The masters of calypso-blues Storehouse are on tour this January and February as part of their “Adam in the Garden” tour, celebrating the worldwide release of the first single from their new Fireplace Recordings album “Live Humble”. “Adam in the Garden” is available as a digital download exclusively from http://storehouse.bandcamp.com and is the first single from Storehouse’s long-awaited “Live Humble” album, recorded on reel-to-reel tape in London in 2009. Storehouse mainman, blues guitarist Tom Rodwell, is joined for the South Island dates by the London-based percussion innovator Damian Horner-Pausma, who returns to New Zealand for the first time in 6 years. An expert not only in Indian percussion instruments like the tabla and kanjira, as well as Latin American instruments like the pandeiro, Horner-Pausma is known for his use of unconventional objects as instruments - like broomsticks, cooking oil tins and even parts of bicycles - to generate exciting new textures and rhythms. Rodwell is known for blending slave era music with foot-stomping blues, and has been described by music-biz bible the NME as “Sheffield’s answer to Lightnin’ Hopkins.” Rodwell and Pausma have together appeared widely in the United Kingdom and Switzerland (where they played in the ruins of a mediaeval castle at sunrise for the Quellrock festival) though both first played together as part of the experimental music scene in the early 2000’s in Auckland. Their duo shows feature long sections of improvisation, that takes the blues sound-world into often unexpected directions, as well as fiercely rhythmic spontaneous reworkings of old blues, calypso and spirituals, at once original yet instantly accessible. The two are joined by Coco Davis, an expert in the salacious and savage world of early female blues and jazz, also known to music and theatre audiences as Slue-Foot Sue in the recent production of Sam Shepard’s The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill, at the Nelson Arts Festival. BLUES IN LONDON: Rodwell manages to eschew the cliches that beset blues music. By turns wild, angry, hypnotic and sensual, its as uncompromising as it is funky and some of the best live music Ive seen. METRO (NZ): Soul-probing... Raw, avant-garde improvisations.
