If an alien landed on planet Earth and demanded to know where they could find the best demonstration of the UK’s burgeoning electronic scene, your answer should be Sheffield’s No Bounds Festival. As our man on the ground discovers, this raucous mix of rave and immersive arts will make you never want to leave the South Yorkshire city
I sit at a picnic bench in the cold night air. Surrounding me is a cluster of industrial buildings, and inside each of these is a rave. Dirty techno rhythms pulse from inside, and the windows dance with colour. In the relative peace of this outdoor smoking area, a student called Chris joins me and exchanges pleasantries. He tells me about the DJs he has seen here and the DJs he wants to see. In turn, I preach about the strange sounds I heard in the cathedral, and I ask if he is going to chapel on Sunday. He does not flinch. This is No Bounds Festival. It is no ordinary rave.
No Bounds takes place in Sheffield, a city whose reputation is built in part on Warp Records, Cabaret Voltaire, and the apartment orgy in Pulp’s 1992 B-side ‘Sheffield: Sex City’. I take these notes at 2am while sitting on a bench between bouts of increasingly exhausted dancing. That said, the festival is much more than its nocturnal DJ roster.
The weekend’s opening show happens in Sheffield Cathedral, with stained glass windows looking down haughtily at a challenging series of sound sculptors and musical experimentalists. Performance artist Cara Tolmie gives a brilliantly layered vocal meditation, jumping personalities from syllable to syllable, and manipulating her torso while exploring the imaginary plasterboard inside her arm. “I don’t know if it’s dust, or…” she trails off enigmatically. Her operatic fractals are a sharp contrast to the audio soup accompanying her, delivered by local lad Rian Treanor.
While the audience decompresses from this, they are assaulted by Iceboy Violet and Nueen, the pair staging with ferocity their latest album, ‘You Said You’d Hold My Hand Through The Fire’. “Why is it so hard to leave?” opines Iceboy on ‘Cement Skin’ as they dive into the crowd, amid a sonic smokiness so dense, it feels like the smothered audience can never escape.
Ten minutes down the road from the cathedral, local techno legends The Black Dog take over the disco-balled pub The Hallamshire Hotel. Their trademark widescreen gloaming is full of scrumptious fuzz as they morph into their woozy remix of the Human League’s ‘Empire State Human’. The accompanying architectural visuals by Amoeba Design mesmerise, hampered slightly by an undersized projection screen that could have been more tall, tall, tall.
The festival oozes from every cranny of this city. The Delicious Clam collective hosts sultry shoegazers Micromoon, community centre SADACCA conjures the history of the city through audio and video while its regulars play dominos, and there are yoga workshops for those feeling knotted from walking Yorkshire’s hilly streets.
A tram ride away in Rotheram, musicians take over the 500-year-old Chapel Of Our Lady On The Bridge. The 40-seater church feels like the cathedral’s baby cousin, although its pictorial windows are no less impressive. Sheffield duo Åyusp impress with their melodic Moog ambience as they prepare their new album, while poet Ralph Dartford evokes a “youth lost in a bedroom mirror” while accompanied by Alison Moyet collaborator Gary Clark on keys and the talented young harpist Alejandro Barnett. In a clumsy but rather charming move, Barnett displays a “harpist for hire” calling-card board while he plays, like a scaffolder hawking for work from passing pedestrians. I’d hire him in a heartbeat.
Elsewhere in the city, I enter a 1980s benefits office. An officious man invites me to take a ticket from a machine while he explains how much the Thatcher government values me as a stakeholder. Today, he says, I can take home three pence. I offer a hesitant thanks. At a desk littered with staplers, date stamps and a Newton’s Cradle office toy, he gives me four pence instead of three. A moment of humanity. “The extra penny will come off your next payment,” he deadpans.
I appear to have stumbled on the performance art strand of No Bounds Festival, supported by artist-researchers at Sheffield Hallam University and curated by Amy Carter Gordon. The coin-proffering jobsworth is researcher Dr Austin Houldsworth: this ‘Countering Rhetoric’ is a satirical mix of improvised acting and minimalist machinery.
Meanwhile, fellow researcher Dr Tom Payne revives an old John Ruskin lecture in ‘Storm-Cloud’. It’s a sprawling and playful piece along a stark catwalk, and Ruskin’s seemingly anachronistic climate warnings are compelling. The audio is sketchy and some of the projections are lost as the organisers surmount tech problems which, to be fair, would have left Ruskin baffled.
‘Flow State’ is an art installation that illuminates a neglected underground car park. In perhaps the geekiest moment of the festival, the colourful displays scoop their digital data from the nearby Megatron, a Victorian storm chamber well known to locals. It’s brilliant in brightness and in intelligence.
There’s also ‘Base Notes And Place Holders’, a clutter of artistic oddities soundtracked with ambient noise. My rave-addled brain can barely take it all in as I fixate on an abandoned tambourine picked up from the streets of Brooklyn.
It takes ‘Areas Of Search’ to cut through the haze. It’s a short sci-fi film by artist Helen Blejerman that offers a visual meditation on locations of femicide, its sun-bleached touristy landscapes darkened by hidden histories. A moment to reflect.
I’m back at the rave, which is taking place at Hope Works, a munitions factory turned arts centre on the banks of the River Don. My new friend Chris has abandoned me to one of the four clubbing spaces – the miniscule and appropriately named High Density Energy Chamber, the starlight-studded and spacious Kuiper Belt, the no-nonsense Janksy Room, and the headliner hangout Mothership whose generous allocation of toilet cubicles seems appropriate for the bowel-wobbling ferocity of its nuclear bass speakers.
Timedance record boss Batu makes the best of the Mothership’s explosive sound system, although the Bristol producer is given a run for his money by the veteran bleeps of Winston Hazel & Pipes, the heavy dub of Denham Audio, and the eviscerating screamathon of Kenyan artist Lord Spikeheart.
A hat doff, too, to the proficient debut DJ set from Paul Raynor, whose rollerdex of tunes includes putting a donk on ‘Dub Be Good To Me’. And to grime MC Flowdan who was heavy on the rewinds.
Finally, local boy 96 Back plays cuts from his compelling new album ‘tender, exit’, including a tune he wrote in the pub while drinking with Modern Love producer Andy Stott. He provides my favourite No Bounds moment when he gives a perfectly pitched performative breakdown like a techno Stewart Lee. His tunes fragment as he climbs on top of his equipment table and opines to the Sheffield audience, “I’ll never leave this place”. I know how you feel, 96. I really know how you feel.
Head to noboundsfestival.co.uk for news of 2025’s edition
