MIRRORHOUSE Launch Party: An In-house Review

All Photos by Joseph Grant

The Champions League final and scorching Manchester weather left us with an array of dispersed characters in SOUP’s basement on Saturday evening. Amongst the artificial smoke and black light was a faint and rather mixed crowd of bookworms, hipsters, goths and the rare sight of an all too regular-looking attendee. They could have been out basking in Stevenson Square’s hot sun like every other Mancunian on the day, but instead they found themselves underground, enclosed in blackened walls soaking with loud bass frequencies.

It was a quietly rewarding moment for us to host such a disparate crowd, present for a similarly varied collection of artists. Individuals of different styles, backgrounds and tastes were brought together in a basement for no other reason than to appreciate art. An accidental alignment with what MIRRORHOUSE stands for.

As I was running around sweating, grabbing bits and pieces with people included, Roop christened the stage for the night in his permanently mellow state. It was an intimate break into the night performance, a guided float through the sound of his formative years. I have a soft spot for Roop; his music reminds me of my younger self, alone in a bedroom with medicinal supplies, a microphone, and a debilitating hunger for success making music. Roop moves with a calm, understated presence on stage and off it, but it’s clear he cares meticulously about his craft and how it’s communicated. His vocals function as instrumentation, blending seamlessly with the beat until voice and production feel like one, carrying a sorrow-laced perseverance across both. A defining quality that gives his music its addictive replay value.

The pleasantly disturbed faces of the Manchester crowd said everything about Charlie Osborne’s set. It felt as if she had a carousel under her feet, spinning through symphonies of capsizing electronics and drum crashes like a buffering, remote-controlled doll far away from home, all whilst clutching onto her handbag. Her drummer Pike stayed synchronised with Charlie's kaleidoscopic production throughout the set, a difficult task in itself, let alone in a near pitch-black room.

Charlie’s voice screams through every element of her work before the singing even begins. Her world-building and attention to detail are a reminder of how rarely authenticity is treated with this level of care in performance. This set was not just live music, but an immersive entry into her universe, achieved with nothing more than a basic venue-provided projector and basement setup. She deserves the bigger budgets.

After Charlie charged our audience with catharsis, the energy in the room shifted towards our headliner, Bloody Shield, who arrived like a soldier and immediately claimed the stage.

Shield's self-produced bass-heavy sound sits naturally within the loud rap landscape of 2026, but there's a raw, uncut spirit in his tatted shell that feels like the attitude of Ol’ Dirty Bastard re-emerging in a young Scotsman. Watching him perform feels somewhat anachronistic. In an era where detached cool has become rappers’ default setting, Shield carries himself with a confrontational intensity that feels pulled from an earlier chapter of the genre. He's clearly well studied, mapping his own lane and channeling that old-school aggression into a modern synth-based sound which stays true to him. After hearing unreleased tracks from his upcoming Year Of The Horse project, it's evident he's on a mission to purge the industry with a new reinforced armour of sound.

Ship Sket is one effective button spammer. Watching him glitch on the decks made me wonder what he was capable of on COD back in the day. This guy drops back-to-back heaters like kill streaks. It’s like he’s going to war with his laptop whenever he hits the studio. I feel sorry for his PC; the amount of automation layers and warped synth-envelope f*ckery in his DAW has to come from some place of human-machine transcendence, or just incredibly long shifts at the laptop learning his tools by the millimeter. Every person at the show was moving to Ship Sket’s sound of the future: terrifying, mechanical, broken but unified. I’d have made sure Joe got a photo of Ship Sket, but somewhere between the machine and human world he became a difficult entity to locate, especially on camera.

I spent most of the night travelling between front desk, green room, and DJ booth, moving through crowd members and taking in different sounds during journeys that felt like a time loop of overstimulation. It was truly a thrilling evening, at least from my perspective. I curated the night with the purpose of showcasing some of the most promising artists in the UK currently. Witnessing their live performances only reinforced my sense of the momentum building around their talent and how aligned they are with MIRRORHOUSE’s commitment to unapologetic individualism.

In a modern world of artistic duplication, identity confusion and aesthetic-focused art, standing out is a difficult necessity. What stayed with me most was how thoroughly each artist approached their work, and how honed in they were on their own voice, regardless of style or direction. That level of care gave me hope, and it is what will stay with me from the night.