THIS city deserves cutting-edge work that pushes boundaries, rather than people having to go up to London.”

So believes Earsthetic programmer Laura Ducceschi, as she introduces the first of what is hoped to become an annual festival of live interdisciplinary performance.

The inspiration for the five-day festival came from the pair Ducceschi describes as the king and queen of digital electronic music: Ryoiji Ikeda and Peaches, who crown the festival on Friday and Saturday next week.

Experimental performers

“When the opportunity opened up to welcome Ryoji to Brighton, it felt like a jumping off point to create something more curated and ambitious around it,” says Ducceschi, who promptly got in touch with Peaches. The iconic star will be screening her new movie, Peaches Does Herself, before performing a DJ and MC Extravaganza on Saturday, December 14.

Ducceschi admits Ikeda’s music is not the sort you would necessarily hear on the radio or sit and listen to at home.

“It’s about the combined visual and auditory,” she says. “He’s off a lot of people’s radar but he’s had his work performed in London, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and in Tokyo. His work is so important.”

His show Datamatics [ver 2.0], which uses pure data from hard drives and software code to create dramatic 3D rotating views, is a good example of the aesthetic behind Earsthetic.

“You’re not going to see five gigs – it’s something else,” says Ducceschi. “In the music world you often have something where another artist is brought in to drop visuals into a musical work. Here the approach is about putting the visual and sound together.

“If you look at the music industry, A and R men might say they like these pieces but don’t know where to put them. This programme represents work that crosses different art forms. It’s experimental by nature.

“The festival concept is to be unpredictable. We want to push ourselves and our audience to create new experiences and new ways of looking at things.”

Dominic Smith speaks to Planningtorock ahead of Earsthetic performance

Jam Rostron would support Brighton and Hove City Council’s proposal to do away with Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms from official documents.

She changed her name from Janine Rostron because she didn’t want to be gender-defined or “genderised”.

The electronic artist, originally from Bolton but now based in Berlin, would tick female should she have to decide.

But her ideal would be to extend the German government’s recent decision to allow parents to leave gender blank on birth certificates and tick “indeterminate sex”.

“You no longer have to say what sex the baby is when it is born in Germany and in passports it is coming through that you can have a third gender,” she says, speaking to The Guide ahead of Brighton Dome’s earsthetic Festival.

“I think that is great. It seems to be that people are starting to want these options, to not be defined so rigidly.”

Rostron works under the title Planningtorock, from a studio in Berlin she shares with Olof Dreijer, of Swedish duo The Knife, and rRoxymore.

After ideas from her 2011 album W failed to connect, she had a breakdown and considered quitting music. Instead, she has returned with material as direct as a bullet train.

Highlighting issues

Patriarchy Over & Out was released in 2012. Misogyny Drop Dead EP arrived in March. Human Drama is due out on Monday.

“I thought the ideas I was trying to convey would come through on W but they were too hidden.

“I was a little scared of being direct about issues that really concern and interest me. As a consequence, after that record, I had a real turnaround of opinion.”

The lyrics on Human Drama – “Gimme a human drama, and understand that gender’s just a game. Gimme a human drama, all sexuality is not the same” – dovetail with her most accessible sounds to date.

The pitch-shifted, genderless vocals are reminiscent of Antony And The Johnsons. The music (the theatre and performance, too) connects to The Knife, who Rostron worked with on 2011 electro-opera Tomorrow, In A Year.

She wants to “spur on discussion” and “ultimately make a record of where I am in my head, to grow on a personal level and to be a form of usefulness for people.”

The contradictions and evils of a genderised society are in her sights.

“It’s a poison and very reductive. And with capitalism you get the commodification of that – why do you get eye gels for men and eye gels for women?”

Her third album, All Love’s Legal, scheduled for a February release, has a neon sleeve with a face hidden behind shades and an anthurium flower (right). It advances themes from the sleeve of W, which had Rostron gender-flipping her face using prosthetics rather than making something androgynous.

“I’m wary of the word androgynous. I’m interested in blending and pushing and unlearning these ideas of what fashion and look really means.”

She’s refusing to release the record on DFA – her old label run by friend and former LCD Soundsystem man James Murphy – choosing to release on her own imprint, Human Level.

“DFA wanted to release this but I wanted to do it through Human Level because of the political intent.

“On a gender level, I wanted to be very clear about where this was coming from. If you release with another imprint with such a strong identity it can mess with the clarity.

“DFA don’t gender discriminate. They are friends and supportive, but it is predominately men who run the label.

“Also, I’m really into queer theory and thinking about queering your everydayness and output as much as possible.”

Does she thus live by her values and try to be genderless day to day?

“To be honest, I’m practical and a bit boring. When I am making videos I think about how I dress but I don’t have one thing. Sometimes I wear a wig; sometimes I like to play with notions of something that is a bit more fem, something less fem.

“I talk about it in Human Drama, these ideas of fluidity and identities that can move and change.”

Identity is not fixed. You can play with it.

“And on a mainstream street level, these binary identities are clearly cut and in mainstream pop there is not much of an overlap or playing around, so you can really play around with it in those fields.”

The protest continues to her stage show, which is anti-hierarchical.

“That is another norm that needs rustling up. I always feel uncomfortable being at the front. I’m always aware there is this hierarchy implied.”

It’s the same with billing on concert rosters.

“Playing live does not have to be this hierarchy and positioning people against each other.

“We have all been at the butt end of a hierarchical construct – mostly in working environments, but right through to how governments and administrations treat us, which doesn’t reflect how individuals are.”