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Edwin R Stevens

“Emerging from behind the shadow of his “singer/songwriter” alias, Irma Vep, Stevens perhaps reveals more of himself as a human being than ever before. If Irma Vep’s overpowering compulsion was for self-analysis bordering on self-flagellation (as hilarious and thrilling as that often was), under his own name his stories seem more well-rounded, more honest. It’s telling on album closer ‘Some Things Are Best Left Undone’, a cover of his own song as Irma Vep. The same song, a beautiful ballad, is rendered here simply and boldly with piano and voice in contrast to the scratchy guitar version recorded 10 years ago. It might be an intertextual joke given the song title but we can afford Stevens his own private mirth given the killer last line of the song and album: “the horse you rode in on just died and I swear I saw a tear in his eye / You thought that he might try say goodbye but he didn’t and you wonder why.” Whereas the Stevens of 2013 might have covered up the core of his message with self-deprecating tape hiss or guitar brutality, here Stevens is telling his story, straight. His story, it turns out, is not one solely populated by ghouls, distortion and compulsion but one that we can all, horror of horrors, relate to. Just people doing people things, fucking up, stressing and relieving, living crooked or living straight.”

Pete Um

Pete Um is a tape-poet from Cambridge, UK, with sardonic humour, an unreliable MD player and a bunch of weird electronic miniatures. Attempts to define his personality provoke his peers to phrases like…

“…Um is an electro-dadaist pop star peddling audio anxiety and monomania from the digital kitchen sink
…Um is the glint in Delia Derbyshire’s eye as she puts Kurt Schwitters and Julian Cope to the razor blade
…Absolute belter of oddball proportions…”

“To whom are your lyrics addressed to?” Felix Kubin once asked Um:

“A lot of my music is made just for its own sake, and I’m kind of talking to myself, but sometimes I’m bitching about a specific other person or how this world of ahistorical squares has done me wrong.”

Um’s 2019 LP ‘As You Were’ was one of the best of 2019. Low Company wrote: “Where so much contemporary stuff in this vein sounds hopelessly mannered and contrived and untouched by actual real-world experience of being on the outside of ANYTHING, ‘As You Were’ sounds fully free and unforced, hopelessly alienated from the thing we call society and GLAD of it, and even at its most demented and disorderly your man sounds like he’s wrenching everything he possibly can out of his primitive keyboard-and-mic set-up cos it’s all he’s bloody well got, not cos he’s self-consciously imposing limitations on himself.”

SIMONE ANTIGONE, DANIELLA PRICE, GEORGINA STARR, PAUL NOBLE

Simone Antigone is a Glasgow based guitarist/composer drawing inspiration from the rhythms of the temporal and the unknown.

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Danielle Price (she/her) is a performer, improviser and composer whose work explores a range of creative outlets, mainly using tuba and voice. She enjoys a versatile career involving her own projects as well as having worked with the likes of The Night With…, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Pure Brass, Ali Affleck, Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat, Oxbow, Ntshuks Bonga, Red Note Ensemble, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Scottish Ballet, Laura Jurd, Martin Green and Hylozoic/Desires at Tate Britain.  Danielle regularly collaborates with Bill Wells, as the Sensory Illusions (Karaoke Kalk) and is one half of the duo Dopey Monkey. Her debut solo EP “After the Allotments” was released in 2022 by OTOROKU.

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Internationally acclaimed artist Georgina Starr has been exhibiting worldwide in galleries and museums since the early 1990s. Her artworks, which span film, sound, sculpture, writing and performance, have been described as “magically complex works that challenge the viewer to re-examine the self, the unconscious and its ever–morphing biographies through a glittering and melancholic theatre of memory, mythology and fiction.” Her recent film Quarantaine was nominated for the Jarman Award. Her debut novel The Discreet Dash is published this year.

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Paul Noble is a universally recognized master draughtsman and all around wiseguy. We are pleased-as-punch to be presenting the second ever performance of his Quartet for Worm.

Quartet for Worm

Worms begin where words end.

A lieder for leaderless times, puppetry of an edible fourth dimension with an ensemble of shadows and voice with accompaniment, composed by Paul Noble and Neil Luck, featuring Cliona Cassidy (soprano voice), David Swan (piano), Mike Parr Burman (electric guitar) and Noble (percussion).

Baked Beans on the Doorstep presents….

DWARFS OF EAST AGOUZA

Founded in Cairo in 2012 by Maurice Louca, Sam Shalabi, and Alan Bishop, the Dwarfs of East Agouza create improvisational, free-spirited music that touches upon jazz and krautrock, combined with influences of Arabic and Egyptian Shaabi music. On stage, the trio embraces their improvisational dynamic, resulting in exciting and spontaneous shows that allow them to venture into whatever musical direction they feel like playing.

After performing countless live dates across Europe, the Middle East, and North America over the past 10 years, the group has just returned from two explosive appearances: Festival Actuel in Canada and the Tomorrow Festival in Shenzen China. Their latest album, High Tide in the Lowlands, was released in 2023 on Sub Rosa and the trio has a new album slated for a late 2024 release.

Jasper Willems writes about their April, 2023 performance at REWIRE Festival in Den Haag:

One of the festival’s definitive highlights was undoubtedly Egypt’s Dwarfs of East Agouza, who rival the great Wolf Eyes as tried-and-true noise psych outlaws. Their show at the always charming Koorenhuis had everything: volatile, industrial-laced sound vortexes that rival Neubauten or Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Halfway through they clowned around with poetic non-sequiturs and frolicking free-jazz tumbling-about, reminiscent of The Ex. Where a lot of Rewire performances court some form of discord or clash, The Dwarfs are an impeccable exercise of chemistry between Maurice Louca, Alan Bishop and Sam Shalabi. By now, you could call it a psychic connection even; all those baffled smiles spotted within the audience say everything about how much of a sure thing Dwarfs of East Agouza are.

Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh is a viola player
exploring the tonal possibilities of gut strings and wood in both
amplified and acoustic contexts.

Amalgamations of influences from improvised, traditional and early
music styles can be heard on solo recordings Oreing (Fort Evil Fruit
2017), The Rounds (KRUT 2021) and most recently Live At Sonic Acts
(Scatter Archive 2023).

She lives in Glasgow where she plays in free-improv quartet Dome Riders with Fritz Welch, Armin Sturm and Mike Parr-Burman.

An active collaborator, Nic Oireachtaigh has toured with experimental
Irish bands Woven Skull and Cian Nugent & the Cosmos and has
performed internationally with artists Josephine Foster and Circuit des
Yeux. She has created music for theatre works by Isadora Epstein and
collaboratively with Pat Thomas and Rhodri Davies. In May 2022 she
composed New Mountain, Reaching Plane, a surround sound piece for
orchestral and gamelan musicians as a commission for BBC Scotland’s
Tectonics Festival.

Recent performances include a newly commissioned work by Natalia
Beylis and a premier of Eliane Radigue’s Asymptote Versatile(1963-64) at
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2023.

Other passing/recurring musical companions include Jorge Boehringer
(in viola duo Swiss Barns), Andrew Cheetham (free style drum/viola duo
Lus), Cal Folger Day, Lori Goldston, Josh Thorpe, David Lacey, Aonghus
McEvoy, David Donohoe, Anna Clock.

Following sell-out runs at Soho Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe, the cult hit comes to Glasgow for the first time. Together with his audience, veteran improviser Elms “builds a comedy mind palace before your very eyes. And you’ll want to move in for good!” – Phil Wang

“David’s very clever. He’s made a show that’s funny, original and different every time. You go there and bathe in it and try not to be jealous you didn’t think of it. Superb.” – Tim Key

“A lesson in the transcendent power of collective imagining” **** Brian Logan, The Guardian

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“A strikingly impressive feat of memory, world-building and forging of communal purpose” **** Jay Richardson, The List

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“A real triumph of the human imagination” **** Polly Glynn, The Skinny

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“This is surely one of the most original and artistic comedy shows on the fringe” **** Steve Bennett, Chortle

“You’d have to be dead not to enjoy it” – Katy Wix

“Imaginative, soothing and gently immersive storytelling – the ASMR of improv” – Rose Matafeo

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“A show that you can’t wait to take someone you love to” John Kearns

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“David Elms’ show is so wonderful I could watch it every single evening until I die” Rosie Jones

We’ve got so much to talk about.

Some of my ideas are so funny that they scare me, so god knows how you lot feel.

The majority of what I say will make you laugh, but there’s gonna be a few things that will really make you think. And that’s why we (comedians) are considered modern philosophers.

For the curious and the clever – see you there.

“Surely on the road to stardom.”

★★★★★

Rolling Stone

“One of British comedy’s most intriguing new voices”

★★★★

The Independent

★★★★ Chortle ★★★★ The Scotsman

A brand new hour from Kiri Pritchard – McLean (Live at the Apollo, HIGNFY, QI). Brand new jokes from “the renaissance woman of UK comedy” – Rolling Stone.

Winner: Best Newcomer – Edinburgh Comedy Awards 2025

The critically acclaimed debut show about suffering (and smiling) from Nigerian stand-up Ayoade Bamgboye.

Following her sold-out run at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Swings and Roundabouts transfers to Soho.

Burdened by the gift of sight, a primeval awareness that something is not quite right, and almost three accents, she’ll ask life’s big questions and provide absolutely no answers.

Born in London, raised in Lagos, sacked in Budapest, the poor woman has been there and done that – and to what end?

Swings and Roundabouts is about going nowhere fast, being too British to stop apologising, and too Nigerian to stop shouting.

Directed by Anna Fox.

‘As striking a debut as I’ve seen.’

**** Guardian

‘A mercurial talent… it takes your breath away.’

**** Scotsman

‘The funniest and most commanding debut to land in Edinburgh for many years.’

***** Chortle