aaamusic | On 19, Jun 2011

Penguin Café

+ Beth Jeans Houghton

Saturday 9th July 2011, 8pm ?
Hackney Empire ? stalls unreserved & standing
Produced by Serious

Tickets £13.50 -20
Box Office: 0845 120 7550 www.barbican.org.uk/blaze
Barbican Centre Silk, Street London EC2Y 8DS

Penguin Cafe?s music has infiltrated daily life from films like Napoleon Dynamite to countless theme tunes, and they?ve played festivals from Bestival and The Big Chill to the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms. Their sound is at once familiar and new, combining acoustic power and a beguiling, feisty charm. After touring packed theatres and concert halls earlier this year, Penguin Cafe return to play festivals and theatres right across the summer. Their new album A Matter of Life is out now.

Arthur Jeffes has assembled a young band ? a mix of personalities not unlike those that made up the original Penguin Café Orchestra, seasoned into a redefined style, adding fresh material and presenting something different and new. The show includes PCO classics – ?Telephone and Rubber Band?, ?Music for a Found Harmonium?, ?Perpetuum Mobile? – as well as newly composed works by Arthur, such as ?From a Blue Temple?, sharing his father?s interest in found sound by using a pane of glass to create a low resonant rhythm, the atmospheric, Latin-influenced ?Pale Peach Jukebox? and the haunting ?Landau?.

The original Penguin Café Orchestra was founded by Arthur?s father, Simon Jeffes. It was a dream-inspired creative universe ? a whimsical and wildly original musical world that fell largely silent when he died aged 49 in 1997. Now, 14 years after his death Arthur is revisiting the Penguin Café ? playing his father?s music and adding new pieces of his own.

Support comes from Mute Records signed singer-songwriter from Newcastle upon Tyne purveyor of sweet and gentle folk music

?The younger Jeffes and his Penguin Café ?reboot?, to use his own words, is more than capable of upholding the reputation of his father?s project and taking it to new heights? SONGLINES, March 2011

?This is music that is designed with a real generosity of spirit? The Guardian

?Penguin Cafe continues to occupy a unique place in music: nothing else has ever sounded quite like it. Eccentric, charming, accommodating, surprising, seductive, warm, reliable, modest and unforgettable: it?s a true friend? Brian Eno