STRANGE BREW

New Independent Venue

Independent venue Strange Brew has crucially shaped the post-lockdown landscape of Bristol’s live music since opening in late 2020: quickly finding its niche putting on some of the city’s most experimental music What were your original intentions behind opening Strange Brew, and – two years on – how close is the venue to your initial vision?

Leigh Dennis: Strange Brew is actually very different to what we had in mind, because of Covid. The plan was for it to be more of a bar-café-live music hybrid: open most nights as a bar, doing two very select gigs a week and one club night a month in the back room, focused on experimental and specific club stuff. We wondered if it could provide a livelihood for 2-3 people. During social distancing it worked nicely as a bar. But as soon as things opened up there was no demand for a bar and our daytime cafe flopped as all the nearby office workers were working from home. There was, however, huge demand for gigs and club nights for the sort of music we were into at the capacity we could provide: so we just went with it. Now it’s hard to imagine things any other way, and we employ around 20 people. Like every other business, we have had a lot of financial catching up to do after Covid and we can't afford to slow down, even if sometimes it feels like we're doing too many late nights.

Strange Brew’s programming quickly established a particular inclination towards new experimental music, from Bristol and further afield: notably welcoming Yves Tumor, Dame Area and Blackhaine for recent shows What draws you to putting on more bracing, challenging new music?

LD: We have always been inspired by bracing, challenging new music ourselves and if we weren't pushing it at Strange Brew there would be no point in building the thing. The programme is an extension our tastes, and the tastes of our friends who were ready to put on events in the space. We often get compliments for our programming but nearly all of it is external promoters, with the exception of the ‘Strange Brew Presents' series and Dirtytalk. All we are doing is saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to stuff other promoters are proposing, who deserve the credit. Those responsible for Yves Tumor and Dame Area are Simple Things and Schwet respectively, who have been pushing great music in the city for years. I'd like to think we have helped them grow their audiences, but this would have happened to some extent with them doing their thing in other spaces. Hopefully it has helped draw parallels between different tribes.

The team behind Strange Brew have previously been involved in underground party Dirtytalk How has this fed into Strange Brew?

LD: Dirtytalk was started in 2010 by Kerry and Shaun. Rob and I got on board in 2012/13. For a couple of years, we used a non-defunct club called Timbuk2, but from 2012 we used off-theradar venues including the Motorcycle Showroom (which was then an arts studio but now a flea market on Stokes Croft), a sex club in a tower block (now burned down) and a biker gang's clubhouse basement. They were always rough-and-ready and very DIY – needing soundsystems, lights and décor. The vibe was always great as a result, but they were temporary spaces, had poor access and were exhausting to set up. We knew we had a community looking for the kind of music and atmosphere we were pushing, in a similarly designed but permanent space. At the same time many other venues were closing due to gentrification and similar issues. It felt natural to start looking for somewhere. But importantly, from our day jobs and past experiences getting temporary licences for spaces, we knew a bit about the bureaucratic processes involved in setting up a venue. Without this, we might not have had the confidence to go for it. This aspect is a barrier that needs dismantling, especially for underprivileged groups.

The success of Strange Brew seems miraculous in light of the difficult circumstances faced by independent venues Strange Brew was built shortly after the closures of The Surrey Vaults and Brunswick Club, just around the corner from what was once the Bierkeller, amidst the worst crisis in global live entertainment However, all seems smooth as you enter your second year How do you explain its success?

LD: That's nice of you to say. It's miraculous that things can appear smooth from the outside, because we have been in a flap since we got the keys. Social media can't capture our daily hairpulling, our frantic crawling around in the dark or our despair when a VAT bill lands. When the pandemic hit, we were about a month into what we had assumed would to be a three-month construction period. In the end it was 9 months before we could open, and then we were in and out of lockdowns. The four of us had to manage the construction programme and do the work we were capable of ourselves whilst in our day jobs, then juggle working there with our day jobs for a while after we opened. It was the first time we had done anything like this, so it was terrifying and exhausting, but we’d otherwise have gone bankrupt before opening. We all had to suspend our disbelief over how bad our timing was when Covid hit, and haven’t properly had a chance to slow down and reinstate our disbelief since. That said, we have been blessed by many other fortunes, and perhaps have fewer things to complain about than many venues. We are still riding the honeymoon of being relatively new.

I would put our success down to our community and to the promoters and artists of Bristol having the appetite to make it a success. We have had a huge amount of support since we got the keys, and wouldn’t have got the doors open without a massive amount of free help. Tradespeople, sound engineers, musicians, breweries, other venue owners and bar managers, accountants, planners, architects, music magazines, DJs, bands, Headfirst, the Music Venue Trust, mates with paintbrushes… you name it, we got the help, and we are forever grateful for it.

In addition to raising part of the required funds for building Strange Brew through donations from local music fans, I understand you consulted with local music organisations while plans for the venue were coming together How would you describe your particular relationship with the Bristol music community, and how do you think that has influenced the kinds of events you put on?

LD: Initially our relationship was almost exclusively with the club and electronic community, and we mostly consulted them when planning the venue. We did not expect to be welcomed so soon and with such open arms by the band/ live music community, but have been very grateful for it. We always respected live music promoters and bands, but having not done much of it ourselves we didn’t appreciate how incredibly hard work and high-risk gigs are: usually for very little financial reward. The people invested in it really are in it for the love of it, probably moreso than in clubland. Nowadays, with our in-house live programming we usually do stuff merging our interests in electronic music with live instrumentation, e.g. Ana Roxane, Dais Records, Felicia Atkinson, Oren Ambarchi, Erika de Casier.

Is there an event you are particularly proud of?

LD: The first time Tara Clerkin Trio played, for Schwet. We had watched them on support slots pre-pandemic, then they released an amazing album during the pandemic; they were the perfect Bristol headline act to host when we opened. I am proud of it because they represent exactly what we built the venue to do: platform amazing local experimental music to a wider audience. The gig happened despite being cursed: it was rescheduled twice due to lockdowns, and then the band catching Covid. When it finally happened, it was quite a milestone.

Coims

DEPTH METAL / NEW-AGE GARAGE JAZZ

COIMS’ catalogue represents one of the most genuinely unclassifiable bodies of work in Bristol’s recent music Employing industrial electronics, fretted instruments and modern percussion, their largely improvised compositions may invoke for some the spirit of Miles Davis’ early-1970s ‘electric’ period, but (particularly in more recent work) bring punishing EBM together with cold, alien ambient What were your original ideas behind the project, and how would you characterise what you do?

Jan Davey: The original idea was to find a less labour-intensive way of making the abstract music we’d been making as Eftus Spectun. I came into that band as a hired hand who had been a fan of the earlier incarnations, so I found it really interesting to see how it was put together. The sound was often something with no recognisable structure, but it was so tightly written. Ol and I wanted to find a shortcut to that sound: uninhibited structures where there are disparate elements that are clearly related, but you can’t always tell what it is that’s holding them together – with quiet bits.

Olly White: We had both worked on very composed and over-laboured music for years and felt a new approach was both exciting and necessary. I guess we now work in different perimeters, but with the same goal: to have more unanswered questions then when you started.

Your music makes, to my understanding, heavy use of improvisation What do you find gratifying about this, and what do you think the effect of it is in the context of your recordings and live shows?

JD: Improvising is cathartic and gives instant gratification. Because of that, the emotions it conjures up are often pretty base (angsty noise or trancey drones) which can be pretty common. We try and hit some of the more subtle emotional buttons you might get through more structured music. So, when playing live or recording, we don’t always know what we’re doing, but we’re always trying to avoid falling into certain traps. In the studio, we’re more likely to stumble across a good sound and then try to really dial it in before capturing a performance. Live, you can spend a whole gig trying to catch a specific sound, so we’re more likely to just give up and work with whatever our gear/ the surroundings are producing.

OW: Improvising live or in the studio feels risky, natural and thrilling. Sometimes you feel like you're sawing through space with a million new ideas and possibilities. Other times you feel like you're telling a dull story.

Members: Olly White, Jan Davey Illustration: Olly White

Members: Jan Davey, Oliver White Illustration: Oliver White

The percussion in COIMS’ music is full of unusual ideas. When you performed on The Bristol Germ’s stage at Dot-To-Dot 2019, I saw you roll a metal ball around the inside of an upturned cymbal What has inspired your approach to percussion?

JD: Sam (of Eftus Spectun) and Ol brought those ideas. I guess they came from musique concrète stuff like Iancu Dumitrescu, but brought down to ‘jam band’ level: taking the sounds and the structures of avant-garde composition, but turning it into something two people can recreate in the corner of a pub.

OW: We have a playful approach to sound, I guess. Once we played a food processor live with two different contact microphones attached to it.

My favourite recording of yours is ‘SANDPAPER ON THE BEACH (WELCOMING)/ LAMBS LETTUCE’. What can you tell me about its creation?

JD: We’d been collaborating online through the pandemic, but the meat of this piece came from our first in-person jam –so we must have captured some of that catharsis. It was a mixture of carefully working out sounds and structures in isolation, then stumbling across new ones when in trying to recreate them, and getting caught up in the pleasing noise.

OW: I think in the first part of the track we were trying to write something metronomic, almost like an industrial dance piece. As usual, it all got out of hand and became super heavy and weird. We managed to make the guitar sound like a synthesized sax, which is cool. The second half sounds very intimate and close, which was a new horizon for us to capture.

You arrive at unearthly sounds via broadly conventional instrumentation, rather than synthesising them digitally Most of textures on your otherworldly longform piece ‘The Anericam’ were created using a guitar What do you find gratifying about using live instrumentation to these ends?

JD: It comes down to catharsis again: feeling as well as hearing the sounds. Also, that thing of working within limitations to fuel creativity. We set ourselves little challenges when we’re recording: trying to get continuous sounds out of things which normally make percussive stabs. There’s a challenge in how you play the equipment, as well as choosing the equipment you use, which can be pretty engaging and gratifying when it works.

You’ve collaborated fruitfully over the years with Adam Bohman, noted for his use of handmade and ‘found’ instruments How do you think these collaborations have influenced COIMS’ development, and how did you go about making your extraordinary collaborative record NIACIAN FLAKES WITHADDEDTHIAMIN?

OW: Collaboration is great way of finding different approaches to chopping an onion: we favoured using a knife, while Adam chose a toothbrush.

JD: It’s really inspiring to meet people like Adam who’ve been on the outer fringes, doing their thing for years. It’s like they’re setting out the boundaries of the world we occupy, showing us what’s possible, but then we marry that with stuff which they perhaps wouldn’t feel comfortable doing. We’ve got our poppy influences, and feel free to bring them in and drag the sound back in a different direction: somewhere less ‘out there’, but in a way maybe more ‘free’? Although the people we most enjoy aren’t trying to be ‘out there’ – they just are.

How do you see yourselves as relating to Bristol’s music community, and how do you think it has changed in your years as COIMS?

OW: The music community in Bristol has created a whirlpool of possibilities. We have had so many opportunities created for us by kind and passionate individuals.

JD: Ol and I spent years in bands with some loyal fans but which struggled to get a gig with complementary bands. Playing fruity music in conventional venues could be a bit of a ballache: not getting paid if you don’t bring in this many people and all that. You’re not happy because you’ve got no crowd. The people who’ve actually come to see you aren’t happy because they’ve had to pay loads to watch shoddy bands. We started Coims just to make music, but by the time we came to play there was a really supportive DIY scene in Bristol. People like Harry Furniss, Liquid Library, the Surrey Vaults and Diego from the Old E made it really easy to play good gigs with a receptive crowd. Cheap on the door. We get beer, we might even get paid. The music is diverse but in the same ballpark. Everyone’s happy. The community around us is what’s often encouraged us to collaborate with others, like Copper Sounds, Dali De Saint Paul and Adam Bohman. Maybe people are interested in what we do, but we don’t sound like the complete package? Whatever it is, we’re really flattered to be invited to work with the people we have over the years. The pandemic has knocked the gigging back somewhat, but the network is still there, so it feels like the potential is still out there.