Vanishing: Shelter of the Opaque LIVE

Vanishing is the unique creative project of Gareth Smith, a working class time-served engineer turned artistic world builder who has traded in his toolbox for the means to write evocative music and resonant lyrics. Born in Hull, now living in Manchester, Gareth’s stunning new album Shelter Of The Opaque, released via The state51 Conspiracy label, seizes quotidian reality and scrapes away at the veneer to reveal the awful machinery of how things are underneath. Lyrics composed while on epic walks round the cities of Manchester and Hull during the years of lockdown, this record by turns more skeletal, more ambitious and more affecting than previous work, seeped in the intensity of the industrial grind. 

 “I look at it as a very Northern record. “Shelter Of The Opaque is an M62 record; the mills, the rivers, the cities, the spaces have all bled into it.” Gareth Smith

For the live show, Smith has called upon a talented array of collaborators, all heavy hitters in the UK experimental music scene, to make this record a live experience; saxophonist Karl D’Silva (Drunk In Hell), violinist Agathe Max (Abstract Concrete/UKAEA), cellist Ecka Mordecai (Circæa/Mordecoli), double bassist Otto Willberg (Abstract Concrete/Historically Fucked) and violinist Hasan Isingor. 

Bringing Shelter of the Opaque to Islington Mill seems like the perfect setting for this live show, with its industrial history as one of Salford’s longest standing mills, purpose-built in 1823 to spin imported cotton, part of the explosive industrialisation of England.