Electric Spring Festival 2025
Four days of electronic sonic exploration
19th - 22nd February 2025
Electric Spring is back for the 29th edition! Spread over 4 days and nights at venues in Huddersfield and Leeds, come and enjoy music at the cutting edge.
Have your brainwaves stimulated, be turntabled, lose yourself in improvisation, have your harp strings tugged, dance the night away, join a coding symposium, or immerse yourself in experimental short films—whatever your tastes, Electric Spring has something to delight your ears and eyes. Be sure to take in the installations running throughout the festival, as well as the concert events.
FREE EVENT
19:00 - 21:00
Richard Steinitz Building (Phipps Hall) ↗
*photosensitive epilepsy warning - this show contains stroboscopic visuals*
Jake Mehew’s Binaural Brainwave Simulator explores the intersection of sound, vision, and neuroscience through modular synthesis and digitally-coded visuals. The work delves into the musical potential of combination tones, creating immersive auditory and visual illusions. These illusions aim to rhythmically entrain the audience, producing psychoacoustic tones in the listener analogous to natural brainwave states. This innovative performance bridges art and science, offering a unique sensory experience.
NikNak is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, DJ, and turntablist known for her innovative approach to sound. Her work, including the immersive album Ireti, weaves together elements of afrofuturist storytelling, experimental textures, and deeply atmospheric soundscapes. Combining turntablism and field recordings, she crafts experiences that transport listeners to otherworldly realms. Ireti explores themes of resilience, identity, and hope, offering a powerful and deeply emotional sonic journey.
FREE EVENT
19:00 - 21:00
Richard Steinitz Building (Phipps Hall) ↗
Please join us for the first concert performance of the Huddersfield Improviser Social in collaboration with Edges Ensemble. We will be presenting a large scale improvisation with a variety of electronic and acoustic instruments. Anything could happen!
Manon McCoy (she/her) is an experimental harpist, composer and sound engineer. Her practice spans installation making, live performance and experimental sound art. She is interested in exploring the boundaries of the pedal harp through preparations, live processing and improvisation.
FREE EVENT
19:00 - 21:00
Richard Steinitz Building (Phipps Hall) ↗
Electric Spring presents a concert of work from SOUND/IMAGE Research Centre based at the University of Greenwich. Featuring a diverse range of works from Brona Martin ↗, Andrew Knight-Hill ↗, Jim Hobbs ↗, Emma Margetson ↗ and Dushume ↗, this concert encompasses the acousmatic, noise music, hallucinatory visual experiences, field recordings 3D spatial audio and experimental audiovisual work.
The SOUND/IMAGE Research Centre investigates the disruptive potential of sound and new media technologies to counter established ocularcentric perspectival bias. It brings together an interdisciplinary team of musicians and sound designers, film makers, scientists, architects, artists and philosophers to critically reflect upon the relationships between the auditory and the visual, in ways that deliver insight to effect real world change.
Register to attend ↗FLOAT ↗ presents Electric Spring Lates
21:30 - 23:00
Voice, tapes, bass, samples, synthesis, strings, reeds, drums, small sounds, big sounds, sunlight, moonlight, a lot of water.
New presentations of acoustic instrumentation with electronics, challenging conventions around composition, text placement and performance.
£8 advance, £10 on the door.
£14 ticket bundle for Friday and Saturday available! (advance only)
Buy Tickets ↗23:59 - 04:00
(23:59 - 01:30) Jake + NikNak (B2B) [modular synth + turntables]
(01:30 - 02:00) Tyger Blue [live coding]
(02:00 - 04:00) Nilehn [Elektron Syntakt]
Computer Club is an inclusive night of cutting-edge electronic dance performances, showcasing live techno, modular synthesis, turntablism, live coding and generative visuals. The event features Jake Mehew and NikNak in an improvised modular synth and turntable back-to-back, Tyger Blue with a dynamic live-coded set, and Nilehn delivering powerful grooves with an Elektron Syntakt. Held at Wharf Chambers on Friday, February 21st, from 23:59 to 04:00, the night promises an electrifying fusion of experimental and danceable sounds.
Free entry for anyone who can produce a ticket to any event curated within the Electric Spring 2025 festival.
FREE EVENT
12:00 - 17:00
Richard Steinitz Building (RS/G01) ↗
Creative coders share the ways in which they approach technical and artistic issues, and the way they link the two together.
Electric Spring hosts the seventh annual Creative Coding Lab Symposium. The annual symposium is a chance for us to bring our discussion of creative coding to the public, and to present an in-depth set of guest talks about music and other creative endeavours involving computers and code.
The symposium takes the form of a set of talks from invited speakers about their creative work with audio programming, representing a range of audio programming languages, artistic practices, and domains of practice. Each speaker will talk for around 45 minutes about their work, with the opportunity for attendees to ask questions after each talk.
Freya Shaw
Vision without Sight: The First Steps Towards the Development of an Accessible Game Engine for blind and visually impaired users
Charlotte Roe
Performing with websites - a developer / artist hybrid practice
Elowyn Fearne
ACorEx from concept to codebase: a solo developer's post-mortem
Jake Mehew
Synchronising Senses: Exploring Audiovisual Illusions within Binaural Brainwave Simulator
Register to attend ↗FREE EVENT
19:00 - 20:30
Richard Steinitz Building (Phipps Hall)
A curated selection of experimental short films.
Brian R Donnelly / Saif Alsaegh / Ethann Néon / Polina Komyagina / Kateryna Ruzhyna / Sasha Waters / Josh Weissbach / Will De Ritter / Murat Boncuk / Dani Asti / Zsolt Gyenes / Sarah Turner / Methas Chantawongs / Soulat Camille / Ali Aschman
Register to attend ↗FLOAT presents Electric Spring Lates
21:30 - 23:00
Field recordings, archival sounds, giant tape loops and tensioned sighing harmonies by Maryanne Royle.
Frippertronics and ambient soundscapes using guitar processing and synthesis. Sound-on-sound looping, exploring live improvisation and sound design on guitar, inspired by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Robert Fripp and Chords of Orion. "Like Brian Eno meets John Carpenter"
£8 advance, £10 on the door.
£14 ticket bundle for Friday and Saturday available! (advance only)
Buy Tickets ↗Installations running in the Richard Steinitz Building ↗ two hours prior to each concert.
FREE EVENT
By Alberto Barberis ↗, Rajan Craveri, and Serena Zanconato ↗. Produced by COORPI ↗ with the support of Italian Ministry of Culture and SIAE on the program PER CHI CREA .
HYBRIDY is a multimedia installation composed of audio, video-dance and vibrotactile feedback, which explores the hybridisation processes between body and nature, instinct and technology, biology and algorithms, vibrations and sounds. The work draws inspiration from the figures of dryads — half-woman, half-tree nymphs of Greek mythology. The dance is intertwined with dynamics of fungi, roots and blooms, the video transforms real images into abstract compositions and the sound-vibration dialogue explores the liminal spaces between organic, analogue and digital. A symbiosis of entities that invites “solidarity with non-human” (Humankind, T. Morton), fighting against the predominance of one entity over another — Reason over Body, Human over Nature, Algorithm over Biology.
FREE EVENT
"komplementäres Rauschen", Loudspeaker installations and pieces on CD
"Rauschen" - white noise - is the totality of sounds. At the same time the maximum and the minimum of information. The maximum, as everything always. The minimum, as infinite redundancy.
In all the pieces of Weiss/weisslich 27 - in correspondence to white light - the spectrum of white noise is refracted into partial spectrums. In a way the sum of these partial spectrums results furthermore in being "white" (everything). The difference between (distinguishable) partial spectrums and their (indistinguishable) sum is the subject of these pieces.
FREE EVENT
Entity (2021) is an audio-visual installation generated from scraped tweets and carefully translated into sound and image.
For nearly three decades, Electric Spring has been a pioneering force in experimental music and audiovisual art, bringing together artists, technologists, and audiences to explore the boundaries of sound, vision, and interaction. This year, the festival features highlights such as captivating live performances, interactive coding workshops, a symposium with renowned speakers, and installations that challenge the limits of art and technology.
Whether you're a seasoned audiophile, an experimental art enthusiast, or simply curious, Electric Spring welcomes you to join this transformative, multi-sensory experience. Many events are free to attend, ensuring accessibility for all.
Brought to you by artists and musicians from around the UK, with films from all over the world, and a crew of volunteers in Huddersfield to pull it all together and plug everything in.