Upcoming and Unvetted
1____ Barbarian (£6+) (until 3rd) The horror everyone’s talking about Various cinemas, various times
_____ Injury Reserve (£12.10) Breaking the rap mould in the wake of tragedy Trinity Centre 19:30
2____ Myriam Gendron + Roy Claire Potter (£9) Gentle plucking and evocative words The Cube 19:30
3____ Special Interest (£12) At their best when they sound like spitting in your face Rough Trade 19:30
4____ Neptune Frost (£5-£11) (Until 10th) Saul Williams’s anti-capitalist Afrofuturist musical
Watershed 19:00
_____ hackedepicciotto + Dead Space Chamber Music (£12) Einstürzende Neubauten offshoots bringing the gloom The Mount Without Crypt 19:00
_____ Set It Out Presents: 2 Bad Mice w/ George Oscar (£7/£8) This millennium was a mistake, return to 90s amens & airhorns Crofters Rights 23:00
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7____ More Than A Number Exhibition (until 15th)(FREE) African photography exhibition running as part of Afrika Eye festival Trinity Centre 12:00 – 20:00ish
_____ Work Party for Cheats (1) (£5/£8+) Get shit done and have some fun!
Interval (above St Nick’s) 18:00
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9____ Improv’s Greatest Hits (£6) Instrumental duos worth making a Big Fuss about
Crofter’s Rights, 19:30
10___ Emilyn Claid, Untitled (£0-£8) Butch hunters and wet clay. New work from a radical queer dance
artist in her 70s. Bath Spa University Theatre 19:30
11___ The Draughtman’s Contract (£5-£11) (Until 17th) Greenaway is insane and so is his camera
Watershed, time varies daily
_____ Schwet with Whitney K & Eva May (£10) Clever avant folk country that I can really get down with
Strange Brew 19:30
12___ Alasdair Beckett-King presents Stranger Films (£4-£7) A competently compered evening of
early cinema curios The White Bear 19:00 & 21:00
_____ NormCore w/ OKO Dj, Stenny, Piezo and more…. (£13) Get yr clubbing fill Strange Brew 18:00
13___ JUDGE DREDD Vs DREDD (£10/£12) The Raid with guns! The Raid with guns!
Bristol Aquarium IMAX 13:30
14___ Richard Dawson – ‘The Hermit’ (£10-£37) Second screening released for Geordie bard’s 40-
minute music video The Cube, 19:00, 21:00
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16___ Trans Pride South West: Comedy Night! (£12) My comedian friend told me this would be funny
Strange Brew 19:00
17___ Boy’s Khaya (£7-£15) Mix of film & live dance by choreographer Bawren Tavaziva as part of
Afrika Eye festival, sounds intriguing Arnolfini 19:00
18___ Aftersun (£5-£11) (Until 24th) Difficult family and painful memories in the sun
Watershed, various times
_____ bar italia + Slauson Malone 1 (LIVE) (£12) Distinct acts, both hypnagogic vibes
Strange Brew 19:00
_____ THORNY w/ TAAHLIAH + more TBA (£10/£12) Bristol’s best queer night is back Exchange 22:00
19___ Film Noir UK: RKO Noir/Horror Double Bill (£10-£15) Cat People & The Seventh Victim have
been on my list for years Bristol Aquarium IMAX 14:00
_____ Giant Swan (£13/£15) Fuck. My 3rd time seeing them this year, still stoked. Trinity Centre 22:00
20___ Nosferatu (1922): 100th Anniversary Screening (£10) Complete the ritual St George’s 20:00
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22___ Work Party for Cheats 2 (FREE) Get shit done and have some fun (2)!
Pervasive Media Studio, 15:00
23___ DRAWN SOUND (£6/£8) Turning drawings into sound and vice versa Strange Brew 19:30
24___ WetWare #3: Audio Visual Performance Night (£12) TOUGH SELL fav Wordcolour returns to
Bristol Strange Brew 19:00
25___ Bones and All (£5-£11) (Until 1st Dec) Sounds like Chalamet’s doing a sequel to Nekromantic Watershed, various times
_____ The Bottle: The Umlauts, Orbury Common, Damefrisør (£8-£12) Germans, what are they like
Crofters Rights 19:00
_____ MDH: Puppets Do A Movie (£12-£17) (Until 22nd Jan) One of The Wardrobe’s best xmas mashups
returns! Wardrobe Theatre 14:00/19:45
_____ Club Blanco 4th Bday with Optimo (£ tba) Bringing the Glasgow party south Strange Brew 22:00
26___ An Evening with Imperfect Cinema (£7) A retrospective of magic, kitsch, DIY, socially-engaged
work Cube Microplex, 20:00
_____ Teachings in Dub 15 (£5-£16) 15 is a big number Trinity Centre, 21:00
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28___ A Bunch of Amateurs (£5) What better place to see a doc about fiercely passionate film-
lovers Cube Microplex, 20:00
29___ Jessica Moss (£10) Violinist of Silver Mt. Zion fame, expect the expansive Crofters Rights 19:30
30___ Rachael Dadd [LIVE] + Maja Lena (£12) Bristol folk hero, nice feelings assured.
Strange Brew 19:30
Dear Laika @ Crofters Rights (04/10)
On a cold and dreary night in Crofter’s Rights, Dear Laika’s music is dreamy and jarring, ethereal and piercing. Surrounded by electronics, her voice raises in waves, sometimes surfing over, sometimes crashing against her wall of sound. It is the soundtrack to a film we cannot see.
It is the grainy, degrading shot of a distant tree lit by the full moon. It is careful feet picking over rocky slopes. It is descending into the caves below, their dark walls glistening with condensation, and veined with luminescence. It is stepping carefully onto a small boat and floating through a subterranean lake so vast and fiercely calm the wake barely marks its surface. It is a chorus of bees buzzing a hymn in praise of their queen.
But it is more as well. It is the longed-for reunion at the end of the film, heart swelling, looking at last out towards the horizon. The rising sun a peach haze through the morning mist, a couple of birds rising from the reeds.
Seke Chimutengwende: It Begins in Darkness
@The Mount Without(29/09)
A huge grin. Ear to ear. Total transformation of the performer’s face. Belly laughter, cackling, whimpering, sobbing, lamenting, crying, howling, giggling, belly laughter, cackling, whimpering. And so forth. Everything else falling away. Just this one performer. Transforming. Something moving through her. Taking her over.
Dropping and picking up. Never tied to a persona, a task. Getting into it, letting it go. Getting possessed, getting dispossessed. Thinking about spirit possession as an escape hatch. Rituals and ritual performance on plantations. Possession as resistance to the dispossession of slavery.
What’s unseen. In the imagination. Keeps you awake at night. Causes tension in the muscles. Unexplained, untraceable. Descriptions of places which are not here. Bringing stuff into this place. Cobwebs, creaking wood, old trinkets. Haunted houses. They spent a week at Newstead Abbey while making this show. Premiering in Bristol, finishing in Liverpool. Haunted houses.
The faces. Slack jaw. Bared teeth. Wide unblinking eyes. The smile again. Thinking of the painted smiles of minstrels. Entertainment and horror and the horror of entertainment. Choreographing the face, disciplining the muscles of the face.
The ghostliness of dance. Difficult to remember what they actually did. Nothing lasts very long. Images all fleeting, there and then not there. Movement is the opposite of stillness. The stillness of a photograph, of records. Did the dancing really happen? Yes, I know that it did. But what can I hold of it?
Something more sustained at the end. The scratchiness of a violin; tactile, rosin and wood and varnish and hollow space. Complexity — pairs, threes, joining and leaving. Microphones on the floor, the sound of scuffling, shuffling, tapping. Bare feet. Then darkness again.
Ana Roxanne @ Strange Brew (05/10)
Another Wednesday night at the Roadhouse, where the buttoned-downindistinct audiophiles rub shoulders with the immaculately deliberateinfluencers rub shoulders with the loving collectives of shabby post-bullshitoutsiders. A projection of Bristol’s factions here together to hang up theencroaching austerity outside.
The interior of the Roadhouse is primary school easy-clean cafeteria in thefront, party in the back. Where the mood on any given night can shift from afrenzied blinkered twitch to bright eyes-closed nostalgia. Tonight is nodifferent.
Tonight we are gathered to see Ana Roxanne and to hear our way out of thepiss-soaked, kebab splattered, nos cannistered, underfunded, rapidlygentrifying, grey grey streets of the UK. Something about an American accent inthis space has a televisual otherworldliness to it even before she launchesinto song.
The songs she does sing are perfect and simple, atonce lonely and romantic. As her choral voice permeates the room, the wordethereal hangs in the air like the gently filling haze of the fog machine. Thisis punctuated by words spoken plainly. “Whatever you want. Whatever you need.”
When she says the words “’Cause I’m every woman, it’s all in me” you canpalpably feel that everyone’s thinking of her, the poor girl they dredged fromthe Avon. Some people smile, most people cry.
Everyone knew her, she worked on the city farm, she campaigned to save HamiltonHouse, she even volunteered to milk the Bristol Street Goats. Those that werecloser to her knew her other side: starting fires on Turbo Island, and dancingpossessed by more than just substances at the Black Swan.
Something changed when she died. We The Curiousburnt down, St Paul’s carnival was a shadow of its former self, a Street Goatgot bitten by a dog, the bunker was padlocked, Turbo Island was built over, andeverywhere you could feel the businesses really fighting to keep their doorsopen. When she died it was like something vital left the city.
We may never know what happened to her, or why theletters S C H W E T were placed under her fingernails, but here in the Roadhousewe congregate, remember, and dream.
Ana Roxanne helps us on our journey as ‘It’s a rainyday on a cosmic shore’ begins. The gentle pops and crackles of a record minglewith the lapping of water against land. For once, my mind doesn’t turn to hertarpaulin wrapped body left on the muddy bank as the tide fell in the morninglight. Instead, it turns to the time she took the old boat that used to be tiedto the tree out. The boat that we were all too cynical to believe was stillAvon-worthy.
She proved us wrong though, and with Ana Roxanne’s help I can picture her nowunder the moonlight laughing to herself. Rowing out to nowhere gladly with thetwin peaks of the Clifton valley either side, and the suspension bridge brieflyblotting out the moon overhead.
Spotted in Bristol
An underpass with around 20 people in it chanting HELL!! HELL!! HELL!! At 2 in the afternoon
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A child inserting truck after plastic truck into a musician’s saxophone
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A freshly painted house immediately graffitied with the phrase ‘nice wall’
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An old woman leaving a caramel wafer as a tip at a greasy spoon
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Email us at toughsellzine@gmail.com with hot tips and strange sightings
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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.
