Bristol New Music Festival 2026: Orcutt Shelley Miller / Cole Pulice (live at Strange Brew)

Bristol
22 April 2026

Strange Brew is a great place and I’ve spent more time there the over the past two years than any other venue. It’s packed out for this; three legends of American underground music are playing in the opening gig of this year’s Bristol New Music Festival, supported by Cole Pulice.

Cole Pulice begins the show with a shimmering drone. Signal-processed saxophone begins, slow and unfolding. Trailers of digitally compressed, fog-grey echoes act like benevolent ghosts around the saxophone, which sounds to these ears like Pharaoh Sanders spilling into a late-night jazz club. And this is how it mostly goes, arresting but never fully flying; this is gentle music in the main, music for guys and dolls in suits and cigarette smoke, music that perhaps needs more darkness and smog than 2026 can give it.

Other than a beautifully dissonant, almost Jajoukaesque interlude where the saxophone is swapped out for an electronic wind instrument that may be a clarinet and briefly swirls us off to a clifftop in the Rif Mountains, this is music, appropriately, for beginnings. Cosmic music at the beginning of the Universe rather than its end.

At times, as the guitar starts picking out gentle motifs, I am reminded a little of Calexico and there’s even a strange, otherworldly and cosmic hint at the “The Star-Spangled Banner” in one of the tracks. I could be imagining, but I’m hoping that’s partly the point.

If Cole Pulice is music for beginnings then Orcutt Shelley Miller pick things up immediately right in the middle, flying immediately out of the traps with a playful glee. They all seem to be having a great time, especially Steve Shelley who is hitting his drums like he’s found a fun way to defeat Fascism and can’t dare stop.

You hear incendiary a lot in reviews and press releases, but their opening track exemplifies the we’re setting shit alight approach and you feel you’re immediately witnessing a trio that know exactly what they’re doing and how to do it. It feels incredibly controlled for such chaotic music; these guys have spent a lot of time honing their craft and as they slide in between the gaps in each other’s playing, you feel that – despite everything – their ears are still pin perfect. The lead passes from one to another in a very fluid way – sometimes the bass drives things, sometimes the drums – but always Bill Orcutt’s guitar is waiting to fly.

It’s not all incendiary. There are passages where they could almost be (what I imagine) The Grateful Dead are like whenever they were good – I’ve still not really got to grips with when or where that might be, but I’ve heard good things. Sonic Youth are referenced too and it’s not just in the drums. Some tracks begin in a chiming Youth-like way, building slowly before spinning off into their strange American shapes.

In fact, strange American shapes is perhaps what all of this evening is about; this all feels like music that couldn’t have come from another country. It is cosmic and dusty, like a long road across a desert. It is windblown music, or rather music than rides into the storm until, disorientated and windblown, you find yourself in the eye. It feels like big country music. Bill Orcutt, Steve Shelley and Ethan Miller take as on a road trip and, viewed as an entrance point to Bristol New Music festival, it sets things off beautifully.

-Loki-