Upcoming and Unvetted
1____ THE WIRE 40: An Evening with People Like Us (£10) Delirious Sound/film collages from Vicki Bennet The Cube 19:00
_____ Back to the Future w/ Bayete, Disk Frisk & more (£5-£10) Noods regulars and NTS occasionals bringing a fun varied night Strange Brew 22:00
2____ St. Pauls Carnival Stripped back for covid and impossible to get tickets but the streets are always lively St. Pauls 12:00
_____ THE WIRE 40: Neptune Frost + Anthony Joseph & Andrew John (£10) Mad looking afrofuturist musical from Saul Williams The Cube 19:00
_____ Equiknoxx ft. Gavsborg, Time Cow & Shanique Marie (£10-£14) The choice for St Pauls after party Strange Brew 20:00
3____ THE WIRE 40: Éliane Radigue Matinee and Scratch Orchestra Revisited (£10 each) 2 gigs going from extreme minimalism to extreme no boundaries experimentalism The Cube 14:00, 18:30
4____ Best of Iris Shorts (£5/£8.50/£11) Award winning queer shorts from around the world Watershed 18:30
5____ Deafkids (£5/£10) Delirious Brazilian noisiness that sits between hard rock and a drone place
The Lanes 21:30
6____ Brunswick Gatherings #3 (FREE) hang out with nice artists on a boat :)
The Lightship Theatre 19:30
_____ Drac & Jill (until 31st)(£16/£20) A hilarious, raunchy, ridiculous show Wardrobe Theatre 19:30
7____ Jerusalem in My Heart (£15) Weird! Cultural! Interesting! Good! The Cube 19:30
8____ Exhibitions - Forest: Wake This Ground (till 2/10) and Earth: Digging Deep in British Art 1781- 2022 (till 11/9)(£8.90) Two exhibitions about nature and landscape Arnolfini, RWA
_____ Pride March (FREE) Needs no introduction Castle Park 10:30
_____ Eat Up! (£6/£8/£10) The only pride after party that has a sex noise choir The Exchange 19:30
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11___ Bunuel (£7/£14) Blistering pigfuck turned on its head The Crofters Rights 19:30
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15___ Schwet with Muqata'a, LAGOSS, Serepente, Biped etc (£10) Experimental hip hop from both the West Bank and the future Strange Brew 19:30
15___ African Apocalypse (£5/£8) Unstylish, important 1st hand doc on the trail of French colonial massacres Arnolfini 15:00
_____ Modern Queers Launch Party (£5-£15) Cool party for cool zine Dawkins Ales 20:00
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20___ Cinema Rediscovered - Lost Highway (£5/£6.50/£8.50) Lynch classic followed by a DJ set inspired by it Watershed 20:15
21___ Cinema Rediscovered– Sunset and Shanghai Express (£5/£6.50/£8.50 each) The end of silent film and the beginning of the talkies Watershed 18:10, 20:40
22___ Cinema Rediscovered - Nightbreed (£5/£6.50/£8.50) It’s sold out but tbf you should just watch Nightbreed 20th Century Flicks 22:00
_____ Exhibition – Amitai Romm: Hum (till 18/9) Sculpture and sound created from environmental data Spike Island
23___ Cinema Rediscovered – Chameleon Street, Amaya and The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (£5/£6.50/£8.50 each) Two stylistic docs and a wuxia Watershed 13:50, 16:00, 18:30
24___ Cinema Rediscovered – Chess of the Wind, Baby Face and High Noon (£5/£6.50/£8.50 each) Iranian murder mystery, pre-code filth and a classic western Watershed 10:30, 13:40, 15:40
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27___ Folk Singing Workshop (£4/£6) Georgian and Eastern European harmonies The Jam Jar 19:00
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30___ Draw a live goat with Streetgoat (FREE) Some things sell themselves RWA 10:30
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HABITAT @ Mayfest (29/5)
To close this year’s Mayfest, around 40 naked Bristolians took over The Galleries in a participatory artwork by Austrian choreographer Doris Uhlich. Draped over children’s rides, huddled in nooks, rattling shutters, gliding up escalators, queuing for an ATM and in myriad formations of ecstatically jiggling flesh. I’d hardly have thought it was many’s first time performing in a dance piece - let alone naked - such was the commitment, confidence and ownership with which the they handled their material. It was celebratory but never twee, funny but never frivolous. Without a smile ever breaking across any of the performers’ faces (concentration, all the time), there was the feeling that it had been a deeply joyful and affecting experience for all of them. The feeling was, as all feelings are, contagious. In the audience, roaming around and sharing their space, we wanted nothing more than to join in.
There were also questions for me, though, with this socially engaged work whose meaning hinged upon a sense of community, togetherness and representation, around the conspicuous absence of certain bodies - particularly Black bodies - and of the importance of invitation. I’m not in the know about any outreach work that may have been done beyond the open call I saw online, but I thought about how the ask to put oneself on display is a riskier proposition for some, and what care for participants and prospective participants looks like in that regard.
EP64: The Grand Final @ Arnolfini (28/5)
It’s going to take me a long time to get used to referring to EP64 in the past tense. Ever since I moved to Bristol, they have felt like the centre around which the experimental scene orbits. Judging from the response to their final show, I’m not the only one to feel that way.
For the benefit of those wretches that never got to see them: they comprised noise witch, Dali de Saint Paul; calmest drummer alive, Dan Johnson; and whichever talented friends would join them. Together they played 64 improvised live shows with Dali looping screams and yelps into a ferociously danceable cacophony that Dan managed to contain within an everchanging flurry of decisive percussion. Each guest led this setup in new and surprising directions, but the end result was always an overwhelming feverish coven of people vibrating in their own noisy worlds. I’ve never experienced another band able to make such vicious noise so danceable - as if the Swans were a samba band.
EP64s farewell saw them headlining both days of their own mini-festival. The line-up consisting of various constellations of their past collaborators, all of them worthy of their own write ups. In fact, the festival proved so good I was worried that EP64’s final set with Giant Swan’s Robin Stewart might be underwhelming. Happily, I was wrong.
A friend of mine once pointed out that at noise gigs, without fail, you will always find a bald man pressing his head right into the speaker, experiencing joy you will never understand as his ears are shredded (and presumably also his follicles). I mention it because in the final EP64 gig it felt that rather than there being a single solitary demented bald man, we were all that demented bald man. We had managed to push our shining heads through the speaker casing and onto the other side of the noise. I have never ever felt such a strong communal reaction at a show. Everyone jostling with the sound, everyone’s yelps joining indistinguishably with Dali’s and the wall of sound till we all became part of the band. It was impossible not to move, we were the dancing plague back in full force, completely engulfed by it all.
And then it ended. Not just the show, the band, and there was a real sense that we had just been part of something, and a real sadness that it was over. Never say never, but I’d be surprised if I go to a gig that tops it.
Wojciech Rusin @ Bristol New Music Festival (7/5)
Though its central mural was covered by a projector screen, St. George’s unmistakeable setting as a former church felt fitting for Wojciech Rusin’s performance at Bristol New Music festival. Mysterious and ceremonial, epic and arcane, Rusin’s music sounded like we’d wandered into a service of an unfamiliar religion.
Rusin’s altar was laid with electronics, his fellow priests Emmy Broughton on harp and Jo Hellier on voice and percussion, his video work projected above in place of stained glass. Both the audio and the visual felt interested in how the classical can be refracted through the modern; Roman statues sliced and glitched, burning planes graffitied in Latin, folk songs and processionals interspersed with and dissolving into electronic noise.
These more vocal, tune led tracks are undoubtably my favourites from Rusin’s albums, from the lightly sinister bombast of Dance, and the sprightly counter melody of Paolo’s Dream (both from 2019’s Funnel), to the delicate beauty of The World in a Tiny Bottle from 2022’s Syphon. Live, they not only absolutely slapped, but offered moments that anchor and re-centre the flow of attention between the sections of more abstract experimentation.
To the contrasts of old and new, structured and freeflowing, Rusin’s performance added the interplay between digital and physical. The performer’s instruments and voices are sometimes distorted by electronics, sometimes rising above and between them. At times they played custom-made 3D-printed pipes - physical instruments created using digital methods. I was reminded that the craft of making recorders, a popular instrument in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, fell so out of fashion that it had to be basically re-invented in the 20th century.
This interest in the physical gives the gig its brilliant climax. It wasn’t clear at first what’s happening, but as it grew we saw the performers inflating a massive cuboid. As one performer channels the escaping the air, the other two threw themselves repeatedly on the inflatable, creating a massive bagpipe; a brilliantly playful ending to a fascinating and theatrical sonic journey.
Spotted in Bristol
A box of doughnuts falling from the sky (or at least a particularly hubristic seagull).
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A group of Turkish men outside the Grain Barge passionately arguing for the superiority of their mother’s traditional cooking (with photographic evidence).
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At the Black Castle pub (the one in the castle between Arnos Vale and the big Sainsburys) apparently food is ordered there mistakenly via the app so often it is a good bet for a cheap evening to just rock up and wait for stuff to just start getting called out.
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A group of children in a boat caught in choppy waters on the Docks going round and round for a good 15 minutes before anyone came to retrieve them
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Email us at toughsellzine@gmail.com with hot tips and strange sightings
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.
BK, LW, and KW (who objects to being a Vitasoy and not a superior Lactasoy)
