Forgotten Futures Festival announces full line up including Douglas Dare, Penelope Trappes, Jo Quail, Gallops, Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres and more

Forgotten Futures Festival is pleased to announce the full line up of artists for Forgotten Futures 2021, including Penelope Trappes (Houndstooth) Douglas Dare (Erased Tapes), Jo Quail (Poppy Ackroyd etc), and Gallops. They are joined by an eclectic programme of music, carefully curated from across the worlds of classical music, electronica, post-rock, shoegaze and more, creating an engaging and unusual programme of music and visual art.

Forgotten Futures is a musically diverse programme of artists across a full day of immersive performances staged within spectacular environments, taking place at Leicester’s Attenborough Arts Centre’s hall, galleries and studios. The event encourages collisions between music and visual art – whether they are being created simultaneously, responded to, or forming the backdrop for each other. An accessible experimental event, it is set to be an inspiring day of artistic expression.

The festival offers tickets for both the live event at Attenborough Arts Centre, and for a high quality live stream. 

Performances from
DOUGLAS DARE
GALLOPS
JO QUAIL
PENELOPE TRAPPES
RICH LIST
ALEXANDRA HAMILTON-AYRES
CEREMONY: AUDIOVISUAL ORCHESTRATIONS
TOM MORRIS (HER NAME IS CALLA)
ALLATSON / WASTELL / WOODHEAD (Trio)
CHIEF SPRINGS
EYRE LLEW
NATALIE EVANS
LION/S
MUTED FNORD
PEOPLE NEED GOALS
REEDER
PETER WYETH

Plus curated spaces from
HAIKU SALUT
COURTNEY ASKEY & NANCY DAWKINS
INTERACT DIGITAL ART

Headliner Douglas Dare is an English songsmith whose third studio album Milkteeth was released in February 2020 on Erased Tapes Records. Dare’s music speaks of his own experiences of universal themes like love, loss and childhood. Perhaps most importantly, his music gives a voice and a sanctuary to anyone who’s ever felt unusual or out of place. Whether he’s singing of the pain of those in the Magdalene Laundries as on Whelm, describing coming out to his parents on Aforger, or processing his own childhood isolation on Milkteeth, Dare has a graceful honesty and an abiding clarity of vision in his simple and distinctive sound.

Penelope Trappes is a London-based, Australian-born vocalist, musician and ethereal soundscaper. She spent 2016 writing and recording what would become her first solo album, ‘Penelope One’ in a piano studio in East London. Composed of mostly percussion-less, reverb-heavy haunting atmospherics with dystopian themes, the LP was released via Optimo Music in 2017 on vinyl and as a photo book. The first single ‘Puppets’ premiered by opening the Fendi SS17 runway show. Penelope signed to Houndstooth in 2018 and released her sophomore LP ‘Penelope Two’ to critical acclaim. The minimalist, ethereal album was built around field recordings, meditations, guitars, synth drones, piano and reverb, and deals with mortality, predestination and empathy.  2019 saw the release of ‘Penelope Redeux’ consisting of reworks of songs from ‘Penelope Two’ by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Mogwai, Félicia Atkinson, Nik Colk Void and more. ‘Penelope Three’ will be out in Spring of 2021 on Houndstooth.

Jo Quail is an internationally acclaimed composer and virtuoso cellist from London, UK. Equally at home on stage solo, with bands or in collaboration with choir and orchestra she combines an eloquent mastery of her instrument with innovative looping techniques, to realise her complex, evocative music for audiences worldwide. Inspired by the visual arts as much as by fellow composers, Jo cites Barbara Hepworth and Georgia O’Keefe as key influences, alongside the diverse music of Debussy, Pärt, Tool, and Trent Reznor. As a result, she freely crosses the boundaries between genres, awakening listener emotions, and taking audiences into uncharted territory with each concert. Her exuberant, celebratory performance style has won her a fanbase in the contemporary classical world as well as among enthusiasts of post-rock, metal and electronica.

After releasing their debut album, a monstrous slab of dark experimental rock Yours Sincerely Dr. Hardcore in 2012, Wrexham’s Gallops soon announced they were no more and broke up in 2013. In 2016, almost three years to the day, they announced their return. Awakening from their nap, they have done so revitalised, rejuvenated and driven, creating an album that stretched their horizons even further and is driven by the propulsive charge of electronic music – Bronze Mystic was released a year later.