A brand new, completely unique event series lands in a vegetarian cafe basement in Bristol, with three tantalising live performances from three wildly different artists. With the city council circling the larger venues with later closing times, louder lineups and crushing overcrowding, the smaller, niche events like this also deserve to be heard.
‘The more ambient build up of the I Love Acid parties was my favourite part of them.’ explained Richard Wigglesworth, aka Tudor Acid, in a recent interview on London radio station, Threads.
He was discussing his involvement in the legendary party that friend Luke Vibert helped put on, and which he played at live on numerous occasions. This endearment towards the more experimental side of electronic music, before the hedonistic hecticism of post-midnight performances, has influenced Tudor Acid to extend this early segment of the night to a whole event. An event for the curious, for the people that eschew Facebook set-times. For the rovers and wanderers.
The result is ‘Electro Cafe’, an event being held at vegetarian Cafe Kino in Stokes Croft on the 25th October. Three performances, all of them live, from Tudor Acid himself, and two fellow exponents of underground experimental music.
Headlining the night is Meemo Comma, whose new album ‘Sleepmoss’ will be launched on the night with a live performance. This is a bold aim, to represent such an exact feeling with music, however Meemo’s debut album Depersonalisation did precisely that. By fusing tantalising textural sounds, near-yet-far vocal samples and warming drones, that strange, uneasy yet comforting feeling of depersonalisation was exactly what the music conveyed.
Second on the bill, after Tudor Acid is Xylitol. This 20-year long project of artist and actor Catherine Backhouse channels the eskibeat clicks and cold production of early grime, with more ethereal and melodic elements. I wouldn’t have ever classed early grime as ‘nerdy’ like I would have ‘Intelligent Dance Music’, until this project put the video-game sampling elements, chiptunes and almost binary rhythms of both genres in my face and asked me to tell the difference.
In a time where the same line-ups are being rotated on an almost monthly basis, where promotion is being homogenised, and everyone arrives after the warm-up acts, the defiance of events like this are good to see.
Much like the ambient build-up of the I Love Acid Parties, this is a relatively wholesome time-space to set the mood for the rest of your weekend, however hedonistic that may turn out to be.