Bristol New Music Festival: Ghost Dubs / Emptyset / Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor / Frankie and Kelman Duran (live at The Lantern)

Bristol
25 April 2026

Someone’s got their curator chops on. The people on the bill tonight feel like threads from the same dark bass wagon; they don’t necessarily sound alike (although they share a sympathy for low tones and steel beats), but they feel like they are parts of a wider subliminal zeitgeist.

They are conceptually aligned, as if they’re different kinds of aliens trying to follow a pattern they don’t quite understand. As a series of events in the dark cave of The Lantern Hall — which has a vaguely Masonic, perhaps Wheatlean, aesthetic — they feel like chapters in a story. It makes sense that they are playing separately, but together.

I get there ever-so-slightly late, right in the middle of a beautiful cello drone from Frankie, as Kelman Duran surrounds their keening drift with their own squiggle and waveforms. It’s very dark, just a blue-light, almost Lynchian tinge to the stage. Frankie lures us into false sense of security — we’re being eased into the night — and then, suddenly, there’s a  single literally arse-quaking bass note, perhaps accidental (I hope so; accidents is where all the best stuff happens), which makes everyone in the room jump.

This is not a drill; some people actually jump, myself included. It’s here that we get a sense of the immensity of the sound system at The Lantern — those of us who remember the old Dead Name Hall probably remember its shitty soundsystem, especially for electronica, but there’s been a very significant upgrade since then. Throughout all the sets, the artists occasionally throw out some furious bass bludgeons and it hits you in all ways: bass that lets you count your ribs.

As the set moves on, Frankie alternates between cello and song, and there’s a sort of slow and fractured pop emerging, not dissimilar in places to bands like Lamb. It’s a good start, though I’d have liked the vocals to be louder, because Frankie has a great voice for dark nights and was occasionally drowned out when Kelman kicks in.

Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor’s set starts before they do. There’s a woman in the audience, galloping around, perhaps insane. You see her as a blur in the dark, chasing invisible tails, hopping up and down like she’s summoning something cold and wet. Then she climbs up on stage and we realise this is Cara Tolmie.

She commences a strange kind of auto-suggestive singing which reminded me of Meredith Monk as Rian Treanor tries to find the right bass and drones and tinkle to help her along. These two work well together; they find each other’s strange groove and run with it telepathically. Sometimes Rian seems confused, sometimes he takes his time before settling on a way to work his music into the cracks opened by Cara’s aphasic singing, but this is what gives their music a quietly perverse kind of majesty.

Does he know what she’s on about? I hope not; this feels like some form of aural cadavre exquis, and is definitely either Dada or Surrealism inspired. You can imagine these two as a modern-day André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba, rendering their unconscious creativity into what could almost be a revue. Beguiling stuff. It all gets particularly weird when it seems like the music is coming from the front, the sides and from above.

Emptyset play in almost pitch darkness with a minimal light show following the music like miniature UFOs, blasting us from above. They might be up there, they might not be. It doesn’t matter because their music is like huge shards of iron passing across each other in a pitch-black desert. It’s the kind of music you might imagine some Leviathan making as it makes itself known.

In the break I end up talking about the shape of music and synaesthesia, and this music is all angles, like a bag of elbows. There’s no curl, no curve. In the near-black of The Lantern it is music that punishes, beautifully; waveforms returned to their primal state. This is not to say that it’s particularly jagged music, just that you can’t imagine it being made of anything other than yellow-grey slabs of sound, sliding across each other and causing long shimmering vibrations that hang in the air.

It’s music for the body more than the mind and, paradoxically, it renders the body inert; an empty desiring machine, happy to be pummelled into submission. On record, Emptyset allows you to quietly get on with things, but live you are forced to confront their music, to withstand it, to give in. The lights burn your retina; quite a few times I just stand with my eyes closed and submit.

After this, I suppose Ghost Dubs is on a hiding to nothing. He takes some of the soundworld from the previous artists and tries to coax it into something approximating ‘dance’ music. It works well enough, and I have a little dance, but it feels like a baby compared to the music before. It tames the bass and echo a little too much and it suffers from its insistence on making things less weird.

To these ears, I would have liked the music to have flown a little further (back and faster). It seems a little considered, maybe even a little polite in this company. You can see that this music is palatable in more contexts that the stuff that preceded it, you can see how someone might decide to just put it on, and let it do its thing; but tonight this isn’t enough.

-Loki-