Sunday 19th February | 7pm | £14 ADVANCE TICKETS / Concessions/Unwaged £8

Wow this one is a BIGGIEEEE!!! None other than the mechanical AV wizard

PIERRE BASTIEN

“A mad musical scientist with a celebrity following” by The Guardian.

Pierre Bastien is utterly unique. Sitting somewhere between music and visual art his shows have been described as “a timeless sounding orchestra, both futuristic and slightly dada, conjuring ancient traditions in its surprisingly sensuous music.”

He has a vast array of previous collaborators: fashion designer Issey Miyake, singer and composer Robert Wyatt and Aphex Twin (who released three of his albums on his label Rephlex) to name a few, and is one of the most influential experimental musicians working in the field.

Bastien plays his ‘Mecanium’, a heath robinson-like contraption build from meccano parts and powered by motors taken from old record players which activate gears and pulleys. Its bows, drumsticks and plecturms produce sounds that could be African drums, Indonesian gamelan or a thumb piano, kora and harmonium playing with a violin.

Yet Bastien’s bizarre contraption is more than just a hotchpotch of seemingly incompatible instruments: a mecanium performance is a complex, emotinally charged affair. This fragile, home made orchestra executes elaborate and strangely moving symphonies, while the miniature pulleys and levers cast giant shadows on the wall behind them, and Bastien himself sits amid his mechanised instruments accompanying them on trumpet, violin or musical saw. Unmissable.

Support from bonkers cornet aficionado :

LOUIS LAURAIN

Cornet, bird calls, percussions

Spell binding solo cornet player who uses extended-techniques-and-squeaks : from bird calls to DIY mutes to hyper rhythmic screeches to create a wild and sometimes startling solo set.

He has an upcoming record on the way, recorded in collaboration with Olga Kokcharova in the french Alps. The idea is to carry out a sound mapping of the different acoustic spaces of a mountain. The record will be called Le Bargy, the name of the mountain.