The year 2014 was very important for Portico. After Keir Vine left the band, Bellamy, Fitzpatrick a Wyllie decided to change the name from Portico Quartet to Protico. The album will be released 6th of April at Ninja Tune and already on the 5th of May they will come to Prague to the Lucerna Music Bar! Portico will bring a special guest: The British singer Jono McCleery.
As Portico Quartet, Jack Wyllie, Duncan Bellamy, Milo Fitzpatrick and then member Nick Mulvey released their first album together – the Mercury Music Prize nominated Knee-Deep In The North Sea – back in 2007, but things around a group change, especially when you start out so young, and by the time Mulvey’s successor, Keir Vine, had also moved on, the three London based musicians realised that they were no longer satisfied by the music they were making. They had, as they put it, “gone as far as they could”. It was early 2013 – they’d all grown up, and were no longer a quartet either. This time, they decided, it was their turn to make the changes.
Living Fields is the debut album by Portico, and if the people – and the name they employ – seem familiar, rest assured that the music they make is not. Gone are the hang drum, the saxophone and the drum kit with which they first caught the world’s attention. What emerges instead is – put simply – startling. The people are the same, but the band’s been transformed. Portico and Living Fields are the proof, and one listen makes it clear that this is almost entirely new territory for Fitzpatrick, Wyllie and Bellamy. Sparse, immersive and spectral, it’s an album that is at once substantial and yet insubstantial, capable of absorbing one into an intricate sonic world whose fundamental components seem paradoxically intangible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NsGCRiEIPw
For the album Living Fields they invited a trio of great artists: Joe Newman from the band alt-J, Jamie Woon and Jono McCleery. The sound is nothing what you heard before, it has nothing to do with the sound they produced before or will produce in the future. As the bass player Fitzpatrick says: “Livind Fileds is just one album. Who knows what will be? We take it step by step.”
Even the new album is released in April, Portico released already many songs from this record:
https://soundcloud.com/portico_music
Tickets are available until the 15th of March for 390 CZK (+fee). From 15th of March the tickets cost 430 CZK. You can get your ticket at the cash desk of the Lucerna Music Bar (without fee) or at musicbar.cz, GoOut.cz, Ticketpro, Ticketportal and Eventim. At the door: 500CZK.
