Fran Pope

Sep 17, 2024 | waxmusicuk.com | Fran Pope

Forwards Festival returned to Bristol’s Durdham Down for the weekend of August 31 to September 1. Its pink and yellow posters had been brightening the city’s billboards for months, big names promising, splashed in white: Loyle Carner, Romy, LCD Soundsystem, Four Tet, Jessie Ware. For many audience members and artists, it would be the final festival of the season as the weather started to think about turning; a last release before the autumn would send us back inside to our sticky, beloved venues.

Jan 12, 2024 | waxmusicuk.com | Fran Pope

French five-piece Unschooling returned late in 2023 with a tightly focused whirlwind of an album, New World Artifacts. It comes after their 2021 EP Random Acts of Total Control album saw them tour extensively – ramping up well-deserved attention across festivals, gig circuits, and the internet alike – much like their debut tape Defensive Designs in 2019.

Nov 17, 2023 | godisinthetvzine.co.uk | Fran Pope

On tour promoting their latest EP, Tao Fire 道火, Taiwanese duo Mong Tong headlined a night of myth and mystery in Bristol with support from maya ongaku. It’s not at every gig that one of the organisers comes round and politely informs you the band will be on in five minutes. But as well as feeling like an exceptionally tight ship, tonight’s show was also one where you really didn’t want to miss a moment.

May 24, 2023 | containermagazine.co.uk | Fran Pope

Two years ago, deep in lockdown, I read Sadie Plant’s book Zeros + Ones. Subtitled “Digital Women and the New Technoculture”, it’s a curious, amorphous work underpinned by feminist, technological, biological, and medical history. Beginning with Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine, it traces the evolution of looms, punch cards, early computers, and code, with enlightening and sometimes unsettling detours into bacteria, botany, chromosomes, and psychoanalysis.