Upcoming and Unvetted
1____ Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (£6-£15) (Until 8th) The 1st one was the rare superhero/
multiverse thing I really dug Various cinemas/times
2____ Editrix + Moni Jitchell (£10) Wendy Eisenberg’s warped post hardcore delights
Crofters Rights 19:00
_____ Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse (£5-£11) (Until 8th) Exuberantly daft stop motion magic Watershed, around 20:00 daily
_____ Club Blanco w/ Decius live (£15) The sleaze of Fat White Family meets the groove of Moroder Strange Brew 22:30
3____ St Anne's Open House (FREE) (Until 4th) Find out what yr local artists do
St Anne’s House, from 11:00
_____ Ecstatic Drum Beats Workshop (£10) Dan Johnson brings his inclusive thumping back
Arnolfini 13:00
_____ Xiu Xiu (£12.50) The sounds of desperate self-loathing, but like… good
Strange Brew 19:00
_____ no_one: Amor Satyr & Siu Mata (3HR Set) [Debut] (£8-£14) Turns out the way to sell me on
Dembow is to speed it the fuck up The Island 22:00
4____ Voice as Embodiment with Tina Hitchens (£8) Deep listening and mouth sounding
St George’s 13:30
_____ Sounding the Space with Shirley Pegna (£8) The art of human echolocation St George’s 15:30
_____ Pram + Motes + Dave Howell DJ (£12) Very messy bedroom pop, kinda Cube Microplex 20:00
5____ audiobooks + Crimewave (£13.75) Strange vibes from this unlikely synth pop duo
Louisiana 19:30
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7____ Histories of Tobacco (FREE) A series of talks, no word on if there are free samples
Watershed 14:00
_____ BEEF presents... Els van Riel (£5) Belgian experiments in light & shadow Cube Microplex 19:30
8____ An Oak Tree (£10/£12)(Until 10th) Featuring a guest actor who hasn’t seen, read or rehearsed the play before, Tim Crouch exposes the mundane magic of transformation in this moving treatise on the nature of performance itself Wickham Theatre 19:30
9____ LustSickPuppy + Goreshit + Demi Yo’Ko (£12) Death Grips gone drag Strange Brew 19:00
10___ Harmonycrumb & Except this time nothing returns from the ashes (FREE) (Until10/09) New
exhibitions exploring trans dreams & glitchy hauntings Spike Island, open Weds-Sun 12:00-17:00
_____ Big Dyke Energy Presents: Eris Drew B2B Octo Octa (£10-£30) An all gayer all dayer
Lakota 12:00
11___ Folk Song & the Voice as an Archive with Phil Owen (£8) Getting to the roots of folk
St George’s 14:00
12___ King Krule (£18.50) The moody one, not the banana stealing crocodile one Marble Factory 19:30
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14___ Algernon Cadwallader / Supermilk / Cosmit (£20) 00s emo, sadly not 00s prices
The Fleece 19:30
15___ Silencio. An evening of ambient music. (£8)Noah Radley sounds like a long hug goodbye
Café Kino 19:00
16___ My Imaginary Country (£5-£11) (Until 22nd) Scenes of real optimism in Chile Watershed TBC
17___ Bristol Transformed Festival 2023 Day 1 (£5-£16) Socialism lives
Venues around St Pauls from 11:00
_____ Totality / Function Room all dayer (£6/£10)All them good local bands you heard about
Dareshack 16:30
18___ Bristol Transformed Festival 2023 Day 2 (£5-£16) Socialism lives
Venues around St Pauls from 11:00
_____ Vocal Improvisation with Dali de St Paul (£8) Scream with improv’s matriarch St George’s 13:30
_____ mr_hopkinson's Computer (£8) Artificial voices, superficial lyrics, heartfelt pop
St George’s 16:30
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20___ Secret(e), Playworker, Insatiable Wound & ecotage (£5) Noisy noisy noise
Exchange Basement 19:00
21___ Inaugural Lecture - Professor Matt Watson (FREE) A life of volcanoes
Wills Memorial Building 16:00
_____ Wicker Man (£5-£11) 50th anniversary of this PSA on the dangers of morris dancing
Watershed 20:00
22___ Windrush 75: Stories Through Film (until 24th) Details are sparse but the bus is cute
Vintage Mobile Cinema Bus Broadmead West BS1 3DS, 10:00
_____ Split Second (£5) B-movies lost like teardrops in the rain if not for BBFC
Bristol Improv Theatre 19:30
23___ Asteroid City (£5-£11) (Until 29th) Wes Anderson living by don’t fix what ain’t broke
Watershed, TBC
_____ Alwynne Pritchard: MONGREL (£7.50/£15) Mutant music theatre where the divine meets the
canine Arnolfini 19:30
_____ DJ Shitmat, Jacken Elswyth, Human Leather & The Acid Morris (£9-£18) An eclectic mix of
delicate folk, boisterous rock, and acid Strange Brew 19:00
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25___ The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (£5-£11) 1 of 2 Wes Anderson’s I haven’t seen
Watershed 14:00
26___ Let's Swim, Get Swimming(£5/£7)Feeling nostalgic for tiny math rock gigs
Exchange Basement 19:30
27___ Dark Alchemy presents KHOST (£10) Hellish ritual sounds in an actual crypt
The Mount Without 19:30
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29___ Le Gateau Chocolat: Raw Cacao (£15/£18) Melt in Gateau’s buttery baritone
The Mount Without 20:00
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So Turns the Wheels of the M.O.T.
@ Former Fireboat Station (22/04)
Above the door of a small wooden shed by the docks hangs a small sign with a familiar sigil – three triangles, touching at the centre, with crossed corn below and the moon above. Inside is a fine collection of photographs, costumes and memorabilia, collected to document the various folk traditions of the British Isles pertaining to vehicle operation and maintenance; a dress belonging to a young Gasket dancer, a snap of the Fuse Queen, a starting mask for recharging a key.
What makes Libby Bove’s alternative history exhibition so effective is the care and attention given to each artifact and photo, and the pitch-perfect documentary tone of the descriptions. As the artist notes to one visitor, it would have been easy to slip into the cheesy vagaries of steampunk. But each entry in this interconnected world of rituals and repairs has a specificity which makes it fit right in to the UK’s odd assortment of folk traditions; after all, if the burry man can exist (look it up), why not the Diesel Clappers. And while everything on display creates a sense of this world, it is in the little booklet of descriptions which really brings it alive; a cohesive portrait written by a passionate curator. Although we know it is made up, the imagined inter-weaves with the real, mundane world in so many subtle, well-balanced ways that it still manages to get little tricks past us. I hear one visitor remarking that they didn’t know MOTs used to only be done on four days of the year – the quarter-days of Candlemas, Rud-day, Lammas, and Hallomas.
That night, listening to Brìghde Chaimbeul’s droning pipes at The Cube, I wondered what folk tunes would be created accompanied by the growls and grumbles of an engine. I long to see more of this strange archive – documentation of real repairs taking place as part of these ceremonies, the interactions of the mechanics and the ceremonial dancers, diagrams of the dances they perform. Bove’s work, and world, feels brimming with possibility.
QWAK club #14: Secluded Bronte
@ Cube Microplex (28/04)
Never was there ever a more TOUGH SELL act. Secluded Bronte is the sort of music that isn’t just sitting in the margins of its form, it’s actively jumping between the lot of them blowing raspberries.
Richard Thomas, Jonathan Bohman and Adam Bohman appear in their respective corners of the stage looking like three disgruntled husbands relegated to the shed to complete their deranged noisy projects. Richard Thomas takes the front right muttering nonsensical anecdotes about Ivor Cutler’s favourite crisps and occasionally remembering he has a guitar to hand, Jonathan Bohman takes the right tickling the keys and making jolly little observations, and at the back is what appears to be Michael D Higgens doing DIY on a table of junk, occasionally yelping in frustration.
Watch any individual for long enough and they make their own bizarre sense like some sort of unhinged middle class street prophet, but taken together the voices and haphazard playing interject with each other to resemble Dadaist poetry set to almost music. This “music” was then split into “tracks” by the interruption of dreamy little films detailing James Holocombe’s fruitless attempts to repair outdated audio-visual electronics found for a bargain. The films helped to make a cohesive world of the performances that made it feel you were seeing an updated Under Milk Wood recast to reveal the collective unconscious of England’s most bumbling men.
To my surprise the overwhelming feeling it gave me was a very unrelatable, personal nostalgia. It was the experience of being a small child falling asleep in the car listening to Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band, waking up to a bafflingly dogshit BBC 4 radio play, and then arriving at a delightfully surreal Forkbeard Fantasy show all condensed into a single hour of charming silly nonsense.
Schwet X @ Strange Brew (06/05)
What to schay about Schwet? Arguably — and we certainly argue —no schingle promoter in recent years has been as vital to the rude health of Bristol’s experimental music scene as has Adam Reid and his co-conspirators. In the past couple of years alone, as they made their home at Schtrange Brew (and became a schtaple of our gig-going calendar as new housemates) we’ve been treated to: the schuper-schweaty, don’t-schtop-till-you-drop footwork of RP Boo; the ecschtatic headrush of Avalanche Kaito; the toe-tapping schwagger of Whitney K; the mischwievous deadpan theatre of Max Syedtollan; a scheries of woozy downtempo dealings from the finest of Australia’s underground; the return of Senyawa’s primal, guttural schonics; Lynchian whischpers from Ana Roxane; and of course the many schtellar home-grown talents of the likes of HARRGA, Dead Space Chamber Music, Tara Clerkin Trio, Coims, Biped, Viridian Ensemble, Ekstasis, EP/64, Memotone, Jabu, Birthmark, Franco Franco, and many many more. That’s not even going back to the before times: Keiji Haino, Still House Plants, GNOD, Jerusalem in My Heart, Hey Colossus, Guttersnipe, Zonal, etschwetera etschwetera etschwetera.
How do you round out a decade like that? May’s epic 11-hour marathon was about a fitting a way as one could imagine. In a line-up of returning favourites and new faces alike, an early highlight is the very first set, which sees Ex-Agent coming out swinging with no-wave free improv that’s spiky and colourful. They’re strong in numbers, but the music always cleaves to sharp, defined contours, never descending into indistinct cacophony. Later in the evening, like the programming equivalent of a Rickroll, there’s the bizarro coup of an unannounced prime-time set from Robert Ridley Shackleton: the most Marmite, hilarious/torturous (take ur pick), full-on cringe-core act ever. I kind of hate it (I think??) but I LOVE that it’s happening.
And then Dame Area. DAME AREA. Man, Dame Area are good. Like, off-the-charts good. There’s a pots-and-pans rawness to their drumming (and sheet-of-metal-penetration), a clear, shiny brightness to the synth lines, a punkish aggression to Silvia Konstance’s vocals. It’s one of those sets that make the dancefloor the only place to put your body — a place where, under the right conditions, a group of strangers can have a truly communal encounter; agree to throw themselves into each other and even carry each other through the air; share in common joy; enjoy an escape hatch from the alienated and awkward shapes into which capitalism squeezes us. A place where, as Andy Field so beautifully puts it, 'we are teaching ourselves how not to be afraid of one another.’ When it ends, the applause is rapturous, euphoric. What a way to go out.
I hope this won’t be the end of Schwet for good, but for now: goodnight. It’s been schweet, and schtrange, and schpectacular.
Spotted in Bristol
A group of black clad, motorised BMX squealing lads jumping a café queue to buy Capri Suns which they then drank through their balaclavas
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A man kicked out of a pub on May the 4th for arguing too determinedly in favour of Star Trek
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A paddling pool falling from a flat balcony, thrown in celebration/protest of the Eurovision results
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The midnight lights of Ashton Gate stadium turning the flocking seagulls into gigantic fireflies
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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.
