The Big Boulder Rolls On – The Old Dance School (+ Sieben)

Worshippers at the grade II listed former chapel were taken on a trip back through the realms of shared memory, to a place long buried in the communal subconscious, where our collective journey is revealed to be cyclical as oppose to the linear trajectory we’ve previously been led to believe, as the mighty Sieben and the Old Dance School kept the Big Boulder rolling on and on…

Matt Howden has been performing as Sieben across Europe for more than a decade; his fiercely progressive blend of modern technology, elemental themes and classical music a perfect example of the Four Rivers ideology of sending traditional folk, roots and blues storytelling into the stratosphere, where tales were warmly received by an audience pushed up close to the stage and bathed in soft candlelight.

Building everything from scratch, armed only with a violin that doubles as a drum, a voice and a loop-pedal that records and saves nothing, Matt debuted two brand new tracks alongside favourites from the Sieben back catalogue, creating a spiral layering of sound that hinted at the violence of nature behind the flowers and the fauna, and the severing of our psyche from the source…

Stopping of in Heeley as part of a 28 date European tour, The Old Dance School created lush cinematic soundscapes that probed deep into the usually unchartered recesses of the mind; a cinematic portal through which to explore fragments of dream and memory.

The contemporary folk septet were framed on the stage by a swirling darkness of reds, purples and flickering white light, with individual members of the band casting huge shadows above and behind, timeless totems leading an enraptured audience into a trance…

Their set list comprised both the old and the new, with beautifully crafted tales drawn from the cycles evident everywhere in nature, from stuffed hares, Stanage Edge and the drummer’s battered old blue car, giving a voice back to the dispossessed along the way, from Irish immigrants to young children displaced from the memory of the fields, rivers and trees of their birthplace.