Upcoming and Unvetted
1____ Everything was Awesome Premiere (FREE) The unveiling of Joe Poulter’s homespun skating film.
Good luck getting in! Strange Brew 19:00
2____ The Quantum Horse (£6/£12) (Until 12th) I hate panto, but apparently that’s why I’ll love this
one. Cube Microplex 14:30/ 19:00
_____ Manchester Collective: Bag of Bones (£12/£15) Eerie contemporary music theatre
Strange Brew 19:00
3____ Noods Radio & Dance Policy: Communal Throb (FREE) (Until 5th) Photo exhibition of youth and
dance culture Centrespace Gallery 12:00
_____ Illegal Data #17: Manuka Honey, Akiko Haruna + more (£8-£12) Eclectic mix of DJs and live acts
keeping the night weird & fresh Strange Brew 21:30
4____ Éliane Radigue (£5/£15) (Rescheduled from Oct) New compositions for violin, harp, & double
bass after 70 years of expanding music Arnolfini 14:00
5____ Funeral Parade of Roses Gay Japanese Oedipus Rex with outlandish style to suit
Watershed 12:00
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7____ The Bristol Germ Final Issue Launch (£6-£12.50) We’re at issue 8, just saying
Strange Brew 19:30
8____ BLEY SCHOOL - Pat Thomas/Dominic Lash/Tony Orrell Avant-garde piano
Bristol Music Club 19:00
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10___ Tallis Scholars: Taverner to Tavener (£10) My favourite comporser & my favourite composer
St George’s 19:00
_____ PTS ϟ Evian Christ, Sarahsson, Alya L & VIO_L3T (£8-£15) Impeccably funny follow up to Felicia
Atkinson. All the strobes! Strange Brew 22:00
11___ Mainly Slow Organ Music (FREE) Playing all the glacial hits, Davachi et al.
All Saints Clifton 11:00
12___ How Shall We Begin Again? (£5) (Also on 11th) Joyous and surprising mass dance improvisation
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff 12:00
13___ OUT-TAKE Ensemble (FREE) Outrageously happy my fave gig of 2018 is back. GO!
Café Kino 19:30
14___ Mog the Forgetful Cat (£13/£15) (Until 18th) Knowing Wardrobe Ensemble it’ll be Memento
meets Mog for kids Bristol Old Vic 10:30/13:30
15___ Pierre Bastien + Copper Sounds (£8/£12) QWAK & Schwet teaming up to put on a mad
Frenchman is my Avengers Assemble Cube Microplex 20:00
16___ Schwet with Shovel Dance Collective & O.G. Jigg This will be my 4th Shovel Dance show in less
than a year, what a lovely bunch Strange Brew 19:00
17___ A New Language + Show Me The World Mister + Forecast exhibitions (FREE) (Until 21st May)
Philadelphia, Guinness, and crows Spike Island
_____ A Violin Over The Head (£5/£8.50) Talk + clips on where music meets slapstick Watershed 15:30
_____ Bingo Fury Presents: BUFFEE + N.O + TDWM (£4/£5) Glitchy gloomy hyperpop, harps + tapes,
and Dolebury drone. Cube Microplex 20:00
18___ The Extraordinary World of Charley Bowers with Peter Lord (£5/£8.50) A guide through the
work to which Aardman are indebted Watershed 09:30
_____ Garry Fabian Miller: ADORE exhibition (FREE) (Until 28th May) Retrospective of photographer’s
patient homely work Arnolfini
_____ Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – Blossoming (£7.50/£15) My fix in the absence of
Bristol New Music Festival Arnolfini 16:00
_____ Ecstatic Drum Beats (£6/£10) The first rule of drum club is be nice Cube Microplex 19:30
19___ Orlando (£5/£8.50) Virginia Woolf adaptation & icon of cult queer cinema Watershed 12:00
_____ Chamber folk series V: Troyka Mala & boci (£5) Balkan, North, and East European influences & arrangements. Lovely. Friendly Records 19:30
20___ Variety (£5) Puzzled & horny woman in a gloriously grimy Manhattan Cube Microplex 20:00
21___ The Wall (Until 24th) (£12/£16) Experimental theatre crossing continents and languages live
Tobacco Factory 20:00
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23___ DOOZY: Art Exhibition, Zine Launch, Happening All our salacious secrets are revealed in this
new magazine (and art I suppose) Strange Brew 13:00
24___ Amity X Counterslip w/ INVT, Ehua & Cando (£10-£15) Extra-long INVT set. Nice.
Strange Brew 22:30
25___ Mini Robot Wars - BBB Beetle Brawl 2023 (£3) Oh Hell yeah!! St Michael’s Centre 10:30
_____ FEEDBACK AND FRUSTRATION (£10-£20) Fancy a migraine? Noise all-dayer. Dareshack 14:00
_____ QWAK club #13: That Long Moonless Chase + Yakka Doon(£6.50/£10) Deeply disorientating live
audiovisuals & gentle folk Cube Microplex 20:00
_____ Emergency Room w/ Leon Vynehall (All Night Long) (£10-£15) It’s been over a year, happy
returns. The Island, last entry 23:30
26___ Dry Cleaning (£23.45) Hate the O2 but do really like Dry Cleaning’s schtick O2 Academy 19:00
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28___ The Million Ryo Pot (£5-£11) Big dog of early Japanese film, I hear it holds up Watershed 17:30
_____ BEEFpresents A body is a body is a body (£7) Experimental Aussie shorts Cube Microplex 20:00
Dan Johnson: ‘Eight Hours’ @ D-Unit (21/01)
Gongs, drums, cymbals, sticks and mallets, metronomes, a glockenspiel, a ball of string, an oven timer, pieces of paper, mattresses and blankets scattered around a tiny, cold warehouse unit. Dan Johnson’s home for an eight hour durational performance.
Rhythm in this endurance format is as tyrannical as it is exciting. Committing himself to exploring ideas to their ends over long stretches of time, the tick of a metronome locks Johnson in, forcing him to keep on going. He keeps one particular exercise in speed and regularity going for an inhuman amount of time — until control becomes release, discipline is subsumed into meditation, the rhythm begins to morph in the ear whilst remaining exactly the same. Elsewhere, there is sparse-ness and scarcity — accidental sounds are given great importance, cymbals are tied to ankles and dragged along the concrete floor, the clattering shutters of D-Unit as people enter and exit become an instrument themselves. The tempo slows right down to hibernation heartbeat, as if encouraging the audience to adjust to the temperature.
Percussion instruments are intensely physical things to play. Johnson takes it a step further - his performance is as much choreography as it is music-playing. Spectators are to choose from a set of hand-written directives on pieces of paper to give to Dan. They include diagrams and physical prompts like ‘contort’ and ‘spin’ — I give these to Dan half-expecting a lateral musical interpretation, but he takes them resolutely literally. He folds his leg over his head, a shape of black fabric on the floor, breathing. He twirls, gangly and half-falling, clattering into objects. He steps back-wards and forwards, approaching the two gongs and retreating; he finally swings the mallet but it stops short of the gong, the tension held. Nothing about the act of making sound can be taken for granted, not even the contact of stick and drum.
When he does hit the gong, he comes down at it with his whole body, something out of an action cartoon. It reverberates, for minutes and with a thousand impossible nuances. When in the last moments of the eight hours, the gong strikes come unrelentingly thick and fast, it’s genuinely overwhelming — like digesting 35 prime steaks in one sitting. As the last gong crash rings out past the end of eight hours, I think about Guglielmo Marconi — the inventor of the radio — who at the end of his life came to believe that no sound ever fully disappears, but only gets quieter and quieter and, with the right listening device, might just be heard forever.
Mouthfeel: Container + Will Guthrie @ Cube Microplex (12/01)
To headline Mouthfeel’s inaugural night, techno veteran, Container, and percussion precisionist, Will Guthrie, paired up to bolster each other’s sounds into a twitchy euphoria. That’s right, techno with live drums. A pairing that works so well I am shocked I’ve not seen it before. I suppose a lot of that will have to do with the skill required.
For me, techno plays on the intonation that falls out of repetition and pace. Like if a metronome was an instrument in and of itself. Once a baseline pace is set any slight deviation is magnified into its own blissful departure. This is also what I enjoy about percussion. Seeing solo drum sets I never cease to be amazed by the versatility of sound produced by bashing slightly different shades of shit out of a thing. Hence, combining the two is the recipe for a surprisingly intimate duet that removes all of the sterility sometimes found in more mediocre techno.
Ironically, Guthrie’s astounding precision, control, and stamina give him a machine like quality that compliments Container’s nervously human jitteriness. A jitter which sees him holding a cassette tape in mouth for comfort while he rains down waves of chaotic noise that break in massive shifts in the beat.
This was a seated gig and to my surprise that suited me fine. I haven’t soberly danced since puberty but give me something to stim to and I’m away. This duo had me tapping and twitching every dextrous fibre with a big old grin on my face. Weirdly, of all things, it took me back to secondary school. Sneaking out of lessons and into the drum rehearsal room with mates. Taking it in turns to more beat the kit than play it. All whilst tinny hyper shite blasted out of our late 00s phones. It sounded horrendous of course, but it felt great. It felt reckless in our own small way. A recklessness I’d forgotten I missed till this Transportive techno.
Enys Man @ Watershed (13/01)
We are all surrounded by ghosts. We live in houses where people have died; travel to work along roads where accidents have happened; pass blue plaques and park benches and bunches of flowers tied to railings.
Enys Men, a remote Cornish Island, has more ghosts than most. As its sole inhabitant, The Volunteer goes about her daily tasks of documenting a single spray of flowers clinging to the cliff’s edge surrounded by miners and sailors, priests and bal maidens.
What is enthralling about Enys Men is the ambiguous nature of these ghosts. I was a little reminded of the works of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in the way that each strange occurrence is met with neither doubt nor belief. When the strange or supernatural appears there is no debate over what is really happening or why, merely reactions to each event as it occurs. And these reactions vary wildly – sometimes The Volunteer is terrified, sometimes she treats her unexpected companions with warmth or ambivalence. It is often the landscape that evokes the most fear in her – a mine cart stuck in the cliff walls, its tracks running through the grass, a rock standing tall framed on the horizon.
Enys Men is something that feels rare – a horror film as memorial, put together in a way that pulls against the traditions of both. Its ghosts are there not as antagonists, but as tributes to the Cornish dead. At the same time, it is still completely terrifying (and I don’t think this is just because I am very easily scared). Even while the film rarely gestures at threat or evil, I felt completely on edge throughout. There are moments of great beauty – particularly what feels like a climax of a priest picking up a song that we have heard snatches of through the film – but the tone is never sentimental. Instead Enys Men exists in an uneasy truce between the past and the present, memory and reality, the landscape and its ghosts.
(Men) Spotted in Bristol
An irate man repeatedly asking the bartenders to turn down the music in a pub where no music was playing
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A bonafide LAD at the market clarifying “so this crystal will clear my auras yeah? Wicked!”
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A Bristolian Rocky climbing all 10 of the cascade steps before absolutely belting ”Eye of the Tiger”
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A chap in Stokes Croft in naught but his speedos taking a dismal January downpour in his stride
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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.
