
Pet owners can take part in sound healing with their dogs at this festival
Festival-goers can expect live performances, workshops, film screenings, talks, and interactive sound installations to explore at your own pace. Eaton's vinyl sharing series A2B x Mystery Train will host listening sessions of Kendrick Lamar's newest album GNX as well as analyses of the lyrics and themes. The Colony Kids Record Fair also returns with a marketplace selling rare vinyls, second-hand sound equipment, zines, and DIY electronics – perfect for any sound enthusiast.
One of the most interesting highlights of the festival is a pet-friendly sound healing session guided by Shoji, which pet owners are encouraged to attend with their dogs. If you're unfamiliar with singing bowls, it is a therapeutic practice that uses harmonic sounds created by tones and vibrations from striking or stroking metal bowl-shaped bells, which promotes relaxation, mindfulness, and a state of meditation. The sound waves produced can help both dogs and owners reduce stress, so if you've got an anxious doggy, try out this sound healing to see if they feel more at ease afterwards!
Of course, no music-related festival can be without live performances, and this year's Unheard line-up includes Donna Goldn, a Belgian vocalist who interestingly creates genre-melding pop in Korean and English; experimental duo cehryl & hirsk; local musician and producer Loisey; and the debut of Hong Kong-based collective A Vivid Machine.
The festival events will be spread across two weekends from July 26 to August 3, with most being free to take part in, though some performance nights will be ticketed. Check out the full programme details here.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Tyler, the Creator: Don't Tap the Glass review
Tyler, the Creator's ninth album received a very contemporary grand unveiling. Rush-released two days after its existence was announced, it had been trailed by the appearance of cryptic art installations at the rapper's live shows – he's still theoretically touring his last album, 2024's Chromakopia – and at One World Trade Center in New York, and by a flurry of online gossip: one US website was forced to retract and apologise for publishing a tracklisting, complete with guest appearance by Kendrick Lamar, that turned out to be fake. Despite all this, Tyler Okonma seemed keen to deflate the kind of anticipation that arises when your last three albums have all been critically lauded, platinum-selling chart-toppers full of big ideas. 'Y'all better get them expectations and hopes down,' he posted on X, 'this ain't no concept nothing.' He then published an essay that read suspiciously like an explanation of the album's concept, bemoaning the intrusion of cameraphones and social media on our ability to live in the moment: 'Our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme.' So what is Don't Tap the Glass? A proper follow-up to Chromakopia or an interstitial release? A random selection of songs with no overarching theme, or something made with more deliberate intent? The answer seems to be: all these things. It lasts less than half an hour, and is noticeably, if not entirely, lacking the soul-searching that helped define its predecessor. The lyrics tend to stick to braggadocio and reaffirmations of the nihilistic persona Tyler inhabited in the days when he was deemed such a threat to the country's morals that anti-terrorism legistation was invoked to ban him from the UK: the first, but far from last, mention of him not giving a fuck about anything arrives less than 30 seconds into the album. There are a lot of memorable one-liners, among which 'I don't trust white people with dreadlocks' and his dismissal of an ageing rival stand out: '49, still in the street / Your prostate exam in a week.' It also eschews Chromakopia's kaleidoscopic musical approach, its sudden leaps from Beach Boys harmony to Zamrock samples to guest spots from Lola Young and Lil Wayne. It's still eclectic in its choice of source material – opener Big Poe samples Busta Rhymes and a 2015 collaborative album made by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, Shye Ben Tzur and India's Rajasthan Express – but ultimately feels more narrow and focused. Almost all of its 10 tracks seem fixated on the dancefloor. There are 808 beats, Kraftwerk-y electronics, a noticeable smattering of Zapp-like vocoder and electro, among other early 80s genres. Powered by a bassline that's a dead ringer for that of Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and decorated with washes of synthetic strings and a falsetto vocal, Ring Ring Ring feels like a lost Leroy Burgess boogie production from the same era. The huge, distorted breakbeat of Big Poe recalls the rhythms produced by the Bomb Squad in their prime, amplified by the stentorian, Chuck D-like tone of Pharrell Williams's guest rap. Elsewhere, I'll Take Care of You unexpectedly transforms from a beatless electronic ballad into something that – with its clattering rhythm and grimy sub-bass – most closely resembles old skool UK hardcore rave: in a neat bit of self-referentiality, the clattering rhythm is actually repurposed from the title track of Tyler's 2015 album Cherry Bomb. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion All of this is done fantastically well. The musical reference points are deployed with an evident love and understanding of the source material, never feeling like box-ticking or pastiche; the hooks work with enviable efficiency. It's all funky enough that you imagine even the selfie-obsessed pocketing their phone and throwing themselves around if it came booming from some big speakers. But it's also not the whole story. There are scattered moments when Don't Tap the Glass feels of a piece with, or an addendum to, Chromakopia. In the middle of the album lurks the incongruous Mommanem, thick with the grunts and gasps and feral barks that were Chromakopia's sonic signature. On the concluding Tell Me What It Is, Tyler suddenly drops the boasts and the IDGAF stuff in favour of precisely the heartsore self-examination that characterised his previous album, the sentiments amplified by the untutored frailty of his singing voice: 'I'm feeling like a bum … is there a traffic to my soul? I need answers … Why can't I find love?' It's an odd way to end an album that seems largely about not overthinking things and simply giving yourself up to the moment, but, then, this is the man who once rapped 'I'm a fucking walking paradox / No I'm not.' Fourteen years on, Tyler, the Creator clearly still reserves the right to be contradictory. When the results are as good as Don't Tap the Glass, who can blame him? Blood Orange – The Field Not a song of the summer in the accepted dancefloor banger sense, but The Field's Durutti Column sample, skittering beats and ethereal vocals (by Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar) are the perfect soundtrack to a languid afternoon.


The Independent
2 days ago
- The Independent
You can now study Kendrick Lamar at this university
Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is set to offer a new course this autumn titled "Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of M.A.A.D City". The course, taught by Assistant Professor Timothy Welbeck, will provide an in-depth Africological analysis of Kendrick Lamar's life and his significant impact on hip-hop. Students will explore how Lamar's art reflects the Black experience in America and examine the urban policies that influenced his upbringing. Professor Welbeck spent a year planning the curriculum, having previously incorporated Lamar's material into other classes. The university's Africology and African American Studies department has shown a strong embrace of hip-hop studies, with other courses focusing on artists such as Tupac, Beyoncé, and Jay-Z.


Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
Kendrick and SZA: Like seeing Prince and Madonna together in their prime
Imagine if Prince and Madonna had toured together in their prime, duetting and interacting over two-and-a-half hours of blockbuster, hi-tech stadium entertainment. In contemporary terms, that is the scale this superstar double bill represents, bringing together Kendrick Lamar, modern pop's most gifted rapper, with SZA, alternative R&B's most sassy and emotive singer-songwriter. Yet even that Prince-Madonna comparison doesn't really do justice to the almost polar disparity between these two stars. They are so stylistically different, it is more akin to seeing a young Bob Dylan attacking his wordiest epics while Tina Turner shimmies around bringing showbiz heat. Lamar is fierce, dark, stark and serious, an outrageously gifted wordsmith with an undercurrent of socio-political anger whose dazzlingly supreme rap skills have carried him to the top in a genre built on battling. He has the intensity and flow of Eminem combined with the depth and righteous charisma of Tupac Shakur, and a certain cerebral artiness that is all his own. His parts of the set were styled in shades of concrete, imposing visions of black, white and grey projected on to giant screens with a Soviet era quality of gloomy brutalism, his grey-uniformed dancers performing rigidly militaristic choreography. SZA, by contrast, is soft-edged and richly musical, with a fluttery high voice and sensuous persona that only slightly cushion the sharp lyrical stabs of her frequently rather rude songs about the travails of modern dating. Her biggest hit, Kill Bill, is a deceptively sweet nursery rhyme about murdering her ex, and it appeared to have every woman in Tottenham Stadium singing along in sympathetic delight. Screens burst with the colours and images of nature every time SZA appeared, bringing much-needed relief after Lamar's visual austerity. Lamar can be easier to admire than to love and benefited hugely from the lightness that SZA brought to his shade. Uncharacteristically, he could even be seen smiling during their frequent, flirty duets – half a dozen songs in a cleverly designed set that underlined their contrasting personalities with bold stage design, while pyrotechnics turned the sky above the stadium black with smoke. SZA was accompanied by a live band, though they remained hidden behind giant LED screens, a sign of how far actual musicians have fallen down the pecking order in pop performances. Like most rappers, Lamar stuck rigidly to pre-recorded backing tracks which restricted spontaneity. The stadium sound was a challenge – all booming bass, thin drums and echoing vocals: if you didn't already know every lyric, Lamar sometimes came across as a tiny figure snapping rhythmically but unintelligibly in the centre of a huge roaring crowd. But it all went off spectacularly for his biggest hits, including a version of his brutal put-down of superstar rapper Drake, Not Like Us, that was so loud one fears Drake himself might have been able to hear it from Birmingham, the latest stop on his own UK tour. In an era of overpriced live entertainment, the Grand National tour, as this spectacular is being billed, offers plenty of bang for your buck. Lamar may be the higher-ranking superstar, but SZA brought more in terms of musical variety, character and spontaneity, and could count on the singalong support of her devoted female fans to tip the balance in her favour. I am not saying she stole the show, but she made it all go down so much sweeter than Lamar ever could have managed on his own. What unlikely team-up can we expect next? After all, as Noel and Liam Gallagher are currently proving, you don't even have to like each other much to share a stage.