April 2023
Upcoming and Unvetted
1____ Three Colours Trilogy: Blue/White/Red (£5-£11) (Until 11th/ Until 17th/ Until 26th) One for all the
arty Squirtle, Charmeleon, and… Reshiram?? fans out there
Cube Microplex & Watershed, various times
_____ CS + Kreme, Valentina Magaletti & Time Is Away (£7/£12) Penultimate Schwet sees the return of
their fav pronged out sounds Strange Brew 20:00
_____ PLU x H&B with Ariel Zetina (£11-£15) I like Time Is Away, but this’ll be sweatier
Loco Klub, from 21:00
2____ Hi-Vis! Trans Comedy (£5-£10) I hear it’s a strong line-up for trans day of visibility
Zed Alley 19:30
3__________________________________________________________________________________________________
4____ Easter Holiday Family Screenings (£5-£8.50) (Until 16th) Child or adult, a great selection of
classics: Fanstastic Mr Fox, My Life as a Courgette, Ernest & Celestine, Wolfwalkers
Watershed 11:00-13:10 daily
5____ Pile (£10) I’ve got a real soft spot for their first couple of albums, underrated imo
Exchange 19:30
6____ Lo-fi Music Poetry Workshop and Happening (£4) Make yr own musical jam w/ Brainbeau
PRSC 18:00
_____ THISQUIETARMY + Sterocilia and Fuck Authority (£4) Drowned in drone
Cube Microplex, from 19:30
7____ Abi Hubbard >> Polyester Paganism << (FREE) (Until 9th) Slime is gay. D Unit, from 18:30/ 12:00
_____ Jam Selectas: Flexfab & Ziller Bas + Marla Kether (£7-£13) Rap’s better in 3 languages
Jam Jar 21:00
8____ NormCore on Qualitex Sound System (£13/£15) Industrious folk, industrial sound
StrangeBrew 18:00
9____ Mary Lattimore (£16.50) Bring yr old revision notes, perfect music for a study sesh
Dareshack 19:30
10_________________________________________________________________________________________________
11___ Trash Salad (£10/£12) (Until 12th) Burlesque clown catastrophe to salad-cream over
Loco Klub 20:00
12_________________________________________________________________________________________________
13___ Yo La Tengo (£23) Seen ‘em before & I’ll see ‘em again, simply some of the best to do it
SWX 19:30
14___ PARANOID (Sweden), Flash, Feral State, and more... live (£10) All your blisteringly harsh punk
subgenres covered Dareshack 19:30
_____ Hallowed Conqueer (£5-£13) Turning clubbing into a performance art
All Hallows Hall, from 20:30
15___ Mainly Slow Organ Music (FREE) One for all the honk shoo mfs out there All Saints Clifton 11:00
_____ Simple Things presents: Marina Herlop (£15) Pristine crystalline highlight of several ‘22
festivals Strange Brew 19:00
_____ space•lab with Objekt & CCL (£12/£15) Not to mention Wipeout for PS1! Strange Brew 23:00
16_________________________________________________________________________________________________
17___ Phil Minton Audrey Chen Matt Davis Henrik Nørstebø (£6/£7) Squeeze this GBLEUDIKRVTHTF in
before Evicshen Café Kino 19:30
_____ Evicshen (£10) Mutilated vinyls, fingernail needles, screeching metal, whips!!
Crofters Rights 19:00
18___ Vincent Moon's Live-Cinéma + J. Martin (Live AV) (£8/£11) Summoning living breathing Cinéma
as the French are wont to do Strange Brew 19:00
19___ The Dynamic Exhibition (FREE) (Until 02/07) Spotted in Wales (with photographic evidence)
Martin Parr Foundation Thurs-Sun 10:30-17:30
_____ Ghost Sonata (£10/£12) Mechanimal’s deep-time geo-theatre takes a Nordic turn
The Island 20:30
20___ Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) (£5) Captivating cryptoid cinema cack
Bristol Improv Theatre 19:30
21___ So Turns the Wheel of the M.O.T. (FREE) Pagan Peugeot pageantry
Former Fireboat Station, from 11
_____ SNOG: aya B2B k-means - All Night (£9-£17.50) aya: the only DJ good enough to Ted Talk at
HÖR & get away with it Strange Brew 22:30
22___ Bristol Radical History Festival (FREE) A whole day highlighting the better side of history
M Shed 10:00
_____ Brìghde Chaimbeul & Ross Ainslie + Steven Byrnes (£15/£18) Pipes never sounded this good
Cube Microplex 20:00
23_________________________________________________________________________________________________
24___ Junk Head (£5) (Until 25th) More wholesome than Mad God’s stop motion nightmare but
somehow no less creepy Cube Microplex/ Showcase, 20:00/19:00
25___ Panda Bear & Sonic Boom (£22) Animal Collective + Spaceman 3 = Beach Boys. Huh
The Fleece 19:30
26___ Alien(s) double bill (£5-£7 each) (Also 29th) Let them xenomorph into your heart
Showcase 18:15
27___ Try and Get Me!(£5-£11) Abject misery in this loose noir remake of Fritz Lang’s Fury
Watershed 17:30
_____ Worm Gigs: Colin Stetson + Support. (£19.50) Steamy tantric sax Strange Brew 19:00
28___ Open Studios 2023 (FREE) (Until 30th) Come see what life could be like if only you were talented
Spike Island 18:00-21:00, Sat & Sun 11:00 –17:00
_____ QWAK club #14: Secluded Bronte & James Holcombe (£TBC) Sonic tricksters, expect the
unexpected. Now with film! Cube Microplex 20:00
_____ Livity Sound w/ TSVI, Lurka, Glances (£6-£10) This Sounds Very Interesting Strange Brew 22:30
29___ Eliza Carthy Trio + Nick Hart (£22) Figureheads of the English folk revival Trinity Centre 19:30
_____ Public Affair #11: Lupini, Clemency & Nate Ka$h (£5-£9) Safe NTS affiliated hands
The Crown 23:00
30_________________________________________________________________________________________________
QWAK club & Schwet present: Pierre Bastien
@ Cube Microplex (15/02)
I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite so thrilled to have had no idea what to expect going into a gig.
As Pierre Bastien sets up his kit it looks almost like a Scalextric, or the board game Mousetrap – a plastic contraption filled with gears and struts and elastic. When he starts performing it is like everything you wanted those things to be when you were a child, but they never were. Once Bastien’s contraption powers up it moves in odd, interlinking, arcane ways which feel almost magical. A bow attached at one end to a wheel seems out of control, jittering and jumping against its string; paper tubes added and removed from a rotating base form a primitive sequencer; air blowing through thin slivers of paper create a strange creature scratching at an alien piano.
In a night of audio-visual acts, Bastien is the only one without a projector, but two adjustable lights point back at his machine, silhouetting it on the screen behind. The shadows not only draw us closer to the intricacies of his instruments as he moves them about to ‘zoom’ in on different elements, but add to the strange, otherworldly effect of the performance. What we see on the screen could be a German expressionist director’s documentary on the Port Talbot steelworks.
The music this contraption creates is at times cinematic, at times jazzy, at times surprisingly pop-y. It proves itself more than a gimmick – its sound is beautiful and compelling, and feels like it couldn’t be made by anything else. It is always slightly uncanny, full of little scratches or crunches. Bastien’s machine, and the music it produces, feels like popular music from an alternate past, like something you’d see in a dream, or a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. A weird, mysterious, utterly delightful treat.
QWAK club #13: That Long Moonless Chase + Yakka Doon + Speed Archer @ Cube Microplex (25/02)
All hail QWAK! Purveyor of the outré, the outsider and the oddball, a QWAK night is reliably mind-expanding and thoughtfully curated. This was maybe the strongest bill I’ve seen - any one of the acts on their own would have been a highlight of a line-up, and together they formed an (on the face of it) eclectic, interdisciplinary but remarkably harmonious sequence, united by an interest in folk culture and stories.
Speed Archer/I Am the Mighty Jungulator’s folk inspiration: popular TV. Soaps (Corrie, Eastenders), game shows and competitions (Dragon’s Den), famous faces and ‘national treasures’ (a series of Guardian-commissioned Shakespeare soliloquies). Cutting out all speech from these clips and amplifying background noise, we’re left with the deeply familiar made strange: silences, hesitations, reactions, emptinesses, decisions to speak, sudden dramatic music cues in response to nothing in particular. It’s, before anything else, hilarious; then, suddenly, desolate. Of course, this is not really a folk culture in the true sense: it doesn’t belong to a people, so much as it is manufactured for them. The treatment of these media reveals their simultaneous hollowness and power; their remarkably effective affective shorthand, the strength of their hold on our collective cultural imaginary.
Yakka Doon’s is the most traditional interpretation of a folk music. County Durham’s Claire Welford describes her music as ‘starkfelt sketchings of lifespaces through flat vowels and strictly necessary guitar-bedding’ — a prosaic-poetic phrasing indicative of these songs’ spare, robust beauty. Presented without showmanship, the focus is entirely on Welford’s immaculate songcraft. Colourful guitar arrangements are skilfully but humanly played, imperfections welcomed. It’s a welcome reminder of that strangely alchemical power unique to ‘song’-songs — that ability to turn your heart, in the space of 3 or 4 minutes, pinker and tenderer than it was before.
The closer is That Long Moonless Chase, an audio-visual project by musician Helen Papaioannou and animator Noriko Okaku which takes folk stories from their homes of Sheffield and Kyoto, and loops them through distorting laps of Google Translate: a gothic ghost story of demonic hounds and the legend of a fire-fighting ginkgo tree. The work is deeply portentous, with booming drones and the deep gurgle of Papaioannou’s saxophone, and layered voices channeling the text like omens or prophecies. As the tales are decomposed, dissociated from their original meanings, they read like coded warnings of impending disaster. The animations are collaged and kinetic, swept away by the force of gales, floods and fires, or crumbling into scrambled data. It’s a precise, structured process of unfurling, dissembling and reconstitution, thrillingly realised. Sick t-shirts, too.
Action Hero & Deborah Pearson: The Talent
@ Wardrobe Theatre (23/03)
I really enjoy reminiscing with new people about school. For better or worse there’s something oddly comforting about one of the most fucked up social experiments you’ll ever experience being a near universal. Thinking back to teachers locked in cupboards and poo bandits reminds you how malleable the social order is more than any anarchist rally ever will. In short, it was a shit time that I remember fondly.
Something I don’t reminisce about much is lockdown. It’s been nearly 2 years but the appetite hasn’t been there to reckon with what a bizarre, society bending, communally lonely experience it was. A time of such simultaneous banality and drama that I genuinely think it has scarred people’s confidence in reality. Following The Talent, I found myself listening back to 2020 podcasts and, to my surprise, remembering that shit time fondly.
On the face of it The Talent isn’t a show about lockdown, it’s a show about a voice-over artist alone in a superbly lit recording booth in the void, struggling through bad ad copy, bad audiobooks, and bad signal to their producers. Through these meagre means we are given a simulacrum of the outside world, and through our lone figure’s mildest of reactions a direct view of her inner one.
Adverts selling the simplicity of breakfast or the cinematic freedom of an SUV hark back to the life we endured indoors where the whole world might as well have only existed as a marketing gimmick. Producers overanalysing the line read for a talking beaver who doesn’t want to wash his hands become reminders of the endless pop media analysis available to you in the absence of anything else. These moments don’t lead down into a dour cynical satire. The humour (and it is a very funny show) is too light-hearted for that. The oppressive absence of the outside is balanced by the warm, quiet, isolation of the booth between reads.
The Talent manages to evoke the feeling of the world upending without you, leaving you with the space and time to focus on your own voice, whilst being reassured that yours is not the only isolation.
Spotted in Bristol
A boy happily walking down the street chomping on a whole lemon as though it were an apple
-
A repair on a major overpass seemingly being held up by a single thin wooden plank
-
Two men squaring up for a fight that immediately abated when one paused to take his shoes off
-
Shit dried immaculately into the unmistakable shape of a large brown chilli pepper
Want a zine? Get a zine!
You can subscribe at Ko-fi below for a steady supply of Tough Sell right to your door for £4.20 a month. If you’ve liked the zine you can also support us with a one off donation.
https://ko-fi.com/toughsell
We are three housemates in Bristol, and we go to see lots of music / theatre / dance / art / film / comedy etc. It’s usually stuff at the margins of these forms, where more is shared between them than distinguishes them. This is a zine of events in the next month that we think we might go to, and reviews of events from the past month that we liked. It is: inexhaustive, biased, of debatable trustworthiness. This is a picture of us.
