Swindon & Wiltshire News
Roni Size to mark 30 years of seminal album at tech and culture festival
Bristol drum & bass pioneer Roni Size will make a live appearance at Brazen, as the technology and culture festival confirms a fresh wave of speakers.
Size, founder of the Mercury Prize-winning collective Reprazent, will appear in a live episode of the Nothing, Something, Nothing podcast with BLANKET Studios during the festival, which runs across Bristol from 9 to 13 November 2026.
The appearance lands 30 years after Reprazent’s landmark album New Forms, released in 1997 and awarded the Mercury Prize in 1998.
The record helped take Bristol-built drum & bass from club culture to a global audience and remains one of the city’s most influential musical exports.
Next June he’ll play at Bristol’s Canons Marsh Amphitheatre as part of a nine-date tour marking the album’s anniversary.
Size’s inclusion underlines Brazen’s ambition to place technology, creativity and culture on equal footing.
The festival will bring founders, innovators, creatives, campaigners and community voices together for talks, debates, workshops, demonstrations and public experiences.
He joins a Summit line-up featuring three-time Grammy-winning producer and engineer Andrew Scheps, whose career spans the alternative-rock era that produced Nirvana as well as work with Adele, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ziggy Marley; Microsoft UK chief technology officer Richard Potter; and pioneering engineer and nLighten CEO Dame Dawn Childs.
Other previously announced names include Google Cloud’s Caelum Rosenkranz, Riverford founder Guy Singh-Watson, artist and composer Beatie Wolfe, comedian Jayde Adams, author Margaret Heffernan, Open Bionics ambassador Tilly Lockey and activist Satish Kumar.
Produced by techSPARK with Bristol BID, Bristol Creative Industries and MyWorld, Brazen has four strands: Summit, Community, Showcase and Live.
The Community programme will feature events from the RWA, Bristol Creative Industries and the Met Office, covering misinformation, entry-level AI talent, creative practice, business funding and the future of Bristol Harbour.
Showcase visitors can explore AI-powered virtual reality roleplay from Virtual Speech, Rocketmakers’ “Crack the Safe” challenge, BodyCharge’s movement-analysis technology and Loupe, a mobile nature adventure for young people and families.
The Live programme includes Bristol: Built by Dreamers, an immersive holographic production at St Mary Redcliffe Church created with Bristol-based Holotronica, alongside Haptic Yoga at St Nicholas Church, combining music-driven vibration technology with yoga and somatic movement.
TechSPARK CEO Ben Shorrock said the latest additions brought “world-class expertise in technology, engineering and music” to the Summit stage, while the wider programme showed the breadth of the festival.
Formerly the Bristol Technology Festival, Brazen has grown over six years from a regional technology event into a national and international platform connecting founders, creatives, investors, policymakers and communities.
