PRESS RELEASE

“VANCOUVER, BC” - The machine hums louder. SHAME Fest returns, now unchained from the linear calendar, detonating across three nights and multiple venues - a fragmented vector slicing through “Vancouver”. August 1-3, 2025: a hyper-event engineered to rupture the simulacrum, to shatter identities and genres alike, heralding a new regime of queer futurity and underground excess.

SHAME FEST II is no mere festival; it is a pulse of cybernetic dissonance in the face of late-capitalist entropy. It assembles the most volatile forces of sonic and performative insurgency from North America’s subterranean circuits. A triad of chaos - The Rickshaw Theatre, Fortune Sound Club, Red Gate Arts Society - each a node in the network of dissidence.

DAY I — AUGUST 1 — The Rickshaw Theatre, 7:30 PM
Backxwash returns, not as a poet but as a necromancer of post-human noise, conjuring spectral rhythms from the collapsing colonial archive. Her Polaris Prize is a relic; Only Dust Remains (2025) is the howl of a world decomposing. Alongside her, Greta Boney transmutes trans identity into audiovisual fissures; Prado Monroe folds pop futurism into digital abysses; AKAsublime pilots the collective’s flux; Aster Dawn projects queer electronics as radical incantations.

DAY II — AUGUST 2 — Fortune Sound Club, 6:30 PM
Dreamcrusher, a disruptor of NYC’s noise underground, wields nihilist queer revolt as weaponized sonic forcefields - performance as tactical erasure of self and other. Devours sparks electropunk glitter detonations; Maskara reprograms noise-pop identities; Citadel dissolves sound and politics into a dreamtrap disintegration.

DAY III — AUGUST 3 — Red Gate Arts Society, 8:30 PM
The closing salvo from the hardcore Midwest, BIB, Toronto’s queer hardcore agitators, Kleener, the absurdists. Blimp, chaotic rock insurgents, The Heterosexuals, and the cultish cult, Girlwife.

ABOUT SHAME FEST
Conceived in the guttural depths of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, SHAME FEST operates as a vector of rupture against the stasis of institutional art. Curated by Eris Nyx, it is an accelerative force-field that amplifies the excluded: queer, trans, racialized, anti-categorization agents resisting the ideological regimes of capital and identity politics alike. It does not seek catharsis but radical collision — where joy and rage merge in an eternal feedback loop.

The fest is a protocol of survival and destruction — a party at the edge of the abyss.