This Saturday is the Grand Cross Fayre at Hanford Park in Stoke on Trent, ST4 4QG. Capsule were invited to curate a festival of new music and performance by Appetite. The event takes place from 12 – 7.30pm and is FREE for all the family and will have food stalls and vintage bric a brac as well as live performances and workshops.

The line up includes

White Manna
Hailing from California, White Manna are a four piece who perform epic and weighty sonic excursions into irrepressible psychedelic rock.

Swoomptheeng
Swoomptheeng is a collective of costumed characters who through the elements of Rave Craft, Zombie Bass and Ritualised Punk Technology, seek to work with audiences to create twisted and dynamic live performances. Join them and unleash your inner beast.

James Blackshaw
Renowned 12 string guitar maestro James Blackshaw, performs celestial and spirit-lifting guitar-led compositions. Meditative in quality, cinematic in scope, his music spirals gracefully across complex patterns, motifs and harmonics. Despite his transcendent state music he is a grounded and earthly fellow who has been written about with reverence and has played churches, festivals, folk clubs and large concert halls on his many travels.

Rattle
Comprising of 2 of Nottingham’s most unique and recognisable drummers (Theresa Wrigley of Fists and Katharine Brown of KOGUMAZA) Rattle perform together to create hypnotic and danceable rhythms.

Paddy Steer
Produces a sometime cartoon-like music dense with events, new textures and the colours of children’s paintings, sounds like a Swiss cuckoo clock made of egg boxes and horsehair, glued together by an African Moog player in a Vietnamese iron monger’s shop.

Haiku Salut
‘Haiku Salut’s elegant weaving of minimalist electro tones around warm, somewhat folk-like arrangements awash with their intoxicating blend of delicate electronic textures and collision of curious instruments.

Come and join in our workshops during the day and then dazzle the audience at our procession around the park.

Juneau Projects: Procession Percussion
Work with artist duo Juneau Projects to design, build and decorate your own D.I.Y. percussion instruments, then play them as part of the Fayre’s procession. Shake, rattle and roll!

Release your inner beastie with the Swoomptheeng Collective
The dynamic Swoomptheeng will be offering an assortment of options in making facial/head wear in eight swoompy colours; perform with them in simplified versions of their balacava stage costumes, and perhaps beards. Yes beards.

Elizabeth Still: Pop Pom Poms
Create colourful a Pom-Pom on a stick using layers of recycled, plastics, net and cellophane to wiggle and jiggle in the finale.

Traveling Treasury is a magical story telling experience that takes places in a beautifully transformed caravan.

Audiences are invited to step inside the pages of a book and where stories unfold, quite literally before their eyes.

Traveling Treasury allows you to think, dream and believe as you are taken on a wonderful journey through sound, stunning visual paper creations and animated story telling. A wonderful experience for all ages!

We’re really excited to announce that Paddy Steer has been confirmed to perform at The Grand Cross Fayre on Saturday 6th September in Hanford Park. Recorded, he produces a sometime cartoon-like music  dense with events, new textures and the colours of children’s paintings, sounds like a Swiss cuckoo clock made of egg boxes and horsehair, glued together by an African Moog player in a Vietnamese iron monger’s shop.

PADDY STEER | Live at The Kazimier Jazz Club from Jack Whiteley on Vimeo.

In rejection of the notion of ‘immaculate reproduction’, live performances  are more daringly and admirably on the frontier of chaotic abstraction, expression and focussed blunder, dice rolling down the hill in case of duende, as from behind his stacked array of instruments, the anarchically intrepid punk gargles through a vocoder with his xylophone, all a-clatter under disco lights and doilies.

Paddy joins a line up that includes psychedelic sounds from Californian 4 piece White Manna, stunning 12 string acoustic maestro James Blackshaw and the delightful hypnotic rhythms of duo Rattle.

With a selection of workshops led by artist collective Juneau Projects and the dynamic, costumed Swoomptheeng. An array of Street food, vintage stalls and more to entertain!

Free – family friendly
Open from 12 with live performances from 1pm – 7.30pm

Capsule have been invited to curate a festival of new music and performance as part of Appetite in Stoke-on-Trent. Appetite’s mission is to get more people in Stoke-on-Trent to experience and be inspired by the arts, working with a range of local and national artists and communities to deliver an expanding menu of artistic projects to develop the appetite for the arts.

The Grand Cross Fayre will be taking place on Saturday 6 September in Hanford Park and will include live performances from James Blackshaw, White Manna from California and Rattle to name but a few as well as workshops led by artist duo Juneau Projects and the costumed Swoomptheeng .
An array of Street food, vintage stalls and more to entertain!

The event is free and will be open from 12 – 7.30pm
More confirmed artists coming soon…

James Blackshaw – We Who Stole The Dream from esther may campbell on Vimeo.

All this week MortonUnderwood are in residence with their Sound Trolley. It is controlled through an accessible interface and features an optical sequencer at its core; triggering sound as the trolley is pushed around on floor patterns made from vinyl. These designs will determine what sound the trolley emits when it is maneuvered over them. It’s a playful vehicle of sonic delights, waiting to be driven by you.

If you enjoyed the 2arttoyguys’ Vintage Sci Fi residency last week, there’s a ‘Robots and Technology’ lunchtime talk by Nick Hoares of University of Birmingham 12.30-1.30pm.

If you missed the amazing Vegetable Quest workshop in the opening week, you can join Juneau Projects this Saturday at 2p to make your own veggie characters.

Read more about the Discovery season here

These lovely characters were born at yesterday’s opening day at the Library of Birmingham. Juneau Projects invited visitors on a vegetable quest, where families made vegetable people from plasticine.

There’ll be another Vegetable Quest workshop on Saturday 26th September, and you can see the Vegetable Quest as part of the Discovery Trail throughout Capsule’s opening season.

Here is another sneak preview of the work we’ve commissioned for the Discovery Trail which is being installed over the next week or so. The Juneau Projects commission is a site specific piece in response to the vegetable beds located on the 3rd floor garden terrace at the Library of Birmingham, Vegetable Quest is a series of vegetable family dioramas sheltered within the vegetable beds, exploring the idea of self- sufficiency and how people and communities might survive following an imagined global disaster. The artists have devised a folklore that explores the diverse origins of each species and link this with the idea of settlement. Migration is one of our key themes within the Discovery Season.





All photos courtesy of Juneau Projects

The Library of Birmingham opens on the 3rd of September and the Discovery Season runs until the end of December.

By now you’ve probably heard all about our Kids Gigs, a series of concerts designed to introduce your young ones to the power and beauty of live music in a safe, child friendly environment (if not, where have you been?). This year we’re proud to present the Flower-Corsano Duo on Saturday 20th, and Islaja on Sunday 21st, but it’s not just art of the musical variety that we’re offering to your kids this year. The fantastic visual arts collective Juneau Projects will be offering a 20 minute animation workshop at both gigs, with the aim of gently introducing your child to the art of creating moving pictures. Using coloured lights and a series of basic images, your children will be encouraged to bring these pictures to life before letting their hair down for the following musical treat.

This combination of visual arts and experimental music is the perfect gift for a precocious child (ideally under the age of 7), and this is a great opportunity to share an artistic experience with your young ones. There are barely any tickets left for Flower-Corsano Duo, but we still have plenty for Islaja; spaces are limited however, so book now to avoid dissapointment!

Tickets cost £10 (parent and child) or £12.50 (parent and two children), and this includes both the gig and the workshop.

Buy Tickets – Saturday with Flower/Corsano
Buy Tickets – Sunday with Islaja

Coming to Birmingham this Monday bass player of  FUGAZI, JOE LALLY will be playing at the Hare & Hounds. We’re over the moon as we’re enormous fans of FUGAZI and have fond memories of when we put them on at the Sanctuary way back in 2002. A definite high five moment when Jenny & I were backstage playing scrabble while the band sound checked with ‘Communication Breakdown’.
Support comes from the JUNEAU PROJECTS + CHAIRMAKER.
THIS IS A NOT TO BE MISSED SHOW – please feel free to help us spread the word!
Advanced tickets available from www.theticketsellers.co.uk
Swordfish/Polar Bear