The ferry and train journey to London were uneventful, notwithstanding the intermittent industrial action that had been taking place on the trains. Rather than risking a missed connection. we broke our journey in London. The check-in queue for the Eurostar in the morning seemed a bit more chaotic than I remembered but moved quickly enough, and soon we were on our way. The Eurostar itself is a weird combination of VERY EXCITING ("OMG we are going under the ocean!") and pretty mundane (it is just a train). I was nevertheless struck by how big and full it was. I've very little sense of how much human traffic there is between England and the near continent, but being able to zip in to the centre of a continental city makes this a far more attractive means of travel than flying. I was irked though by the fact that the catering car seemed to shut for an age before and after a staff changeover at Brussels, which was basically prime time for when you would want to be sourcing wine to drink at your seat like some kind of debauched plutocrat. By the time the bar was open again we were so close to our destination that it didn't seem worth it.
We left the Eurostar in Rotterdam rather than Amsterdam, as we thought it might be interesting to have a quick snoop through that famous town. It did not quite conform to expectations. Firstly, there was no gabba blaring non-stop over the loudspeakers in the station, with no loud voices shouting "FUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUU" to be heard either. Also the city centre had far less of the completely rebuilt after being bombed to shit look than I was expecting (the city was heavily bombed by both sides in the Second World War but they seemed to have missed a surprisingly large number of old buildings). However it did feel a good bit less shi-shi or dinky than Amsterdam and Utrecht, and the walk down to the river (a mouth of the Rhine, I think) gave good nautical feels. The hour or two we spent there might be enough, but I'm sure if circumstances brought you back (say for their film or jazz festivals, or the < href="https://www.erasmuscon.nl">2024 Eurocon) you would find things to amuse yourself.
From Rotterdam it was a short journey on a double-decker train to Utrecht, where we checked into our hotel (conveniently located right beside the station with a view of the platforms, while also being five minutes away from the Tivoli), ate our dinner in a branch of the famous Dutch restaurant Wagamama (where I saw a couple that I then kept seeing again and again over the weekend) and repaired to bed.
The festival started the next day, which was a Thursday. Following the crowd I found myself catching the very first performance of the festival, Sote and Tarik Barri performing together not in one of the Tivoli Vredenburg spaces but in the Stadsschouburg, a theatre space I had not previously made it to. Sote is an Iranian electronic musician while Barri is a Dutch visual artist. For this Barri was doing visuals live in response to Sote's plinky music, which made for a wonderfully immersive introduction to the festival.
After a quick beer and burger break we made our way to the Tivoli's Grote Zaal for a performance by the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar (who split from the Master Musicians of Joujouka in the 1990s, for reasons). Hailing from Morocco, their music draws from Sufi traditions and would probably have originally been played at events where people were going into trances and getting close to the divine and stuff, as opposed to music festivals for whitey. Quite a few of their tunes began with long piercing blasts from their wind instruments, before the percussion instruments came in and a bit of to-and-fro ensued. I did find myself thinking that maybe the percussion instruments were a bit quieter than they should be, but that might be because the master musicians kept moving away from their microphones. My beloved meanwhile was amused by how the various master musicians were like a bunch of crotchety auld lads who seemed to spend their time grumbling about stuff.
In previous years it has been hard to move from gig to gig at Le Guess Who, with venues filling up to the extent that you needed to get to them half an hour or more before an act was scheduled to start in them. But I was nevertheless able to go straight from the Master Musicians to the Ronda (second largest Tivoli venue), where Divide and Dissolve were playing. They had played support to Low earlier this year but I arrived too late to see them on their Dublin date, so this was my first time catching them. They are a two-woman outfit, one on drums (Olivia, filling in for the usual drummer) and the other playing sax, guitars, and keyboards (Takiaya Reed). There were no vocals, though Reed did a lot of between song chat. Some of the chat was about the late Mimi Parker of Low, who Reed reported being very supportive of Divide and Dissolve's work. Colonialism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, etc. were also discussed (the band are broadly against all of these things). The music meanwhile was quite in-your-face and in some ways contrasted considerably with Reed's vocal style, which was quite soft spoken and almost like what you might get from someone fronting an indie band. I liked her and sympathised with her struggle, but after not too long I felt like I had got the idea with D&D and did not really need to hear too much more of their music.
Leaving the Ronda I decided to make my way up to Cloud Nine to see OKI. The venue was pretty crowded, but I made my way up to the balcony and had a pretty good view of proceedings from there. But who or what is OKI? It turns out that he is this guy called Oki Kano and he is a member of the Ainu community (an indigenous people hailing from the north of Japan). He was playing with his wife and son as well as some other guy on bass. Kano and his family wore what looked like some kind of traditional garb, while the drummer was less traditionally attired. The instruments meanwhile hovered between tradition and modernity: as well as the bassist, there was Kano's son on a standard Western drum-kit, while Mr & Mrs Kano played the tonkori, the five-stringed harp of the Ainu, which they played almost like a guitar.
From reading about Oki Kano, I gather he is all about preserving the embattled culture of the Ainu, yet he is also surprisingly un-precious about it. His band's performance was not like some kind of stuck in amber reconstruction of a true well of Ainu music of yore but instead pulled in influences from all over the place, with dub and western pop being obvious points of reference (I read that he has also collaborated with Ireland's Kila, but then hasn't everyone). All in all this was a big pile of fun and one of the most enjoyable sets of the festival.
I made arrangements to rendezvous with my beloved in the Grote Zaal where she was planning to catch Alabaster DePlume but I arrived early and the previous ensemble of Mr Sarathy Korwar was still playing, joined by special guest star… Mr Alabaster DePlume! Confused? Not as much as I was when they all went offstage and I thought that the Alabaster DePlume concert was over before it had started.
But it was not too long before Mr DePlume returned with his band. Basically he is a jazz saxophonist but when he isn't playing his sax he treated us to either his wise sayings about the world (generally of the upbeat positivity variety) or else his beat poetry. It's the kind of thing that should be terrible but it all somehow worked. I particularly liked his "I Was Gonna Fight Fascism" poem, which was all about how he was going to fight fascism but for a variety of reasons he was unable to do so (he was a bit tired, he had a lot on, he got a bit annoyed with the other people fighting fascism, etc.); and then it was too late. We've all been there.
And that was that for me. Some of my buds went on to BASIS, Le Guess Who's late night club venue, but you don't want to wreck yourself on the first night of a festival.
More terrible Le Guess Who photos
More Le Guess Who action real soon.
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