Festival Time

The season of festivals is upon us with more than ever to choose from. The good news is that there are plenty of things to see that provide a refreshing alternative to standing in a corporate-sponsored field drinking warm, overpriced and watered-down lager watching corporate indie bands. Here are just a few.

The annual Sonar festival in Barcelona is its fourteenth year now, and is firmly established as the left field electronic/dance gathering of choice. It takes place in various venues in the Catalan capital between June 14th and 16th and includes acts as varied as Mogwai and the Beastie boys through to Kode 9, Wolf Eyes and, um, Altern8. www.sonar.es

On a similar sort of theme, the seventh Dissonanze shindig takes place at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome on June 1st and 2nd with Alva Noto, Fennesz, Battles and Pole amongst many others. www.dissonanze.it

Le Weekend in Stirling is just a month away. Similar to Glasgow’s Instal, but with a more visual element, the Tollbooth is the venue for this bash which takes place over le weekend of May 25th to 27th and features an array of experimental musicians and film. Nalle, Bill Wells, Nils Økland, Ikue Mori and Zeena Parkins are among those scheduled to appear. www.leweekendfestival.com

More electronica and digital art stuff is showcased in Britain’s spiritual home of the form – Sheffield – between May 13th and 20th. The Lovebytes 2007 festival includes live appearances by Plaid, Battles and Clark. Not very Warp-centric at all. www.lovebytes.org.uk

The weekend before that Manchester gets in on the act with Futuresonic 2007, three days styled as “Music For The Bleep Generation”. It takes place at various venues around the city and includes a showpiece reconstruction of the legendary 1967 UFO club light show. Faust, Clark and Legowelt also appear, but the real scoop is a solo show by Wolfgang Flür of Kraftwerk. May 10th – 12th. www.futuresonic.com

If your ears are up to it, Super Sonic 07 at Birmingham’s Custard Factory will definitely be the noisiest of the lot. It takes place on July 13th and 14th and features such gentle souls as Sunn O))), Zeni Geva, Jazkamer and Wolf Eyes. Mogwai will be soothing balm for the soul after that lot. Cakes are promised too. www.capsule.org.uk/supersonic

Finally, Indian Summer in Glasgow returns, but misses the point of its name by moving to July (14th and 15th) in the hope of catching the mercurial Scottish summer. Flaming Lips, Wilco and Explosions In The Sky headline this bijou festival in the West End’s Victoria Park. www.indiansummerglasgow.com

Album: STARS OF THE LID – And The Refinement Of Their Decline (Kranky KRANK100 2007)

“I simply feel that they are making the most important music of the 21st century.” That bold claim by Ivo Watts-Russell has been used in the advanced publicity of this album, bringing to mind the hubris of “I have seen the future of rock ‘n’ roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen” and all the trouble that caused. And The Refinement Of  Their Decline is only Stars Of The Lid’s second album of the century too, following The Tired Sounds from 2001. Like that record, this is a double with eighteen tracks and a playing time of well over two hours.

Tired Sounds was a triumph, albeit an album that really went as far as it could go in the direction of narcoleptic drones without degenarating into a simple low level hum. Both CDs opened with some gorgeous gossamer melody, but then seemed to decay into a long drawn out drone and then silence. There were subtleties along the way, but it was like a melodious half-life that faded infinitely into the ether. It was effective, but unrepeatable. So Stars Of The Lid have made a pop album. As if.

And the Refinement Of Their Decline sounds like dreams. Everything happens in the background. Drones dominate, but there is more going on. Although sometimes it is hard to define what is on the CD and what is simply an aural illusion in the head, especially at low volumes. It is mood music – and the mood is dead of night, 3am solitude of the half waking / half sleeping. It is not music you could imagine sharing. The duo have introduced more organic instrumentation on this album – there is piano, cello and woodwind. There is even a children’s choir, but they have been processed into ghosts. The second CD seems to have more substance than the first, and is slightly more bolder and melodious, and less spectral. Their are echoes of Brian Eno’s ambient works, of course, but there is something that Stars Of The Lid have latched on to here that few others have managed. There is some trigger to the subconscious that they seem to be able to trip that gives what is essentially skeletal music such power.

I’ve had these CDs for a while, but it’s taken me a long time to figure out what to say about them. But this is music for the imagination, not for discussion. A masterpiece.

Song of the day: NOMEANSNO – The Graveyard Shift (2000)

Sometimes Nomeansno can be really annoying. They are responsible for some of the most visceral, angry, complex and intelligent music ever to be tarred with the broad brush of punk rock. They can also dick around like a dumb-cartoon band. The two chord ice-hockey obsessed nerdishness is fine when it appears on a Hanson Brothers disc, ’cause that’s what you expect, but all too often the jokiness on the mothership albums just gets in the way. The last album, All Roads Lead To Ausfahrt, was particularly guilty of that. The best albums are when the clowning is kept to a minimum and the bile is given free reign. Small Parts Isolated And Destroyed from 1989 is one such record, and One from eleven years later is cut from the same cloth. Famous as the one with the sixteen minute Miles Davis cover (“Bitches Brew”), there is a lot more to the record than that. And in “The Graveyard Shift”, Nomeansno came up with one of their strongest ever tracks.

The protagonist is a security guard working through the dead of night. He’s not unhappy with his lot – far from it. It’s a job where he can cut himself off and forget, somewhere he doesn’t have to face up to how screwed up things have become:

I like the graveyard shift
It’s quiet, I can read all night
I don’t mind wearing a uniform
I don’t mind walking in the dark
You make your rounds, you check all the locks
And when the sun rises, when everyone is getting up
You punch out and go home

It’s a life that is so much easier than the one he has come from where there were “too many secrets to keep / Too many obstacles to overcome / And all that talk just made me tired“. It’s a grim picture of a man at the end of his tether who has decided to turn his back on the world. If the lyrics may be a little on the maudlin side, the music is brutal, indicative of the pent up, repressed emotions inside. There is a majestic guitar riff that underpins the whole song, and there is a vehemence to the performance which never fails to set the adrenalin running. It’s inspiring stuff.

Album: TARWATER – Spider Smile (Morr Music 073 2007)

The duo of Ronald Liphook and Bernd Jestram are up to album number seven with the release of Spider Smile, the second for Berlin label Morr Music. Tarwater’s trademark has always been an analogue sounding electronic music that seems an era away from the gleaming laptops of many of their contemporaries. Increasingly, though, they have married electro rhythms with live instrumentation to produce a kind of skewed pop that is neither one thing nor another, but never less than interesting.

Spider Smile sounds at first like the group’s most conventional record to date with the electronics largely taking a back seat to guitars, keyboards and other traditional instruments. The songs, too, have a more accessible, even commercial, edge. Even Liphook’s trademark deadpan vocals seem more melodious than usual. Further listenings suggest that Tarwater have managed to simultaneously become more conventional and more adventurous. There is a greater eclecticism to this record than any of its predecessors. ”Roderick Usher” is a lovely lilting instrumental dominated by acoustic guitar and oboe, whilst “Arkestra” introduces a new genre (to me) of electro-country. “Easy Sermon” is as urgent and gritty as the band has ever been. All eleven tracks have their own little niche, but hang together well.

The 1999 album Silur is still quintessential Tarwater for me, but the duo have managed to progress down new avenues without losing sight of what makes the band what it is. Spider Smile will not disappoint fans of the group, and is as good a place to start as any for neophytes.

Song of the day: FRANK SINATRA – I Get Along Without You Very Well (1955)

Now here’s something very old and very sad. Hoagy Carmichael based the words of “I Get Along Without You Very Well” on an anonymous poem that had been just signed JB. He gave it a tune and published it in 1939. It wasn’t until 1952 when he sang it with Jane Russell in the film Las Vegas Story that it came to the public’s wider attention. The mysterious JB was finally revealed as a Philadelphia woman called Mrs Jane Brown Thompson who sadly never lived to see its subsequent success.

Meanwhile, Frank Sinatra was all but washed up by 1952. The teenage Bobbysoxers had moved on to the likes of Johnny Ray, and Sinatra’s Columbia singles were barely registering on the charts. His fortunes changed when he landed a role in the film From Here To Eternity and switched to Capitol Records. His first two albums for the label, Swing Easy and Songs For Young Lovers had been well received. In early 1955 he began recording his most ambitious record yet – a sixteen song suite of downbeat break-up songs spread over two ten inch albums. In The Wee Small Hours had a lot of familiar material on it, but it was the lush string arrangements by Nelson Riddle and the weary vocals of Sinatra that gave the album its dead-of-night feel.

It’s a sad album, but nothing on it is as utterly miserable as “I Get Along Without You Very Well”. From the first note it’s obvious that that is far from the case and the protagonist is simply trying to put a brave face on things. The exceptions regaled in the first verses are avoidable, but it’s the last verse that is the clincher.

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.

There are few things sadder than the way that Frank delivers those last few desolate lines. You have to be made of wood not to be moved. It’s the definitive performance of a truly great song, and sounds as fresh today as ever. The cover of the album is one of my favourites too – here it is below:

Song of the day: MICROWAVE PRINCE – The Eternal Light (1995)

The Microwave Prince was German techno/trance producer Steffen Müller-Gartner who seems to have disappeared after being fairly active between 1993 and 1998. “Eternal Light” first appeared on his only album, A Captive In The Land Of The Iron Bubbles (Le Petite Prince). It’s one of those albums that I’ve had an eye out for for around ten years now, but I have never come across a copy. Instead, my introduction to the Microwave Prince came via a 1996 Millennium Records compilation called Techno Ballads, a double CD with an icky pink cover. It’s a collection of lengthy instrumentals that straddle the bridge between trance-techno anthems and the chill out room.  It’s a genre which has more than its fair share of formulaic guff, but there are a few choice tracks on this particular compilation, especially the two longest tracks – Surge’s “Sensory Bliss” and “The Eternal Light”.

The track takes an age to build. It has a pulsing beat, and a muted synth melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on Aphex Twin’s first Selected Ambient Works album. But there is a spooky atmosphere to the piece that sets the scene for the sampled dialogue. A disembodied Irish voice starts to recount a tale of a near-death out of body experience, none too coherently I might add. His reference to “going towards the eternal light” is fairly self-explanatory, but I’m not exactly sure what all the references to “taking the pictures” is all about. Whatever kind of paranormal nonsense he’s spouting, it makes for one spookily trippy ten minutes. I still play the track regularly, and it never sounds less than magical, especially in the dead of night. What became of Müller-Gartner, I know not. And one day I’d like to get hold of his daftly titled album to see whether “The Eternal Light” was a cosmic fluke, or whether there was a special talent at work who somehow never got the props he deserved.