Live Music in the Hall: Mike Gangloff, Adam Kiesling, and Liam Grant

Music in the Hall at the MRC

10.11.23

Doors 7:00, Music 7:30

$10 Suggested Donation

Fiddler Mike Gangloff plays free Appalachian music that weaves together improvisation, melodic composition, and traditional tunes learned from older players in Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina. He is a founding member of Pelt, Black Twig Pickers and Eight Point Star, and also often performs solo fiddle shows, often on hardanger-style or octave violins, and in duos, including shows this year with UK guitarist C Joynes, with Prices Fork, Va., cellist Kaily Schenker, and fellow Black Twig guitarist and banjoist Isak Howell. Last year he recorded Evening Measures, a solo album released by VHF Records. An LP-length collaboration with Elkhorn is due out later this year.

Adam Kiesling’s favorite thing to do is playing his guitar and backing up a good old-time fiddler. He got his start playing bass as a teenager in south-eastern Wisconsin, and ended up playing more guitar after moving to the Twin Cities in the early 90s, where he fell down the rabbit hole of flatpicked fiddle tunes à la Norman Blake and the country blues of Mississippi John Hurt. Adam started playing old-time string band music around 2000 and spent some time with the Wild Goose Chase Cloggers, the Mill City Grinders, and also had a stint as the bass player for Pert Near Sandstone from 2010 to 2014. In addition to performing as a solo artist, Adam’s main musical output has been with Corpse Reviver, a Minneapolis-based trio who focuses on the music found on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. His latest solo recording, Down The River I Go, was released in September of 2023.

Liam Grant is a New England guitarist with a punk ethos, cut from the American Primitive cloth. The restless guitar explorations, modal epics, and driving uptempo rags recall the likes of Grant’s pedagogue, Takoma Records, and the path that was paved by his forebears John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and later Glenn Jones, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Jack Rose, and others.
Bridging that past Grant evokes the pith of the landscape in which he was raised. Personal instrumental memoirs and ruminations on the banks of the Merrimack River. Amoskeag. And the place where the waters flow around it. Salmon tails up the falls and black pearls from the river. The exodus to Stratton-Eustis and the Last Night on the Dead River before the great flood.
“Although only 23 years old, Liam’s become a leading force in a much needed third wave revival of American Primitive music. Despite his age, Liam’s the very definition of ‘an old soul’ and while he draws on a wide variety of contemporary influences, he also channels a comprehensive history of the blues as well as a deeper energy that informs both his playing and songwriting.” — Rob Vaughn, Portland, Oregon – July 2023