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Blackout 2005
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ASHTON COURT MENU: intro | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
The computer-human compere extraordinaire is back among the specially chosen Blackout guests, willing the crowd to dizzy new heights with his special digital friends, huge head and roving ego.
Sub-aquatic marine surrealist short films come alive as a breed of Bristol's
finest musicians create their own interpretive scores. Pioneering scientist,
documentarist, self-declared anarchist and scuba-auteur Jean Painleve made
a series of rapturous underwater films, exploring undersea and microscopic
worlds filled with beauty, horror, sadism, amorality, joy and grace. The films
defy categorisation as either science or art with their humor, lyricism and
uncommon beauty.
Featuring the music of: Joe Volk, John Baggott, Mark Henson, Paula James,
Rasha Shaheen.
Mad musical mining of order and chaos. Applying an indiscriminate policy to sound sources, anything can be recycled and used for new purposes to harness moments when highly ordered synthetic structures are broken apart.
Using a variety of homemade software samplers and synthesizers, the familiar
is laid bare to complete transformation -in which the most gentle and the
most violent sound can live together in a utopian world of electric junk noise.
Using cameras and experimental frequencies to animate the inanimate, the Bin
Ray sound will generate a new visual cuisine.
A matinee with global underground error cell GN re-navigating the sumptuously retro-styled blockbuster. The film is translated into an alternative narrative spectacle through a re-score using original and plunderphonic sound.
The film has built a cult (kiddie and oldie) following due to its extravagant mesh of cutting edge technology and nostalgic allusions to comic book fantasies, WW2 dramas, TV adventure serials and 1930's design. Sky Captain hints towards a broader digital future for film studios and the techniques used to create this re-dub push the democracy of home technology into this vision.
Feral Trade is a public experiment in trading goods along social networks. The use of the word 'feral' describes a process that is willfully wild, as in pigeon, as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). In March 2005 Feral Trade imported 200kg coffee from a farmers co-operative in high-altitude El Salvador, direct to the Cube Microplex in Bristol UK.
In the Blackout space, feral trade coffee will be served, along with rare
slideshow footage from recent feral shopping trips to El Salvador (coffee)
and Iran (sweets).
Stalwarts of Bristol's underground music scene return to Ashton Court with an exclusive performance of east/west psychedelic fusion. The band blends sitar-blues-drone with tripped out psych-eastern patterns and textures.
Mojo magazine likened them to 'the droning narcotic detachment of Spacemen 3, the dynamic overdriven fuzz-slide of Ry Cooder' and some sublime electric sitar.Ó Backed by stunning esoteric images and cult exotica courtesy of local filmmaking cooperative Lyricalvisual.
Big Daddy of the Hanham Massive, 'The Shock' tweaks his electronics, adds some real instruments and presents it with sumptuous visuals, including nearly-satellite link-ups. Like adding a little blue packet of salt to your plain old crisps, this performance provides exquisite texture with extra flavour.
Producing undulating and inspirational music with a playful, comic edge, the West Country boffin has signed to 4AD and is back with second album 'Maritime' the most tuneful and downright enchanting nautical/Miami Vice electronic offering you'll hear this year. Dive down and lend him your ears.
This is a dream machine in which Motorboy (Language/Crash) mixes a soundtrack evolving from ambient to electronica and dancefloor grooves, while Anyone (VJs.net) creates a synchronized video/graphic montage progressing from blurry abstract colour fields to more complex figurative layers.
Enjoy a late afternoon re-tune with this 45-minute live video-sonic project, free of pain and alienation; voluntarily suspend awareness that Òthis is just a storyÓ; dispel all cynicism; and experience, for a limited time, a sense of comfort, security, intimacy and pleasure under the hedonistic apparatus of club culture.
Theatre anyone? Imagine having 100 photos thrown at you. You try to piece them together in some logical order, only there is no order. After four sold-out performances at the Cheltenham Everyman and Bristol New Vic Studio, The Dave Fish Theatre Company steps out of the theatre into the Blackout with a bizarre 'chamber play'.
Interpreted and adapted by Dave Fish, this is a raw and exciting telling of the absurdist text by radical New York playwright Richard Foreman. Left without a narrative or recognizable characters, the audience makes links with what they hear - a mix of live action, short projections. Soundtrack by A Lion. Beckett meets Marx Brothers in a life-changing conceptual and structuralist menagerie.
Cult, constant and unrestrained sounds with art and magic un-wisdom. Based around the duo of Dylan Nyoukis (Prick Decay/Decaer Pinga) and Karen Constance (Polly Shang Kuan Band/Smack Music7), Blood Stereo is a vast brain-tangle of full-on freeform noise, veering from feral electronic to rabid sound poetry.
Up there with the odd, unpredictable folk of the Klinker, Sun City Girls or Climax Golden Twins and a favourite of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, they will perform at Blackout as a quartet (joined by Dallas K and F Ampism) to a selection of handpicked abstract imagery. 'Gonna make love to the brains of Bristol'.
Expect a rocking mix of dub, broken disco-hiphop and breaks with live brass, vocals and vibesters. A band put together by producer and guitarist Marcus Campbell known for collaborations with Zion Train, Headmix, Dubmerge and Universal Egg records.
Fresh selected cuts have been specially brewed for a live carnival-style mash-up with kitsch-to-bits-visuadelia.
Block party beats! This crew of female hiphop artists from in and around Bristol, comprising DJs, MCs, Breakdancers and graf writers, throws down a BIG party. Their ethos is about celebrating feminity in hiphop and getting the props they deserve as artists.
Their successful monthly club night at Bristol's Arc Bar has been up and running for two years and they have featured female artists from around the country. DJ Diss Miss, Short-E, DJ Honeytrap and MC Kash Honey will be running the showÉand how!
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