Northwest Festival Watch: Threshold and FutureEverything

As we keep an eye on the Northwest’s homegrown fests, two programmes steal the limelight this month – Liverpool’s Threshold, and FutureEverything in Manchester

Preview by Laura Swift | 21 Mar 2014

Entering its fourth year, Liverpool's grassroots Threshold Festival of Music and Arts (28-31 Mar) commandeers a clutch of venues in the Baltic Triangle – as varied as rave cave 24 Kitchen Street, the cosy Baltic Bakehouse and fringe champion Lantern Theatre – to offer a programme that's strong on local acts but also nods further afield, all for the price of one big gig.

Likely to jump out are names like Natalie McCool – whose alternately razor-cut and smoke-grey vocals have lately been turning heads at BBC 6 Music – and Leeds' smart synth-bots Galaxians, but we'd like to ensure you don't miss instrumental solo guitarist John McGrath, whose fingerstyle string work is calm, considered, and rose-red with quiet revelation. Elsewhere, there's a party to be had with Upitup Records head honcho DJ Jacques, and if you'd like to feel concerned about where you are in your life and what you've done with it, make sure you catch the upsettingly young Tyler Mensah, who sings with a refreshing lack of forced warble in comparison to many aspiring pop stars his age, and who might even drop a Frank Ocean cover. For something different, there are live electronics from Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts students Adronite, percussive use of the cello from Abi Wade, and modern-pastoral waltzes from Stems (violin, viola and electric guitar).

Threshold has never shied away from a sense of carnival, either, and true to form this year's programme is full of many-membered mega-troupes, with physical theatrics coming from Harlequin Dynamite Marching BandScience of the Lamps, and first-night headliners The Destroyers. Getting into the festival spirit has never been easier.

By contrast, FutureEverything (27 Mar-1 Apr) offers perhaps its most pensive, cerebral programme yet. Away from the big-hitters (Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington's DARKSIDE, and Tim Hecker) lies a series of events that share more in common with the likes of Faster than Sound or even Huddersfield Contemporary than the festival's headliners, and which are, appropriately, presented largely in the RNCM's spaces: they include a world premiere of a new piece, Projectors, by musique concrète manipulator Martin Messier (30 Mar, RNCM Theatre), and Evian Christ performing within a festival-long installation in the Studio Theatre by lighting designer/visual artist Emmanuel Biard and engineer David Leonard, which uses mirrors, mechanics, lasers, optics and structures to seemingly etch structures made of light on to the air (30 Mar). Meanwhile, on 28 Mar Soup Kitchen plays host to Dean Blunt, whose quite literally electrifying performance at Liverpool's Blade Factory late last year – unrelenting scythes of strobe rendered the audience immobile – bodes well for a return to the Northwest, and, on 30 Mar, a showcase of obscure, fogged hip-hop and electronics at the hands of Berlin label PROJECT: Mooncircle. The locus of much of last year's programme, Islington Mill, plays host to just one show this year, but sees Faktion going all out for the occasion on 28 Mar: Mika Vainio's bloodied landscapes join Source Direct, Ninos Du Brasil (Nico Vascellari) and EVOL for a complete and total sensorial assault. 

Threshold Festival of Music and Arts, various venues, Liverpool, 28-31 Mar

www.thresholdfestival.co.uk

FutureEverything, various venues, Manchester, 27 Mar-1 Apr

www.futureeverything.org