The inaugural Spilt Milk Audio-Visual Festival will see three days of music, film and art around venues in Sligo town from 22nd-24th November. Bringing national and international artists alongside emerging local acts across a myriad of musical genres, Spilt Milk invites audiences to take a chance on something new.
In addition to the music strand, the festival will see a visual art strand featuring video installations, pop-culture inspired film screenings and a record & zine fair. A key tenet of the festival is to offer a genre-spanning celebration of homegrown musicians, producers and artists and engage with young people additionally.
Performing live at the festival will be a diverse assembly of new voices and musical propositions: this is superbly distilled by Ensemble Economique, the California-based musician Brian Pyle. His music is a multidisciplinary trip into the exotic unknown, deeply emotional and intense, moving seamlessly through sound-collage, dark noir pop, and minimal techno. The experimental trio Percolator masterfully navigate the spaces between subgenres, their sound laced with hypnotic motorik rhythms, Stereolab-recalling vocal harmonies and the miasmic ecstasy of shoegaze. At the other end of the spectrum are Landless who sing unaccompanied traditional songs from Irish, Scottish, English and American traditions in close four-part harmony. Further folk explorations come via Aoife Nessa Frances, a musician and songwriter who draws on 60 psychedelia and Rachael Lavelle who blends electronic soundscapes with elegant piano, found sounds, percussion and spacious, arresting vocals For fans of straight up post-punk, indie supergroup Grave Goods and youthful four-piece Problem Patterns have come out of the starting blocks with electrifying sets pushing the boundaries of what an alternative band should be. More out-there experimentalism comes from Sligo quartet Gulpt who skew the line between no-wave, free improv and avant. Rounding off the music line up are multi-disciplinary artist Katie Gerardine O’Neill who will perform a 30 minute sound collage, south-Sigo audio-visual artist Dult, improvisational electronic supergroup BB84, Sligo upstarts Marge Bouvier and Dublin-born, Sligo-based harpist Dave Lawless.
Spilt Milk builds on the activities of a group of like-minded individuals each already working within the music landscape and passionate about building a community in Sligo that joins the wider burgeoning alternative and experimental music scene across the island of Ireland. With the help of funding from Sligo Co. Co. and the Creative Ireland (Sligo) Programme, a limited number of free tickets are available to under 23s.
All performances are ticketed separately with some free events; for booking and more info visit: spiltmilkfestival.com
