On Wednesday, the Bristol fringe festival will be taking place. The event was hastily arranged by venues and promoters in parallel with the official BBC 6 Music festival, where Roni Size and Tricky are scheduled to play, presumably as Banksy and the rest of us one-toothed yokels glug cider from a brown paper bag.
In the five years I have lived in Bristol, my perspective on the city’s musical heritage has changed, and I doubt I’ve even scratched the surface. Within a few months of moving here, a friend and I set up a record label – Howling Owl – and now, the thing that keeps us motivated is the perpetual flow of new music and sense of risk. It’s a place where progression is key and genres and “scenes” happily splice with one another, creating beautiful hybrids that get discovered five years later – by which time the next future has already been cut on to a dub-plate. I’m not going to gush about the city as there are enough sponsored “best places to live in the UK” polls driving the house prices up already, but it is one hell of an audiovisual treat.
At the fringe music festival, music, comedy, art, screenings, workshops and more will bubble through the city for several days and nights, from 12-14 February. Over a dozen venues will be showcasing over 200 acts, and while it’s impossible to cover everything in a few hundred words, especially with such a diverse lineup, below are a handful of personal highlights you can attend for free (four of which you can find on our Howling Owl stage, and are the artists who I would have chosen regardless, hence why we asked them to play!).
The list of all of the participating venues and performing acts is available here.
Young Echo Sound
Perhaps the best example of “what this is all about”. This is an 11-strong collective of boundary-pushing producers whose incursions into dub, bass, drone, grime, noise and techno have sent a fresh charge through the UK’s musical landscape. Their endless list of monikers and projects include Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ossia, Ishan Sound, Jabu and El Kid among many others. Young Echo are the future.
Giant Swan
One half of Bristol mainstays the Naturals (a band who formed 11 years ago, at the age of 12), Giant Swan are an embryonic, shapeshifting duo who use their guitar-pedal boards as a cauldron to stir up hot bursts of twisted dance music, infused with jah-blissed noise, guttural lurches and mangled guitars.
Repo-Man
Frenzied, sax-drenched post-punk with a frontman insistent on bundling you into the back of the Repo-mobile. Tracks from their recent album Minesweeping will cause you to take cover as their visceral observations smash through the windows.
Wenonoah
Raw honesty channelled into pop. Sometimes dark, sometimes peaceful, sometimes funny but always essential. Wenonoah explores change and desire, transformation and stagnation, survival and embodiment. Live, she stuns to silence.
Boofy/Lemzly Dale/Hi5ghost (Sector 7)
Sector 7 is a rising, Bristol-based grime label formed by the formidable trio featured above. Although every year is supposed to be the one in which grime breaks through, it really doesn’t matter when artists like these have been firing on all cylinders for years.
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