ctrl LIVE: Geordie Greep [UK], Cardinal [RO]

Name: ctrl LIVE: Geordie Greep [UK], Cardinal [RO]
Start: 2025-03-21T20:00:00+02:00
Location: Control Club

Schedule

Fri, 21 Mar, 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Control Club | Bucharest, BU

Geordie Greep (guitarist and vocalist in black midi) is coming to Control on March 21, 2025. From 2017 to 2024, he was the frontman and lead guitarist of the rock band Black Midi, often considered part of the emerging wave of British rock music known as the Windmill scene.
Following three astonishing albums with black midi, most recently 2023’s ‘Hellfire’, and almost non-stop worldwide tours for near-on five years, Geordie Greep has somehow found time to record his first solo album ‘The New Sound’, an album that has allowed him scope to explore creative ideas like never before. It boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time.
Geordie Greep; “With recording ‘The New Sound’, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. And with every impulse I had, I was able to completely follow it through to its conclusion. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it's good to do something else, to let go of things.”
Over thirty session musicians were involved in the making of the album, on two continents, in São Paulo and London. Geordie Greep; “Some of the tracks we had recorded already, elsewhere, but it just wasn’t right, so we re-recorded them with new people. Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days. Then we did the overdubs later, in London.
It’s certainly an album that fully engages the listener, throughout the eleven tracks. Greep; “I was worried about the length in terms of not overblowing it. But I’m also really bloody bored of listening to music and, for better or worse, knowing in advance what it means or what it’s trying to do. All my favourite music is about the listener coming to terms with what is going on. My favourite singers, like Peter Hammill or Nat King Cole, are literally one of a kind. I love that. Especially with lyrics, where you’re not sure what they’re going on about, but you know it’s not just abstract thoughts.”
What next? Could we see The New Sound as a live concept or is the album going to stay forever in our collective imagination? Greep; “My plan is to ‘do a Keith Jarrett thing’, have a different group of session musicians in a different place and lean into the fact that we’re not going to get it the same.” How can anything ever be ‘the same’ with Greep at the helm?

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Opening for Geordie Green are CARDINAL , one of the most mystifying groups in the Romanian rock scene. Having started in 2016 with two well received albums (Noisehead, 2016, and Disappearer, 2017) released in a relatively short period of time, the band continued to craft their own puzzling sound well outside the boundaries of contemporary guitar rock.
Their live performance has been described as a “tight rope act”, where one can find the trio putting out a furious blend of math / psych rock and more.