Daniel Avery live at Bristol Beacon: Gig Review

Live4ever 11 November, 2025

A photo of musician Daniel Avery

Daniel Avery by Keffer

4 stars hq

Daniel Avery is a past master, and here he maintains a balance between control and abandon.

With the Simple Things festival officially underway, a dark, pulsing energy filled the Bristol Beacon on Friday night as Scaler and Daniel Avery brought two distinct visions of electronic intensity to the venue’s main hall.

Both acts pull at the boundaries of live dance music, merging the mechanical with the emotional, but both finding beauty in the noise.

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Locals Scaler, who have evolved from their earlier industrial dance-rock beginnings and have expanded their live act (now featuring five musicians lined up across the stage), now channel something more refined yet no less ferocious.

Apparently determined to be more than just a support act their set, largely based around new album Endlessly, was less a gig more like an exorcism.

Their sound sits somewhere between the brooding menace of Nine Inch Nails and the raw power of Pendulum, but it’s unmistakably their own.

Gnarly guitar loops collide with slabs of synth and distorted bass, creating a wall of sound both brutal and hypnotic.

At times it bordered on heavy metal, all serrated edges and pounding rhythms. At others, the mood was gothic and cinematic.

There were flashes of tenderness buried within the chaos, but mostly their hour-long set was steeped in darkness, madness and sadness.

Each screeching, metallic burst was timed perfectly, forming an integral part of a carefully controlled musical hurricane.

A tough act to follow then, but where Scaler’s performance was rooted in shadow, Daniel Avery’s headline set aspired for transcendence through contrast.

With his atmospheric techno productions, Avery’s live shows are often immersive experiences, and this was no exception.

Stood behind his desk centre stage surrounded by his live band, while letting his band exert themselves, particularly one of the (two) drummers who pounded through the set with relentless precision.

The sound was huge, all bassy pulses and machine-gun snares under a blinding spectacle of lights, but rather than a blitzkrieg techno assault, Avery’s latest album Tremor has new, shoegazey timbres, provided by some of the genre’s leading lights.

As such, on stage his music walks a fine line between the ethereal and the industrial; there were moments of serene, ambient beauty (as provided by guitarist Joe Vickers from bdrmm), always underpinned by a fierce rhythmic drive.

Tracks built patiently, layer upon layer, before detonating into euphoric crescendos. When Rapture In Blue – his collaboration with Andy Bell of Ride (and some other band touring right now) and Cécile Believe – emerged from the fog, it was a striking moment of emotional clarity, all yearning, wistful and utterly transportive.

Daniel Avery is a past master, and here he maintains a balance between control and abandon.

While his presence on stage remains understated, the sound itself is colossal, drawing the crowd into an experience as physical as it is emotional.

The set culminates in the pulsing sky-kissing, full-on rave techno of Drone Logic, by which time the Beacon had transformed into a cathedral of light and sound, equal parts rave and ritual.

While the main chunk of the Simple Things Festival took place the following day, Daniel Avery and Scaler set an unassailable bar for the other bands on the bill to attempt to match.

Richard Bowes

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Tags:daniel avery, richard bowes