Ewan Bleach - Mystic Mood Ewan Bleach

Ewan leads the Cable Street Rag Band and The Fleeting Paradise Orchestra in London and has played internationally with notable bands from across the pond. Ewan's interest lines primarily in old sensibilities of pre-war music that he calls "music for dancing and romancing" and is fond of playing for functional events such as weddings and other private parties and happy to be setting the mood as much as being in the limelight. Ewan Bleach and his remarkable band make the kind of passionate, guileless music which exists in its own temporal bubble.

“I don’t think of it as ‘retro’ - a meaningless word when bands are forming today whose grandparents were punks / synth pioneers fifty years ago. Why not 100 years? Anyway: Ewan’s music is, by turns, anarchic, sweet, melancholic and joyous. It's the sound of musicians who are faithfully reproducing not old recordings, but rather the ‘enormous yes’ that Larkin compared to love. This is living music played by the very best, and I urge you to seek out his concerts, and the new album Mystic Mood” Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead.

“The album is otherworldly, like captured transmissions from other universes, other pasts. The melodies conjure cryptic romances, moving in their own rhythms, working antique enchantments modern listeners will find it impossible to resist. These pieces are freighted with all he twists and turns of Ean’s artistic journey – jazzy, in a pre-bop fashion, but also informed by his travels further outward – while the interaction between the musicians’ is preternatural and telepathic, horns switching solo in exquisite and etching those refrains, these euphonies, these themes into the memory forever. The likes of September Rag – melancholy expressed with such ineffable jaunt – and the sonorous, affecting clarinet croon of Sipihr Song and the restless rhythms of Rolling Home mark Ewan as a master of this sound – though “this sound” is a misnomer itself, as the album is unique, as perfect an expression as the work of Moondog. Let this record in and you cannot fail to be enchanted”. Stevie Chick.