Step inside an alternate world where time is suspended in light of revelry, art, laughter and music. Come misbehave!, with a lead from the brilliant Cretan rebels Balothizer, and the maverick Alabaster Deplume…

THEY’RE BACK! After a bit of a hiatus Balothizer stride back into town to re-unite and once more lay down their beautifully chaotic, deeply embellished take on the traditional sounds of Crete.

Cretan music is wild and unpredictable – quite a different thing to the disciplined bouzouki music of the Greek mainland. Endless melodies, rolling one after the other in stomping rhythms, sometimes monotonous and archaic, sometimes near ecstatic, with an unmistakeable Asian influence.

Here’s a video from Balothizer’s former incarnation as El Khandak

Opening the evening, Alabaster Deplume is a Mancunian spoken-word theatre artist spicing up audience / performer relations, a “slinky, kaleidostropic maelstrom” as Now Then magazine has it; “part performance poet, part Leonard Cohen, part jazz saxophonist, and something of the Ivor Cutler”, says Simple Folk Radio’s Daniel Green. Expect highly original oration and song to have you standing on and falling off your seats.