The Secret Shade: Lena Willikens

The Secret Shade
presents

Lena Willikens (Amsterdam / Germany)
Extended 3 hour opening set
Saskia LIVE (Bristol UK / Japan)
Lynne (London UK / Japan)
b2b Anina (Bristol, UK)

@ Strange Brew, Bristol (backroom)

Excited to present our next club excursion, welcoming Lena Willikens for a special three-hour opening set traversing her weird and wonderful catalogue of downtempo, techno, acid and esoteric gems. Saskia follows with her rhythmically futuristic techno hardware sound before Anina & Lynne close out the night with occult DnB outer-orbit explorations.
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Lena Willikens (Salon Des Amateurs / NTS)

We’ve all probably caught Lena serve up some pretty mind-bending sets over the years, so we’re really happy to welcome her back to Bristol where her sound runs parralel to the city’s darker and curious styles.

Lena has had a long-standing presence at Düsseldorf’s iconic Salon des Amateurs since the mid-2000s, a place that played a big part in shaping her musical identity. She started out working the door and bar before becoming one of the club’s regular fixtures. Also as a duo with Vladimir Ivković for some time, the two share a similar love of digging deep, finding unusual records and taking things in unexpected directions with the most brain-frazzling flavours of acid, downtempo, dub, techno, Krautrock and industrial.

For this one, we’re particularly excited to have Lena take over the backroom for an extended opening. It’s a less common scenario to experience her in and we’re really interested to see where she takes it!

Saskia LIVE (Accidental Meetings / LYL Radio)

A sound artist from Kanagawa, Japan, we’ve been lucky enough to have Saskia based in Bristol and as part of our community over the past few years, catching some incredible and versatile DJ and live sets along the way.

Bringing together elements of techno, ambient and strange rhythms, Saskia’s style is cinematic and playful, moving through negative space and unpredictable experimentalism. Her EP es, released on Accidental Meetings shows this amorphous and curious approach, alongside her contribution to a VA on Archaic Vaults and a self-released EP.

Following on from Lena's 3 hour trip, we’re very excited to hear Saskia's subwise hardware explorations as the night reaches full swing.

Lynne (Unknown Species / Chaos Ambiants)

Lynne is a Japanese, London-based artist whose work moves through the outer reaches of drum & bass, experimental electronics and sound design. Rooted in the physicality of rhythm but drawn towards its more abstract possibilities, her sets occupy a space where broken percussion, dense atmospheres and strange, shifting textures pull the dancefloor into unfamiliar territory.

A winner of the Samurai Music Mix competition in 2015, Lynne has spent the decade since refining a singular approach to rhythm, one that slips between genre boundaries without ever fully settling in one place. Her sound exists in the grey areas: heavy but elusive, cerebral but deeply physical, with the pulse of drum & bass acting as a gravitational centre.

Now a resident of Unknown Species and Les Chaos Ambiants, she continues to explore the liminal space between atmosphere and abstraction, pushing deeper into the stranger edges of the dancefloor.

Anina (Young Echo / Slack Alice)

Forward-thinking while still drawing on the UK's rich bass continuum, Bristol based DJ Anina fiercely traverses tempos and genres - marrying ruff breakbeats, precision percussion, lo-fi atmospherics and low-end experimentalism.
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