ATP: The Nightmare Before Christmas

this is sort of lazy. well, it's not my fault i couldn't find a better home for it. Actually it is, but let's not go there. i went to the mighty All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Sussex before Christmas........eugh, Christmas.... it's such a dirty word in January innit? Long winded review of said festival here:

All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Nightmare Before Christmas
Curated by the
Mars Volta
2nd – 4th December 2005

By the time you’ve got there, bought booze, carted copious amounts of food that will remain uneaten, found mates, lost mates, found mates, imbibed some imported Buckfast, you’ve missed the far too early scheduled Battles. Dang. We should have driven. We should have gotten an earlier flight. Wait, forget it. Jaga Jazzist is starting. Nice. Actually these guys are quite boring, I wish they’d stop doing their en masse shoegazing stuff and pick it up a bit. And they do. A rousing second half rescues Jaga Jazzist’s set from a stodgy quagmire, placing it firmly in the ‘that was worth sticking through’ category. Now who’s next?

All Tomorrow’s Parties always begins with many of its patrons in a state of flux. Well the non native ones anyways. It temporarily combines the worst elements of going on holiday, moving into a new gaff, and trying to get to a gig on time. There is no respite. By the time you’ve set up shop in the chalet, it’s time to haul buns into the venues and check out what’s on. That electro-post rockers Battles had to be sacrificed in this maelstrom of activity was an aberration, but mercifully only a temporary one. Tick Jaga Jazzist off and take stock. Maybe even sit down. There is a weekend ahead and it cannot be this breathless. Bit it may just have to be.

The first rule of every festival is: you can’t see everything. It’s a toughie, and it hits especially hard when you peruse the schedule and spot unsightly clashes left, right and centre. The blow is lessened at ATP by the it’s compact layout. There is stage one downstairs, and the larger stage two upstairs. Still, dashing between shows to savour their best parts inevitably leads to a distinctly underwheming impression of both artists. It’s like flicking between two football matches on the telly: you maybe lucky and snatch a goal here and there, but you’ll never get the context in which it was scored.

So Dälëk were the first to get the cold shoulder. I vouched for The Locust. It was a good bet that I’d see something here that I wouldn’t see for the rest of the weekend. I was right. The Locust apocalyptic tumult fires spastic synths, primal screams, and dirt-pool guitars at the audience in short spasmodic waves. Their songs begin and end randomly, a melange of staccato noise building up and quickly destroying any hint of rhythm or song structure. They remain incommunicado and motionless on stage, bedecked in one-piece ‘Spiderman-in-mourning’ outfits, looking like Kraftwerk from Hades. It’s a compelling sight and sound. One slight flaw: it’s not music. But who cares when the outfits look that good?

If you thought there was going to be any respite from then sonic assaults, you’d be wrong. Next up was über-caterwauler Diamanda Galas. Her bone jarring, air-siren, banshee wail and piano pounding proved too much for my already softened up eardrums. Sure, it was an extremely intense and provocative performance, but one lacking in any real empathy for…ah…..the audience. Saul Williams, on the other hand, proved to be a more welcoming distraction. As compelling and intense as Ms Galas but easier on the ear, his ‘spoken word remix’ show was undoubtedly one of the weekend highlights, combining mellifluous beats with sharp, polemic prose.

The Kills tuneful man/woman duopoly was always going to struggle against some of the new weirdness heavyweights on show, and they conjured up little spark in front of a demonstrably passive audience. It just seemed so dull in comparison to what had gone on previous. The crowd filtered away only to be greeted by Battles ad hoc late night show down stairs, a special treat for all us latecomers. It quickly dissipated the torpor lingering from the Kills abject show. With the ink barely dry on their Warp records contracts, Battles put on a blinding show, sounding somewhere between Daft Punk and the Redneck Manifesto, it was a fantastic way to end the day. Well, apart from boozing all night in the pub….

400 Blows performance had all the menace and ruthless efficiency that their weedy counterparts JR Ewing lacked earlier Saturday afternoon. Maybe it was simply that 400 Blows stark black military fatigues gave them this sort of campy bad cop/bad cop omnipotence, but their tunes were still headstrong and abrasive, fusing hard-edged punk and firebrand no-wave. Even the fire alarm, which subsequently evacuated the building, had a hard time clearing these guys. An incendiary show.

It was followed was an equally eviscerating performance by lippy fire-breather, Lydia Lunch. Without her full band in tow – only accompanied by some blow-life sax dude – she lacked certain oomph, but her ire and brimstone poetry still packed a kick in the nuts. Those hoping she’d pull out a flaming tampon and fuck it at the crowd were surprisingly disappointed.

The Fucking Champs geekish pseudo-metal took a while to get going, but proved more than an embellished sidenote on the weekend. Ironically that’s all they get though, because the hyperactive Quintron and Miss Pussycat – think B52s/LCD Soundsystem soundclash – brought a desperately needed air of frivolity to the evenings proceedings, rendering the more sombre preceding acts look a bit po-faced.

The fun-size pop frolics soon got squashed. A certain utterly merciless raging torrent of heavy metal named High On Fire ploughed through ATP leaving a trail of flailing limbs and perforated eardrums. It was a rousing juggernaut – frontman Matt Pike showering up close fanboys in wife beater sweat, George Rice’s slobberknocker basslines, and drummer Des Kensel obstructed by the hereditary sea of toms. This was hard, hard, unyieldingly hard. To paraphrase George Orwell, it was like getting stamped on the face forever. But in a nice way, if you get me.

And ditto for Mastodon.

In between there was a stint at psychedelic-indie-rockers Weird War being funky and engaging. Enigmatic frontman Ian Svenonius sashayed about the stage, amongst other places during the weekend, and acted the spazed-out shaman. A captivating performance. Yeah, and before you go all nuts on me and say I’m forgetting to mention one of the best shows all weekend, I only saw ten minutes of Les Savy Fav and they were great but I had to attend a chalet meeting to negotiate the sleeping arrangements. Would there be sleep or not was the gist of the minutes of said chalet meeting.

I returned more out of courtesy than any great overriding desire to watch the Mars Volta. It was their weekend, their Nightmare, their bash. I give them their dues, they put on a fine jamboree, but they remain an acquired taste. Moments of prog-metal inspiration were repeatedly ram-raided by guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez indulgent guitar noodling. Often just when they clicked, they crumbled. Maybe it’s me. I just don’t get these guys.

Sunday brought carpet tongue and septic stomach. The perfect antidote was supplied by the Cinematic Orchestra, providing the live score to Dziga Vertov’s seminal documentary ‘Man With A Movie Camera.” The images and jazzy-trip-hop sounds melded into a unique synergy, and it was at times both languorous and beautiful. The viewer could drift in an out, coaxed into a soporific state by the sultry sounds, yet captivated by the sprightly rhythm of the visuals.

By this stage the timetable went into meltdown. Ex-Can member Holger Czukay disappeared, Acid Mothers Temple got bumped until evening, and Micheal Rother was left holding the baby. The former NEU-man’s set was plagued by dodgy sound, but he still carried off an impressive and vital performance of hallowed tick-tock-krautrock. The Eternals, who followed him, were terrible, in many different ways, but mostly by denying people opportune time to play this irrepressible boxing game in the arcade. Or eat some ‘toad in the hole’. Or decimate the guy’s toilets – you naughty, naughty boys. Such peccadilloes make ATP.

And by now CocoRosie were stealing everyone’s show. A really quite special performance, with Sierras Cassady’s voice soaring in all sorts of unforeseen directions and her sister, Bianca, dueting with her ‘little-girl-lost’ timbre. A beat-boxing mc provided backing for this powerhouse of freak-folk lullabies. Audience enraptured, they disappeared, and it was left to Antony and the Johnsons to gather them into his affections. What he did was sweet, amiable and affecting, but maybe a little maudlin in comparison to what had gone before. It didn’t stop some burly chaps blubbering in the front row though. Maybe those tears were shed because the weekend was over?