Fresh Thursday // New Ways of Moving in the Counterworlds + Brian d'Souza

Please note, the advertised start time is when our doors will open, generally music starts one hour after doors.

Fresh Thursday is a unique regular event that showcases new music alongside a home-cooked meal. For more information about how this event works please read the info at the bottom of this event carefully. Thank you. If you have a dietary requirement you can indicate it by selecting one of the free add-ons when purchasing your ticket.

Please note we are unable to offer refunds. You can click here to view our full refunds policy.

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New Ways of Moving in the Counterworlds

A vibrant collaboration between three artists drawing on spiritual jazz, deep listening, mercurial poetry and spontaneous improvisation, New Ways of Moving in the Counterworlds brings together the nimble violin-and-bass duo of John Garner and John Pope with the gracefully probing text of poet and author Nisha Ramayya. Exploring and celebrating the music of shared influences from Alice Coltrane and Fred Moten to Ahmad Jamal and Don Cherry, these three creators seek to bring their audience into a world charged with the thought-provoking, life-affirming potential of art and dreaming.

Garner and Pope’s long-standing partnership, built on years of playing and improvising together, serves as a flexible and dynamic setting for Ramayya’s sensuous poetry, which she performs, de-constructs and re-examines in the eruptive moment of performance. Formed in 2024 to perform at Newcastle’s esteemed Masala Festival, New Ways of Moving in the Counterworldsis an exuberant and timely celebration of connectedness, an artistic riposte of imperial narratives and a powerful hymn to love and resilience.

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Brian d'Souza

Brian d'Souza, also known as DJ Auntie Flo, has been experimenting with making music from plants and fungi for the past five years under the new alias 'Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing)'. He uses the plant biodata to trigger notes on his specially built modular synthesizer in a process called bionsonification, with the intention of bridging the gap between the natural world and electronic music realm. He currently runs the A State Of Flo label and substack, focusing on the biological basis for music, new ecosystems and the creation of acoustic ecologies.

As Auntie Flo, he recently released his fourth album 'In My Dreams (I'm A Bird And I'm Free)' which included the hit single 'Green City' - the follow up to the acclaimed 'Radio Highlife' released with Gilles Peterson's Brownswood. His nature based music has been featured on the BBC, 6Music, V&A, Discovery Channel, Tate, Glastonbury, National Trust and more.

Read more

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More about FRESH Thursdays...

FRESH happens every Thursday during our open seasons. It is a platform to bring you fresh new music served up alongside a homecooked plant based meal, board games and candles. It can be hard to get people out to hear music that they don’t know yet & this is why we decided to offer dinner as an incentive to try something new, these gigs are cosy, communal nights and often you get to hear completely new music for the very first time. The music varies across multiple genres but it is usually fairly gentle listening type music & well suited to a relaxed Thursday night. The gigs are seated and during the sets the audience is very music focused & quiet with time to chat in between the sets and at the end when we keep the bar open.

We cook the food from scratch usually and dinner is well suited to lover of vegetables and wholesome cooking, it's usually something like a dhal, veggie chilli, tacos, roast veg or similar, our base line is vegan sometimes with veggie options. We can cater for nut/gluten free meals, but nuts & gluten are used in the kitchen so if you have serious allergies please bear that in mind.

Doors at 7pm, we aim to get dinner ready by 8pm and will bring it to you when its ready… music usually starts around 8pm, sometimes later if it’s a busy night for food (we are a tiny team) and we aim to have the music finished by 10-10.15 pm. We can only guarantee dinner with advance tickets and these days we cap dinner at 60 meals and the food tickets do often sell out.

We hope/think it's obvious that quality music and dinner for £10 is all about culture & community and that these events cost us money… If you can afford to purchase a higher level ‘Cobalt supporters‘ ticket we appreciate the additional help towards costs very much.