QWAK club & TOUGH SELL come together to present... a perfectly packed evening, elegantly lurching from experimental film -> radical performance -> wildly engrossing music.

Gentle Stranger 

We’re beyond elated to be hosting this London-based “post-clown” music trio for what will inexplicably be their Bristol debut. All multi-instrumentalists, Alex McKenzie, Tom Hardwick-Allan, and Josh Barfoot are riddled with enough chameleon-like talent to pull together free jazz, emotive folk, pop hooks, drone, noise, noise rock and some genuinely funny antics into deranged but seamless live shows. At a festival we attended last year, they very literally had the room laughing one minute and in floods of tears the next. Seeing them is a must for those in need of an emotional diuretic (or y’know a nice time).

You may recognise members of Gentle Stranger from other projects: Shovel Dance Collective, Caroline, or the new long-time in the making Search Engine Quartet. Despite being so busy, they've managed to release an album a year since 2020, with the brand new LP 'Inner Winter' being album of the week at The Quietus. That album may throw you - we're expecting them to be doing something quite different to that record as they storm the Cube! 

Futurist Bags

Adam Davenport and Neil Campbell (/Astral Social Club) of Leeds’ near-legendary psych-noise-drone ensemble Vibracathedral Orchestra in collaboration with the "totally fresh" Paul Conrad. 

Futurist Bags take the rhythmic electronic pulse of ASC and passes it through a psychedelic, almost acid house variant on Vibra’s Fourth-World outer voyaging. Generated through a hybrid set-up of electronic devices, repurposed instrumentation and home-made equipment, Futurist Bags’ music is a joyous, sprawling, highly-coloured soundscape radiating kaleidoscopic space 'rock', burbling electronics, cosmic mutant-jazz and pure noise.

A cornerstone of the UK weirdo underground, Campbell’s long musical history stretches back to the early 1980s and the days of postal tape-swap sheets. Forever restless and inquisitive, he has had recent collaborations with the likes of Richard Youngs, Territorial Gobbing, Oren Ambarchi and Helena Celle.

Listen Here

Moa Johansson

moa johansson (UK/SWE) is a queer interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of Live Art, dance & textiles. In the context of intersectional queer ecofeminist reading, moa investigates theories concerning the body, ephemerality, materiality and spatiality. Interested in limitations as possibilities, they often use found or recycled objects/material as a starting point for their material-enforced, task-informed work. Their performance is reactionary and reliant on the active liveness, reactionary to the audience’s response and movement within the space. 

moa has presented work in gallery spaces, performance venues and festival contexts across the UK and Europe including Fierce Festival, Humber Street Gallery, Tempting Failure, Summerhall, Moderna Museet (SWE) and SLUG Gallery (GER). 

We have no idea what Moa’s cooking up for this performance! Expect something entrancing, or tickling, or bemusing, or any combination thereof.

Vicky Smith

Artist film maker and academic who has worked in experimental animation and 16mm film for 30 years and has screened work internationally in galleries and at festivals. Vicky was part of the London Film Makers Co-op, has a PhD in experimental film, is a member of artist collective Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) and lectures at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.

Vicky will present recent 16mm work that deals with the role of tactility in processing memory and loss, as well as ideas relating to the practice of superimposition in an economy of exposure. 

To include: 

Not (a) Part (2019) 5’. B&W. optical sound // Re:exposure (2021) 8’. B&W. optical sound // Screen Tests (2021) 3’. B&W. silent // Self portraits 1-2 Shedding; Spinning (2023) 4’ B&W silent

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DJ'ing in the bar from the one and only Noel Gardner (Quietus / The Wire etc) before and between the auditorium acts, following live acts, Benny Dart plays a set of leftfield folk bangers, plus a PALM OIL set that you can dance to, LIVE in the bar @ midnight. Entry to the bar only is FREE! Come and dance your January blues away!

Tickets:
Standard price £13
Concessions (unwaged/low income) £8
** Please note the cheaper concessions tickets are limited. **