This video goes a good way to explain the ethos and configuration of the www. You should watch it.

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 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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Sphere

Kind of hoping that I could keep pushing for more miles and by end of next year do a half marathon but at 4.2 miles today I had to give in after everything started cramping up I’ve still got a long way to go.

My running playlist at the momment: (suggestions welcome)

• Emeralds — Genetic
• She center — Luomo
• Tessio — Luomo
• Everday — The Field
• A Paw In My Face — The Field
• Sun And Ice — The Field
• We Share Our Mother’s Health — The Knife
• Like A Pen — The Knife
• Cascade — Tycho
• Turbo Dreams — Ellen Allien & Apparat
• Retina — Ellen Allien & Apparat
• Rotary — Ellen Allien & Apparat
• Jet — Ellen Allien & Apparat

For the Birmingham premiere of ‘GOTTESRAUSCHEN (GOD’S WHITE NOISE): Action for Players, Guitars & Amplifiers’, a number of musicians and artists will perform at Eastside Projects over the course of 7 hours. Intended as a performance for an indeterminate number of guitarists and amplifiers, and taking its cue from a passage by Friedrich Schiller on man’s relationship to a series of sensual and formal compulsions (“For all beauty is ultimately but a property of … movement”), GOD’S WHITE NOISE will unfold over a single day, with guests free to enter, circulate throughout, and remain in the gallery space as long as they wish.

Jendreiko’s actions have been performed at Baer Ridgway, San Francisco (2010), Wesleyan University (2007), Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2007), Kunstverein Nürnberg/Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft (2009), the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg (2009) and in various galleries and art institutions throughout Europe. Jendreiko has also presented work internationally since 1999 as a founding member of Düsseldorf-based artist collective hobbypopMUSEUM.

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I was avoiding listening to the new Blonde Redhead album “Penny Sparkle” on the basis that I thought it was the end of them really…

What I mean is while “23” had it’s moments and was a gracious, warm return, the shoegaze guitars seemed to me a bit cordial and the lyrics a little sparse in meaning. Also the title track “23” was so good it nearly eclipsed nearly everything they had done previous to “Fake can be just as good”. Then ultimatly the miming bits when I saw them live in 2008 at Shepards Bush Empire. I had rengegated to them to “kind of fizzled out” but the new bass synth heavy “Penny Sparkle” is kind of wow. It’s pretty much perfect. I’ve been listening to Blonde Redhead for around 8 years now, after luckily finding there music on the now defunct Epitonic and taking a chance at seeing them play “melody of certain damaged lemons” in it’s near entirety at the London Garage with a crowd that seemed to be little more than a handfull of French and Italian backpackers and few other luckly people. I was hooked for lack of better word. I think a lot of the bands I started liking around the time I’ve either gotten bored of, split up or I’m just not feeling the lastest works (See Interpol, Liars, Tv on the Radio) So it’s nice with just about everything else in my life changing since then that Blonde Redhead are still there making the music I love.

As whimsical and tedious it’s something I like to cling to cosidering they have soundtracked so much of my life from first few weeks of my hnc at “Bedford arts college” through Cambridge, Brighton, Marston and to Luton. At this point (for indie points) I should find my photos of them playing the Mean Fiddler in London (it’s now a block of flats) but they are lost somewhere, so I’m posting images found on the amazing last.fm pictures section.

Obligatory Link »  Blonde Redhead

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Supsrsonic is a mix of art, music, film, performance, good food & drink and has the right kind of explorative atmosphere that festivals of this kind need. There feels a group, hive minded consciousness full of excitement and intrigue, few ideas that try to push the envelope are rejected and the audience are trustworthy and give artists the freedom to explore without feeling the need to shout “Play one the drummer knows…”

The music was difficult, loud, abrasive and I got to see Swans and Neu! (in a different form), OVO, The Bordrum film, Matthew Barney’s Guradian of the Veil, Musicians of Bukkake and Khyam Allami,  Eagle Twin, Cloaks, King Midas Sound, Demons (with Sick Llama) Devilman Lichens, OvO, Tweak Bird, Nisennenmondai, Factory Floor and many others. I really wish more people would come with me though.

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From H2Ogate Blues:

“This here, this is going to be a blues number, but first I want to do a little bit of background on the blues, say what it is. Like there are six kind of colors, and colors have always come to signify more than simply that particular shade, like redneck, or got the blues. That’s where you apply colors to something else, you know, to come up with what it is you’re trying to say.

So there are six kind of colors: yellow, red, orange, green, blue and purple. And there are 3,000 shades. And if you take these 3,000 shades and divide them by 6, you’ll come up with 500, meaning there are at least 500 shades of the blues.

For example, there is the “I ain’t got me no money” blues. There is the “I ain’t got me no woman” blues. There is the “I ain’t got me no money and I ain’t got me no woman,” which is the double blues.

And for years it was thought that black people was the only ones who could get the blues, so the blues hadn’t come into no international type of fame.” 

Girl Scott Heron

This year I got to see a recompiled “re-discovery” edition of Metropolis which made me think a fair amount about the reason it was cut in the first place and for once I can actually understand why some films that are aimed for general consumption need to be cut.  The film is beyond bloated to the point of tiredness and incoherence, it does not actually detract from the overall experience of “Metropolis” at all but it’s much finer film with the cuts included. I wish I could write why this film is so important but the words epic, timeless and testament to modern science fiction should do fine.

The cut edition is on google at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD_-flw9IcQ if you have yet to see the film.

Secondly I got to see all of the short films of Roy Andersson  including Something Happened and World of Glory. To see them in a cinema was deeply disturbing but worth sitting through his very tame student films in order to do so.

New images based of a forthcoming music project of my own.

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For download/purchase early March from “We Are Another Us” run by Mark Burton, who is better known as Oblio.

The artwork was a collaboration between myself and artist SuzyBee. Suzybee provides the intricate illustrations in this artwork. I really enjoy working with her as I feel each of styles naturally compliment one another.

More information at Resident Advisor and www.weareanotherus.co.uk.

Mask images developed for an experimental dance / electro night.

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