Saturday Night Howff with Future Get Down, The Positive Experience and Mogwai

howff /haʊf/. A favourite meeting place or haunt, especially a pub.

Welcome to Saturday night at the Howff, Bella’s lounge for the lockdown. This week we feature Future Get Down, The Positive Experience and Glasgow legends, Mogwai.

The Edinburgh-based Future Get Down have built up an enviable reputation over the past couple of years, renowned for their dark-edged, hook-laden compositions and captivating live shows. Their successes have even seen them supporting Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür.

Their kaleidoscopic debut album, Here We Go, Wonder, is brimming with an array of reference points. Nods to post punk, Berlin era Bowie, Nick Cave, Mark E Smith, early 2000s American indie and late 70s electronica are all bubbling under the surface. The outfit has a knack for crafting throbbing, propulsive music that makes you want to dance.

“I really wanted us to move away from the potential safe havens of sequencers and click tracks when making the album. To favour live performance, off the cuff ideas and unplanned alchemy in the writing and recording process wherever possible,” says frontman Oliver Kass.

“I think we’ve done our job if it polarises and surprises people. Anything in between isn’t doing anyone any favours, is it??”

You can hear more from Future Get Down and support their work at their Bandcamp here:
https://futuregetdown.bandcamp.com/

The Positive Experience is an experimental band, that hold message and groove in equally high regard, fronted by genderpunk poet and MC Lady Incarnate. Their approach to songwriting is largely improvisational and collaborative, and their pan-global influences shine through in their raucous live sets, ranging from wise and insightful spoken word to dreamy rock, electronica, funk, soul and hip-hop.

Their recent album is the result of a Carlops fever dream, where band members congregated at a house known as the Rat Palace to jam. The events of the evening were recorded and edited into Rats in the Palace, a psychedelic live album. It is a melting pot of musical genres, with the fun, free flowing feel of a good old jam session. If you are missing the conviviality of live music, I would play this album loud, close your eyes, and play pretend.

You can hear more from The Positive Experience and support their work at their Bandcamp here:
https://thepositiveexperience.bandcamp.com/releases

“Next month it will have been a year since we last played a live concert. I don’t think I’ve really gotten used to life without live music, both playing it and hearing it,” says Stuart Braithwaite, of the inimitable Mogwai. 

I hope that this situation doesn’t last for much longer for a lot of reasons. Everyone’s health and safety being the biggest concern obviously, but also so that gigs can finally resume. It’s a cliche but you really don’t realise how much you miss something until it isn’t there.

With that in mind, we thought it’d be a good time for us to share with you a new live album recorded on our last tour in 2018.”

The album, released on Rock Action records, is available on a pay-what-you-can basis.

You can hear more from Mogwai and support their work at their Bandcamp here:
https://mogwai.bandcamp.com/