On the second bank holiday of May 2013, just as the Summer begins, Noisily Festival of electronic music and arts will open its gates and allow revelers to pour into its woodland playground for a second time.

30 Apr

Incredible drawing of Noisily By Melissa Greenwood illustration (c)

A few months ago I met Meloo at a house party. We got chatting and she told me that she was trying to spend more time drawing

NEWS

30 Apr

Incredible drawing of Noisily By Melissa Greenwood illustration (c)

Click here for full zoomable image

A few months ago I met Melissa, Meloo to her friends, at a house party. Amongst the usual late night babble it emerged that as a keen illustrator she had always had an urge to put together a large drawing of a festival like scene, and never being one to miss an opportunity I threw our little festi into the mix.

A long stream of correspondence about what the festival stood for followed, and after many hours spent, pencil in hand, we received the final result – and I could never have imagined that it was going to be quite so fantastical!

It’s a beautifully put together Where’s Wally-esq rendering of Noisily featuring all the key Noisily team. Frankly, it’s a masterpiece.

Around every corner there is another treat, naked tennis players, treble clefts in trees, paddling pools, gramophones, the list goes on. See for yourself! Click here and zoom.

Thank you Meloo!!!

10 Apr

An Electric rescue

Music can determine the circumstances and surroundings of a person’s life

NEWS

10 Apr

An Electric rescue

The ramblings of co director Charles Audley

Music can determine the circumstances and surroundings of a person’s life, the friends you make and the food you eat, how you spend your holidays, the person you fall in love with and the stories that make up your existence. How much depends entirely on where it lies in your list of priorities.

Nine years ago my love for music, by this point taking a massive shift in direction toward Electronica thanks to the likes of Trentemoller, Nathan Fake, Steve Angello and Infected Mushroom, made me make a choice that, against all advice from my teachers and the embezzling government funded ISCO test which suggested I should be a sewage worker (obviously trying to draft more personnel into this honourable yet unappealing profession), I made anyway.

The choice was choosing a university because of the city, and not the course. The choice I made was Leeds.

Three years later and I found myself deeply immersed in the diverse music culture of Leeds, weekdays and weekends were spent bouncing between pubs, nightclubs and house parties. Louche consistently delivered at Mint, voted in the top 30 best clubs on Earth; Exodus at the West Indian Centre provided more bass than can possibly be healthy, so much so that once I was drinking a beer and the frequency reversed the direction of flow down my oesophagus and a fountain of hops drenched my face.

A friend of mine, Sam, would always harp on about Sven Vath in the Park, Sven Vath in the club, Sven Vath anywhere really, and although my tastes were faster, more aggressive and undeniably psychedelic, when someone raves about an artist that much I think you owe it to their interest to check them out. It turns out I also like Sven Vath in an awful lot of places as well, for want of a better turn of phrase.

Vath’s label Cocoon has an array of brilliant artists at the top of their game; international stars like Guy Gerber, Joris Voorn and everyone’s favourite, Extrawelt. At Noisily this year we have drafted in one of Coccon’s finest, Electric Rescue. An old hand on the French Techno scene Electric Rescue delivers crisp clean cut music across the board, Saturday night at Noisily will be no exception.

01 Mar

Full line up announced!!!

Noisily 2013 is well and truly underway and today sees the launch of our second wave of artists and the completion of our line up

NEWS

01 Mar

Full line up announced!!!

Noisily 2013 is well and truly underway and today sees the launch of our second wave of artists and the completion of our line up, which, as you can see from the image below, is as diverse as it is brilliant.

You’ll notice a few of our artists from 2012 are back; Eveson will be mixing it up and playing a House set on Saturday night at The Treehouse, Atomic Drop are sure to throw their dirty grooves down on our newly built Tipi Stage, whilst Real Nice will carry out Sunday in collaboration with Oxford based Thesedays for those of you who fancy something a little mellower than the Trance at the Tipi.

As well as these stalwarts Noisily will be welcoming many new additions to our growing family.

Tickled Pig, a stand-up comedy night founded in Leeds several years ago with the goal of creating a stage for potential comedians to flex their humerus, will be showcasing some of the best up-and-coming talent the UK has to offer. You can expect 3 hours of carefully curated laughter on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so for those who would like a break from the bass that will be lashing the rest of the site, our new chill out area complete with cake shop and live performance arts will be the perfect place to recharge your batteries before the final push into Sunday night.

For those of you who came along last year you may have seen a rather attractive wooden gazebo in our campsite, this belonged to a great friend of ours who was launching a prototype to be used in festival campsites in order to create a sense of community, and to provide a welcome (and extremely beautiful) shelter and focal point for people to gather around whilst out of the festival site. So it came to pass that the ‘Handsome Hardwood Field Lounge’ was born.

From humble beginnings at Noisily the Field Lounge multiplied and jumped in with gusto to the Secret Garden Party and Wilderness Festivals respectively. Back for year two and we will be building a Field Lounge village on site that will act as a wonderful place to relax and hang out, whilst observing the workings of the festival from up on top of our hill. A stone’s throw from the bar and housing your breakfast of boutique bacon butties and real proper coffee, the Field Lounge Village will be the perfect place to start you day.

With food in mind we are also taking great care to put on a real spread for you this year to ensure no one ever goes hungry, we all know a healthy diet is part of a healthy body, and a festival is no exception!

Last year the main stage, aptly named Noisily Hall in ode to the estate on which the festival takes place, was situated up a long corridor towards the North of the site. Conscious of the intimacy that the festival needs to be successful (and the fact that no one likes to be too far from their next drink), we have cleared out a new area in the centre of the site where we will be building a rather large Tipi with a stage inside. Here you can expect to see Electrixx, Atomic Drop and the Plump DJs on Friday, Electric Rescue, James Monro, Ticon and yours truly on Saturday, then 19 full hours of Psy Trance on Sunday from the likes of Dirty Saffi, Lucas, Hamish, Liquid Ross, Bahar Canca, Avalon, and of course, Perfect Stranger.

Bassline Productions, our in house audio and lighting wizards, are back and bigger than ever. They will be bringing a lorry load of lighting, lasers, smoke, haze, Funktion One and Opus Audio, and plenty of other weird and wonderful gizmos that the layman can’t comprehend, in order to turn the woods into a truly magical place to be. Combine this with the additional help of the projection gurus behind the Meteor stage at Glade, and the return of Rupert Newman (with whom Bassline did a job at Chequers for David Cameron in October!!) who built the enormous 3D mapping installation last year, Noisily promises to attack all of your senses from every angle.

Prepare yourselves for an extravaganza in the woods this year; it’s going to be one hell of a party.

21 Feb

Plumping

As music tastes have evolved so have the Plump DJs, infusing Electro licks into their tunes and sets, whilst maintaining the Break Beat basis that their outstanding career was forged on.

NEWS

21 Feb

Plumping

Post by Audley

My first notable foray into the world of festival going was in the summer of 2007, when I spent a totally en(psy)tranced weekend wading through waste high mud, and even more bass, at the completely saturated Glade. I am of course discounting my experience at Reading circa 2005, wherein I was surrounded by a mob of baying thirteen year olds sporting “I hate Morrissey” t-shirts, and only managed to see The Darkness and Dirty Sanchez live throughout the course of the whole weekend, which was spent predominantly in my tent evading said mob. It’s not that I’m not a fan of new age Glam Rock or smoking my own pubic hair through a bong of someone else’s urine, the whole atmosphere was just far too aggressive for my apparently peaceful demeanour. I bought a book from a bald Buddhist on my departure and headed to Aldermaston!

The feeling of excitement when entering the gates of Glade for the first time almost made me want to dump my belongings then and there, and as it turned out it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest, because, unlike Reading, I only spent about an hour in my tent over the whole weekend.

Now it would be easy to speculate where all this energy came from, I certainly know I couldn’t manage it nowadays as the emotional fall out after a stint like that would be too much to handle. The answer lies in the music.

During the early Noughties the Break Beat Boom swept across the UK, with artists such as Krafty Kuts, Stanton Warriors and the Plump DJs spearheading the movement with their exciting and aggressive blend of the classic Amen Break, that the Winstons crafted decades earlier. The Breaksday tent at Glade was no exception and in 2007 Krafty Kuts ruled the show. A year later and I found myself writhing in the same spot, in a little less mud, listening to the dance floor destroying beats of the Plumps.

As music tastes have evolved so have the Plump DJs, infusing Electro licks into their tunes and sets, whilst maintaining the Break Beat basis that their outstanding career was forged on. It’s music like that of the Plump DJs that breathe life and energy into festivals the world over; five years on from my first good Plumping and I am now in a position to offer them a place in our beloved Noisily woodland. We are very excited indeed to have Lee Rous and Andy Gardner headlining our Tipi stage on Friday 24th May at Noisily this year. Plump it up!

Fins out more about the plum DJ’s here.