AM: Space Afrika, John T. Gast, Ossia +++ More at Strange Brew
Headfirst Editor's Pick

"Monumental gathering of outer orbit bassheads from the subtly dubby technoscapes of Space Afrika to John T Gast and Ossia’s industrialized powersteppas to the always always ALWAYS essential junglist ruffige of Anina & Guest. Essential doesn’t cut it….."

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A clubnight held at Strange Brew on Friday 15th April. The event starts at 20:00.


Space Afrika (Live)
John T. Gast (Live)
Ossia (Live)
Elijah Minnelli (Live)
Guest
Anina
i-sha

8 pee em until 4 ay em

Accidental Meetings

With their slow-stepping, spacious urban dubscapes, Space Afrika harness ambient, Detroit techno and shades of early nineties Sheffield with a fresh and open approach to composition — this is dub techno stripped-down, sealed in a time capsule and sent back from the near future. Driving, echo-laden deep beats form the bed for a heavily subaquatic sound palette with undercurrents of cybernetic dread.

Friends for almost 2 decades, the two Joshuas formed Space Afrika after years of listening to music together, sequestered by harsh Northern winters. Heavily inspired by the industrial architecture of Northwest England and notions of travel, their sonic framework evokes images of rust and disintegrating concrete, and sensations of movement and redemption — exuding a distorted analogue soul offering escape into their overcast skies. Closely associated with Brighton/London label, Where to Now?, who slink along a vintage axis of post-punk, On-U Sound, minimal and no wave influences, Space Afrika's diverse and creative radio shows (notably their residencies on NTS and Reform Radio) also display a breadth of curiosities in experimental and avant-garde music, old and new.

Dealing with John T. Gast is a little frightening because it’s like dealing with nothing. Typing his name in the search engine is much the same as leaning over a cliff. We hardly know anything about the British producer, if in fact he is British at all. If we walked past him in the street, we wouldn’t recognise him because there are no images of him on Google and his Instagram profile is private. It feels like he doesn’t really want us to get to the material that he has been releasing whenever he feels like it since 2015. In fact, we know him more through other artists with who he has worked with: the fact that he is a close friend of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, the two geeks who formed Hype Williams, says a lot about his take on music. But what is most startling about John T.Gast is not that we know nothing about him, but when we listen to his glitched productions, full of unknown sounds coming from nowhere, we realise that we don’t know as much as we thought about ourselves either. Would we ever have known we liked them if he hadn’t created them? Now that is frightening.
Ossia's sound world is an amalgamation of heavy-weather, beyond-good-and-evil soundsystem poetics, channelling raw and rootical techno, isolationist abstraction, and dub at its most turbulent and raw-nerved and space-time-warping.
Through running a range of record labels and being a member of Bristol’s Young Echo Sound, he has amassed a wide knowledge and in-depth understanding of music that informs his own skewed, futuristic drenched-in-dread aesthetic and his unhinged take on soundsystem & club music.

Entry requirements:

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