aaamusic | On 30, Sep 2010

Chosen from thousands of hopefuls by the In The City A&R panel, 30 bands have been picked as the latest in a long line of acts showcased during the event’s successful history. In The City Unsigned has been a significant stepping-stone in the careers of Ash, Badly Drawn Boy, Bjork, Catatonia, Chemical Brothers, Coldplay Daft Punk, Doves, Elastica, Elbow, Foo Fighters, Gallows, Hadouken, Lady Sovereign, Maximo Park, Muse, Oasis, Orson, Placebo, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Snow Patrol, Stereophonics, Suede, Sunshine Underground, The Darkness, The Fratellis, The Verve and Little Boots amongst many others.

The 30 bands selected to appear this year are:

2:54 – Sinister and moody shoegaze two-piece
Andrew Davie – understated singer-songwriter with a songbook of Autumnal tales
Beaty Heart – Lush, percussion-heavy art school hypnotics
Big Deal – Loose, summery pop, joining the dots between Mazzy Star and Tennis.
Brown Brogues – Six strings and two drums-worth of stomping, bluesy garage.
Catfish & The Bottlemen – Wide-eyed rock four-piece
Chad Valley – Jonquil frontman’s disco dreampop solo project
D/R/U/G/S – Soaring, post-dubstep anthemics from Manchester
Dead Models – 50s and 60s-indebted smoky songwriters.
Eagulls – Explosive, bloody-nosed slacker punk from Leeds
Fanzine – breezy, bright-eyed slacker pop from blog darlings
Films of Colour – Swooning, layered epic indie.
Fixers – Tom Tom Club-esque surf-dance quintet
Foreign Office – Infectious synth-flecked new wave
Frontiers – Midlands-based post-punk and shoegaze quartet
Labyrinth Ear – Much hyped boy/girl duo, new to the live circuit
Les Cadets – Latin and electronic-influenced indie-pop.
Milk Maid – Lo-fi grunge pop from Manchester
Misty Miller – Teenage ukulele player with an amazing voice
Monument Valley – London singer-songwriter, with echoes of Nick Drake.
Oberhofer – Much blogged youthful exuberance from New York.
Picture Book – Insistent, dancefloor-driven electro pop
Samuel Diamond – Brooding, Hyperdub-influenced lo-freq. electronica
Sissy & The Blisters – Primal, inventive krautrock from Egyptian Hip-Hop labelmates.
Slow Motion Shoes – Lamacq-approved fizzy neon pop
Smatka – Broad-brush, multi-faceted pop, from innocent to disturbing
Sophie-Rose – Florence and Mystery Jets-approved pop
The Car Is On Fire – Infectious and experimental Polish psychedelia.
The Kill Van Kulls – a four-piece dealing in gloriously harmonious synth-soaked pop
Thomas J Speight – Sweet and wistful folk-inflected songer-songwriter

FURTHER NEW ADDITIONS… Dutch Uncles, Flats, Tribes, ExLovers, Stricken City, The Neat, Youth, Vondelpark, Planet Earth, Egyptrixx, Advances In Mathematics, This Many Boyfriends, Ana Free, Nikki Garnett, Easter, From The Kites Of San Quentin, Holden, Rook and the Ravens, The Horn The Hunt, 1913, Berlin Berlin, Hey Zeus, The Hidden Revolution.

Full details of when and where all the bands listed above are performing during In The City 2009 will soon be available athttp://www.inthecity.co.uk

IN THE CITY 2010 iPHONE APP

Launched in time for the event, the brand new In The City iPhone application will allow both attending delegates and festival wristband holders the chance to interact with the festival in a way they’ve never been able to before. The application has been designed to enable the user to:

– See who’s playing & plan their schedule
– Access up to date times and venues
– Browse gigs through a map
– View the most talked about bands at In The City through “Buzz” (a metric solution designed to determine the most talked about act at that moment. Every time the act’s name is mentioned on Twitter, or someone adds them to their calendar, this calculates their buzz score. So, if you want to see which act is the hottest at any given moment, view the Buzz and see if you agree with what everyone else is saying)!

The FREE iPhone app can be downloaded here – http://bit.ly/dm6Xa3

IN THE CITY – NEW MUSIC FILM SCREENINGS

In The City 2010 will present a new film programme strand in association with the Sensoria Festival of Music & Film. Four new music-related movies will screened to Delegates this year including

‘Upside Down – The Creation Records Story’ – Weds 13th Oct @ The Place Hotel, Manchester
– Prior to the screening Danny O’Connor, the film’s director, will take part in a Q&A session with Mark Gardner – the lead singer of Creation band Ride – and acclaimed journalist and former Creation artist (with The Membranes) John Robb, who has written extensively on the label. The evening will also begin with a drinks reception hosted by Vision & Media.

‘Mogwai Burning’ – 5pm, Weds 13th Oct @ Nexus Art Cafe, Manchester
– A stunning, raw performance film by Vincent Moon, stylishly shot in monochrome. Expect a wall of Mogwai sound with immersive visuals.

‘The Beat Is the Law’ – 5pm, Thu 14th Oct @ Nexus Art Café, Manchester
– Eve Wood’s end-of-the-century documentary about the British music scene through the eyes of Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley and other Sheffield natives. A journey through Thatcher’s politically charged 80’s that ends up at the epicentre of Britpop.

‘Separado!’ – 5pm, Fri 15th Oct @ The Band on the Wall, Manchester
– a documentary that follows Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys on a quest to find his descendants in Patagonia. His long lost relatives emigrated in the 19th century as part of a Welsh diaspora to Latin America. Rhys provides an entertaining guide as he also looks for the Welsh-Argentinean singer René Griffiths, briefly a star of Welsh TV when Rhys was a teenager.