Le Guess Who 2023 part four: Sunday

You can see my previous Le Guess Who post here, and all my Le Guess Who 2023 posts here.

Sunday morning at Le Guess Who means it is Le Feast day, where you go for brunch in the home of someone who lives in Utrecht and have fun interacting with strangers, if you have signed up for this (my beloved and I always sign up for this while our friends never do). This year we were hosted by a Brazilian-Dutch couple (with the Brazilian woman doing all the cooking I think) and their delightful dog. Delicious food was served. There was quite a large group present, to the extent that once we sat down to eat you could only really talk to the people in your immediate vicinity. I found myself chatting to an Irish woman (small world), a guy from Portugal who lives in Liverpool, and a woman who appeared to be from a number of different countries, one of which was the Czech Republic. We talked about David Lynch films and the Twin Peaks; I felt sad about the fact that I still have not seen the recent Twin Peaks series. We had such fun that some of us repaired afterwards to Café Derat, which has become our Utrecht local to the extent that we met more people we know there, including a visitor from London who wasn't even over for the festival.

Tempting as it was to spend the day skulling pints (or whatever passed for pints in the Netherlands) we had music to see, so we bade farewell to our new friends and went back to the hotel to freshen up. Then it was music time. The first thing I saw was The Harvest Time Project: A Tribute to Pharaoh Sanders (who I am going to stop referring to as Finbarr Saunders). This saw loads of people playing jazzy stuff. I liked it. It reminded me of the all-star jam that closed off the Jeff Mangum-curated All Tomorrow's Parties in 2012. Later I would realise that to some extent this was basically a very expanded version of Irreversible Entanglements, although I am guessing that the various other players present might have had their own views on this. But certainly Moor Mother's very deliberate beat poetry was an important element here. I was struck by R—'s query about how long some randomer who gate-crashed the stage would take to be found out.

Memorials sounded like a good idea (with the presence of Verity Susman of Electrelane being the big draw for me), but I found them underwhelming. The big problem for me was the amount of recorded backing material, which undermined any sense of this as a live performance. Not everyone would see things this way and I can imagine that they might still be worth investigating on record.

So I cut my losses and raced down to grab a place near the front for Irreversible Entanglements. This lot are great, managing to make weirdo art jazz that you can dance to. I'm sorry I don't have more to say about them, considering they were one of the weekend's highlights.

Afterwards I tried to get into the Pandora stage to see Model/Actriz, who had been recommended over brunch by the Liverpudlian Portuguese guy, but it was way too full up there. So I drifted into the Grote Zaal to see Faiz Ali Faiz, some Pakistani Qawwali lad. Holy fuck this was pretty full on. He was onstage with a load of other guys who were either joining him in testifying about how great Sufi Islam is or else playing instruments (drums and harmoniums) or doing handclaps. It was all pretty in your face but definitely the kind of thing that would have you deciding to become a whirling dervish. At an intellectual level I find the whole thing of devotional music being played for the entertainment of the non-religious a bit weird, but you can't argue with the awesomeness of Faiz Ali Faiz and his buds.

Following that we looked experimentally at trying to sneak in to see some of Stereolab but it was too crowded and I did not fancy being stuck at the back. Instead after a quick nightcap we repaired back to our hotel, though I did pick up a Stereolab t-shirt. And that was it for another year of Le Guess Who.

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Le Guess Who 2022: Sunday

This is the final part of my account of the 2022 Le Guess Who festival. See part one here, part two here, and part three here

On Sunday morning we did in fact partake of our hotel's breakfast cava, but overall we adopted a more restrained approach to breakfast because we had signed up for Le Feast. This is a Le Guess Who thing that had been abeyance for Covid last year. It basically involves sees those who sign up for it going to some random Utrechter for brunch. We did it the first time we went to LGW and we were looking forward to doing Le Feast again, albeit with that mild trepidation that faces the socially anxious when they have to interact with new people.

This year our brunch host lived just south of the moat canal that envelopes Utrecht. The other guests were two Dutch women, one younger than us and one older. Our host's son also helped his mother serve us and made for entertaining company, as did her friendly cat (her other cat hid upstairs). The food was appealingly homely. Interestingly, none of the other brunchers had full LGW tickets (the event was sold out by the time they thought of buying ones), so they were just dipping their toes into the free daytime events (which we largely ignored because they were on in out of the way places or, let's face it, because they didn't appear in the LGW scheduling app and so were off our radar).

Anyway, Le Feast is great and I recommend it to all Le Guess Who attendees. You can't beat second breakfast.

The first musical act we saw was Marina Herlop, a Catalan artist described in the programme as being inspired by Carnatic music from India. My first reaction when she came onstage was "Jesus Christ what is she wearing", showing how conservative I am with matters of attire. And I must admit I struggled with this set, mainly because I was by now incredibly tired (last day of a festival, etc.), spending most of it hovering between sleep and wakefulness. Herlop's set saw her doing electronic stuff and vocals accompanied by two backing singers and a drummer. I did not hear an obvious Indian influence, but then what would I know about Carnatic music? Overall though I was struck by how the set was simultaneously very avant-garde (in terms of its rejection of normal song structures etc.) but also clearly very composed and focussed. Whether I actually liked it was not something I could determine, at least partially thanks to my fatigue, but my beloved thought it was great.

We could at this stage have caught sets by Supersilent or Abdullah Ibrahim but then we realised that i) we had had no chips from Frietwinkel over the weekend and ii) friend Eamonn had NEVER been to Frietwinkel on any of his trips to Utrecht. So chips it was. Nom nom nom.

We did go to see Panda Bear & Sonic Boom playing electronic stuff with vocals in the Ronda. I liked the visuals but, unfortunately, the music was not really doing it for me, so we slipped off to the Pandora to see Gnod. Gnod, as you know, are a bunch of freak out types from Greater Manchester. Every time you see them they are different and have different people in the band. This time they had lost the singer and the quietly competent non-bloke member of the band but now have two drummers and a keyboardist as well as two guitarists and a bass player. They rocked hard in an interesting but impossible to photograph manner and were one of the highlights of the festival.

And that was almost it. But not quite. After some post Gnod refreshments we popped in to see Mr The Bug who was playing in the Ronda. At least, we think he was playing there: the stage was so wreathed in dry ice that it might well be that someone had just plugged a Spotify playlist of Bug classics into the PA. There seemed to be MCs lurking behind the dry ice too and they kept importuning us to "Give it up for The Bug!" which had me thinking what it must be like to keep encouraging people to give it up for someone else. The music meanwhile was of the crunchy bassy variety. I even danced a bit, though truth be told I was kind of hoping it would finish so I could go to bed.

But it did eventually finish. Some tried to keep the party going but I opted for sleep.

The next day we flew home (don't tell Greta) on stinky Ryanair, where the passenger in front of me in the boarding queue had a distinct odour of having been to several Gnod concerts without an intervening shower. Soon after arriving home we booked tickets for next year (too late for the early bird) and booked ourselves into the same hotel.

In previous years, I found it difficult to move from one gig to the next at Le Guess Who, with it generally being necessary to head to a venue a half hour early to be sure of getting in. This year though it seems much easier to move from venue to venue, with the result that I saw more performances than I had expected to. That said, I was a bit lazy about going beyond the Tivoli venues. Apart from Noori And His Dorpa Band and Sote and Tarik Barri in the Staadsschouwburg, I saw nothing outside the environs of the Tivoli. And I completely ignored the daytime U programme, which typically features smaller scale local acts, though in my defence I cite the festival's not including U acts in the timetable app.

All in all the festival was a lot of fun and a great way to catch up with buds and see weirdo music that I wouldn't otherwise have come across. See you next year.

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