Portico Quartet at Gretchen / Sunday, 24.04.2022

One band we never get tired of – the mighty Portico Quartet return to Berlin in April ’22 for a special live concert at Gretchen in Kreuzbreg. With Portico Quartet, an impressive and celebrated live band is back on stage: Inspired by jazz, minimal music and ambient, with influences ranging from trip hop to dubstep, the four friends from London’s East End develop their diversified, subtle and original sound. After their debut album already being nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2008, the band has been invited to famous jazz podiums world-wide as well as to big festival stages around Europe.

Following some explorations in the field of electronic pop on the British cult label Ninja Tune, Portico Quartet now celebrates the return to its well-tried instrumentation: For the new album “Art In The Age Of Automation”, the band still makes use of effects, real time looping and samples, but also reverts to its acoustic core and the inimitable Portico Quartet sound. After more than five years, the quartet can finally be experienced in Berlin again – UM:LAUT invites you to an exclusive record release show at Radialsystem.

Portico Quartet was founded in 2005 and quickly made its first mark by busking on London’s Southbank. Their debut album “Knee-deep in the North Sea” was already nominated for the renowned Mercury Prize in 2008, followed by two more albums on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. Since then, the quartet has been heaped with praise from critics and invited to clubs, concert halls and festivals around the globe. A special percussion instrument called “hang”, whose tonal features are reminiscent of Caribbean steel drums, marimbaphone and partly a percussively played piano, takes a special role – the hybrid position between percussion and melody instrument opens unexpected space of creativity for both the rhythm instruments as well as for the saxophonist Jack Wyllie.

Meandering between jazz, trip hop and ambient, the quartet does not follow prevalent song structures but creates a unique sound language which is equally reminiscent of avantgardists like Steve Reich and Arve Henriksen as of British dubstep artists such as Burial and Mount Kimbie or the atmospherical sound of Cinematic Orchestra or e.s.t. For their fourth studio album “Living Fields”, the band – by then a trio – dared to explore more electronic terrain under the name “Portico”. Ten years after the release of their first album, the band now returns with its original quartet instrumentation: The new album “Art In The Age Of Automation”, released on Gondwana Records in August 2017, ties in with the first records without resisting technical and personal progression.