UKAEA

UKAEA is an ever-shifting collective of musicians, visual artists, performers and material artists founded by Dan Jones (Nitkowski, Sly & the Family Drone, Worldzero) in 2014. With UKAEA, Dan Jones combines his background in organising free parties and playing at underground clubs with a knowledge of indigenous folk musics gleaned from studying ethnomusicology. Modular synthesis is used as a means to secede control of elements of the structure and sound to algorithmic, random and complex cyclical processes. The goal is to ‘teach’ the hardware to manifest a sort of folk music from a dystopian future that will hopefully never come to pass.

Apocalyptic and violent, but also redemptive, their work deals with themes of animism as environmentalism, collective expression as resistance, and mutual experience as solace and transformation.

Performances at festivals across Europe have become vehicles for large-scale multidisciplinary productions, but UKAEA is equally adaptable to sweaty basement clubs and spacious arts venues. The new album, Birds Catching Fire In The Sky, is forthcoming on The state51 Conspiracy; at times hyper-violent and disturbing, it seeks to still keep one foot in imagined folk styles from a distant future, and one foot on the dancefloor. Vocalists deliver powerful, memorable melodies and haunted declamations; instruments and styles shift, blend and intersect.