aaamusic | On 22, Jan 2012

As the last Ja Ja Ja was a massive two year anniversary celebration with  – as per always – incredible music, and due to us having a month off for Christmas, January’s Ja Ja Ja had to be a pretty special come-back affair.

 

So as well as bringing you three acts that are brilliant and renowned in their Nordic homelands, we’ve brought you three that are blowing people away internationally and in a world of their own. Mirel Wagner makes stripped down blues of such fragility and beauty, words do not do her justice. Philco Fiction have had both our media partners Record of the Day and the Nordic music connoisseurs at The Line of Best Fit raving with their bold use of instrumentation and songwriting skills, and Giana Factory have created their own blend of noir-pop that won them international adoration from their first EP release onwards.

 

Ja Ja Ja, I for one have missed you and I am currently more excited by this line-up than I am about Christmas. Who says January is for staying in? More info on all acts playing including links to music, plus stage times and venue details below.

 

Line-up & links:

 

Germany’s Spex magazine said of Wagner: “Songwriting can hardly be more minimalistic, no-frills, more strict as Mirel Wagner’s sparse music”. While often categorized as blues, it has fragility and beauty that makes it as distinctive as Mirel Wagner herself, being Ethiopia born, but Finland raised. Learning guitar at an early age, Wagner wrote her first song ‘To The Bone’ (the opener of her self-titled debut) at only 16 and began performing at open mic nights in Helsinki where she was spotted by an American music journalist, Jean Ramsay. He promptly wrote of her; “Mirel Wagner is the real deal, an innovator among imitators. In a genre ridden with cliches she cuts through with the sheer the power of her lyrics and intricately finger picked guitar. And that voice… it is the antithesis of how a young woman in her early twenties should sound. It has those world-weary and resigned tones that make Billie Holiday and Leonard Cohen so appealing. It sounds like the truth….” (Jean Ramsay/Rumba). A photographer friend of Ramsay’s was equally taken, offering to finance the recording her of self-titled debut which was released in Finland in 2011 and now through Europe through Bone Voyage Recordings and soon to be released in North America and Japan via Friendly Fire Recordings. The record of nimbly picked, almost trance-inducing guitar is stripped to the bone, creating a strange but captivating tension felt even more in Wagner’s live performances and heightened again by the songs themes of necromancy, love, death, the devil and desire.

 

Mirel Wagner + Philco Fiction + Giana Factory

@ The Lexington, London

Thursday 26th January 2012