerman and joing his band the 5UU’s brought him into contact with the RIO musicians in Europe and after tours with The Ec Nudes and HAIL he moved to the South of France in the 1990s, where he set up the studio Midi-Pyrenees, together with former Henry Cow live technician Maggie Thomas. Since then he has worked with and for musicians such as Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Stefan Tickmayer and Art Bear’s Peter Blegvad. But he can also be heard on lots of other records as a musician, ao. VRIL, HAIL, The Dead Brothers not to mention his work as an engineer on hundreds of albums by Pere Ubu, Dull Schicksal, Faust, Misha Mengelberg, Dick El Demasiado and Terry Riley, among others.
Bob Drake released a lot of solo albums on the prestigious label Recommended Records and also presents himself online. In particular the ‘BD Livestream Extracts‘ on his YouTube channel give a good impression of what you can expect from his concert, but also check out his bandcamp page with lots of briljant stuff.
https://www.bdrak.com/
Kaspars Groševs; Figūras
Figūras is a musical project by artist and curator Kaspars Groševs who has been creating sounds since late 90's. Figūras started as explorations of improvised music that's created on different hardware, experimenting with limitations of knobs and gestures. I'm a visual artist, curator and musician performing under the alias Figūras. He’s also the co-founder of 427 gallery in Riga, which has been operating since 2014 and has had more than 70 exhibitions, also co-running a cassette label called No Sex Just Talk, organizing events, etc.
https://figuras.bandcamp.com/
