Blood Ceremony’s distinct style of flute-tinged witch rock evolves from an infernal marriage of occult inspired acid folk and vintage hard rock riffing.  After a mind-numbing study of hundreds of witchcraft themed films, the group began to pour their energies into crafting songs, transforming their fascination for horror into a profane musical vision.

Invoking the mischievous Pipes of Pan, Blood Ceremony songs are distinguished by singer Alia O’Brien’s alluring flute solos, accenting an instrument long-associated with a list of devilish figures.

A celebration of Euro-horror, ’60s saturnalia and occult miscellanea, their self-titled debut album was mixed by Billy Anderson and released by Rise Above Records in 2008. Following this they completed a successful European tour alongside Brit doom legends Electric Wizard.

Blood Ceremony finished recording their second album ‘Living With The Ancients’, working alongside producer Sanford Parker in Chicago. The album displays a definite improvement in songwriting skills and a strong musical maturity. Wider influences from obscure areas can be heard fluctuating beyond the more obvious comparisons associated their aforementioned 2008 debut.

http://www.myspace.com/bloodceremony

Sally

Altogether more experimental, their ultra-heavy guitar rock owes more to the psychedelic world of Sonic Youth and Mudhonev than anything intrinsically metal. This is the ultimate in head music, cupping your brain and lifting it into the clouds before dragging it down an alley and kicking the crap out of it. C-Earth is a heavy and oppressive pressure wave. Heavy and hypnotic. Billy Anderson’s production drenches everything in a nice layer of mud, which suits the grimy, semi-liquid nature of the sound perfectly.

Battles fans, rejoice! Gloss Drop, the year’s most hotly anticipated record, is almost with us. Featuring guest appearances from Gary Numan, Matias Aguayo and Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, get ready to fall in love again.

Capsule are excited to announce that Battles will be visiting Birmingham during their extensive worldwide tour.

Here’s footage from when they played back in 2007:

http://bttls.com/

Young Montana? With an exhilarating new style that is raising the bar for sound collage artists to an unheard-of altitude, Young Montana? chops beats into being on a hypercolor canvas that is saturated with soul and lit with innovation.

Few producers can make music this multidimensional that is also fun on the dance floor, but 20 year-old Young Montana? works both the technical and psychological sides of the beat with equal finesse. Combining the rich hues of nostalgia from manipulated samples with futurized beat magic and an avant-garde style, Young Montana?’s experimental hip hop is smartly structured and swung out through a warm haze of grime, soul, folk, and glitched-out machinations.

http://youngmontana.com/

Emeralds are an ambient / drone / psychedelic music trio from Cleveland, Ohio, United States.

John Elliott, Mark McGuire and Steve Hauschildt, as Emeralds, focus on live improvisation.Since June 2006, the group has released over fourty recordings, on labels such as Hanson Records, American Tapes, Manhand, Ecstatic Peace! and also on their own imprint Wagon.

They have collaborated with Aaron Dilloway on the cassette Under Pressure, released a split tour CD with Japanese noise musician Pain Jerk and opened for Throbbing Gristle in New York. The band has also had the pleasure of performing headlining spots in Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun Fest in New York and Stockholm, Sweden. Mark McGuire and Steve Hauschildt also perform and record under their own names. John Elliott performs as Outer Space, Imaginary Softwoods, Lilypad, colored mushroom and the medicine rocks, and as various other aliases.

Emeralds are noted for blending ambient music with 80’s synthesizer textures, German kosmische music and the minimalism of Terry Riley.

http://www.last.fm/music/Emeralds

Iron Fist of the Sun
Bitter cold contemporary power electronics/industrial that steers clear of the cliches that pollute the scene. Synth heavy and tonal, drawing inspirations from electro-acoustic academia as much as underground black metal.

http://www.myspace.com/ironfistofthesun

Mr Underwood fuses an array of electronic and acoustic sounds in his
improvised live performances. Drawing inspiration from electronica and
Musique concrète, Mr.Underwood weaves a complex sonic tapestry, from
delicate and intricate sounds to more beat driven compositions. Using his
ever growing collection of obscure and self-made instruments Mr.Underwood’s
live performances are rich with distinctive sounds and textures.
www.mrunderwood.co.uk

Poster by Bethan McKnight

Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, from San Francisco aided and abetted by many others. In their recordings and live performances from 1995, Matmos have used the sounds of:

amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, a bowed five string banjo, slowed down whistles and kisses, water hitting copper plates, the runout groove of a vinyl record, a $5. 00 electric guitar, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, rat cages, tanks of helium, violas, human skulls, cellos, peck horns, tubas, cards shuffling, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, electrical interference generated by laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions and balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones on a dinner plate, Polish trains, insects, ukelele, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room, dogs barking, people reading aloud, life support systems and inflatable blankets, records chosen by the roll of dice, an acupuncture point detector conducting electrical current through human skin, rock salt crunching underfoot, solid gold coins spinning on bars of solid silver, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal and the vagina, uterus, and reproductive tract of a cow, among other things.

For this performance the band will be joined by J Lesser, knowne for his unrepentant approach to sound creation.

http://brainwashed.com/matmos

John Wiese is an artist and composer from Los Angeles, California. His ongoing projects include LHD and Sissy Spacek, but is known for his collaborations with many artists as diverse as Sunn O))), Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Thurston Moore, No Age, Smegma, Kevin Drumm, Cattle Decapitation, and C. Spencer Yeh as well as his work as a solo artist. He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering Europe, Scandinavia and Australia as a member of Sunn O))), the UK as part of the Free Noise tour (a tentet including Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Yellow Swans, etc.), the United States alongside Wolf Eyes, and recently performed in the 52nd Venice Biennale with artist Nico Vascellari. While releasing albums on a variety of international labels, Wiese often releases work on his own label, Helicopter.

http://home.earthlink.net/~johnwiese/

CANCELLED – We’re very sorry to announce that this event has been cancelled, here is the statement from Elastic Artists –

“We are extremely sorry to announce that we have been forced to cancel
Blood Ceremony in Birmingham and the rest of the band’s scheduled UK
dates.This is due to a conflict in schedule with Ghost who had been due to
tour as a package with Blood Ceremony. We have tried everything we
possibly could to keep the shows on but unfortunately it has not been
possible owing to the complex logistics involved. Blood Ceremony will
be returning to the UK in the Summer of 2011”

But keep the date in your diary as we’re planning a Capsule party of some great Brum bands – you can’t hold back the grannies!

Blood Ceremony

Born out of an obsession with ’70s occult rock, Blood Ceremony’s music resurrects the spirit of groups such as Coven, Affinity, and Black Widow. After a mind-numbing study of hundreds of trashy witchcraft films, the group began to pour their energies into crafting songs, transforming their fascination for horror into a profane musical vision. Blood Ceremony is interested in musical sorcery, the members having made a firm pact dedicating themselves to the twilight world of saturnalia and occult lore.

Blood Ceremony plays a distinctive brand of flute-tinged witch rock. Early on, their sound revealed an infernal marriage of Black Sabbath and the manic piping of Jethro Tull. Eschewing the affectations of modern rock music, Blood Ceremony keeps it simple and heavy; yet their songs are tempered with strong, brooding melodies. This effect is enhanced by their use of the flute; an instrument once prevalent in progressive rock, but which is uncommon in today’s scene. Invoking the mischievous “Pipes of Pan,” Blood Ceremony songs are distinguished by singer Alia O’Brien’s energetic jazz-flute solos – accenting an instrument long-associated with a list of devilish mythic characters. Writing of Blood Ceremony’s situation in heavy music, NOW critic Jason Keller points out: “Once (the flute) enters the forum of heavy metal, there aren’t many other bands you can reference.” Although the tag of Heavy Metal may be a stretch, there is a sense of heaviness and funereal gloom in Blood Ceremony’s music, as well as a lyrical obsession with eldritch themes, that aligns them with much of traditional Doom.
http://www.myspace.com/bloodceremony

Ghost

Ghost is the name of a devil worshipping ministry that – in order to spread their unholy gospels and, furthermore, trick mankind into believing that the end is ultimately a good thing – have decided to use the ever so popular rock music medium as a way to achieve their ends.

Standing motionless and anonymous beneath the painted faces, hoods and robes which their sect demand, the six nameless ghouls of Ghost deliver litanies of sexually pulsating heavy rock music and romantic lyrics, which glorify and glamorise the disgusting and sacrilegious, with the simple intention to communicate a message of pure evil via the most effective device they can find: Entertainment. This is Black Metal at its most original and deceiving; compositions such as “Ritual” and “Death Knell” majestically weave their melodic spell of evil through the senses until the listener finds themselves utterly possessed and open to any diabolical suggestion.
http://www.myspace.com/thebandghost

Where better to spend your honeymoon than Birmingham? Wills (P-Willy) and Kate have picked their favourite local noise makers to celebrate their marriage in style.

Stinky Wizzleteat have cancelled their performance at this gig – apologies.

Bargepole

Earth are an American drone band based in Seattle, Washington, formed in 1990 by Dylan Carlson, Slim Moon, and Greg Babior; the band took its name from the first incarnation of Black Sabbath. Although they have played various styles of music, they are best known as pioneers of a minimalistic, long and repetitive form of heavy music known as drone. To a lesser extent their sound is referred to as doom metal. Earth, however, have little to do with metal in their current sound. Their early albums could be seen as a variation of the experimental doom-influenced metal of The Melvins.

Their music is beautiful and at the same time desolate featuring the sound of lonely highways, wide-open spaces and the occasional slide guitar. They are so far ahead of the pack it will take years for people to catch up with them. This is music to get totally immersed in; it’s melodic, powerful yet understated and reserved.
www.myspace.com/earthofficial

Lori Goldston’srestless curiosity and the adaptive sounds of her cello blur the lines of genre, time and geography. Her music reflects broad, layered interests and feelings, from fierce humor to focused chaos to hauntingly tender melancholy. Current projects include work with the experimental metal band Earth, and her bands Spectratone International, the Shifting Light and However; a score for Linas Phillips’s film “Bass Ackwards,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and live scores for several silent films, including a commission by WNYC’s New Sounds Live. Co-founder with partner Kyle Hanson of The Black Cat Orchestra, Lori is a frequent collaborator in dance, film and music from other disciplines. She has played with Nirvana, David Byrne, Cat Power, Earth, Mirah, John Doe, the Wedding Present, Laura Veirs, Secret Chiefs 3, Parenthetical Girls, TU, Larry Barrett, the Dead Science and many others. http://www.lorigoldston.com

Poster designed by Tom J Hughes

Filmed and editorially controlled by: Chris Needham 

UK 1992

Running Time: 50 mins

Recommended Certificate: 15

Home of Metal brings a slice of Heavy Metal to Flatpack Festival this year.

“The plot: Chris Needham, a 17 year-old Thrash Metal fan from Loughbrough who has been absolutely lacerated by the puberty stick, is about to play his first gig with his band, Manslaughter. The problem is, they’re complete rammel. Between their first painful attempts to stand musically upright and their debut gig, Chris takes the time to defend Metal and Youth, unleashes torrents of adolescent venom upon the Green movement, ‘old bastards’, vegetarians, ‘Chart Music’, organised religion, teachers, and Neighbours, conducts a relationship with his girlfriend in excruciating silence, gets hassled by Mr Taggart and His Amazing Shirt, and goes fishing.”

– Al Needham, Leftlion

During the twenty years since it was made for the BBC’s Video Diaries strand, In Bed With Chris Needham has become a cult artefact; not just for its wealth of quotable lines, but because it plugs you straight into the sensation of being a teenager at battle with the world. It’s also a window on life before social media, a reminder that TV producers once handed out cameras to young people without treating them as performing monkeys, and a testament to the power of metal. Unscreened for two decades – excepting youtube bootlegs – tonight we’re honoured to have not only the full original programme, but also Chris Needham himself in person and in conversation with Al Needham (no relation).

This event is presented in association with The Quietus.

Taylor Parkes on In Bed with Chris Needham