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(ATP) @ Alexandra Palace London review

So ATP moved from Butlins to London for the weekend…I was unsure when they announced it that if indeed this was a good idea? I felt that ATP without the chalets, holiday camp and seaside wouldn’t really feel like the ‘atp experience’ that I’ve been so fond of over the years. Replicating the atmosphere of holiday camp in a swanky Palace could have potentially been a disaster but I think the ATP organisers just about pulled it off. There were defiantly some teething problems; such a daft one way crowd control system that meant you could only move from one room to another in clockwise path and the food courtyard was so rammed it took nearly half an hour to procure a pie with some mash and on the Saturday morning they opened nearly an hour late. But compared to the first Field Day this was fine. Anyway Onwards with the review.

The London Snorkelling Team

These guys were very refreshing to watch. They were part musical comedy, audio-visual collage and English Jazz fete band. They mixed weird skits about Voodoo seances and a shipping forecast with anecdotes about the Amish and Chemists. weird. The visual aspect of the performance utilized an overhead projector kind of like what they used to use at my primary school for assembly and used ohp paper to draw a variety of odd characters (crabs, pirates, murderers, robots) onto the film and move them about by hand to give the feeling you were watching a low budget cartoon. Considering the years I’ve spent messing about with live digital projection and it’s increasing use in live performance it was cool to see people making projection this way.

The music is a weird composition of a English fete band playing Lounge Jazz and would be the ideal accompaniment/soundtrack British cartoons from the 70’s like Mr Ben and Roobarb and Custard. Their Debut album ” Audio Recording And Map” is out via Touch Recordings

Helen Moodey

I wish I could have gotten the time to see this/her but I was hunting out some decent food. The whole idea of Black Sabbath replicated via Cello loops would have been good listening. What I heard was reminiscent of Bela Emerson. I hope she will crop up on a festival bill that I’ll be at some point with any luck.

Foot Village

I thought they would be a really energetic, visceral and raucous experiment but it just tired really quickly. The setup was like Boredoms, an all drumming all singing 4 piece but having listened to a lifetime of Samba band music due to mother’s participation in local groups I kind of knew the parameters of all percussion groups. Without getting all sneery it was pretty obvious that guys were from New York and were shopped at American Appel.

The Books

I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Books live, I envisioned it to be a laptop style band with some visuals. This is because the albums are such a kaleidoscope of painstakingly put together musical collage, it was easy to forget that their is some really meaningful and passionate instrumentation on all of their records. Today the band comprised of 3 multi-instrumentalists playing a mix of cello, banjo, guitar, violin and synth with a pre-recorded selection of their films/video with the found musical collage parts of their work within the soundtrack.

I found that visuals didn’t just encapsulate the meaning and substance of the songs but are the real driving force of the melody and rhythm and act as vocalist, singer and frontman all at same time. It’s very hard to explain a Books song to people without remarking upon cliches about VHS and forgotten 80’s shows but I would describe it as what seems to be hundreds of unrelated sequences and quite plain sounds and video that explore society, tradition and life and dull day to day actions, events and sequences that that explore the ordinary and sequential and by great artistry are manipulated to become profound and meaningful short sound sculptures
that despite there abstractive nature are quite “whole”. What I also loved was the absence of drums or repeated sound-bytes within their tracks, which meant the whole construct of their songs were more sparse and could play-out in the air without being conformed by construct of melody and traditional chorus-verse procedure. They played songs from “The Lemon of Pink” and “Lost and Safe” and to me they were the stand out artist of the day.

Pj Harvey

I’ve always found it hard to talk about why exactly Pj is so meaningful to me so it seems pointless to try and express it now. So all I’ll say is that she was as good as she needed to be and “Let England Shake” is a very important record.

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I’ve decided to launch my blog today. It’s about time as it’s been sitting around 80% ready for many months as I’ve tried to compile my past projects into individual posts and index them by media type and year in the Projects section.

I don’t think it’s indicative of sheer volume of things I took on between 2007 and 2010 but I’ve tried to compile the most relevant of pieces.

On a more social note, I’m still in Luton and moved in with my girlfriend to a nice flat near the train station, and still work at the same place and do the same eat, sleep, shit routine.

On the Luton note, here are some photos of the place in all it’s charm:

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