Colour Out Of Space International Experimental Sound and Music 9

Various venues in Brighton and Hove
17 – 19 April 2026

A hefty ole’ weekend of experimental music. And what’s more, a works social for a lot of people from around the place. And perhaps we could say, something of a state-of-the-nation for people occupying a particular spot on the experimental music map.

My apologies upfront for the people I missed — it being a social weekend and my being knackered from the previous week I didn’t make it to a decent amount of stuff. Our fearless documenter Agata Urbaniak, however, made a fair fist of seeing pretty much everything – her photos are here and her videos here.

Friday kicks off with something predominately quiet from Jo Morrison — brings to mind the word ‘unhurried’. The visual performance is, as they say, on flick and her wee textural devices (including some kind of autonomous plastic bag-cum-jellyfish thing) are entirely charming. Theatrics arguably belie a keen sense of texture and there’s a lush moment where a mic’ed-up amp playing white noises gets turned upwards off-mic for a great bit of tension shifting.

Adam Buffington, by contrast, is largely stock still at a laptop and picks at one of the weekend’s themes — typically Colour Out Of Space is a home for a lot of sample-based music and this is a whistle-stop tour of mutated squelching loops. Marc Matter follows and was probably my highlight of Friday. By the culmination of a heavy build-up, samples are attacked and released at a terrifying old rate — like some otherworldly DMC champion or hyperpop (it seems he comes from a DJ background, so that makes sense).

Hexakaidecagon bring the vaudville free improv vibes next — on a middle-of-the-pit stage they’re scraping and slapping a range of metallic objects, many of which seem to be very kitchenly. It’s avowedly non-serious and isn’t a million miles from something like The Bohman Brothers, though perhaps more showbiz and less implacably absurd.

Absurd Cosmos Late Nite next and it’s largely a kind of satirical dialogue between the performer and some hypothetical Brighton wanker wittering on about booze prices and whatever auld shite. Very well researched considering he’s not a Brighton musician and a rare nod to the locale from performers at the festival. Fleshtone Aura next and more from the realm of tapes and samples. All on the slower side of things — plenty of wobble and a distinct patina of a melted chaotic radio from ye oldern times. A largely calming vibe, but enough oddness to unsettle out of the ever-tempting nap-space.

Hali Palombo rounds off the evening and it’s still largely sample-based, but by now the layers are deeper and the timbres are thicker and squigglier. She moves between ideas swiftly — loops have a rhythmic quality, but a density such that it’s not really something you’d want to dance to, except weirdly.

Saturday I crapped out of most things, as is typical for me — so apologies to the rotating improv and panel discussion at One Church, but I was limply flapping about in bed. I caught a smidge of Julian Weaver‘s installation which seemed to be an interactive phone-based set of weird samples — the tech was having a funny five minutes while I was there, but it definitely seemed to be pushing to a different direction of unsettling spacious clatter.

The evening’s performances kicked off with Shakeeb Abu Hamdan — arguably pushing the night from the realm of samples and into something more obviously ‘musical’ — his sounds seemingly coming from live sources. A real masterly control over using acoustic sounds — processing was often discrete but magical — plenty of times when it wasn’t clear what was live and what was processing, and the sense that, like a good magician, it didn’t matter how he was conjuring his sounds.

The Billa Ensemble brought the free improv vibes — a quartet of signal processing and guitar scribbling. Discontinuous and measured, players seeming to operate as one voice, plenty of drift and dynamic without ever threatening to spill into ‘jamming’. Now next was Alice Kemp and many people (including our aforementioned Ms Urbaniak) spoke of it as a highlight, but I was gassing at the bar like a dickhead. Check out the video of Agata’s though — the second ‘performative’ thing by the seem of things and looks terrifying. I’m sorry to have missed it.

Michael Barthel and Anna Schimkat followed and if they weren’t the first fully-composed thing they certainly were the most tightly controlled. Something of the John Cageian performance to it, but also touches of the codification of Cageian performance (think Lukas Foss) — dialogues and bird sounds and clashing whistles and all sorts. I’d say that this jumped out at me as possibly one of the most consummate performances of the weekend — possibly reflective of what I imagine is an academic background. Startling but spare.

Chik White was a great follow-up, inasmuch as he was fairly polarly opposite — some kind of absurdist blues performance, plenty of incoherent gurgles and sqwarks[/pullthis]. Not clear if he’s playing for laughs, but it was certainly fun — a sense that looking this reckless and unhewn takes a lot of care and attention (and style).

Augustė Vickunaitė after that and probably my highlight of the weekend. Proper concentration face. In the middle of the venue on the stage that Hexakaidecagon were on — back in the realm of tapes and samples, but this felt like something with a minimum of improvisation (clear to see that a lot of the tapes had various markings on them). Per se not a musical performance (if we separate tape music from music like that), but very clearly a tight grip on her materials and technology such that it felt like the most virtuosic performance of the weekend. Unhurried and gorgeous and with an ear for texture that I’ve not heard in experimental music for a time- – I wrote “Parmegiani” on my notes and I don’t write that lightly. Spellbinding.

Tongue Depressor closed off our Saturday at The Old Market and my fatigue was kicking in by this point. I don’t doubt I would’ve dug their spacious malevolence and vocal distention some other evening, but my head was looking for bed by this point. Hoping they come back soon because it definitely had less of a fractuous vibe than others today — and it looked somewhat more like a typical band than most of Saturday’s performers.

Sunday I once again crapped out and missed most of the afternoon performances (annoyed to have missed Marija Kovačević doing her broken violins bit). It looks from Agata’s videos that the church space’s acoustics made for a grand venue so yeah, more fool me.

Sunday evening was in one of those venues that I imagine most of the performers (with the exception of Aaron Dillaway) rarely get to — and probably more so in these straitened times of landlordism fucking up smaller acts. So there was a sense of validation that all of these artists deserved to be on bigger stages. A moment to shout out the festival organisers, in fact — while there were some acts who are probably used to somewhat professional environments, there was an equal number of people you can imagine playing those smaller and more informal venues, if not merely flapping about in their bedrooms.

It’s an important thing and a function of festivals like these that the organisers can throw more weight behind acts that, while ‘internationally known’, are not internationally well known (and, crudely, probably have second jobs). I’m hoping that we can get more of this next year.

As if to prove my own point, I’m fairly sure I’ve seen Ypsmael at Splitting The Atom, Brighton’s long-running weird music event that offers a free place to see acts ranging from the bright young things to the poorly-considered experiments (I say that as someone who’s done stuff very much in the latter category). We’re still in the realm of sounds from odd wee boxes, but the volume and textures are closer to your conventional noise territory. And not to be disparaging to Ypsmael, who has a tight control over feedback-y tones and difference intervals at a volume that made me grateful for my earplugs. A textural feast.

Suppwiyah does a grand job of seeming less loud while having a much more caustic approach to textures. I’m always fond of the haunted geiger counter sounds or the notion that subliminal remorse code is being deployed. Again a note to the organisers — while it’s difficult to pin down what unites the acts on each night, there’s a sense of complement and alike-ness to performers and putting people where they’ll shine. It’s possible Suppwiyah may not have appeared quite as imperative on a smaller stage — the big speakers really letting those textures go right through your teeth.

Shit Creek likewise may not have been so foreboding and large on (ahem) a smaller stage — I wrote “hyperpop by noise” in my notes and that makes sense. Big glacial dreamy tones and the faintest whiff of pop samples, but close enough to the noise world to keep the crowd engaged. I wanted to compare it to Carl Stone, but it’s a lot less sedate than that.

Given that The Concorde 2 is typically a rock venue, Zheng Hao was doubtless aggravating the in-house engineers — plenty of the sounds were exactly the stuff that’s cut out of the stock and trade. Sounds like broken cables and feedbacking devices and squeezed interference sounds. Discontinuous but tightly controlled — one of those where you suspect the performer is well in control of the narrative (especially where the maddening rhythmic loops were concerned), but that it’d be a nightmare to transcribe it (should you be so inclined).

Chop Shop was inscrutable visually — I’m not sure if I saw the performer at any point, and more times than not there was a microphone in the minimal spotlight. Difficult to say if the visual aesthetic pushed me to thinking that it was somehow a noise vision of black metal or a fractured view on harsh noise wall. It certainly wasn’t harsh noise in that a lot of the time textures were just left to grow, but it was also not so static that it ever turned into HNW. Given the output it makes sense that it’d be minimal visually — which adds to the fun of the emphatic textures.

CIA Debutante by contrast reminded me of something like Skinny Puppy or Brainbombs gone industrial; I was informed by a pal that it was probably more like Chrome or Suicide, which in retrospect is a better comparison — electronic keys and guitars with distorted vocals and a dogged sense of sitting in a texture or rhythm for a long time, vocals just too low in the mix to make out. It seemed very much like a rock band by this point, which is probably reflective of a weekend of gear-staring performers.

Having people standing and actually moving on stage — dare I say, guitar shredding (in a noisy way) — pushed it into contrast with the other acts. The Skinny Puppy comparison is probably because the vocals were often shredded in a different way (ie, distorted heavily). Actually also a bit like Alec Empire in his early 2000s solo guises that weren’t jazzy.

And finally Aaron Dillaway to close off the festival. Rightly headlining in several senses — a reminder that there are some acts who can make a living off of stuff that, in the ’80s, was exclusively a bedroom tape affair. If CIA Debutante drilled into a single area, Dillaway does a more gradual build — never quite to some harsh noise apocalypse, but plenty of explosions and sputters that punctuate the drones and burrs of his loops. By many estimations the act of the weekend (though personally I was half-asleep by this point) and certainly one of the more excitable and varied of the gear-on-table fiddlers.

So yeah — in summary: banging festival. I don’t want to miss out on the important social stuff — it was really heartening to see so many people as much interested in chatting to distant (and often online) pals as they were watching music. Largely the acts were new names on me (no surprise — I don’t follow this scene much) and all of them deserving of the larger stage. So big up the organisers to taking this stuff seriously and finding a way to make it happen in front of my literal face. Big up.

-Words: Kev Nickells-
-Pictures: Agata Urbaniak-