Heatsick // JG Wilkes (Optimo): Festival Closing Party

Braw Gigs and Summerhall

- Venue: The Dissection Room
- Category:
- Age Suitability: 18+
- Times: 23.00 (240 mins)
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Heatsick is the project of musician and visual artist Steven Warwick, whose new album, ‘Re-engineering’, is out now on PAN.

Jonnie Wilkes is a DJ, electronic musician and composer. He is one half of the international Optimo deejay team, and releases his own output under the Naum Gabo moniker.

Heatsick’s entrancing live show is created in real time based upon loops that are moulded, stretched and reduced to interlink, nestling and merging with one another in a similar way to his visual artwork, where objects and media combine and coalesce in an environment inviting the viewer’s participation. Combining a palette of sources from early Chicago house mixtapes (in sound, texture AND mixing technique) through to musique concrète and psychedelia, Heatsick proposes a live dance music that expands and unlocks the senses: his use of limited resources to produce an immersive, maximalist sound environment – often stretched beyond three hours and augmented by elements of his broader art practice for his Extended Play… performance series – has been favourably received at venues, clubs and festivals across the world including Berghain/Panorama Bar, Unsound, MoMa and Novas Frequencias in Rio.

Jonnie Wilkes took the first successful steps as a deejay at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. In this bristling underground community of artists, musicians and creative outsiders, Jonnie ran a series of techno parties for a number of years – firstly as Knucklehead and laterally as My Machines – with his friend Hamish McChlery. These became essential events at what would become one of the key clubbing venues in the city, one of the most popular destinations for weekend revellers and provided a residency which would cement Jonnie’s reputation as an eclectic and skilled DJ. As the Art School parties continued over the years Jonnie became disaffected with the musical direction of the techno scene, and at the invitation of a fellow DJ friend of his – Keith McIvor (Twitch) – decided to start up a new event which would allow for a much broader and more adventurous selection of music.

The collaboration between the two would become the Optimo nightclub which would run for 14 years at the infamous Sub Club, spawn a series of critically lauded compilations and generate a global reputation for the duo as two of the most forward thinking and iconoclastic deejays in contemporary clubbing. The Optimo deejays breakthrough release was their (now seminal) ‘How To Kill The Dj Pt.2″ mix on Tigersushi. Over the next ten yers this would be followed by “Optimo presents Psyche Out” (Eskimo), Walkabout (Endless Flight), Sleepwalk (a compilation) (Domino), Sub Club: 20 Years Underground (Soma) their exceptional mix Fabric 52 and most recently with Dark is the NIght (Endless Flight).