Right, final postmortem. I'm starting to feel back to normal now, having gone to the pub last night and played Mission of Burma, Sir Lord Baltimore and Major Stars to a completely uninterested crowd of Christmas drinkers.
My principal surprise was at just how freakin loud the sound was, esp. in the main room. That one seemed to be a pretty hardcore PA, maxed out most of the time (I'm sure I remember hearing it distorting and clipping during someone's set). Was it specially brought in for the event or was that just the standard Butlins ents' backline? It was bone-crunching at points and this seemed to fire up the crowds even more.
My highlights - NWW (great start to the weekend, so loud I had to sit on the floor in the middle of the crowd), The Stooges (fucking full on, righteous, Iggy spitting vitriol barely able to keep his jeans on), The Dead C. (totally whacked out but sounded so good, like the Dead C. of yore - nice guys, dazed and funny), Melvins (superb, pile-drivingly awesome, the two drummers, Crover and protégé, were the most entertaining thing to watch of the whole festival), Sun City Girls (YES! - guitar/bass/drums, proper songs, 'Lets Just Lounge', 'Dreamland' and Uncle Jim - need I say more?), Major Stars (righteous and funny, with Kate's anecdotes and Wayne's furious stomping around and his climactic massive run-up-and-dive on to his guitar - something I would love to see again), Notekillers (relentless, taught, powerful, aggressive instro math rock), Negative Approach (so hardcore, so angry, so good - also chair smashing guy made my weekend), and NNCK (I feel some kind of drawing would probably describe their set better than words could).
Like, too much for one weekend really, considering those were just the highlights for me and nearly everything I saw was good. Fuck the security guys for trying to remove me from the site at 4am on Monday morning tho. And fuck the massive blow to the back of my head that I gave myself in the swimming pool on the Sunday morning (the throbbing is only now receding after four days).
But really all bands seemed up for the party, mostly operating at maximum intensity the whole time. Maybe that was a reaction to the crowds, queues and debauchery of the whole event. Or maybe John Olson was giving everyone a little 'pep talk' before they played. I guess we'll never know. Whatever, I'm glad I was there. Even if I never did manage to find Chalet no. 6.
― myopic_void (myopic_void), Thursday, 14 December 2006 13:26 (seventeen years ago) link
This is what I wrote on my LJ:
I only had to queue once, for no more than 15 minutes, and I watched full sets by 16 different acts, including three on the big stage. Nearly everything I saw was gd to great to v. v. great. Obv. it helps to avoid 'punk rock' reunion school acts, and have a taste for free jazz and noize, but I put in a bit of 'planning' ahead of time and it worked for me!
I mean fuck, what other UK festival but ATP cld pull off, say, Nurse with Wound's first live appearance in the UK for something like twenty years? That was the first thing I saw on Friday aft, and it was just a perfectly judged opening performance, setting the whole tone (LOUD! DRONEY!) - David Tibet screeched his lungs out, Stapleton and Potter and co effortlessly moved from one piece/mode of expression to another and yeah, even got kind of funky towards the end.
After NWW, I next went to Richard Youngs on Stage 3, who was hitting the kids w/ a split set of flute improv and accapella singsong, it wuz nice but I kinda wanted to see him play a guitar too, or brew up more of a drone thing (but then, this was not a fest short on guitars or drone brews, so gd for R Young eh)
Then on Stage 2 I saw Dead Machines, a fruity sex noize collab between John Olson of Wolf Eyes and his wifey Tovah. They would kind of stare at each other and then twist some knobs and make some thuddingly horrible SCREEEE from out of their noize briefcases. At the end of their set Olson gave his wife a big french kiss, tongues and all.
After my all night coach flight I was totally wiped by this point, so went back to my toasty lil micro-pad and zoned out for a cpl of hours. This meant I missed Charalambides on the Friday evening, which might have been awesome but might also have been a bit shit in the noisy venue 3 (aka the Crazy Horse bar - one of the weird things abt Butlins Minehead is the way that lots of the venue made reference to American genocide and exploitation - the chalet, with fine views of the sea, was located on 'Plantation Quay' ffs, and this on a bill largely dominated by white male Americans...)
It seemed as if a lot of the bands were playing esp. hardcore/loud/noisy sets, partly because the sound systems in all three venues were ultraloud, encouraging yr sonic violence/confrontation, but also cos any quieter sounds/moments got kind of eaten up by the bar hum and air hockey clack etc. When Wolf Eyes briefly tuned up before playing on the main stage on Sunday, one of the hairies set off a drum machine that made the loudest single sound I think I've ever heard, but their actual set was not THAT deafening or punishing if viewed even halfway back. (W/Eyes drew the biggest crowd I saw over the w/end, and were of course insanely intense rockfun, tho they didn't seem to play for that long. Their slangy on-stage banter (ALL TOMORROW'S PLAYAS, Olson kept saying) and interaction w/ the audience made them sound like a hip-hop group and you know their bass is as low as human hearing/feeling can go.)
When I awoke around midnight on Friday I went 'straight' to 'Centre Stage' and caught the last 20 mins or so of Sonic Youth's set, funnily enough one of the few groups who seemed to be having sound 'issues' (ie a bit boomy in the bass) o/er the weekend. Wld it be predictable of me to say that Mark Ibold is nowhere near the musician that Jim O'Rourke is? Cos the jammin I heard just wasn't as flyin' as when Jim was on the bass.
Still, managed to get myself a pretty sweet spot near the front for Dead C, watched these three gnarly old noise fucks set up, Bruce Russell smoking a cheroot and twangin his gtr on quite a small lookin' amp, Michael Morley all hair and goofy gogs opening up a laptop and setting his gtr up too, and Robbie Yeats svelte and severe, with a relatively small drum kit and again not much ampage.
So I just wasn't prepared for the awesome POWER of the Dead C 2006 live experience, their sound/overall conception not just seriously loud (originally typed: load) but thick and crunchy and really nasty: angry and engaged but also self-lacerating/defining. Dead C recs reference wars and bombs and their hour long set was like one big bang, played w/out gaps, all noise morph, song fragments and improv detonations (there was one bit when Michael Morley started farting around w/ his puter that I thought for sure my ears were gonna burst.) Towards the end, Russell and Yeats swapped instruments and the sound/shape of the music changed, it was like a textbook demonstration of the power of primarily improvised music over rigidly structured and predictable songform. My festival highlight, easily.
It would've been nice to have pondered on the beauty of the Dead C's set for like a week or so in a monastery but the v. next day I was back at the noize coalface for the New Blockaders/The Haters, a big time old skool pain sesh on Stage 2, Saturday afternoon, you shoulda been there. A group all in black, wearing balaclavas, stood in front of a table of electronic equipment; one of them, perhaps the most 'dominant', had the remnants of a guitar fretboard tied to their chest and also a metal tin that seemed to make the most gutwrenching skreech whenever they shook it - and they shook it a lot, baby! Behind the standing bunch a couple of new haters crouched on the floor, they seemed to be jiggling a big wire, like a hot sausage on a griddle, at one point. My 2nd fave thing I saw at this fest - totally.
I can't believe I saw Double Leopards so up close and personal next, Stage 3 at 6.45pm. Poor fucks were up against some heavy competition but I kept the faith and was rewarded. Double Fuckin' Leopards man! two guys two gals playing guitars and machines and singing and humming and generally levitating the listener to a sweet sonic spot somewhere above, in this instance, Minehead via the Taj Mahal. Sometimes they crouch (cf Byron Coley's booklet discourse on the phenomenon of 'buttcrack cleavage' amongst sexy noizers bending over their equip) but this time they mostly stood, Marcia Bassett in black like a blonde Keiji Haino shemale (HOTT!) thrashing her black guitar, Maya Miller entering into a trancelike state in front of the amplifiers, as the group moved closer together - magicians!
The rest of Saturday I spent in Stage 2, for a great evening of music, pretty much OWNED by American ex-pat drummer Chris Corsano, who to begin w/ played a BLAZIN' free jazz set w/ saxophonist and beard champ Paul Flaherty and violinist and throat gurgler C. Spencer Yeh, who totally won me over w/ his post-Conrad rock action stylings this eve after previous uncertainties. Corsano's energy and stamina are almost superhuman, and sometimes almost indecent to watch, he really is the greatest.
One of the bigger idiocies of the programming was, to my mind, frequent 'like-for-like' pairings - ie Corsano/Flaherty/Yeh, one of the v. few pukka free jazzxxor acts on the bill, followed by Brotzmann/Bennik, one of the v. few blahdiblahs on the blah. I'd never seen Brotz before, and I hate to say it, but on this evidence his blood-vessel bursting days are well behind him - at times he sounded positively sweet and musical and def. part of a idiomatic jazz tradition, but maybe that was the context and shit. Certainly the crowd totally got off on Bennik's chops and fun and funk, who wouldn't, and Brotzmann really did look the part of a master European improvver, with blackcoat and greybeard.
.
Corsano returned for MV/EE and the Bummer Road's long, set-closing jam on 'Death Don't Have No Mercy' (olde blues tune also covered by the Grateful Dead on Live/Dead). The whole thing was great, hard-hitting folk rock psych and blues, lotsa peachy Garcia gtr noodle and unison throat-thought, but the dual drumming aktion crescendo was esp. exciting.
Tho not quite as exciting as the Comets on Fire set that followed. Total white light energy and riff noise action and no fucking slow ones. Again, Corsano took up the drums on the last song, Spencer Yeh, a fourth gtrist! and a second geezer on electronics also turned up for a cosmic egg-splitting last gasp of transcend rock. And then to bed.
It's just a restless feeling, that Sunday Morning (oblig VU ref). So I eased myself in w/ Bark Haze, one of Thurston's noize side projects - he goes through em like other ppl go through socks (s'ok, some of my socks must be ten years old, easy!) This one involved a Magik Marker on drums and another guitarist and was surprisingly straight-forward, bliss-pretty noise rock.
Stayed on in the same venue for West Coast dronekings the Skaters, who I'd seen in Glasgow the week before: then they played a very short set, light and airy with lotsa bells and drums, whereas at ATP they played for slightly longer and were louder and heavier, their 'waking the dead' chanting deeper in the murk mix. I always find the Skaters slightly spooky, like they've tapped into some kind of auditory wormhole where ppl shriek and gibber for all eternity. Brrrrr, man. Fiona seemed to enjoy em!
After Wolf Eyes on Sunday I was early enough to catch a set by Monotract on Stage 2, my one 'unplanned' gig. They were very loud art-noise rock in the brutalist Ut/Harry Pussy tradition only with slightly weaker 'songs'. I'd actually gone to see Mouthus, an Americian guitar/drum noize rock duo who I really enjoyed at the Subcurrent Fest earlier this year. Of all the groups I saw over the weekend, Mouthus were in some ways the most original, in that it was difficult to nail down who they actually sounded like- the closest I can come is to tell ppl they sound a bit like earlyish Royal Trux only w/ funkier, Jaki Liebezeit-type drumming and cloudier vocal/gtr effects, the whole thing drenched in reverb and fugly fug. Great set, one of the least well-attend shows I saw, bummer.
I was really slowin down by this point but managed to haul my fat ass over to Stage 3 in time to catch a surprisingly country-rock set closer from Six Organs of Admittance, w/ guest Rick Bishop from the Sun City Girls on 2nd 'axe'.
After a fairly long interval, the No Neck Blues Band from NYC kicked off their set with some female frontal nudity courtesy of their sax playing lead screamer; after some more artplay and performance fuckery, NNCK moved into one of their heaviest freak psych noize jams, w/ a guy just stumbling round stage w/ a cardboard box on his head, a blindfolded beardo tapping a weird percussion contraption while basso mumbling into the mike, and various guitarists and drummers playing heavy on both conventional and non-conventional equip. About halfway through a fire alarm went off, the lights went on for a moment or two, but NNCK totally stayed locked in their groove. A nice hour of stoner surrealism that seemed to be a gd ending for the whole fest. And for my whole ATP-going life.
― Ward Fowler (Ward Fowler), Thursday, 14 December 2006 22:01 (seventeen years ago) link
four years pass...