Summer 2015 has seen the launch of Fat Out’s Burrow in the Mill, creating a two-year programming residency for Fat Out to take full curatorial control of the ground floor event space.
Taking cues from Liverpool’s The Royal Standard and Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery, both of which operate a two year rolling residency, experimental music promoters Fat Out Til You Pass Out have taken on the mantle of the Burrow’s residency. The two-year stint is aimed at giving them the space and opportunity to develop their business, grow their skill set and enable future ambitions by giving full them autonomy over the creative programme and venue management.
Organising events in the city since 2008, Fat Out have proved themselves dynamic, creative promoters. Their new residency sees them dedicated to bringing exciting and diverse music to the Mill, whilst retaining a strong DIY ethos.
Fat Out’s Emma Thompson says: ‘We’ve rebranded the space Fat Out’s Burrow and will use our residency to support emerging musicians, bring new audiences to Islington Mill and curate a diverse and interesting calendar of cultural events in Salford. We launched the Burrow in June with a week long stretch of events including performances from Dan Deacon, James Blackshaw and collaborations with promoters Gesamtkunstwerk, Grey Lantern and Now Wave.
‘Through this residency Islington Mill is enabling us to grow as promoters and entrepreneurs giving us a unique opportunity to develop Fat Out as a sustainable business, which I believe will be imperative to our future.’
2015 is Fat Out Til You Pass Out’s seventh year of organising events in Manchester and Salford. In that time they’ve promoted more than 80 live shows and three festivals for artists including Swans, The Bug, Melt Banana, Boris and Russian Circles. Fat Out first got involved with the Mill in 2009, hosting a stage at Sounds from the Other City in the years since. The Mill has also been the venue for their own weekender, Fat Out Fest. Verity Gardner, Fat Out’s co-director, says: ‘It’s been a long standing dream of ours to have our own venue; total autonomy in programming and also managing a platform to engage with new artists, collaborators and the local community.’
Mark Carlin is a director of Islington Mill Arts Club. ‘A big part of the developing residency offers at Islington Mill is to explore new ways of enabling more people to benefit from residency space, and the time and freedom to develop that comes with it,’ he says. ‘As a building that has such a rich musical heritage we thought it really fitting to experiment with how to give music programmers and curators an opportunity to do just that. The promoter residency with Fat Out is another in our series of ongoing residency pilots and experiments and one that we are really excited and hope to see develop into an ongoing opportunity that we can offer into the future.’
