Melting Vinyl: Bringing the cream of live music to Brighton.

Since being founded in 2006, The Great Escape has been firmly established internationally as the leading event for showcasing new music. Taking place in Brighton over 3 days in May, The Great Escape kicks starts the festival season, introducing 15,000 music lovers to the key artists and sounds of the year. With over 350 bands playing in 30 venues over 3 days, The Great Escape is the key date in the music calendar. In addition to pre-publicised performances, impromptu street gigs spring up all over town. The Alternative Escape, numerous club nights, label parties, industry showcases, unique collaborations and outdoor gigs all add to the festivities.

2016 will be the second year that St. George’s Church will be a part of TGE. Three nights of music in a perfect atmospheric setting for a line-up of interesting creatives playing the festival.

The Great Escape – St George’s Church Line-up

Thursday 19th May (Royal Albert Hall Stage day)
Soren Juul
Performing his first solo show with the moniker Indians in February 2012, he self-released his debut single on 7″ a few months later. Soren has intensively toured Europe and North America with the likes of Other Lives, Beirut and Perfume Genius. He was signed to a British well known indie label 4AD with his wonderful debut album ‘Somewhere Else’ released in 2013. The album chartered in his own country of Denmark also having his song “Oblivion” featured on The Fault in our Stars soundtrack.
“A world where boundaries between folk, piano balladry, arena rock, and post-rock dissolve, resulting in something both unclassifiable and wholly his.” Pitchfork

Mt. Wolf
After the lead singer left the band, Mt Wolf brought new talent and flavour to fruition. The band emerged with their new EP “Red” changing the band’s vocal style and opting for the sweet and distantly inward fading drifts of Bassi Fox. From “Red” the album moves to “Hamburg” also highlighting the voice of Bassi. The tracks build subtly creating anticipation for a multi-layered electronic and acoustic ambience that softly blends in instrument-like vocals. Red proves that with key elements remaining a band can not only make a comeback but create new versatility.
“Subtle Soundscapes, haunting vocals and broody bass” – Clash Magazine

John Metcalfe
Metcalfe is one of the UK’s most sought-after arrangers. Since his work on Morrissey’s no.1 solo album Viva Hate, he has worked for artists such as Coldplay, Bat For Lashes and Blur. He provided all the strings for the Concert for Linda at the Albert Hall, working with George Michael, Johnny Marr and Tom Jones. As violist in the renowned Duke Quartet, Metcalfe has toured worldwide, made numerous recordings and worked with a huge range of world-leading artists from pop, dance, film, TV and theatre; all highly acclaimed by audiences and press. Metcalfe performs music from his latest solo album ‘The Appearance of Colour’, out on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. Within his album are powerful rhythmic strings evoking the world of systems music, moments of transcendent solo piano, shimmering electronics and guitar, elements of drum and bass, and of chamber music.

Michael Kiwanuka
Singer/Songwriter Michael Kiwanuka is a young musician from North London. His debut album, 2012’s Home Again, was released to widespread critical acclaim from journalists and fellow musicians alike, all paying testament to Michael’s incredibly smooth and soulful voice that recalls a number of the greats of our time. Michael has recently dropped his latest music video for the title track of his upcoming album “Love & Hate” where his warm vocals and subtle harmonies permeate the 8 minute track. Michael creates a body of work that shows him as honest, unabashed and ambitious.

Friday 20th May
Kevin Garrett
Kevin Garrett is a singer/songwriter based in Brooklyn, New York. His debut EP Mellow Drama, which includes songs “Coloring” and “Control,” received critical acclaim from a variety of media sources along with strong support from the likes of Sam Smith and Katy Perry. Kevin has been heavy into touring for much of the last year, including dates with James Vincent McMorrow, Hey Rosetta!, and several music festivals. He’s currently on tour with X Ambassadors and Skylar Grey, all the while preparing a full length LP.

Masayoshi Fujita
Masayoshi Fujita is a Japanese vibraphonist and composer based in Berlin. Masayoshi first learned how to play the drums followed by extensive vibraphone training to craft and play his own compositions. Determined not to stick to traditional vibraphone styles or techniques and theory of composition, he seeks his own sound of vibraphone and new possibility of it. His recent collaboration with German electronic musician Jan Jelinek received a lot of attention from experimental music fans around the world.

Alina Orlova
Alina Orlova’s success story is comparable to those of the Arctic Monkeys and other acts that have propelled to stardom with the help of the Internet and word of mouth. Having been the best-kept secret known to a relatively small crowd of admirers in the beginning, later, when her music was discovered by a much larger audience, the idiosyncratic singer and songwriter performed on some of the best stages in Lithuania and went on tour to places like Liverpool, London and Moscow. Her debut album received equal praise in Lithuania and abroad, and some tracks off it can be heard on the radio regularly. Alina Orlova’s folk- and cabaret-tinged acoustic music might remind the listener of such diverse acts as Coco Rosie, Cocteau Twins and Anthony and the Johnsons (all being her personal favourites), but it is really much more than just a sum of these influences.

Yorkston Thorn Khan
This is Scottish-Irish-Indian-English music in the raw, Yorkston’s familiar steel guitar strings pulled, pushed and bent into more unfamiliar acoustic drones, the bass dropping anchors through the floor. Yorkston/Thorne/Khan are an experimental group that includes James Yorkston, one of the most “influential singer/songwriters on the Scottish folk scene”, Suhail Yusuf Khan, award winning sarangi player and classical singer from New Delhi and Jon Thorne, best known as jazz double bass player with electro outfit Lamb. The trio have released their collaborative debut album ‘Everything Sacred’.

RY X
Ry Cuming, better known by the stage name RY X, is an Australian singer-songwriter and musician. He was the first artist signed to the Stockholm-based label Dumont Dumont with his tracks reaching half a million YouTube hits. He’s part of “an electro-project” – a three-piece called the Acid and does the Howling with a gentleman by the name of Frank Wiedemann, which doesn’t sound a million miles different to what he’s doing as Ry X.

Saturday 21st May
Shift Work
To quote one of the duo, Shift Work can be summarised without hyperbole or the tenuous reference points of desperate marketers. When asked by The Quietus exactly what the partnership comprises, Mark Harris cut to the chase: “Johnny Rivo, myself, mid-priced synths, low-end vintage effects, endless improvising…” Working from their hand-built studio in North London, the pair makes uncompromising music in a compromising place, building throbbing tracks with analogue kit and busted-up amps.

Oliver Coates
Oliver Coates is a cellist, composer and producer based in London. In the past year he has performed solo shows in China, Russia, Brazil, Egypt, Australia and New York. He is an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre, has released records on Prah and Slip, and collaborates with the London Contemporary Orchestra, Jonny Greenwood (on The Master and There Will Be Blood), Mica Levi (on Under the Skin) and the artist Lawrence Lek (on the award-winning video piece Unreal Estate). His new LP, Up stepping, is out on Prah in May, and he has programmed the Southbank’s DEEP∞MINIMALISM festival taking place in June.

Guy Andrews
Guy Andrews is a London based producer who is best known for creating textural electronic music, which combines an array of influences from post-rock, techno, ambient and afro beat inspired genres. Guy Andrews’ first release under his own name came about in 2011 for the critically acclaimed Hemlock record label. Since then he has gained support from tastemakers such as Massive Attack, Mary Anne Hobbs, Scuba, Untold and many more. Guy Andrews has since released on a number of critically acclaimed labels such as Hotflush and Pennyroyal, scored for world-renowned photographer Nadav Kander, as well as collaborated with Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja for a remix of his well respected Battle Box series.

Aisha Devi
The enigmatic Aïsha Devi set forth on a new adventure with Danse Noire, her own sanctuary-label in 2013 dropping her EP Aura 4 Everyone followed by the 12 Hakken Dub/Throat Dub in Summer 2014 alongside EPs from boundary blurring artists Vaghe Stelle and El Mahdy Jr. Danse Noire is dedicated to exploring abstracted techno/club structures, and Devi’s own music mines her Nepalese-Tibetan heritage, using her machines to transmute deep meditation. Whether they are guttural or soprano, Devi’s warped pop mantras instruct us to find the unseen through a tense, visceral musical landscape that is often gnarled and industrial as it is danceable.