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Arnolfini - est 1961


AV sets in a cinematic environment from three exciting electronic projects who each escape the restrictions of genre and draw on the rich legacies of both underground club music and precision sound production to produce complex, conceptually driven, twenty-first century forms of subterranean techno.

Emptyset will perform a new live show with visual artists; Raime perform with an intense new audio-visual live show based on their forthcoming full-length for London’s Blackest Ever Black label, Quarter Turns Over a Living Line; finally, Bristol’s sonic explorer Bugbrand, who has generated intense excitement with powerful recent live modular synth shows in support of Bass Clef and others, produces a bespoke set.

Raime are an enigmatic London-based duo seeking to re-establish electronic composition as a physical and emotionally inquisitive force. To date, over three sold-out EPs released on and a select string of imperious live outings (including at Sonar as watched by Aphex Twin, a pronounced admirer of their work, and dates with the likes of Hype Williams and Cut Hands), Raime have honed a shadowy aesthetic all of their own, weaving vast waves of sound, both beautifully intricate and artfully industrial, around gut-shaking rhythm cycles. Raime draw explicit inspiration from the marginal mavericks of early European goth, minimal dance and synth wave – artists largely omitted from the current master narrative of post-punk history, who strove to make music at once cerebral and visceral, futuristic and atavistic. Tying this to sonics and textures worthy of future music field leaders from Shackleton to Sandwell District (whose Regis remixed This Foundry from the debut EP), they prove themselves expertly versed in the language of subterranean club music, while rejecting its typically rigid sequencing and arrangements.

Emptset is a Bristol based production project formed in 2005 by James Ginzburg, director of the Multiverse studios and network of labels and the curator and electronic artist Paul Purgas. The project explores the legacy of analogue media, integrating aspects of rhythm, signal processing and spatial recording within the framework of minimalist composition. Their work interrogates the perceptual boundaries between noise and music and the potential for both technology and architecture to embed and codify themselves within sound. Through collaborations with visual designers they have extended their work to explore the potential interactions between sound and image, reflecting upon structural film and video techniques and addressing the evolving relationship between old and new media. Their output includes Demiurge, their second studio album, and the 2012 release Medium, recorded live in Woodchester Mansion in Gloustershire. Emptyset have presented live performances at Sonic Arts XIV, Mutek and Berghain and are currently developing a release for the raster-noton label as well as a sound installation for the Architecture Foundation in London.

Bugbrand is a Bristol-based designer and inventor of modular synthesizers with a cult international reputation. He has a long pedigree as a producer and live performer and, increasingly intrigued by the rhythmic sound-worlds of certain lauded Bugbrand users, is currently developing a powerful and ever-evolving Detroit-inflected experiment on self-built synths chained to vintage drum machines. Fragments circulating online, cut out from hundreds of hours of improvised explorations into a complex and unclassifiable strain of techno, as well as recent live modular performances with Bass Clef and others, have rightly caused jaws to drop.

Visionary Kingdom

Across four evenings, the Visionary Kingdom programme presents a spectrum of incisive contemporary live music, film and performance from established talent and fast-rising names from the underground.

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Season pass £20/£18 concs