Grayson Gilmour and Strange Stains

Overview

It's the final week of the Adam Art Gallery's exhibition The Tomorrow People, and to mark its final weekend, Grayson Gilmour and local electro-noise artist Strange Stains will perform live sets in the galleries.

Grayson, since parting ways with his first band So So Modern! has branched out on his own with a Flying Nun deal (their first acquisition since their resurrection in 2010) and a recently-released album Otherness. The Wellington artist is also an award-winning film score composer, so it will be awesome seeing him perform his own material — he hasn't announced a tour for Otherness yet, but we hope it's in the pipeline. Strange Stains (aka Cooki Ami) is described as "droney electro goth wanna-be pop", with computer-generated beats composed primarily of bass and deep sounds. Lyrics and synth are then layered over the top in a melange of sound. "I could be singing about how much I love feijoas and no one would know the better" — intriguing.

Both acts are the perfect sonic accompaniment to The Tomorrow People, with its themes of art-making as a kind of special power: it's the ability to draw the attention of others to the overlooked, the forgotten, the misunderstood. They're both young, up and coming acts with something to communicate — head along and hear their sounds in context.