Free-drummer Alex Neilson has played with most of the musical underground’s heavyweights of this era. This one-man folk renaissance movement has left a trail of recordings and thrilling live shows with Jandek, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Heather Leigh, Alasdair Roberts, and Richard Youngs in his youthful wake. His initial interest in improvised music as well as folk led him to initiate projects which synthesised the two drawing on the trove of British traditional music and ‘transplanting it to a setting that was natural to me growing up in the 21st century.’ In 2008 he formed his own band Trembling Bells, recording two albums which received critical recognition from the likes of Mojo and Uncut magazine and a recommendation for the Mercury Music Prize. Using folk songs as inspiration he extrapolates his own song ideas adding a quasi-mythical dimension to it thereby attempting to describe and celebrate the very land the original tunes sprang from.
