Proud to announce that the annual Blue Tapes showcase will this year take place at The Lexington, with a headline performance from Poland’s post-punk heroes Trupa Trupa, who will be debuting new material from their eagerly-awaited follow-up to 2015’s classic Headache LP.

It also just wouldn’t be a Blue Tapes night without a transportive set from Norwegian ambient icon Benjamin Finger, who has performed at all four of the showcases so far! (At The Green Door Store, Café OTO, SUPERNORMAL and Power Lunches (RIP)).

Support comes from kosmische-techno dons 2ndSun, who we will be releasing a mega tape from VERY SOON.

Expect DJs, exclusive merch, Blue Tapes projections, lovely people, life-changing sounds.

TRUPA TRUPA

“This album from Trupa Trupa comprises always clever, often beautiful, and at times very angry guitar music that defies definition. Razor-edged no wave rumblings, anguished Bad Seed shanties, sopping wet blue-eyed soul ballads – Trupa Trupa touch on it all. The result is their first moment of true greatness. This is incredible work.” – The Quietus

“I have to admit that it’s been a while since a rock band was able to give me that real ‘woah’ factor… But Trupa Trupa circles around concrete songs, stretching and plying them into dazzling displays of sonic architecture that immediately stopped me in my tracks. Bands are back in a big way, and Trupa Trupa is hands-down among the very best of them.” – Tiny Mix Tapes

“Blue Tapes’ recent releases have been pretty spectacular. The latest is no exception. It’s rare that Blue Tapes have flirted with anything as conventional as a guitar band, but then Trupa Trupa are not your conventional guitar band. This four piece from Gdansk funnel US no wave influences through a kind of psychological pain tunnel, making this album’s title of Headache all the more apt.” – Louderthanwar

BENJAMIN FINGER

“Like a gleaming reverie, slightly submerged… redolent of Alice Coltrane’s graceful, spiritual ecstasy and the decelerated density and dusky forest-plunge of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project… A fever dream at turns gorgeous and fiery.” – TheRansom Note

“It’s usually a cert that we will love anything that comes from the wonderfully diverse world of boutique label Blue Tapes and X Ray Records. This stunningly hypnotic release from Benjamin Finger is not about to change that in the least. The six tracks on Amorosa Sensitiva are the stuff of beautiful daydreams if they had a electronic soundtrack.” – #SRCZ

MAP 71

Brighton’s Map 71 pull off one of the festival’s most simultaneously baffling and banging sets. A drummer, a backing track and a poet doesn’t sound like the ingredients for an on-one night out, but everything coalesces into a furious stream of drums and invective, with no one element ever being allowed to dominate. The result is furious and fiercely funky. The kind of mix that one senses couldn’t be imitated by anyone else attempting the same. The total product of the sum of its parts: a twin motherfucker, poesy driven Voltron. “Fuck fucking Sleaford Mods!” yells one wag in response. Well, quite.” – The Quietus

“Jayne is one of the most physically arresting performers of poetry in Brighton, with a stage presence informed by visiting London strip clubs and observing strippers at work: a persona at once both provocative and absent; lingering eye contact and gyrating hips behind a wall of cool Perspex charisma.

As can be heard on Map 71’s tape on Blue Tapes, Pyne’s primal approach offers the perfect backing for Jayne’s stark confessions, delivered in a thick Essex accent like apocalyptic proclamations from some piss-stained midnight car park of the mind. It makes perfect sense that Jayne cites Vi Subversa as her key influence – the radical feminist frontwoman of punk group Poison Girls, who found her voice as an artist at the age of 45.” – The Wire

“Following the tradition of industrial champions like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten, the group blend spoken-word poetry with the shrill clanks of metallic objects and cavernous thuds. The impression of spatial anxiety and an awkwardly haunting sub-narration of Jayne’s screaming moans make this a deeply rich progression that follows ebbing patterns of physical and verbal expression over a single percussive pattern. If bands like The Fall, Y-Pants, Suicide – or even some of John Zorn’s work – strike your fancy, Map 71 play off a similar vibe that delivers a truly distinctive flavor of industrial noise-rock.” – Boston Hassle