Henge + Shunya @ The Sunflower Lounge, 7 April 2019
Attention Earth! Strong signals of ‘cosmic dross’ were perceived on Sunday at the coordinates 52.4762° N, -1.8974° W. Henge landed at the Sunflower Lounge in Birmingham during their Demilitarise tour.
They came from space ‘in the name of rave, bringing love and harmony’ through their music. They believe that we, human beings, have great potential but we are wasting our resources, instead of using them to explore space and help our species survive. Through their single, Demilitarise, which was highly acclaimed by the audience who sang along, they pay tribute to one of their favourite humans, Professor Stephen Hawking, who believed that mankind can only survive by colonising other planets. They say: “We demand/ that the weapons of war/ are manufactured no more/ … Demilitarise!”. They want us to learn to love and dance again, to unite and colonise space.
The gift they brought us, cosmic dross, is alive and eternal, a kind of music new to our world and hard to describe in words, inspired by the Universe. Zpor, the founder, vocalist and guitarist of the band, originally came from the planet Agricular in Cosmos Redshift 7. He made contact via lucid dreaming with Grok, a human being who plays the synthesiser. He helped Zpor come to ‘this very dangerous militarised’ place, Planet Earth, marking the start of Henge, together with Nom, the frog drummer, and Goo, the alien on the keyboard.
The artists entered the stage one by one by making their way through the middle of the audience, taking their time to greet the fans, some of which were wearing space-like make-up and alien hats. Their experiment had some wonderful results – their up-lifting extraterrestrial music brought smiles to everyone’s faces, the whole night. During the show, Zpor left the stage a few times and sang and danced with the human beings. They showed their love to mankind until the very last minute of the gig, when the band members hugged the people who came to enjoy an unrivalled night.
After attending their last experiment on gathering of humans, there is no wonder they won Best Live Act at the 2018 Independent Festival Awards. This followed the release of their debut album, Attention Earth!, which presents songs like Mushroom One and Indigo Dust.
Opening the show for Henge was the solo artist Shunya (Alan Keary), an Irish born multi-instrumentalist and producer. Combining electronic beats with a violin and singing, it is difficult to define his genre of music, but it is definitely creative and unique. His performance made the perfect intro to the cosmic dross of the extraterrestrial band.
Photographer and Reviewer: Andra Tudoran