trio VD
Fill it Up With Ghosts
BDV 2985


Chris Sharkey guitar
Christophe de Bézenac saxophone, effects, voice
Chris Bussey drums


Jazz CD of 2009 in Mojo Magazine




This is urgent, engaging music with the longueurs knocked out, spanning jazz, world music and edgy rock."
The Guardian

"...flashes of dark genius at work'
Time Out **** November 2009


"...making some of the most exciting, mind-expanding, earlobe-baffling sounds to emerge from the UK in a long, long time. '
Time Out April 2010

" the resulting flow of brilliant and busy ideas are unstoppable as they are breathtaking. "
BBC Music Magazine

trioVD roar out of Leeds with a visceral attack on your ear drums, sounding like nothing you've heard before. Their rocking live shows have become the stuff of legend - with their trademark mix of machine-gun drumming, unfettered saxophone improv, electronics and spiky guitar, blowing audiences in to the corners of every venue in which they play.

Fill it up with Ghosts, their startling debut album will be released on Babel Records, the renowned indie jazz label that first released Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear. The album captures this head on assault on your senses perfectly - trapped in their studio while the worst storms for several decades raged outside, the band's marathon recording sessions were fuelled with a diet of caffeine and shouting. With a sound much bigger than the sum of their parts, Chris Sharkey plays guitar and bass at the same time, Christophe de Bézenac uses the saxophone, effects and the voice to create a multi-layered sound while Chris Bussey 's ferocious polyrhythmic drumming style would put at least two drummers to the test.

Influenced by the likes of Tim Berne , David Torn , Derek Bailey and Oslo's Supersilent , as well as contemporary post rock/ metal bands such as Battles , Zu and Mike Patton, trioVD's working practices are half way between an improv and a rock band. All material is written collectively, starting with an idea which is then broken down and explored until it resembles a composition. Preferring to memorize the music from the beginning of the compositional process, rather than writing it down, the band has an exhaustive rehearsal regime. Gamelan and sub-Saharan African musics have also been a big influence and can be heard in several tracks.

Coming in at just over forty minutes, the debut Fill it up with Ghosts is a compact tour de force of an album and cuts to the chase from the off, with one of the band's oldest tunes ‘ Returns ' – “a smack in the face” as they affectionately call it. Followed by ‘ Kesh' , a tune inspired by a trip to Morocco , it contains what their producer Ben Hammond likes to refer to as “the best drum solo ever”. The mammoth ‘ To Whom' features pretty much everything the band are into - heaviness, perceptual ambiguity, improvisation, subtlety, electronica… and complexity to the point of confusion. ' Rash ' is just a straight up, nasty mash-up of sound and texture....who's making what sound? The title track is melodically and rhythmically pure Indonesian gamelan, which although sounding complex has a very simple phasing concept ‘don't fuck it up'. The gamelan influence is also prevalent in ‘ Cow Dun ' a play on the West Javanese drum the kendang. Mastered by Jon Astley, who mastered The Who ‘Live in Leeds ' and the Led Zeppelin remasters, Fill it up with Ghosts is designed to make your speakers fall off their shelves. Play loud……you will not be disappointed.

Formed in 2006, trioVD are closely associated with the Leeds Improvised Music Association (LIMA) and collectively have worked with an astonishingly diverse range of musicians including Jack De Johnette , Marc Ribot , Ken Vandermark , Henry Rollins , David Murray , Marc Ducret and the London Sinfonietta to name but a few. Most recently Sharkey has joined Acoustic Ladyland and features on their new album as well as tearing it up on the live circuit with death metallers Bilbao Syndrome along with Bussey. Bussey has an incredible list of credits to his name, including composing and performing with Evelyn Glennie and he also plays in Minghe Morte – the equally ferocious, but more laid-back relative of Bilbao Syndrome, with de Bézenac. De Bézenac also has several other projects on the go, applying his perceptually-informed approach to music towards duos with pianist Matthew Bourne and computer artist Christian Sebille , as well as traditional and contemporary gamelan music groups.

And finally, the story behind the name trioVD ….distinctly less salacious than most people expect. The very first time the band played together was February 14 th 2006 . The session was recorded on a laptop and, without realising the implications it would have, the session was saved as trioVD – trio Valentines Day (although on occasion they like to pretend there is more to it...).

For the 2010 European tour see the live page here

Watch trioVD at: www.bbc.co.uk/music/introducing/artists/triovd/

www.myspace.com/triovd

For more information please contact Si â n Williams at Riotsquad Publicity:

020 7223 7456 or [email protected]

CD Available to purchase from our shop here
Download this album for £6.99 or buy individual tracks for 79p from our new download store (high quality mp3s at 320kbps) here