The Glasshouse

5.30-6.00pm, 8.30-9.00pm, 11.15pm-1.30am | Concourse
DJ sets from Echo Juliet, Birmingham-based DJ, producer and classically-trained percussionist. Expect hypnotic percussion loops and organic sounds blended with contemporary beats, creating an uplifting, melodic feel nestled somewhere between jazz, soul, classical and electronic – the perfect mix for the After Dark Festival.

6pm – 6.30pm | Concourse
Sunset
Saxophonist, composer and arranger Chelsea Carmichael is an understated innovator and educator, quietly adding her own contribution to the iteration of jazz that has evolved on these islands. With her 2021 debut album “The River Doesn’t Like Strangers”, Carmichael was the first signing to Shabaka Hutchings’ new label Native Rebel Recordings. A player who brings subtle and considered improvisation to everything she does, Carmichael is joined on the concourse stage by guitarist Niko Ziarkas to present a hypnotic set to open the After Dark Festival.

6.30pm – 7.25pm | Northern Rock Foundation Hall
Poems of Change
Ian McMillan, Barnsley’s poet extraordinaire and presenter of Radio 3’s The Verb, hosts an energetic poetry cabaret to launch us into the evening, with poems on the theme of change to mark the start of Spring. Including performances from Mike Garry, bringing a flavour of Manchester to the North East, local lad Rowan McCabe who described his “door-to-door” poetry service as “like the Avon lady but with rhymes”, the ever eclectic Kate Fox, and John Challis, whose first full collection, The Resurrectionists, was published last year.

7.30pm – 8.30pm | Concourse Restaurant
Inside the Equinox
On the eve of the Spring equinox, Matthew Sweet hosts a discussion exploring the meanings and interpretations that humanity has given to the moment when the length of day and night is equal. What does it mean to be in balance? Cosmologist Carlos Frenk from Durham University and archaeologist Penny Bickle from the University of York, Kevin Lapping from the Pagan Federation and his daughter Bex discuss the significance of the changing seasons, what we can learn from the solar alignment of Neolithic monuments and the vaster galactic and cosmic cycles that we are also a part of.

9pm – 10pm | Concourse
Darkstar
Darkstar bring their idiosyncratic take on electronic pop music to the Sage concourse at the heart of the After Dark Festival. Key voices on the scene for the best part of two decades, Darkstar have recently worked with the likes of Actress, Wild Beasts and Zomby. They have also released music with Empress Of (XL) and Gaika, collaborating with director Lucy Luscombe and Random Acts for Channel 4, working on ground-breaking live dance performances with choreographer Holly Blakey (Micah Levi) and scoring the Palme d’Or nominated short film ‘Dreamlands’. The band has worked with St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, in Minneapolis, Metal Liverpool, Arts Council England and Harthill Community centre to create an installation and performance piece with teens from migrant communities. The final performance, TRACKBED, was performed at the Barbican in London.

8.45pm – 9.45pm | Northern Rock Foundation Hall
The Sleeping Forecast
A specially curated After Dark edition of BBC Sounds’ Sleeping Forecast mix: a unique journey to dreamland, blending tracks from BBC Introducing artists with a live reading of BBC Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast by Radio 4 newsreader and announcer Viji Alles. A National Radio Institution re-invented in a unique event.

10.15pm – 11.15pm
Dark Places
As we enter the darkest hours, Matthew Sweet hosts a discussion exploring areas beyond the reach of light, both literally and metaphorically, with crime writer Ann Cleeves, theologian Mona Siddiqui, deep sea fish expert and host of the The Deep-Sea podcast Thomas Linley, and poet and Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Jake Morris-Campbell, who writes about the experience of working in darkness for the mining communities of Northumberland and Durham.

11.30pm – 0.15am
Vashti Bunyan in conversation
Newcastle-born singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan talks to Jennifer Lucy Allan about her new memoir, “Wayward: Just Another Life”, which tells the story of her journey as a musician, from an unconventional childhood to the writing of her now-cult 1970s album Diamond Day, and the rediscovery of her recordings after 30 years in the musical wilderness.

01.30am – 05.30 | Sage One
Deep Night Tracks
Join us for Sage Gateshead’s first ever overnight event, as Sara Mohr-Pietsch and Hannah Peel host a 4-hour immersive deep night musical adventure from the team behind Radio 3’s ‘Night Tracks’.

Live performances include a special collaboration between multi-instrumentalist Memotone and his father, nature writer Chris Yates, who take us on a night walk through moonlit forests and nocturnal landscapes; Manchester Collective breath new life into music spanning 900 years from Hildegard of Bingen to Edmund Finnis, including Arnold Schoenberg’s luminous ‘Transfigured Night’; Newcastle-based electronic folk innovator Jayne Dent aka Me Lost Me captures the nocturnal atmosphere with original songs and reworkings of traditional ballads; and Xenia Pestova Bennett and Ed Bennett invite us to lose ourselves in meditative music by Egidija Medeksaite, Gayle Young and JS Bach, in a radical reinterpretation of the Goldberg Variations for piano and live electronics. Something very special to stay awake for.

05.30am – 06.45am
Sunrise
As the sun rises over the Tyne on the Spring equinox, the virtuoso Leeds-based sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun welcomes the new day by performing a traditional north Indian dawn raag, preceded by an evocative soundscape of real, manipulated and vocalised “dawn chorus” birdsong from the sound artist and beatboxer Jason Singh. Join us for an unforgettable way to start a Sunday.