Sensoria Music & Film Festival 2015: The Review

According to Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, speaking in the documentary Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay, the city of Sheffield is synonymous with ‘unstructured noise, cacophonous noise, beautiful music – those sonic moments we were all surrounded by’.

Mallinder is right – the sound of the immediate environment integrated into technology is at the core of the music which has emerged from the city, one which was at the centre of the European industrial revolution and, some 150 years later, the birthplace of a new, harsh proto-electronic sound which appeared to tap into a sonic spectre redolent of the steady progress of manufacturing industries and urban planning.

The documentary was playing as part of the remarkable calibration of live music, cinéconcerts, talks and documentary screenings at Sensoria Festival, the title itself a nod to Cabaret Voltaire’s own 1984 single of the same name. The UK may be teeming, bursting with endless music and film festivals but, you see, Sensoria is unique in that it not only readily engages with its host city but seeks to actively question and redefine its engagement with Sheffield – how and why do artists annex themselves to and amplify the sound of the city?

Of course, the idea of a city having its own sonic trademark isn’t unique to Sheffield itself. The festival opened with B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin, a rollicking account of Manchester native Mark Reeder’s life at the core of progressive electronic music in 1980s Berlin. The film showcases some remarkable archive footage and staged re-enactments, as we follow Reeder’s endless pursuit through the city’s nefarious drug-fuelled culture and his encounters with a series of exceptional figures in the industrial and burgeoning electronic music scene – including the ubiquitous members of Einstürzende Neubauten along with Gudrun Gut and her pioneering electronic outfit Malaria! – with a pounding Krautrock, post-punk and techno soundtrack.

Despite the fact that many of the characters Reeder encounters often appear to be immersed in some sort of perpetual drug binge – we witness an emaciated Blixa Bargeld doling out the shots in a local dive bar and a lethargic Nick Cave attempting to decorate the walls of his Kreuzberg flat – there is a very real resilience to Reeder’s restless explorations through the cut-up city skyline, as he proves to be a hyperactive and ultra-connected guide: “Berlin was like Disneyland for depressives,” he remarks.

The quote could also be somewhat appropriated to describe life within Killing Joke, Jaz Coleman’s army of industrial bandits as they careered through over thirty years of occultist mischief making in The Death and Resurrection Show, a near three-hour exposition of their – well, primarily Coleman’s – fractured history.

Fittingly for a band who claim to have been brought together through a ritual ceremony in Notting Hill, the documentary courses through the enigmatic frontman’s Icelandic freak-outs, success as a classical composer and his constant, near-evangelistic presence at the helm of Killing Joke. Of course, it’s bloated, occasionally pompous and incredibly discursive but would you expect anything less?

But Sensoria wasn’t entirely rooted in the past. In fact, the festival very much looked to the future specifically through the triumvirate of acts performing at the city’s Abbeydale Picture House, a (now sadly disused) cinema space dating from 1920. The cinema space – locally and historically referred to as the ‘picture palace’ due to the sheer opulence of the interior décor – proffered a fitting deconstructing opulence to the fractal, popping electronics of Factory Floor, Friday night’s headline act.

Trimmed to a duo of Nik Colk Void and Gabriel Gurnsey, the black-clad pair channelled the spectral spirits within the picture house and conjured up a relentless, palpitating mélange of mantric rhythms, pummelling and grounding the assembled throng into a pounding scorched earth groove. This was Factory Floor’s debut performance in Sheffield yet they still managed to appear somewhat emblematic of the Sensoria festival; so very post-industrial, so very digital and the inexorable source of a bloody good night out.

But even more impressive was the support act, Julie Ann Campbell, aka Lonelady. Her second album, Hinterland, out earlier this year on Warp, is a magnificently urgent dérive through the cement-coloured byways of northern England, crackling with synths straight from the gates of Heaven (17) and impeccable pop sensibilities. Lonelady is even better live, her set augmented by a series of isolated topographical slogans and a relentless disco grind; the anxious sound of 21st century psychogeography.

Meanwhile, down in the basement of the Abbeydale Picture House, an altogether more bellicose beat was emerging, that of Sheffield’s own Blood Sport. While the band – consisting of drums, guitar, baritone guitar and all manner of warped vocals – may have coined the term ‘aggro beat’ to describe their feral experimentalism, but on the evidence of this appearance, the trio have honed and defined their sound into something somewhat more palatable if no less pugnacious. The entirely bass-less sounds suggest a thwarted funk which is given shape by the sheer size of the noise produced and while there are echoes of early Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA stirring within the mix, Blood Sport are a resolutely modern proposition even amid the crumbling façade of the Abbeydale Picture House.

The following morning’s proceedings begin with a screening of the aforementioned Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay, as introduced by the irrepressible Mallinder. The man himself is the key speaker in the film which traces the development of industrial music through Dadaist influences, William Burroughs, the San Francisco underground printing press and the rise of local acts such as Cabaret Voltaire and In The Nursery and concomitant appearances of Throbbing Gristle and, across the channel, Boyd Rice’s NON.

Interestingly, Mallinder stated in his introduction that he never viewed his band as being industrial in any way yet, for the viewer, it is tempting to trace a lineage through the analogue experiments of the early electronic acts emanating from Sheffield in the 1970s through the emergence of the more traditionally industrial sturm und drang output of the likes of SPK and Test Department, who also feature strongly in the documentary.

The period in which Mallinder recalls the formation of Cabaret Voltaire is telling as Sheffield was, in fact, one of the most prosperous cities in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s; the opening of the M1 motorway in 1968 opened an easy passageway to London and the appearance of films such as David Cronenberg’s Shivers and essential reading such as Ballard’s High Rise within the early few years of the decade suggest the artistic youth of Sheffield couldn’t help but become inspired by their immediate surroundings. Interestingly, he notes “Sheffield was a place of declining industry… Margaret Thatcher didn’t intend it but [the government] opened up a whole culture of people able to make music in their own way as there were little workshops [available] where people could take over and rehearse in.”

While all this talk of the empty spaces amid an industrial cityscape harks back to forty years previous, it also had relevance for the present day; Sensoria aligned itself with Peddlers Market, a street food market on Arundel Street; this was significant as the location itself is parallel to an area granted conditional approval for demolition, an inexplicably absurd decision which would surely stem the positivity otherwise inextricable with the city as it currently stands.

The very final act The Skinny saw before we packed up and departed dear Sheffield was John Robb and his evergreen, ever-punk Membranes. This seemed an apt fitting for a finale; the ubiquitous Robb’s career as punk frontman, music critic, record label boss and all-round Northern powerhouse neatly encompassed the magnificent range of opportunities and events within this year’s Sensoria programme and his curious on-stage presence, calibrating combative intensity with affable banter, hauled and ferried his troupe of renegade rockabillys through the heady scientific concepts of new album – and first since 1989 – Dark Matter/Dark Energy.

“I’m an unapologetic, middle aged, fucked up, twenty first century man… I know too much and I feel everything and it disgusts me,” screams Robb on, appropriately, 21st Century Man. But this feels like a misnomer; The Membranes have unrelenting fun on stage, devoid of unnecessary mystique or any form of self-consciousness and Robb – rather like his erstwhile Lancastrian contemporary Mark Reeder – is an ultra-enthusiastic conductor at the vanguard of sweaty punk rock. And perhaps the same can be said for Sensoria; while the festival is unafraid to delve into potent and provocative waters, it does so while ensuring you have a staggeringly good time.