DOLLSTEP IV

For CLIMAXED's 5th Birthday, we are bringing the fourth edition of DOLLSTEP to the tunnels of Loco Klub for an all-doll lineup!

From the US via Berlin, we bring the priestess of maximalist textures, futurist techno and transformation, Alif Hilal (fka Lyra Pramuk), to her debut DJ set in Bristol. From performances at Unsound, Sonar & Pitchfork, Alif’s approach to music is ritualistic, sensory and timeless. A true testament to the DOLLSTEP sound.

Sub-heavy starlet Jess Hands joins us after several years playing for the likes of Outlook, FOLD, Eris Drew, Octo Octa, Waterworks and Rinse FM.

Bringing it back to the dubby low end, in true DOLLSTEP fashion, the mother of CLIMAXED, Lyzander completes the lineup after a year of launching the club series. Over the past year, she’s played for the likes of Dalston Superstore, Queerky and Gay Garage alongside appearances on Rinse FM, Brixton and Netil radio.

Derived from queer expression of ‘the dolls’, the artificial life of a doll, and the tension between the human and the machine, DOLLSTEP queers dubstep into something mechanical, camp, and dystopian, undefined by genre. The line between social reality and science fiction is an optical illusion.

Dubstep emerged from displaced sounds, pressurised bass, syncopated rhythms out of step, half-time, and double-time coexisting. Drawing on dub, jungle, and the wider hardcore continuum, it was music built on the margins before hardening into a commercialised form that shed a deeper intersectional possibility. DOLLSTEP develops those sounds for gender expression and speculative future-making.

The project builds a trans-sonic fiction: a reimagining of genre through femme, queer, and trans artists working at the intersection of low-end electronics and cyber-feminist world-building. The DOLLSTEP curative framework and genre hybridisation is built from hyper sensibilities, exploring themes of transhumanism and postmodern feminism; technology as a tool for expression; the self by synthesising the real.

DOLLSTEP moulds electronic music culture from a site of comfortable displacement, building infrastructure needed to sustain trans spaces in nightlife.

Editions have included hybrid live sets from gyrofield and princess xixi, DJ sets from Introspekt, Karlie Marx, Ifeoluwa, ex.sses and Lyzander. Bristol has been the base, with support from the Arts Council and the PRS Foundation.