Next week Manchester will be transformed for the city’s bi-annual International festival where the city celebrates its rich heritage of music and culture over the course of a month of bespoke shows, performances and art installations.
Today, the film-maker Adam Curtis has provided the first glimpse of his collaboration with Massive Attack which is meant to be a “new way of integrating a gig with a film”.
Also confirmed for the MIF show is the addition of two guest performers: Elizabeth Fraser, formerly of the Cocteau Twins and reggae singer Horace Andy.
Curtis explains: “The show tells a story about how a new system of power has risen up in the modern world to manage and control us. A rigid and static system that has found in those images and sounds a way of enveloping us in a thin two-dimensional version of the past.
“A fake, but enchanting world which we all live in today – but which has also become a new kind of prison that prevents us moving forward into the future.”
The collaboration between Bafta award-winning director Adam Curtis and Massive Attack has been commissioned especially for the Manchester International Festival, which kicks of July 4 and runs until July 21.
Elsewhere James Murphy and 2 Many DJs will spinning vinyl for four days during the festival on a custom-made disco soundsystem called Despacio.
