Brainchild is certainly one of the best and most forward-thinking festivals in the UK, and yet it is still relatively unknown even though it has won the AIM Best Independent Festival award in 2015 and 2016. It happens in the beautifully serene setting of the Bentley Wildfowl & Motor Museum on the Lewes Road heading to Uckfield and boasts only 2,000 people, including all the acts and workers on site.
here is a strong ideal behind Brainchild – it is a DIY-powered and volunteer-led festival, free from any sponsors, and celebrating the talent and ideas of people from around the UK and the world. Instead of the get as messy as possible attitude that is becoming the norm at the bulk of festivals around the UK, Brainchild is more a meeting of minds, where people can come together and form creative projects in front of other creatives. Whether it is live music, jam sessions, spoken word, DJ sets, talks, workshops, poetry, film, theatre, comedy or art, there is something for every creative mind at Brainchild with the festival site acting as a celebratory hub for blossoming artistry. The collective atmosphere across the festival is hard to explain – likeable to the special vibe at Glastonbury – everyone falls into the family mentality for the three days and will strike up a conversation with the person next to them at any chance. It’s the festival utopia we all look for that sits only in the clichéd ideal.
Before the festival gates opened, over 70 young artists had spent the week decorating the intimate festival site with 30 art installations – including incredible eco art, wonderful sculptures as well as various intriguing interactive pieces that aimed to challenge and amaze everyone over the three days. The site is split over five main areas – a cinema, The Forum which holds a wide variety of non-musical events, and three music stages. I dipped in-and-out of all of them, but as a music journo, I spent most of my time drifting between the Brainstage (main stage), in the woods at The Shack stage which hosted an eclectic array of DJ’s and The Steez Café.
The Steez Café is the heart of jam sessions and the musical, lyrical experiments at Brainchild. Run by the Steez team, a south-east London collective who put on monthly nights and can be partly thanked for jazz music’s vibrant resurgence in the capital, brought in some of the most exciting talent the UK has to offer. A few of the highlights from the weekend saw Thidius bring together a heady mixture of powerful sounding jazz, trip-hop and airy pop influences, tied nicely together by the beautiful tones of Izzy Risk. Debtford saw K3mp and Cecil B combine to create a dark electronica / spoken word blend that reminded of a more truthful and harder hitting version of Ghostpoet. Brighton’s Footshooter played a live set of tunes from his new EP, including Izzy Risk, Brother Portrait and Slam The Poet from MVC on vocals as well as Da Rico on guitar and Jack Stephenson-Oliver on keys (who also played a stonking set at The Steez Café in Vels Trio). But one of the most extraordinary acts that graced this stage were the phenomenal Dylema Collective. A new name to me, the band brought jazz, r’n’b and funk together for some of the most delicious sounding music at the whole festival. Led by stunning vocalist, poet and frontwoman Dylema, the strong band included a three-person male backing vocal troupe, and had the audience in raptures, wanting more and more and more of their marvellous, super sweet “spoken-soul” sound.
The Brainstage was one extraordinary act after the other all weekend. Friday was kicked off with the interesting sax sounds of Laura Misch and her band the Amphibians. Producer Huw Bennett brought a magnificent live version of his Susso project to the festival, playing songs from 2016’s Keira LP (Soundway Records) which is made up of samples taken in Gambia. Their set had the festival busting a groove to the dancey African beats, getting everyone in the perfect mood for the first night’s headliner Kojey Radical. The poet and rapper holds a weird juxtaposition, where his recorded material can come across as aggressive and sometimes jarring whilst his live performance welcomes you in and has all ears hanging on every word he says, but it is safe to say he brought considerable hype to the festival stage with a set that should have been twice as long.
Saturday saw brilliant performances by the deep Afro-Latin electronica of Penya and the extremely promising Brighton-based jazz-prog trio Luo. Former Brighton residents Vels Trio performed a spellbinding set of Madlib tracks whilst the festival relaxed to the chilled jazzy hip-hop grooves in the scorching summer sun. Ezra Collective, who have played each of the five Brainchild’s since its start, created spectacular scenes of hysterical dancing with their afro beat crossed with jazz blend, before Ross From Friends continued the party on the Brianstage as the Saturday night headliner with hedonistic sounds of thumping techno-house.
The final day on the Brainstage continued the incredible wealth of talent that had been before. The jazz-meets-hip-hop combo of Elisa Imperilee & Srigala was an early highlight, bringing with them some deep soul feels to the festival. Cosmo Pyke, fresh from the Montreux Jazz Festival days before, showcased how good an indie, blues and jazz concoction can be. The six-piece Ishmael Ensemble proved to be the perfect soundtrack to the ferocious heat with an emotionally heavy ambient jazz set. Festival highlight, Alice Phoebe Lou, bewildered the festival crowds with songs of old and new, making everyone very excited for what this South African-born talent will do in the future. London’s seven-piece afro beat band, Kokoroko, made sure everyone was in good spirits and loose for Sunday night’s headliner. SE Dub Collective suitably closed the Brainstage in emphatic style, bringing the likes of Ezra Collective, Oscar Jerome, Poppy Ajudha, Thidius and many more on for one big final celebration.
However the music didn’t stop there, as The Shack stage in the woods carried on the party late into the night – with genre spanning sets from Elpeche, Eclair Fifi, Boko! Boko!, Anu and Dego (2000Black) all impressing over the three days. The stage hit its euphoric peak with tunes coming from Brighton’s Gardenn DJ’s who closed the stage, showcasing some of the most interesting tracks from the weekends.
Continuously over the three-day festival I was amazed, not only by the special atmosphere that the organisers, volunteers, acts and festival goers brought with them, nor the ridiculously great weather, but the unbelievable amount of talent across each area of the festival. Highlighted best by the jam sessions hosted each day in The Steez Café – where musicians, rappers, singers, poets and spoken word artists would bring their craft and make something brilliant, surprising and utterly unique to the moment.
Iain Lauder