The festival weekend kicks off this Friday with the Immersed! 5th Birthday Awards at the Cardiff ATRiuM, celebrating the best acts of the past five years. The show will feature a performance from Skills Competition Wales’ Battle of the Bands, as well as the festival’s first Music Industry Careers Fair. You can vote for your favourite acts here!

On Saturday, Immersed returns to Tramshed with award-winning rapper Lady Leshurr as headliner; supported by Cardiff-based musician Minas, who will perform tracks from his new album “All My Love Has Failed Me” and Sage Todz, who went viral for his spin on Yma o Hyd last year.

Curated by University of South Wales students, the festival will feature four stages with over fifty artists and bands, as well as live theatre, a tattoo parlour, street food, and an up-cycled fashion market. The festival has partnered with climate change charity Music Declares Emergency so each of the stages will embody one of the four elements: fire, earth, air or water, to highlight the effects of climate breakdown and help promote change towards more sustainable future.

It comes to a close on Sunday with Immersed! TV, an online broadcast produced by Media Production students at USW. The programme will feature highlights from the festival, interviews with the artists, and a documentary celebrating five years of Immersed!

Connor Cupples is the operations manager and promotor at Orchard Live, he also teaches BA Popular and Commercial Music at USW and spoke about the benefits of working on live events: “Its a really great opportunity to be able to partner with Immersed and help develop new talent in Wales. There is a bit of a talent gap at the moment so we really need some fresh new talent coming through and just to be able to spend a few hours every couple of weeks to help bring that new talent through is a huge plus for me.”

Find out more here.