Threshold Festival, 7-11 Mar
Hidden between the wood warehouses of Jamaica Street and Greenland Street, Liverpool's Baltic Triangle plays host to Threshold, back for its third year for three days of grassroots multi-arts shenanigans.
On arrival at Camp and Furnace, where the majority of Threshold's events take place, you’re invited into a dizzying atmosphere, with an eclectic mix of pop-up installations, live stages, projections, a forest of handcrafted trees, and ad hoc art events waiting to be discovered around every corner.
Social art project Draw the Line allows us to sit and doodle on the tables while we watch bands and enjoy a pint or two – OK, three. A favourite hangout is the cleverly titled Listening Within Tent: a tiny caravan turned into a cocoon of fairy lights and cushions, where you can chill with an iPod playing songs by some of Threshold's artists.
Down the hall, Shoot Gallery has an impressive collection of exhibitions. Working in dialogue, Charles Holden, Maggie Lambert and Sam Skinner explore current issues such as globalisation and population growth through an audio visual installation that features four planet-like circular projections incorporating appropriated imagery of subway commuters, weather patterns, blood cells, neuronal pathways and miniature constructed landscapes. The accompanying soundscape, titled Deltra Metropol, creates an eerie, recurrent echo made from a selection of found and recorded audio sources. In the Art Attic, there's Loci (Double Binded), a specially commissioned installation from Liverpool Art Prize-winner Robyn Woolston sculpted from metres of layered red thread.
Saturday evening sees art collective RAAP perform Ghost Hands, a live drawing/sound performance that uses analog telepresence. A group made up of two illustrators, two musicians and a technician, they directly influence each other through improvisational sound and art, while the audience watches their eerie drawings appear on a projector screen.
The Threshold Escapism afterparty finishes off the night with DJ sets from Milk, Waxxx and everisland – making the cold, drunken 15-minute walk back into town more than worth it. [Helen Stead]