The Brighton Festival begins in May. Since 2014 theartsdesk has had a media partnership with this lively, multi-faceted event which takes place over three weeks. This year the Guest Director is the Malian musician Rokia Traoré, who inhabits a position previously filled by cultural figures such as Brian Eno, David Shrigley, Kate Tempest, Anish Kapoor and Vanessa Redgrave.

“When we graduated we were seeing lot of theatre as a literary form,” explains Candice Edmunds of the theatre company Vox Motus, “But we were really excited by it as a visual form and everything we make, from our earliest scratch pieces up to Flight, has really been an experimentation into how much we can substitute dialogue and the written word for theatrical visuals.”

The striking cover for the Brighton Festival 2019 programme shouts out loud who this year’s Guest Director is. Silhouetted in flowers, in stunning artwork by Simon Prades, is the unmistakeable profile of Malian musician Rokia Traoré.

Signed to FatCat records and purporting to create music that “recalls thoughtful days spent outdoors”, Breathe Panel’s self-titled album could easily be lost in the thriving soft-psych scene that seems to have set itself up in the south of England. Ultimately, though, Breathe Panel’s considered melodicism and dynamic range ensures that it’s a strikingly tender body of work that gets more and more enjoyable with each listen.

Hailing from Canada and born from the ashes of cult indie heroes Women (the band responsible for that chiming Calgary guitar sound), Preoccupations haven’t let up since their first LP Viet Cong was released just three years ago.

As the Brighton Festival 2018 draws towards its closing weekend, its Guest Director, the artist David Shrigley, has committed to an illustrated talk about his work that “will contain numerous rambling anecdotes but not be in the slightest bit boring”. In the programme, he claims to have promised this signed in his own blood. Such drastic assurance proves unnecessary.

Watching this band in action is a treat. They gel absolutely and play off one another in a manner that’s easy and mellow, yet also sparks by occasionally teetering on the edge of their virtuosic abilities. The songs played throughout the evening at Brighton Festival are protest classics and other socially aware fare, but the group’s leader-arrangers, singer Carleen Anderson and keyboard player Nikki Yeoh, have turned them, via jazz, into almost completely new pieces of music.

The welcome to Glasgow audio-visual artist Robbie Thomson’s performance engenders a hefty sense of anticipation. It’s almost nervousness-inducing as we’re handed ear-plugs and warned about how very loud it’s going to be. Then, walking into the main hall from the bar, all is gloom. From 1849, for a century-and-a-half, this venue was a church and attached school, its claim to fame a dismissive mention in Jane Eyre. But this evening the stained glass windows are blacked out, blocking the evening sun.

First the good news: Cédric Tiberghien, master of tone colour, lucidity and expressive intent, playing the 24 Chopin Preludes plus the Bach C major and the C minor Nocturne in the red-gold dragons' den of the Royal Pavilion's Music Room.

The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.”  Oyewole is raging and it feels good.