The weeklong programme at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts as part of this year’s Brighton Digital Festival is the most ambitious programme of contemporary electronic music to hit Brighton since the Loop Festival, almost ten years ago. The opening night (Tuesday 19th) ends a summer long collaboration between Warp Records veterans (and perennial totallyradio favourites) Plaid and Brighton born audio visual sculptor Felix Thorn. Felix’s Machines are visually stunning tactile sculptures built from layers of deconstructed acoustic instruments, toys and mechanical equipment.  Plaid have the ability to meld abstract electronic composition with physical and organic instrumentation. I’m looking forward to whirring, blinking, bleeping, living machines on September 19! 

Vicki Bennett’s People Like Us (Wednesday 20th), a double bill with extraordinary cellist and composer Oliver Coates, ‘began life on totallyradio’s forerunner - Brighton’s Festival Radio, as a show called Gobstopper in 1990, where Vicki re-constructed cut up ‘plunderphonics’ with audio cassettes.’ She has since released around 20 solo albums based on her radio sound collages broadcast on the grandaddy of freeform radio stations, WFMU in New York and her work has been seen at; Tate Modern, The National Film Theatre, The ICA, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre and at Sonar in Barcelona. Unlike many of her chin stroking contemporaries, there is always a mischievous and surreal humour to her performance. By contrast, Holly Herndon’s music (Thursday 21 September) is unashamedly cerebral. Music, voice, deconstructed samples, the laptop and her own image are integral in a quest to divine emotion in sound and vision at the cutting edge of technology coupled with an overtly political questioning of consumerism and the nature of personal and private space. The enigmatic Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, closing the festival (Saturday 23 September) is also unmissable and equally uncompromising, but unlike Holly, offers no manifesto, subtitle or explanation in his exploration of the synthesis between the “data of sound” and “sound of data.”  It must be seen, heard and felt - be prepared for an out of body experience, if you enjoy that kind of thing! 

Totally Radio will be broadcasting across the week with us – see more here: https://www.totallyradio.com