A new clubnight, It Came From The Sea, launches at Dalston's Bardens Boudoir on Saturday. Co-promoter kicking_k tells us what's in store.

Simone Baird: Brief outline of It Came from the Sea: where did it really come
from and when?

kicking_k: The club was founded in 2003 by Nikon Driver & kicking_k – we'd been putting on art exhibitions in the north to audience of approximately each other and decided it was time to head some place where we could sucker moneyed types into supporting our secondhand book habit.

Brighton was the obvious place, and once we'd made our name (mobile disco tours of local pubs and DIY nights with free zines and specially-commissioned beermats) and settled into a central venue our wild dreams of a moderate income were fulfilled. We also got to meet lots of total freaks at totally freaky afterparties, forget what daylight looked like, played support slots for the likes of LCD
Soundsystem, Lady Sovereign and Optimo aaaaaaaand simultaneously had a
morose exhibition about 'the emptiness of pleasure' featured in the national press.

Simone Baird: Who is behind the club and what do they do?

kicking_k: kicking_k (who spews out all the promo blah) is also a writer/editor for Plan B magazine (www.planbmag.com) but secretly wants to be a playwright. Nikon Driver (who handles the visuals) is an artist/designer who has just hooked up with legendary French label ZE Records to design the promo for a music festival to be held in Brasil 2007. Casper C joins the team for London shows, and can usually be found promoting Baile Funk shows or playing on arcade games. None of them do requests.

Simone Baird: Why are you coming to London? Brighton's not big enough for you?

kicking_k: I guess we just thought it was the next logical thing to do. It's not far away, there's more street crime, commuting is hellish and *apparently* the streets are paved with gold. Also, the media love London and doing something there gives us a much better chance of getting the attention we crave (hello!)

Simone Baird: Take us through an 'average' Sea night.

kicking_k: First, we advise some form of self-medication – even if only prayer, or caffeine – in the comfort of your own (or someone else's) bedroom. Dress as the person you always wanted to be, or your parents warned you about, or just randomize or remix yourself, it's all good.

Get laughed at in the street. Inflict psychic revenge in own head, giggle a bit.

Enter club. Witness a room full of industrial-strength smoke and lights, wander blindly to bar, purchase refreshment, sit at table and graze toward a sugar rush from thoughtfully-provided dogbowls full of sweets.

Spend rest of night dancing to music you have never heard before, that shifts genre every other song, and employing the suggested topics of conversation scrolling past the dancefloor on an LED screen with other self-made superstars.

Go home vowing to change your life as of tomorrow.

Simone Baird: How is your club different?

kicking_k: We've never ever had a guest DJ. We don't trust them. We are paranoid control freaks and we want to be in charge of every single aspect of the happening.

We do have guest artists that make us nice things which we mass-produce and give away free.

Indie discos used to be places you could hear experimental music, new stuff, songs that broke the rules. We call It Came From The Sea an 'experimental disco' 'cause we run a new music only policy – on any given night a third of the stuff we play is making its debut. Even we don't know what's going to work (or not). This isn't about nostalgia, knowing all the words, going through the motions.

There's something about the first time you hear a new song – that uncertainty, the feeling of doing something you haven't before. We try to throw curve balls and surprise the dancefloor, we shift genres every other song – we don't make it easy for ourselves.

Simone Baird: Will you be giving out/selling postcards? Are they Brighton artists?

kicking_k: Yeah – there'll be free postcards from Brighton artists – and an appeal on the back for London artists to get involved and help us give this version of the night its own character.

Simone Baird: The NME described you as "the coolest night playing the coolest music before it was even cool." Did your mum cry with happiness?

kicking_k: I hate to say it, but my mum didn't even know what TIME OUT was, let alone the NME. Still, she's dead now. That'll learn her.

Simone Baird: Are you getting any fashion stalkers?

kicking_k: More a zombie army, really. Can't complain.

Simone Baird: Just how appalling is the appalling depravity you've promised to inflict on the capital? Explain...

kicking_k: To be fair, we can only do so much. Oh, sure, we'll dose you up on sweets, blitz your hearts with music from the future, blind you with near-psychedelic smoke & lights and brainwash you with LED subtexts but fundamentally it's the audiences job to spend the first half of the night discussing Kubrick and the latter part trying to eat each other's faces (or faeces) to the beat.

We hear that shouldn't be a problem in quaint little London town…

"The coolest night playing the coolest music before it was even cool. Did we mention it was cool?" Thus spoke the NME on the subject of It Came From The Sea and, for once, they might have just been right - this triumphant re-launch in their new home, the Sussex Arts Club, proved such a draw for local fashionistas it was one-in-one-out not long after 11pm. But, as promoter kicking_k explains, it's success isn't simply down to the free sweets, "We play the most exciting, innovative music we can find, we use as many special FX as we can and we spend a lot of time and energy making it as chaotic as possible"."We don't play your favourite music - we play your new favourite music," adds fellow promoter Nikon Driver, who believes that ICFTHS has "the fastest-evolving dance floor in Brighton". Their defiantly forward-looking music policy has its heart in DFA disco-not-disco and electro punk funk, but its outer edges veer wildly from grime, dance and hip-hop to "technicolour pop filth". It's a multi-media happening too, with slides projected onto the domed ceiling throughout the night. If for some strange reason you're not tempted already, then know that this month they celebrate their second birthday and are promising to provide "150 cakes and a ridiculous amount of fun things". Computer D.A.I.S.Y, who runs the entire night, adds, "Puny humans are advised to get down early or suffer the consequences".

Q&A: LOCAL HEROES: It Came from the Sea, Sussex Arts Club.

Last September, Brighton's most innovative club night, It Came from the Sea, temporarily blipped off the Nightlife radar. Founded in 2003 by two enigmatic artschool refugees - Nikon Driver (visual and artistic aesthetics) and kicking_k (propaganda, affectations) - the 'experimental disco' night transformed the Hanbury Ballroom into a decorative, dream-like environment with projectors, bubble-machines and themed surprises around the venue all presided over by a huge talking DJ computer called D.A.I.S.Y. During this period, they filled support slots for Chaos Rocks at the C2, Pink Grease at the Po-Na-Na, a free tour of Brighton's pubs and a residency at the Electric Sessions, as well as an invasion of swanky superclub Audio. Finally set for a resurrection this month at the Sussex Arts Club, It Came from the Sea is returning as the official clubhouse for the duo's Brighton art-collective, the Voodoo Lily Conspiracy - also responsible for the DIY culture night Lo-Res and the broadsheet-acclaimed Post-Everything exhibition.

Explain 'experimental disco' and how a club night can also be an art happening.

kicking_k : Once upon a time, indie discos were the places you went to hear the future. Nowadays most of them are just exercises in nostalgia, Britpop hangovers with a dash of bad garage to no taste. There are honourable exceptions - 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Nascent, Detournement. But fundamentally, people in venues all across town are walling themselves in, playing the same songs, the same songs, the same songs, the old songs they know the words to. We like guitars. And synths. And beatboxes. And yeah, all in the same track if possible. It Came from the Sea is where genres clash or breed or blur.

As curators, how did you discover that homoerotic pop art collages, surreal animated projections, plastic flower decorations, hard-edged hip-hop, exotic electro and mainstream pop and mutated DJ computers all share a common ground?

kicking_k : We've always tried to make it multimedia - and that goes double once we're installed in the Arts Club. So, yeah, there'll be surprises on the tables, a smoke machine, a bubble machine, slide projectors working overtime to illustrate any free space with all-new original art custom made by local up-and-coming artists (and archived along with their info and contact details on the voodoolily.co.uk site). We've already held exhibitions, made and distributed free zines and CDs - It Came from the Sea has a tentacle in everything - and why shouldn't it? Curating an ongoing, growing, evolving exhibition inside a (hopefully) full nightclub is just our latest way of playing on the border - where the interesting stuff still happens.

Aren't you a bit pretentious though?

kicking_k : Yeah, we're pretentious. Pretension is fun. Angst is also good, but that's more for days off, or Lo-Res. And down-to-earth is six feet away from dead.