One of the seminal bands of the trip-hop genre.

Massive Attack may be one of the most important British Electronica acts, uwsing their debut album, Blue Lines, to create a new genre of music called Trip-Hop, fusing hip-hop and electronica until neither one is recognisable. While the name may not be familiar to many of us, odds are, if any of you have ever watched House, you know at least one of their songs, because “Teardrop”  was turned into the show’s theme tune.

And now, the band has joined forces with documentarian Adam Curtis, who you may know from documentaries like The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. They will create a performance piece for the Manchester International Festival entitled Massive Attack V Adam Curtis. All that is known about it is known from quotes by Robert “3D” Del Naja that it is a “Collective hallucination,” and Curtis that it is a “a musical entertainment about the power of illusion and the illusion of power.” No other details about the show’s actual contents are available, but the piece will be performed eight times, from July 4-7 and 10-13 at a city centre location. Tickets go on sale at February 1 at 10 AM GMT, and there will be no more than 100 people per gig.

Other collaborators known to be involved in the show are Felix Barrett of the Punchdrunk theatre company, and costume designer Es Devlin.

The xx will also be performing a series of shows at the festival for those who don’t particularly care for either Massive Attack or Adam Curtis, and there will be other shows in the festival from July 4-21.

The festival, a biennial event, has had names like Bjork, Snoop Dogg, and Damon Albarn from Gorillaz and Blur performing, and that’s just from 2011.

More information on the festival can be found at the Manchester International Festival’s  website.