Come all ye to the village of Pewsey in Wiltshire, home to all manner of bespoke festivities in its history no doubt. But forget everything you know about village fetes when it comes to Acid Horse, because this three-day kneesup in and around Pewsey’s Barge Inn will be a sonic dazzlement spanning rock, dance, folk, noise and things defying even those classifications. It will also be a convivial change to form friendships or revive old ones over pizza and good ale, so if that is your experience of village fetes you needn’t forget that bit.
Acid Horse, which debuted in 2023 and returned in ‘24, is the brainchild of The Quietus’ co-founder John Doran, in conjunction with Mark Pilkington of book publishers Strange Attractor Press. Two of Mark’s bands, Teleplasmiste and Hitiloma, will perform over the weekend; Hitiloma also feature John, and the duo will be joined by Conny Prantera as The Seer for what should be something heavy and ritualistic. It’s the kind of festival where the organisers are the performers are the audience. See the Matmos entry below for another example of that breakdown, plus nine more class acts who will be joining the merry American pranksters in Pewsey this May.
2rana 3crana
This is the newest musical endeavour of Jussi Brightmore, who’s done a big whack of bands and suchlike in Brighton and London and now lives in Portugal. It’s also his first time going out solo, I think, so it makes sense that the breathlessly upfront ballroom-gone-industrial sound of 2rana 3crana is the one which packs an aura most akin to the one Jussi does in person. Hectic, off the chart, born to entertain but not by taking the simple route there, flamboyant in a fairly imposing way, a real presence in a room. Acid Horse will be Brightmore’s first UK live set in this incarnation – he’s played some club sets at semi-private Lisbon raves, a scene which has inspired this sound considerably (think the Príncipe label), and at 2024’s Supernormal festival in Oxfordshire signed up to DJ in the Repeater radio hut, gave a mostly unsuspecting audience a USB set of his own productions and went down a storm. Should you want to hear those productions, 2rana 3crana dropped a two-track single on Bandcamp in mid-January, followed shortly after by the Olivine To Emeralds, Sceptre To Thunderbolt EP: 25 revelatory minutes of elegant slamming, as you’ll know if you’re a tQ subscriber and had this sent to you in exchange for your initial outlay.
Dawn Terry
A woman in thrall to the sonic and psychic power of the drone, across a few decades and in many musical arrangements, and one who continues to share those powers with the people. Dawn Terry, from northeast England, has most often flown solo since her most prominent band, fantastical space doom titans Bong, went on hiatus. The setup differs from Bong, certainly – Terry usually playing accordion and/or hurdy-gurdy instead of guitar, with little in the way of effects and prizing intimacy over volume – as do the themes, reflections on and celebrations of queerness and transness. But in this music, typically extended-length pieces where a quarter-hour stint is a relative pop song, is a continuing quest for oneness (if only for the time allowed by earthly restraints) and escapism from straight society. Its ancestry is found in American and European minimalism, folk music made from instruments which drone, and all manner of strange psychedelia and dungeon synth. Conversely, a cover of ‘Boys’ by Sabrina is also in the Dawn Terry songbook.
Haress
This band really were one to clasp to one’s bosom when they emerged in the late 2010s. For one thing, it’s good when bands are from places like Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, as Haress are – well, they moved there a few years before getting going in this incarnation, having done older bands in various and more populous English places, but David Hand and Elizabeth Still have brought goodness to the local area, such as this (quite Acid Horse-coded, I think) alldayer from 2023. The area has given much to them, too, and the slow, sparse, verdant rock-not-rock music found on Haress’ three albums to date hums with the determined singularity of rural living. On record, drums are played with mallets, cymbals reverberate into space, guitars are as inscrutably patterned as spiders’ webs and vocals, when they feature, have the blues in as abstract a way as the music, although the version of Haress playing Acid Horse is the core duo of Hand and Still. Comparison points might include unravellers of Americana tropes such as 75 Dollar Bill, The For Carnation or Enablers, who Haress toured with a couple of years back.
Matmos / Hit Em Live!
There isn’t really another live act that’s like Matmos in a meaningful sense. Two inveterate American experimenters with vastly-ranging tastes in music and other cultural forms, they could never be actually sui generis for that reason, but when Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt started playing sets in the mid-90s, they quickly began to establish a performance-based approach to computer-based electronic experimenting. That is to say, no proverbial checking of the proverbial emails. They work with clubbable rhythms and textures but prioritise the spontaneous human aspect of playing in front of an audience over any given attendee’s entitlement to dance to the perfect beat. There is wit, banter even, and high-culture elements recontextualized: the last time I saw the duo play, over a decade ago I regretfully realise, they sampled someone reading Eunoia, an incredible book of univocal poetry by Christian Bök. Since the last Matmos album, 2023’s Folkways Records-honouring Return To Archive, Daniel has invented a new musical genre in the most accidental way possible – a dream – and at Acid Horse, people will be invited to take part in trying to make its unfeasible parameters work as live sets. So that’s Hit Em Live!, where everything is “in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds”. Fancy it?
Milkweed
The four albums to date by London duo Milkweed – Remscéla, the fourth, will have been out for a few weeks by the time Acid Horse rolls round – have each taken a different esoteric text and adapted it in their own marginal folk image. It actually bears comparison to Matmos, in its steadfast commitment to a concept, though comes out sounding rather different. As recording artists, Milkweed use field recordings, primitive electronics and lo-fi intimacy, with the vocals coming over cracked and aged – the better for you to feel like their rural Americana twang was captured on a reel-to-reel 75 years ago or so. The pair’s aesthetic, if they have a definable one, is neither retrograde nor committed to pushing forward, rather collapsing comfortable definitions of time and place as much as possible. The lyrics of Remscéla, after all, are based on the stories of The Táin, an Irish saga dating from some unqualifiable part of the Middle Ages. Milkweed have been playing some of it in their more recent live sets, with immersive and theatrical (in a good way) results.
Oh Mr James
A seasoned and secretive producer of acid-flecked braindance hardware jams, with Welsh roots but found down in Cornwall. Oh Mr James is not the Mr James you might be thinking of thanks to my manipulative phrasing, but he certainly shares plenty of that cultural DNA, and is a sterling latterday exponent of that same 40-year ‘hypnotic beat-based electronic music’ continuum which some would say is the only thing to have put the Great into Britain during that time. OMJ cut his musical teeth around the Wrexham area in the early part of the millennium, raised as a rocker like many in those parts, but absorbed experimental tendencies, learning how to build modular synths in the process. He now lives in Falmouth, where he’s just one of plenty of people doing interesting musical things, and keeps his hand in as a live performer though his last release proper – seven-strong blissful rush Primer – was in 2019.
Regis
You’re looking at a DJ set from Karl ‘Regis’ O’Connor here, a Saturday night shutdown special to be exact, and in recent times that’s been what the Birmingham industrial techno pusher has chiefly shared with the world in this incarnation. Regis’ last new release proper, the Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss album, came out five years ago, though this spring also sees a new album by Sandwell District – a project put out to pasture over a decade ago after O’Connor and SD cohort David Sumner got the hump with one another, but revived partially in memory of sometime member Juan Mendez. As a result, Sandwell District are getting plenty of outings in early 2025, most often with Regis playing solo on the same evening, and so maybe offering greater opportunity to roadtest certain things for O’Connor. Notably, and as much as received/hackneyed wisdom tags him as a man shaped by the most glowering and mirthless post punk, EBM and noise – with a passing suggestion of being made from girders like Irn-Bru – there’s a wicked seam of humour to all Regis does, and a few tracks on that new Sandwell District that land in trippy 90s acid party territory.
Scotch Rolex
Shigeru Ishihara, for he is Scotch Rolex, is a man of the world. His music, 20 years’ worth of which now exists in that same world, is an implicit and sometimes specifically announced product of time spent in Tokyo (as a young’un), Brighton (where he met various mid-00s UK gabber/pop ne’er-do-wells and became DJ Scotch Egg), Berlin (where he escaped to in the 2010s, changing his name to DJ Scotch Bonnet and getting into the street food biz) and Kampala. Ishihara didn’t move to the Ugandan capital, but he did spend time there in 2019, as one of the many producers invited by the Nyege Nyege collective, and the residency has permeated everything he’s done since. The name change’s a cultural hat tip, for one – ‘Rolex’ here is a vegetable omelette and chapati wrap, as opposed to a watch – and on his debut release under it, 2021’s Tewari, Ishihara enlivens his cone-shredding trap/ noise/ bass/ dub/ ‘ardkore concoctions with vocal spots for some of East Africa’s finest, including MC Yallah and Lord Spikeheart. Two subsequent releases have both featured the co-production of Shackleton: 2023’s Death By Tickling and last year’s The Three Hands Of Doom, the third hand being Omutaba of HHY & The Kampala Unit.
Slav To The Rhythm
If the only immediate way of you experiencing the Slav To The Rhythm steez is their regular Repeater Radio shows, then you should certainly take that opportunity, because the dedication of the outfit to the excavation and rehabilitation of Eastern Bloc alternative pop is intense and immense. You should also know that their way with a DJ set in front of real-life jiggling bodies is on another level again, and as much as it might still function as a history lesson (I don’t know how Shazamable the stuff they play is, because I essentially believe the app to be witchcraft) its primary purpose is to soundtrack dancing with gay abandon. You will probably encounter driving post punk, rickety synth frostiness, disco for abandoned roller rinks and gloriously unsuccessful applications to enter Eurovision. STTR, from Brighton, are a trio: founding members Iris Baklava and Catherine Bunnyhausen (who also makes wicked jungle-adjacent music as Xylitol and indeed played Acid Horse ‘24 in that guise) plus newly added third wheel DJ Lofidelica.
Two Form A Click feat Phantasy
Another (don’t call it a) comeback to Acid Horse base camp here. Gretchen Aury and life partner in crime Sydney Koke are 100 per cent of Two Form A Click and 66.6 per cent of Tristwch Y Fenywod – who brought the house down last year before a Sunday set by Petronn Sphene, which is 100 per cent Gretchen. Since then, Tristwch Y Fenywod has become more popular than Welsh language gothic folkgaze most commonly does, and taken up plenty of their time; but like sharks, Gretch’n’Syd must instinctively keep moving, and so have jumpstarted the 2FAC format with the crucial addition of Phantasy, which is the duo of Cal and Aubrey, who comprise their favourite contemporary no wave / experimental / queer performance punk band of modern times. The core duo’s two cassette releases to date – I Lobe The Secular World and Backpfeifenphaseshift, both from mid-2023 – find them jumbling up deeply homemade electronics, dub technique, waspy drone and more-or-less-human vocal garble. The chance to see Two become Four should not be missed by any self-respecting explorer of subterranean space.
