Friday 22nd December | 7pm | £12 advance tickets
An evening of crepuscular folk and empyrean soundscaping to greet the Yule.
empyrean relating to heaven or the sky.
crepuscular resembling or relating to twilight.
Featuring Penelope Trappes (free range nocturnes with a stygian bite), Pefkin (slowly unfolding psychedelic hymnals), Agnes Haus (modular improvisation and post-industrial murk), Sairie (enchanting songcraft with an undertow of ivy-choked melancholy), plus The Séance DJs.
Australian born Penelope Trappes’ spiralling ouvre applies electronics, cut-up vox, found sound and misused noisemaking apparatus towards a constantly mutating latticework of non-linear ethereal wraith canticles imbued with a stygian heft. Phantom choirs, maelstrom crescendos, low-end depth charges and the unlike may all be encountered within.
Pefkin is the nom de plume of Gayle Brogan, available elsewhere in thunderously acclaimed Scottish wyrd/freak/drone/whatever-folk duo Burd Ellen alongside Debbie Armour. Combining zither, vocals, violins, salvaged stuff and field recordings, Pefkin sets are a thing of oneiric wonder which have garnered apt comparisons to Coil, Popul Vuh and Nico and make for excellent viewing if trawling YouTube in those later and stranger hours.
Agnes Haus is a Brighton-based audio-visual artist who creates experimental music videos and live visuals for sound-based artists along with synthetic, fractured audioscapes. Agnes’s sonic explorations vacillate between ELpH-like experiments in semi-autonomous modular improvisation which - by both accident and design - have been known to stimulate all seven chakras in even the most casual listener, and the markedly more punishing post-industrial murk of Isolating; their additional recording persona.
Central to Sairie’s unique and beautiful thing is their repertoire of remarkable interpretations of songs ancient and not so; up there - further up, even -than those of a Trader Horne, a Trees or th’Span in their Please To See The King prime. Psych-folk revivalist retro flourishes aren’t relied upon mind, just starkly enchanting songcraft executed with an ever-present undertow of ivy-choked melancholy.
What others say…
PENELOPE TRAPPES - ‘Like bare bones interpretations of This Mortal Coil or Julee Cruise, all gothic romance and celestial mystery.’ (The Wire)
PEFKIN - ‘A kaleidoscope of imagery and holy mystery. Album of the year contender.’ (Terrascope)
AGNES HAUS - 'Fractured electronic landscapes (which) construct painterly images both euphoric and beautifully harrowing.’ (Beats Per Minute)
SAIRIE - ‘Their haunting style retains the English folk tradition nurtured by Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins.’ (The Wire)
THE SÉANCE - 'Thrillingly eclectic.' (The Guardian)