Visions Festival Reveals Food Plans + Son Lux Q&A

Visions Festival is coming back to grace London's streets with food, alcohol and music on August 8th. Following the success of their last two sell-out events, Visions will be taking place across different warehouse venues, art spaces, courtyards, rooftops, churches and outdoor areas around London.

As well as having a music program to indulge your ears in, this year Visions will be running a craft beer and street food festival to indulge your stomach. The craft beer and street food festival will be taking place in the gardens of their main venue St John's at Hackney Church. A bar hosted by Adam and Eve will be situated in the venue and they'll have a craft beer selection curated by Hackney based The Five Points Brewing Company which will feature independent brewers including One Mile End, Hackney Brewery, Beavertown and Pressure Drop. Also, if you've got an urge to start concocting your own brew of beer, Home Brew Depot will be running a stall where you can sign up for one of their classes at the Adam and Eve.

Food-wise, Visions will be opening up food stalls to represent the quality and variety of London's street food scene that'll include the likes of Capish? Italo-American sandwiches, Yard Sale Pizza, Oh My Dog for burgers and hot dogs, Mama's Jerk Station for finger lickin' Caribbean and Taco Queen. All stalls will offer vegetarian options. For all those who aren't able to get a ticket, Visions craft beer and food festival will be open to the public as well as ticket holders. You lucky things.

Finally, Visions market will be expanded this year as the feature was so popular last year. Now, it will be taking place in Space Studio's outdoor courtyard. Setting up shop there will be stalls that feature independent creative outlets including Seven Doors Tattoo who will be selling flash prints from resident artsits, Zine Swap, Mr. Gordor, an illustrator who will have posters for sale and will be doing live doodles on demand, Break Down Press comic book stall, Black Wax Record shack who will have classic and new releases available and Ditto Press will have a selection of their prints and books for sale. Furthermore, Babek Ganjei will return to Visions following his interpretation of the Patrick Swayze's classic Roadhouse at the art market last year. This year, Ganjei will create a comic strip featuring all Visions artists as well as a larger than life print exhibition at Oval Space. There's also another class you can sign up for: a class on how to screen print run by East London's Printmakers' designers Narcsville & Pat Lunch.

We got so ruddy excited, what with all the food and all, that we asked Son Lux some questions about why he's looking forward to this year's festival;

What attracted you to playing Visions Festival?

London is one of the world's great cities, and people have shown us a lot of love every time we've played there, so we're psyched to return for Visions! And, of course, it's always nice to be performing alongside our friends and peers, so we appreciate being a part of this lineup.

What can Vision-goers expect from your live performance?

We'll be performing several new songs from our forthcoming album, Bones, many of them for the first time ever in the UK or Europe. There's a fair amount of improvisation involved, so every night is different, and we'll be trying to capture the moment and connect with whoever is in the audience. Regardless of how that ends up playing out, though, I think we can safely say that it'll be no holds barred.

Compared to a normal show, do you approach your setlist at a festival differently?

We approach every set differently, and there are often things about the context surrounding a festival set that separate it from a headlining show. For one thing, people are usually hearing a lot of music, so we try to keep things direct and to the point. Often times, festival stages are in larger rooms or outdoors, where sound translates differently – for example, you can hear the kick from a mile away, but you can barely hear the cymbals if you're standing right in front of the stage. Therefore, I think we tend to play leaner and meaner on festival shows, and omit some of the more intricate and delicate moments that we'd linger on in the club set. 

Among all of the summer's big festivals, how important do you think the more local, 'across-venue' festivals are?

It's all important! Local venues festivals are great, though, because they showcase venues and spaces for artistic creation that are already there and hopefully increase awareness and support of that kind of activity in those spaces beyond the festival itself. 

Is there anyone in particular you’re looking forward to watching at Visions Festival?

Well, we're friends with Peter from The Antlers, and he's guested with us before, so we hope to catch their set. And I'm curious to check out Shamir – that's guaranteed to be a great time if his live set is anywhere near as fun as his recordings!

To buy tickets to Visions Festival click here.

Son Lux's album Bones is out on 22nd June via Glassnote.