Hats off to whoever organised this festival. Super cheap tickets, super tasty lineup, super pairing of music people with visuals peoples. Super surroundings (Laboral Ciuda del Cultura in Gijon, Asturias, Spain: feckin mad buildings with horsey sculptures out the ying yang and then a load of us boppin round to hoooj chooons, right craic).
And now the videos. First up we got Raime, who played a great set on the Friday night. It was all-seated, in the Teatro, and you couldn’t see a thing it was so pitch black, bar the visuals at the top, which were beautiful to watch, slow moving and ambiguous.
Saw Pole shortly afterwards, someone who I’ve listened to quite a lot at home, usually in the wee hours when it’s time to start switching off, but bejaysus does this lad tear up a PA with some hooooj swoops of dubbed-out bass! Great to hear this through the well-tuned soundsystem that was set up in the Iglesia (big fancy church, fair play to the sound crew, twas crisp for the size of the place and not a bit of echo).
Andy Stott finished up the Friday night with a slew of warehousey bangers. This was by far the most uptempo stuff I’d heard that night, and went down well with the crowd who were on a great buzz by this stage. I actually felt pretty spoilt by the last three acts of the night and I think a lot of others felt the same!
Saturday was a far more full-on affair. After Evian Christ and Face & Heel got La Nave all warmed up nice, Emptyset bludgeoned the crowd, switching between broken beat techno and unquantized industrial filth. Great tunes, but pity the visuals weren’t working for the full set.
Kid 606 followed up with a pretty heavy set, varying up the BPMs nicely, and playing a lot of his new stuff, which I hadn’t really checked out in advance as I prefer hearing that biz straight up and live.
For me, the absolute highlight of the weekend was Jon Hopkin’s set. I hadn’t heard of him before so didn’t know what to expect, but considering he was second last on, he musta had some skills right? It started off on a techy buzz but the guy practically demolished the crowd by the end of it, just watch the video ok?
The mighty Clark closed proceedings with a pretty decent set. OK. it’d be unreal for anyone else, but considering its Clark, I’m going to say it was pretty good, but not amazing.Just felt a bit disjointed in comparison to the ominous constant build of the previous set, knowhumsayin? Here’s a quick snippet:
Roll on next year! Big ups all the crew who kept it lit!
Check the mix above, nice journey in breaks. The man behind it, Primus Luta, has also wrote part one of a three-part piece over here on Sounding Out, which explores the language of performance, paying particular attention to electronic music and jazz. Now, we’ve all had that debate at some stage or other on the performer who pushes a space bar occassionally versus the musicians making music and occassional mistakes. We might never reach consensus on the merits of each, as Primus Luta quite rightly points out there are too many variables, and perhaps we need to move towards a re-work of the language we use in the first place to describe performance.
Image from concretesoundsystem.com
I’m really looking forward to reading the next two parts, hopefully we’ll see more overlaps with Christopher Small’s ‘musicking’ theory as well. In the meantime, make a cup of something nice, check the mix and have a read of his related 2009 article for Create Digital Music. Keep an eye on more Primus Luta work over here. Oh, and he also does a regular show for the mighty Rhythm Incursions here. Busy man!
Exploring the occassionally fine line between art and criminality, weekend viewing sorted, shouts to Lisa from A4 Sounds for this. Oh, and there are studio spaces available at the mighty A4 Towers, one of the finest examples of an independent, collectively ran artspace in Dublin. Details here:
Yo, so spent two lovely days in the sun week before last painting down on Ormond Place. Had the please of painting beside FOH, Deneb One, Idealism Art, Art by Eoin and a heap of others and even got to do two pieces. Rocked out some masks with the random colours but worked out sweet. If yr ever strolling along Ormond Quay, take a look up the alleyway and ye’ll see ya boy Monkfish be keeping an eye on ye.
This was part of the Dublin Beta project. Shouts to Paul Grant for letting me paint (check his hooooj graf photography collection here). Read more about the project here.
