People Like Us & The Light Surgeons

The Festival kicks off this year with a journey through cinema coupled with consensual hallucination…

People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) will get the ball rolling with an audiovisual collage, The Library of Babel - inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story of the same name. Meticulously editing together film clips that span the history of cinema, PLU presents new narratives and pathways that flip traditional storytelling on its head.

Dreamlike and immersive, the performance layers music and visuals both recognisable and obscure. You’ll spot films you know, hear sounds that trigger memories or associations, but ultimately you’re better off giving yourself over and getting lost in the experience.

Not too lost though. Next up, pioneering audiovisual performance group The Light Surgeons take to the stage, with their new work The Consensual Hallucination - a highly improvised audiovisual experiment crafted in real-time using an archive of 16mm film loops. The film is a treasure trove of abstract footage and cult cinema built up in the 90s at club light shows and gigs and painstakingly recorded from various VHS video tapes.

The performance weaves together a fragmented, hallucinatory narrative, scored live with an equally surreal sonic journey through a collage of classic psychedelia, jazz, film soundtracks, early electronica, and library music. It's a celebration of all things analogue - embracing the happy accidents and wondrous collisions that can only come from working with physical material.

Throughout the night, Birmingham’s finest, DJ Sam Redmore will be providing a specially curated sample-based soundtrack encompassing hip hop, breaks, fusion, neo soul and more.

This is going to be a festival highlight for sure, starting as we mean to go on.