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Bristol's Experimental Music Listings

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Bristol's Experimental Music Scene

It’s Bristol’s dance music that has earnt Bristol’s music scene international recognition, but the city’s playful experimentation between musicianship, electronics and sound art that is starting to gain the most traction. It's with a sigh of relief that we bid farewell to loop-pedal-powered hippies of the past and embrace the patch bays, compressors and modular synths of the future. All Bristol’s experimental music events are listed on this page.

Buy tickets for experimental music events in Bristol

What our editors say

“We are pleased to return to Loco Klub for a third year, for a gig that has become the production modus operandi of the festival. With a new year, comes a new transformation of the club’s tunnels. A/V installations, light shows and projections are set to accompany visceral and experimental live performances.”
From: Loco Klub

““An album of dizzying detail, delivered in a manner more open and accessible than pretty much anything in Leonard’s excellent back catalogue. It is spiky and literate and humane ... Real Home is an object lesson in combining experimental substance with accessible style.” - KLOF Mag on ‘Real Home’”
From: Kiran Leonard + Sunglasz Vendor

“With their live-instrumentation-meets-electronic merging of styles, the group were always broader than the ‘new UK jazz’ tag which they were often given, but here their scope and boundary-pushing ambition is more evident than ever before. Still maintaining a blend of spiritual jazz, dub, experimental and electronic soundscapes, here those elements are vigorously whipped-up into huge cyclones of sound, more song-based and accessible than before, but also almost psychedelic in its euphonic blend of colours, textures, facets and moods.”
From: Ishmael Ensemble

“Formed in Bristol, 5-piece LICE have become one of UK experimental rock’s most inventive and ambitious outliers. Their second album Third Time At The Beach arrives 20th September on AD93 (Loraine James, Overmono, Giant Swan, Moin): a three-part epic exploring our struggle to better understand the world around us. Darting between minimalism, rock, techno and more, it hurtles through time and space: featuring a cast of astronauts, cavemen and dinosaurs.”
From: LICE

“The duo allows Owen and Louis to distill their love of traditional and experimental music into powerful, intricate and intimate music. Their music manages to orbit many different sound-worlds from traditional English dance tune to chamber music and post-rock with influences ranging from field recordings, to The Gloaming, Bill Frisell, Ravel and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.”
From: Owen Spafford and Louis Campbell