Swans at The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove, Sunday, 8.30pm
Michael Gira might be 60 years old but the New Yorker is not slowing down.
After curating Le Guess Who? festival in Holland and inviting Wire to co-headline that event, he returns the favour and brings his long-term experimental rock project to Brighton.
Swans, who released their 13th solo album To Be Kind earlier in the year, will close the festival.
Recent shows have been loud, long and visceral, averaged about six songs a night and lasted for up to two and a half hours.
“The thing I love about Swans is they are loud,” says Newman. “They are very present as a band and they work incredibly hard, or Michael Gira works them incredibly hard. They are admirable in the amount they tour and the fact they are so fantastically sonic in their approach.
“It’s about sound and frequencies as much as about music.”
TRAAMS at Green Door Store, Trafalgar Arches, Brighton, Friday, 9pm
The Krautrock-loving garage rockers formed in Chichester in 2011.
Drummer Adam Stock and bassist Leigh Padley met singer and guitarist Stu Hopkins at the club night Hopkins started to escape the boredom of small town life.
Hopkins used to spin Wire records as well as tracks by other TRAAMS influences such as Mclusky, Pavement and Television.
Three years on the group have released debut EP Ladders on Brighton label FatCat and honed their fusion of aggressive, experimental noise and groovy rhythms. It was enough for Newman to ask the group to support Wire on a recent European tour after he heard a track on a One Inch Badge Seamonsters compilation album.
“Not every band is prepared, especially young bands, to get in a van and go round Europe as a support act,” explains Newman.
“They didn’t have to do it, but they got a bit of help from the record company and it worked it out.
“They write strange songs – some you imagine wouldn’t work. There are things where guitar and voice does same thing and normally I find that quite annoying in music but somehow with them it works – and they are a great live band.”
The German-born, London-based producer melded electronic music with shoegaze long before M83 thought it possible and turned it into chart material.
His early records, Far Away Trains Passing By and A Strangely Isolated Place, defined the form and the latter was voted in Resident Advisor’s top 100 albums of the 2000s.
“He will be a surprise choice for many people. I’ve been a fan of his for years. I got the chance to meet him earlier this year and he is an interesting and particular kind of person,” reveals Newman.
“Of course people who do creative things are interesting and particular, but what he does is extraordinary.”
TOY at Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Middle Street, Brighton, Friday, 11pm
London and Brighton psych-rockers Toy sprung from the ashes of Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong and in two years have eclipsed all the efforts of their former group.
Two albums of wide-eyed guitar fuzz for Jeff Barrett’s Heavenly records have found the group friends in high places with The Horrors’ Rhys Webb a big fan and The Vaccines and Placebo booking TOY for support slots.
“I like them as people and musically the sound is Krautrocky, shoegazey,” says Newman. They get tagged with the psychedelic thing but they are much more pop-oriented than most of these lumpen psychedelic acts. I think they are great.”
Courtney Barnett at The Haunt, Pool Valley, Brighton, Saturday, 9pm
Rolling Stone magazine called the 26-year-old Australian singer-songwriter a “hybrid of Kimya Dawson and Kurt Cobain”.
She was raised in cosmopolitan Melbourne but spent more time in the suburbs. Her droll musings on the banality of everyday life, tinged with country, have secured her support slots with Billy Bragg.
“We did an Australia and New Zealand tour this year and we were trying to figure out who to have,” says Newman.
“We didn’t know anything about who was famous and who wasn’t famous in Australia. But we asked some people and a few people mentioned Courtney Barnett and everybody liked it.
“Then we realised she was way too big to support us. It became obvious she was available for the festival so we went for it.”
It’s hard to believe the Icelandic trio which mixes trip hop and dreamy electronica was actually formed in a clarinet class.
But clarinet player Áslaug Rún Magnúsdóttir and singer Jófríður Ákadóttir met during their studies and quickly formed Samaris in 2011 to break away from tradition.
In came electronics whizz þórour Kári Steinþórsson as the group then set about taking 19th-century Icelandic poems and fitting them to the tracks like a puzzle.
The group cite Bjork’s 1993 Debut as a key touchstone and have themselves become a key part of Reykjavik’s electro scene.
“It’s amazing beautiful music and very different to anything else on the bill,” says Newman.
“They are much more introspective, lower key and understated than their countrymen Sigur Ros, who are more bombastic.”
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