An international gathering of dadaists, noise freaks, DIY artists and weirdos in Brighton makes for a great weekend at the seaside

Various venues, Brighton, UK
Photo: Aaron Dilloway by Ilia Rogatchevski

Colour Out Of Space is a magnet for noiseniks and dadaists who refuse to take themselves too seriously. The festival returns after a six or seven year absence – depending on whether you count 2020’s Plague Time Television YouTube series – and for a few wonderful days the Sussex city descends into a bacchanalia for the weird.

Jo Morrison wanders through the crowd at The Old Market, costumed in a reclaimed graduation gown and foam mask. Her set is a collage of toys and spiritual signifiers performed over a tense backing track. The ending is a music box melody that mirrors Brighton’s hallucinatory seafront carousel.

Melbourne’s Absurd Cosmos Late Nite deliver a sardonic dialogue between two frenemies, one of whom derides the aesthetic merits of noise in favour of a reunited Oasis, much to the ironic delight of the audience. Marc Matter dives into his sampler to sequence spoken word fragments. He gets physical with the button pushing, dissolving Gregory Whitehead’s voice into Black Lodge techno.

However, there’s nothing quite like the junkyard hiphop of Hexakaidecagon, whose trash (metal files, saws, slinky) are a sound person’s treasure. These objects are clanged out of time to an errant piano loop and the duo’s set permanently teeters on collapse.

Closing Friday night – and opening Saturday morning at The Rose Hill – is Chicago’s Hali Palombo, whose background in ham radio informs her approach to visuals. Postcards of kitsch US architecture are modulated into terrestrial TV signals and decoded by custom software. Her soundwork is, she says, a “patchwork quilt” of granular synthesis, hydrophones and quotidian field recordings. There’s an emotional ambivalence to her compositions, which are peppered with eerie number patterns, spectral atmospherics and waves of bass that haunt the spirit.

The One Church hosts an afternoon of rotating improvisation from the 4046 Group, an anti-performance by Lonny Hoffmann and Zhao Ziyi – in which the duo move their chairs painfully slowly across the stage – and violin torture from Marija Kovačević. Back in the depths of The Old Market, drummer Shakeeb Abu Hamdan employs transducers, beaters and ample intervals to deliver a set that sounds like panicked wings inside a battery cage.

Running with the avian metaphor are Michael Barthel and Anna Schimkat, whose bird song mimicry and animated Germanic sound poetry elicit great pleasure from the crowd. Chik White does a convincing Tom Waits impression while choking on a broken jaw harp and serenading us with tall tales on a detuned guitar. A major highlight is Augusté Vickunaité who attacks her tape spools like a turntablist, cutting the reels to create rhythmic and disconcerting loops out of obscure voice recordings.

Sunday largely takes place at Concorde 2, where noise artists of various stripes confound resident sound engineers familiar with less divisive creative choices. Ypsmael, Chop Shop and Suppwiyah all walk the plank between tinnitus-inducing jet engine ambient and self-immolation. Meanwhile, Zheng Hao and Shit Creek’s respective electro scrapes and scattergun drops are the festival’s most club friendly performances.

Former Wolf Eye Aaron Dilloway, though, is the bluesman trading souls at the devil’s crossroads. By swallowing contact mics, smashing metal plates against his leg and stacking bricks of hiss inside the PA he ensures that everyone in attendance has a great weekend by the seaside, surrendering to the emerald stage lights and static.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, June 2026