TUSK Festival 2020 at Sage Gateshead

About

The internationally renowned TUSK Festival returns to celebrate its 10th edition this October, once again bringing its uniquely diverse programme of adventurous international music to the North East of England.

The first line-up announcements for TUSK Festival 2020 are:

Norwegian noise artist Helge Sten a.k.a. DEATHPROD brings his sensory overload to the region for the first time after releasing his obliterating first album in 15 years, Occulting Disk, via Smalltown Supersound last year. A favourite of Will ‘Bonnie Price Billy’ Oldham who says in the sleevenotes that he enjoys listening to Deathprod with his Mum.

From Baltimore, the music of quartet HORSE LORDS can entrap the listener mesmerically with their off-kilter, polyrhythmic take on math rock that summons the spirits of early Philip Glass, Tony Conrad and, weirdly, Liege & Lief-era Fairport Convention in its urgent post-rock dynamics.

Another Norwegian, MAJA S.K. RATKJE, returns for a very rare Northern show following her duo with Ikue Mori in 2012. Renowned as a noise artist, improvisor and vocalist, Maja caught many ears by surprise last year with her album Sult, a beautiful solo suite for pump organ and voice that was written to soundtrack a ballet based on Knut Hamsun’s famously intense novel Hunger.

WHISTLING ARROW are something of an English leftfield supergroup, comprising Charles Hayward (This Heat) on drums, Liverpudlian combo Ex-Easter Island Head on hammered guitars and other instruments and TUSK favourite Laura Cannell on strings. An exclusive one-off live performance for the group that was meant to purely be a recording project.

SARAH HENNIES hails from Kentucky and is concerned with a range of issues including queer and trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics and percussion. An increasingly revered artist internationally, her 2017 audio-visual work Contralto was a finalist for the Queer|Art|Prize and she released the great Reservoir 1 album on Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label last year.

LUMP HAMMER are a Newcastle trio with many fingers in the regional sludge-rock pie and a maximalist/minimalist approach of overwhelming guitar/drums/vox and bloody-minded musical stasis that has seen them perform two hour sets of just one, obliterating song.

Many more acts still to be announced, plus TUSK’s famous film programme, talks, exhibitions and workshops.

Entry to Northern Rock Foundation Hall is subject to capacity.