A SÉANCE FOR THE SUMMER
A day of arcana, caprices & wyrd waveforms with Rapid Eye Electronics Ltd., YOU&TH, Kemper Norton, R.dyer, Agnes Haus & the Séance DJs.
Date and time
Location
The Rose Hill
Rose Hill Terrace Brighton and Hove BN1 4JL United KingdomRefund Policy
About this event
- 8 hours
'Rapid Eye Electronics Ltd. was formed when three refugees from The Psychedelic Duelling Wars stumbled from that psychic wreckage to congeal in a studio/artspace in an abandoned glove factory at the outer edges of Yeovil, Somerset. R.E.E.L. represents an atavistic and spontaneous wing of the more considered and philosophical approach of their work in Hacker Farm, pHarmerz, Magnétophone, Assembled Minds and IX Tab.'
Being a hybrid entity of some of our ongoing playlist favourites and one of the Wyrd Wild West's most essential components, the firsthand witnessing of a live R.E.E.L. action has ranked high among The Séance's wants since their initial inception as an ephemeral audiovisual happening for the Supernormal festival a few years ago. Hosting this three-headed myth machine's first Brighton mission is the stuff of dreams.
'Bounces hazily from Coldcut collage to Terry Riley-adjacent trance keys to rural acid house to ...austere minimal synth.' The Quietus
https://zonawatusa.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-psychedelic-duelling
Elsewhere available as one of Desire Line and queer feminist art-punkers Slum of Legs, Maria Marzaioli's supreme violinery was first encountered by the Séance as a hypnotic component of The Academy of Sun's gnostic torch-prog sprawl.
Her expanding repertoire as YOU&TH finds her weaving the prima materia of field recording, electronic droneworks, improvised noise abrasion and violin into a gloriously uncanny latticework.
A long-standing live favourite and recurrent apparition on The Séance since our earliest transmissions, Kemper Norton's accumulating works stand as a peerless gazeteer of England's occulted history, encompassing half-forgotten children's songs and folk dances and the sunken lands, abandoned mines and anomalous phenomena of his native Cornwall. New album Tall Trees (and other tales) finds him turning his excavatory ruminations inward to the time-befugged spectres of clubs and dancehalls past.
'The music of Kemper Norton streaks across the ages like a tipsy beach-comber, enthusiastically and expertly skipping across time’s tide and handpicking an array of instruments, contexts and influences to form what he succinctly describes as “coastal slurtronic folk”. ' The Quietus
'The lexicon of unusual folk instrumentation, all traditionally English (presumably Cornish), but remarkable for its unearthly, non-Western scales, is tiled up and funnelled, swirling, through the matrix of electronic music.' The Wire
https://kempernorton.bandcamp.com/
R.dyer’s hermetically singular avant wonkpop posits them as a most beloved fixture of this parish’s seething DIY noise and song pantheon. 2023 album Small Victories is a recent parlour favourite, and their Rose Hill performance of the same year, utilising - if memory serves - looped vocals and rudimentary flip chart diagrams while dressed as an ice cream, was one of the most confounding and enchanting we have witnessed. We are delighted to have them participate in this Séance.
'Found sounds, synth, musical saw, saxophone, nose-flute, folk harp, household objects, and light up shoelaces to create looped performances which move from baroque-pop to mesmerising soundscapes via acapella lullabies and stories about dogs in trainers.' http://rdyermusic.com/home
'Kitchen-sink orchestrations, the macro-micro focus, the sense of a universe both galactic and mundane, not to mention the theremins, clarinets, microtonal slippage, and musical saws. R.dyer is convincing us, as well as themselves, that beauty is what gets us through, by actively making art to that end.' Freq
https://rdyermusic.bandcamp.com/album/little-victories
Agnes Haus is a Brighton-based audio-visual artist and composer creating synthetic, fractured audioscapes as well as visual work for sound-based artists. Their murky sonic explorations revolve around semi-autonomous analogue sound made entirely with modular synthesizers. The album 'Sequel' was released in 2023 on the iconic cassette label Opal Tapes - with a sophomore LP out early summer 2024 . Their live performances are 100% improvisational and beautifully erratic. Visually, Agnes Haus explores dark and surreal visuals and has shown their work on prestigious screens and stages at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Attenborough Centre for the Arts, EarTH, Dark MOFO Festival, and Sonica Festival among others.
It pleases the Séance mightily to have Agnes return for us after their hypnotic Solstice set.
“…spiraling synth tendrils take flight amidst a cloud of celestial drones.” - First Floor
“ There’s a bleakness infused through the whole cassette… This sense of glassy-eyed sinisterism births a feeling there’s an extra presence over your shoulder as something darker permeates the room. ‘Sequel’ sits in a tainted gothic electronic void.” - Foxy Digitalis
Near-weekly Séance channelings have occurred variously via the Repeater Radio, Slack City and Radio Reverb motherships for 15 years. Born from a series of all-day musical pub sessions in the mid noughties and named after the 1964 Bryan Forbes film Séance on a Wet Afternoon, each show is a digressive wallow in the astral hinterlands of esoteric pop, buried soundtrack treasure, new and old electronic grot, folk musics psych and trad, freeform misshapes, arcane dub effluvium, modern composition, covetable new releases and whatever else happens to be punching their ticket at the time.
When operating as a production unit The Séance has contributed tracks to A Year In The Country alongside remix work for various valued compadres. It will do some more of all this at some point once it pulls its finger out. Pete Wiggs is otherwise available as one third of Saint Etienne and Dem (aka James Papademetrie) isn't.
A full archive of shows can be found at www.the-seance.com