The Black Lights festival, a new three-day event in Blackpool curated by the team behind Manchester's now-closing White Hotel, has emerged as a triumph of pan-genre experimentalism, tapping into the kitsch and romance of a seaside weekender. Within two minutes, attendees can move from a BBC Philharmonic performance of John Adams' symphonic masterpiece Harmonielehre in an art deco concert hall to DJ Afrodeutsche slamming breakbeat techno in a side room, with digital visuals and lager spilling over plastic cups.
Bold programming and democratic gestures
This disinclination to view art as high or low gives soul to the festival, which runs across various venues in Blackpool. The organisers, clearly in love with the town's faded glamour, open proceedings at the end of the north pier with a recital of a Rupi Kaur-ish screed: 'Look around, every person here arrived carrying a private dream.' Given Blackpool's evident problems—homelessness, substance use, dilapidated buildings—this romanticisation might feel uncomfortable, but the overwhelming sense is of earnest affection, including democratic gestures such as Mark Fell and Rian Treanor's free drop-in electronic music workshops, where one person improvised on a plugged-in banana.
Dance heritage and transcendent performances
Blackpool's rich dance heritage is reflected in a set by the Caretaker, the north-west ambient musician whose corroded ballroom dance recordings found favour with a huge TikTok audience. Presented with live ballroom dancers in the gilded Blackpool Tower Ballroom, it's like David Lynch week on Strictly: dry ice shudders across a strobe light as dinner jazz instrumentals get overtaken by noise. However, he is upstaged later by Klein, who plays billowing plumes of cacophonous guitar noise and a sudden drill beat to transcendent effect.
A cornerstone performance is new music by Blackhaine, a towering rapper and movement artist who looks like a member of Dune's Harkonnen clan if they grew up in Chorley. His sense of drama has inspired the rage rap scene of Playboi Carti, and here, with stunning screamed assists from Sam.Brown, he emits anguished bursts of declarative rap. An old-school orange-hued streetlight acts as a second stage in the Winter Gardens, a poignant symbol of a lost past.
Saturday night highlights and venue inversions
Saturday night features Gescom, an Autechre-adjacent collective, playing a frisky set of glitching polyrhythmic techno with stunning Cerith Wyn Evans-style laser squiggles. Evian Christ's light show of peach and pink strobes remains psychedelic in aggression, alongside triumphant airings for trance, big beat, and Millie B's Blackpool bassline classic M to the B. Anz and Crystallmess close out to 4am with blog-house classics.
The festival upends traditional venues: Nazar plays kuduro in the Pleasure Beach's function rooms; Red Laser and Bakk Heia spin strutting house in Blackpool Catholic Club; Jennifer Walton delivers peals of electric guitar and howls of grief from the altar of a Spiritualist church. Jawnino's rap tracks are so boisterous he trips the fuses at Bootleg Social indie club, and his ode to ketamine in a shopping centre, Westfield, prompts a mosh pit of pure joy. On the sweatbox balcony of the Winter Gardens' Olympia area, Lintd offers theatrically enunciated flows over jazz and afrobeat drumming, followed by the set of the weekend: Moin, finding a euphoric new route for post-rock by playing body music informed by UK bass culture.
New commissions and festival spirit
The Black Lights ends as a much-needed British iteration of experimental European festivals from Kraków's Unsound to The Hague's Rewire, especially as it commissioned new work: an untitled orchestral piece by Mica Levi, a riveting soundscape of far-off screamer fireworks, avian calls, and Doppler-effect pitch bending from strings over sustained bass notes. Issues typical of first-year festivals—almost nothing starts on time—are mitigated by Blackpool time: a holiday mode where ordinary rules and a corporatised festival market are blessedly suspended.
