Upcoming and Unvetted
1____ People’s Art Fair (Until 11th) Check the schedule, TOUGH SELL friends, Brainbeau, are playing on
the 8th! PRSC, exhibition 12:00-18:00 + some evenings
_____ Liquid Library (PWYW) Kino’s back baby, come butter some Jorts Café Kino 20:00
2____ Belle and Sebastian (£10-£12) (until 8th Jan) Delightful children’s show to get you prepped for a night of hyperpop & gabber Bristol Old Vic 10:30/11:30/15:00
_____ Namasenda + staysie atoms LIVE (£12) Happyhard hypercore pop Strange Brew 19:00
_____ PTS ϟ DJ Scotch Egg (live) & Paul Seul (£8-£14) Live chiptune, gabber & chaos
Strange Brew 22:00
3____ Creators Market Ah finally, an end to the gift hunting misery Strange Brew 12:00
_____ The Wizard of Oz (£3/£5) First in a very cubic double billing (in colour!) Cube Microplex 14:00
_____ Wild at Heart (£5) Has it all: Cage, Lynch, and the charming Bobby Peru Cube Microplex 20:00
_____ Housework w/ OK Williams, Daisy Moon & Golesworthy (£10) OK more like KO amirite (writing
these is hard) Strange Brew 22:00
4____ The Cube Festive Market Ah finally, an end to the gift hunting misery Cube Microplex 11:00
_____ The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (£5-£8) Sand, glitter & glam Watershed 15:00
_____ Chamber folk series IV: benjin & Cirenne (£5) Folk! Classical! Klezmer! Friendly Records 19:30
5____ Casablanca (£6-£7) (Until 8th) Look, I confess I’ve never seen it!
Showcase De Lux, time varies daily
_____ French Film Festival: Saint Omer (£5-£11) Silver Lion winning courtroom drama
Watershed 18:00
_____ Clipping. + Jwalt + Cold Light Collective (£20) Are we sure this is right, and it’s still not sold
out? The Lanes 19:30
6____ Gremlins Birth Day Party! (£5/£8) Look if the words “make your own gremlin competition” don’t
excite you, hope is lost Cube Microplex 19:00
7____ Cuatro Colores (part of Bristol Palestine film festival) (£5/£8.50) Football as a lens for
Palestinian history Cube Microplex 20:00
8____ Nautical Women talk (FREE) A history of port town women and perilous sailors
Central Library 12:30
_____ Rainy Miller, Tardast, Susu Laroche & i-Sha (£7/£9) Sadboi drill, persian drill, and a smattering
of industrialised dabke Strange Brew 19:00
9____ Rimini (£5-£11) (Until 15th) Horrible + old + gross + lounge singer = comedy
Watershed 22:10/22:30
10___ Radical Bookfair (FREE) A great chance to organise. Fuck cuts! Exchange 11:30
_____ Iceman Furniss Quintet, Milon + Broadsheets (£6) What can we say, Bristol has a lot of great
improv All Hallows Hall 19:30
_____ Home Is Where the Horror Is Allnighter (£15/£20) Love staying up till 9am going completely
deranged Watershed 22:30
11___ Batman Double Bill: Film Noir UK The fun Burton ones. Yes, fun. Bristol Aquarium IMAX 14:30
_____ The Devil’s Drivers (part of Bristol Palestine film festival) (£5/£8.50) Get whiplash switching to
this tense human trafficking doc Cube Microplex 19:00
12___ Work Party for Cheats (FREE) Doing things is hard – get someone else to Bristol Old Vic 10:30
13___ Carol Evening and Wassail (FREE) Our mate Emma’s the bull Yate Heritage Center 18:00
_____ Amity w/ Toumba, Alya L, Cam(alot) (£4-£8) The lord of the dance said he Crofters Rights 23:00
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15___ Matthew Bourne & Drone Orchestra (£7) Improvisations on a prepared piano Jam Jar 19:00
16___ Avatar: The Way Of Water (£6-£13.70) lol Various cinemas, various times
_____ BRAINTOWN presents: L.A.B (£15) Immersive international clowning?!?!?! PRSC 18:00
17___ All the Xmas Markets Ah finally, an end to the gift hunting misery
everywhere, mostly from 12:00
_____ BRAINTOWN presents: ONLY BONES 1.9 (£8) Dance, clowning and Kungfu all within 1m3 of light
PRSC 18:00
_____ Tara Clerkin Trio & Able Noise (£10) Both good but Tara’s local. If you’re feeling daring, run to
Able Noise between BRAINTOWN Strange Brew 19:00
_____ BRAINTOWN presents: FENÒMEN (£8) Dancing with ice (and sledgehammers) PRSC 21:00
18___ The Fire Within + Werner Herzog Zoom Q&A (£5-£8.50) Let’s get Werner to speak French to
honour the film’s volcanologist subjects Watershed 15:00
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20___ Winter Solstice - Musical Ceremony (PWYW) The Bristol Gamelan is out!
St Anne’s Church 19:30
21___ Minton / Davis - Omega Institute - Grant + 2 (£6/£7) Proper free improvisation. Be prepared
Café Kino 19:30
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31___ PTS x AM NYE (£15) Look, if you can’t get tickets just remember NYE’s always shit
Exchange 21:00
TOUGH SELL Jan 23 is delayed as we’re away for December, sorry! To tide you over we’re providing the skeleton of the Jan calendar. Though trust our recommendations at your peril, lots of events haven’t been announced yet!
7____ Preview: Enys Men (£5-£11) Surreal Cornish horror from the Bait director Watershed 17:30
9____ Liquid Library Presents Phil Minton and Audrey Chen + Carnivorous Plants Trio, Arkade (£5/£7)
LL always deliver the goods Cube Microplex 20:00
12___ Mouthfeel I: Container/Guthrie + Tapsew + Palm Oil (£8/£12) New night coming out swinging
with great line-up, hot mead cocktails and a TOFU RAFFLE Cube Microplex 20:00
14___ Eat Up! (£8-£12) The Pink Suits are here and are both rootin’ and very much tootin’
Exchange 19:30
18___ Bound (£5) The Wachowski lesbian crime thriller debut I never knew
Cube Microplex 20:00
21___ 1% Of One Presents: 6% Fiesta (£6.66) More exciting new bands than the price suggests
The Louisiana 15:00
25___ Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Natq (FREE) live audio-visual essay to pair with the fantastic film
installation currently exhibited Spike Island 18:00
26___ Avalanche Kaito + Support (£8/£10) Post punk meets a Burkinabe urban griot (yes, I googled it
too). Point is it’s fucking great Crofters Rights 19:00
Forbidden Worlds 2022: The Big Scream - The Tingler
@ Bristol Aquarium IMAX (28/10)
Late 2021, all of your favourite film clubs grouped together to revive the too long unloved IMAX. They set the bar high with May’s inaugural festival, but rather than rest on their laurels, for Halloween they expanded on everything: more curated curios, special guests, celebrity intros (Jamie Lee Curtis, no less!), and, most importantly in the case of The Tingler, more daft antics.
For background, 1950s B-movie classic The Tingler is the brainchild of William Castle, the king of daft cinema antics. After a relatively sensible career directing cheap films for Columbia, Castle leant hard into the schlock, even customising the cinemas his films would tour. Skeletons might drop from the ceiling, chairs might shake or shock you, if you lost your nerve you might be ushered to Coward’s Corner to be heckled relentlessly.
The Tingler invites this gimmicky fun but is also a joy in itself by virtue of being downright bizarre. Vincent Price, a doctor of fear, and his assistant (of fear) investigate what causes people’s spines to tingle (of fear). To their horror they find that the answer is scream-averse puppets. From that premise the film packs in a completely uncalled-for amount of noir-ish plot and an absolutely called-for amount of campiness.
In screening it, The Forbidden Worlds team went to great pains to channel Castle and bring the film in full Screamarama. Puppets descended into the audience whilst actors screamed, fainted, and were led away on gurneys. The result was a cinema in a full state of hysteria, screaming and laughing with wild abandon.
It's this kind of gleeful DIY silliness that really creates a sense of community at Forbidden Worlds, something that’s often lost in the rather isolating world of cinema.
Emilyn Claid: Untitled @ Bath Spa University (10/11)
Emilyn Claid begins with an ending – a dance which is precise and beautiful, her control of her body so absolute that she seems at times to hang in the air.
Untitled collages together a collection of seemingly unconnected speeches, dances, costumes, and slabs of clay. At first many seem, as Claid claims of an elaborate headdress, ‘to mean nothing at all’.
It is when Claid turns to the clay that threads start to come together for me. Here, her foot ensconced and monstered by the pummelled mass, she talks of how her ‘clay foot’ has troubled her for years – numbness, pain, disconnect. I think – how can this person whose 70 years of dancing, training and performing seem to have made her so at one with her body, have felt disconnected from parts of it for so long?
Each snapshot seems to ask – is this Emilyn Claid? Is she the intimidatingly cool model draped in furs? The chatty funeral planner asking for song suggestions? Is she the performer, the choreographer, the psychotherapist? Is she the slick of oil rising to life wearing the skin of an animal it has devoured? The goddess Diana doing a Pilates workout? A lover playing card games in a rainy caravan? A ballet dancer fainting with shock while she wonders what’s for dinner?
The question of what songs to play at your funeral becomes; when you’ve been so many people, to so many people, what music can you use for that final bow, so every part of you can have its curtain call?
QWAK Club #11: Sholto Dobie @ The Cube Microplex (25/10) and Improv’s Greatest Hits: Arthur Chambry @ Crofter’s Rights (26/10)
Two experimental DIY bagpipers walk into a bar... It’s pretty affirming evidence of the vibrancy of Bristol’s music scene that, on consecutive nights, I’m able to see two examples of the very niche category of international musicians using home-made pipe instruments - albeit with startlingly different approaches.
At QWAK club, Sholto Dobie takes a monastic approach, laying his assortment of objects on a blanket on the floor; a set of metal pipes, a squeezebox with a wig of plastic tubing, and a cranked wooden box (looks a bit like a rectangular hurdy-gurdy). It begins ceremonially, with the artful placing of heavy stones onto the squeezebox. The system will run on their energy for the next half an hour. Dobie methodically opens and adjusts valves, slides pipes out to change pitch, cranks and fiddles inside the box. There are tinny drones, sweet ones, raspy ones. It feels almost less like ‘playing’ instruments than a scientist’s demonstration. Drones halt suddenly, and begin as abruptly. It’s enchanting in its simplicity, just the unique timbre of different pipes, and the layering of them, one by one. At once totally transparent and magically strange.
On the other hand, Arthur Chambry is all chaotic energy. His instruments sprawl across the stage, including big blue yoga balls (the bag of the bagpipes). He relentlessly stomps on foot pumps like he’s crushing wine grapes, contorts his back in order to hold balls and pipes at the same time, attaches DIY (like, papier maché??) mic clips to the ends of his pipes, gets tubes and wires tangled and forgets what’s connected up. It’s just super fun, rough and exuberant, and halfway through he invites Harry Irvine up to drum with him, and they both sit on the yoga balls to keep the drone going. I’m so interested in what happens to one’s listening when live music is grounded by a clear link between what’s happening onstage and the sound being produced; a kind of joined-up comprehension that’s uniquely satisfying. These coincidentally twinned performances were great examples of music that’s disposed towards performance, music that’s meant to be seen as well as heard.
Spotted in Bristol
A daydreamer delaying a bus by walking face first into the wing mirror
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A tiny child hurling their entire body into a muddy puddle and then immediately rising and demanding “CLEAN ME!” to anyone who would listen
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A night cleaner dancing wildly with their broom to an audience of none.
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Graffiti that simply read GRAVITY NONCE
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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.
