Le Guess Who 2023: epilogue

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

Monday saw us making a long, depressing, and surprisingly stressful journey home by plane. The possibility of travelling back overland next year was discussed, though I suspect it would be a bit impractical. It was however nice to receive a welcome at home from cat name of Billy Edwards.

Some Le Guess Who things I did not see but wish I had:

• Caterina Barbieri + Space Afrika with MFO: partly just for the name.
• Decisive Pink: someone who was formerly to be in the Dirty Projectors and someone who was not.
• Alan Sparhawk: I think this could have been quite emotional. Plus Low were always one of my favourite live bands.
• The Good Ones: My beloved saw them and said they were great, as did a guy we were talking to at Le Feast. They are from Rwanda but were not playing traditional music of their country, but instead tunes of a somewhat more globally informed variety.
• In Solidarity With: This was not a performance at all but a gap deliberately left empty in the programme in which people could sit in Hertz and think about all the bad things happening in the world. If I remember correctly the time slot was meant to be filled by a Palestinian musician from Gaza but he is now trapped there and fleeing for his life from Israeli bombing.
• Model/Actriz: As previously noted, this Brooklyn bunch were recommended over brunch. I will investigate them.
• Stereolab: I have seen them many times and while I do not regret seeing other things instead of them I would still like to have seen them at Le Guess Who.

Thanks to anyone who has made it this far. If you want more you can see all my terrible Le Guess Who pictures here.

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 2023 part three: Saturday

You can look back on my previous Le Guess Who post here, and you can see all my Le Guess Who posts here.

By now I was getting the hang of the hotel breakfast and was carefully balancing my intake of bread, rolls, egg, poffertjes, croissants, coffee, and cava to ensure an optimal start to the day. I think we may also have visited the St. Catherine's Museum today, educating ourselves on some of the more entertaining aspects of Dutch religious history (in particular the secret Catholics who had to build hidden churches for themselves while feuding with the Vatican over definitional issues). An early dinner in the afternoon saw us washing down a tasty Tilt veggie burger with some Belgian beer. Then we went off to The Drain, one of the faraway venues to the south of Utrecht, outside the moat that protects the city from attack by barbarians.

We were there to see Khorshid Dadbeh, an Iranian musician. We kind of assumed that relatively few people would make their way to such a remote location, arriving just before she was due to start, but sadly we were wrong and had to queue to get in to where she was playing. We then found ourselves stuck at the back of a venue without a raised stage, which meant that although we could hear Dadbeh playing we never actually saw her and I am still not entirely certain she was actually there. Music was pretty good, if you like the sound of people playing Middle Eastern stringed instruments similar but not quite identical to the oud.

Back in the Tivoli Vredenburg I saw Moin, a band featuring drummer Valentina Magaletti (of various other bands) and some other people. They were pretty good but looking back on it after a couple of weeks I fear they might have been one of those acts you enjoy seeing at a festival but who leave no lasting impression. Maybe I should check them out on record.

Who definitely left an impact was Colleen, a French electronic musician based in Barcelona who has adopted an Irish (or Irish-American) name. She was playing in the Janskerk. She was playing on a Moog and her music seemed very analogue, with a lot of having to patch through wires between pieces. It was all very enjoyable in a wibbly wibbly way, making good use of the Janskerk's acoustics. It also can't be denied that Colleen radiated such an appealingly pleasant personality that it would have been hard to dislike her music. But there was still a sad moment, with Colleen reporting that she was playing the last ever Le Guess Who concert in the Janskerk. Perhaps the Dutch Reformed Church had put their foot down after ATTILA CSIHAR's invocation of the day before.

And then when she finished, a funny moment: the stage was rushed by members of the audience who wanted to inspect the kit and ask Colleen how it all worked. God bless them.

That was already quite a lot action for one day, but there was more. Next up I saw ESG, the minimal dance sensations from New York. They only have one original member left now, a somewhat frail Renée Scroggins, with the line-up filled up by her daughter on bass, a son on percussion and dancing, and a session musician on drums. Scroggins herself did vocals and played some guitar. And it was amazing, with the grooves being totally infectious. My friend R— was saying that he finds ESG a bit thin on record and sees their being endlessly sampled as indicating how their music suits having more stuff built on top of it, but that it still works live. I'm not familiar enough with their recorded output to judge but they definitely work as live performers. They are definitely one to catch if they ever come to your town.

That was kind of it for me on Saturday night. I saw in Hertz for an electronic set by ZULI & Omar El Sadek, who are I think from Egypt and then caught a good chunk of Nihiloxica. People were very enthusiastic about the latter but once I start thinking it is time for bed I find it hard to engage.

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Le Guess Who 2023 part two: Friday

And so we come to the second day of 2023's Le Guess Who. You can look back on day one here.

The first people I saw on the Friday were the Pankisi Ensemble, who were playing in the Jacobikerk. They release music on the Ored Recordings label, who I recommend investigating if you are interested in weirdo folk and and folk-adjacent music from the Caucasus or the Circassian community. The Pankisi Ensemble are a mainly vocal group of Kist women from the Kist, with Kists being a Chechen or Chechen-adjacent people living in the Pankisi gorge area of Georgia. I had previously heard one of the Pankisi Ensemble's songs on the Mountains of Tongues compilation of music from that part of the world. My beloved was particularly interested in catching this lot; she has an interest in Georgian polyphonic music and although the Pankisi Ensemble are from a different tradition, there is a definite air of cross-pollination here. The music features the members of the ensemble sometimes singing on their own and sometimes in the kind of multipart choral harmonies with long sustained notes that to my untrained ears sounded very like Georgian or Bulgarian choral music. Sometimes one of the women accompanied the others on a guitar-like instrument or accordion and sometimes she didn't. The music was beautiful and deserves a wider audience… check them out on Bandcamp.

Following the Pankisi Ensemble there was a general sense that the place to be was the Stadsschouwburg theatre, where Kali Malone was going to be playing her Does Spring Hide Its Joy album with Lucy Railton and Stephen O'Malley. Malone was going to be starting very soon after the Pankisi Ensemble finished so I felt that speed was of the essence if any of her set was to be caught and I headed off to towards the theatre with some despatch. My colleagues headed off with somewhat less despatch and so I found myself arriving at the theatre on my own, whereupon I joined a long queue. That moved off pretty quickly but alas the venue filled before I gained admittance. However, I was now sufficiently near the front that I reckoned I would gain admittance before too long when attendees started leaving after realising that Stephen O'Malley being in the line-up did not mean they were going to be getting a Sunn-O))) greatest hits set. And while I did have to wait for a bit I was able to get in time to catch an hour or so of Malone's long set, and to sit in a comfy seat while doing so.

So, Kali Malone. Readers may recall me saying that initially I was not quite so impressed with an album of her organ music but that I grew to like it during the early days of the Covid pandemic as its gentle sounds proved quite soothing in that difficult time. This time she was not playing the organ and she was playing with her buds. The three of them were widely spaced out on the big and largely dark stage, Malone in the middle and the other two on the flanks. Malone was playing some kind of synthesiser thing while Railton was on cello and O'Malley played occasional guitar. It was all very drone and beautiful in its restfulness. And I was amused by how O'Malley was probably the most famous person on the stage but the least essential (unless he was doing more than I was aware of), with his guitar only coming in very occasionally as an augmentation to the wider sound. Definitely a highlight of the festival for me and I was glad to have caught as much of it as I did.

The curse of Le Guess Who's massively multi-tracked programme meant that I had to miss various interesting-sounding things in order to catch Kali Malone, but I did manage to get up to the front of the Janskerk for ATTILA CSIHAR, VOID OV VOICES. Mr Attila is a Hungarian grunty metal vocalist who spent some time performing with evil Norwegian band MAYHEM (managing to avoid committing suicide, eating any of his bandmates' brains (so far as we know), murdering any of his bandmates, or being murdered himself) and has more recently provided vocals for Sunn-O))) (I saw him performing once with them in a tree costume). When he came on he was in full corpse paint and wearing a costume whose hoody top seemed to merge into his hair. His set was almost entirely vocal, exploiting the amazing acoustics of the venue. He used some electronics to treat and loop his voice as he went along, but beyond that it was all pretty minimal. The overall effect was like being present at some kind of Black Mass, particularly as he was performing behind what looked like an altar bedecked with some occult symbols, and I did find myself looking over into corners in case some obscene horror was starting to manifest. I also wondered if there was any danger of a Dutch clergyman storming in to denounce this blasphemy (while also wondering if the non-English vocals might contain some controversial content, given MAYHEM's association with disturbing far-right sentiment).

The concert ended on a funny note however, with ATTILA responding to the rapturious applause by giving us a big cheesy grin and two thumbs up. He didn't quite say "Thanks! you've been a lovely audience!" but he might as well have done.

Friends had bigged up the Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective, another orthographically challenging act who had played the night before and were on again tonight. So I went to see them. This lot are from Vietnam and they were playing in Cloud Nine, the highest of all the venues in the Tivoli Vredenburg (although there are rumours of a secret venue above it, so high that attendees sometimes complain of altitude sickness). And they played on the floor with the audience around them. It was good fun, with guitar sounds that reminded me of heyday Sonic Youth. Their recordings might be worth investigating.

After checking out Rachida Nayar in Hertz (interesting) I repaired to my bed like the lightweight I am.

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Le Guess Who 2023 part one: Thursday

Previously I wrote about my journey to Utrecht for the Le Guess Who festival. Now at last I can start to talk about the festival itself

The festival starts on Thursday. That meant we picked up wristbands and did a bit of strolling around before slipping into Café DeRat, where I met a beer snob who berated me for my pedestrian choice (I was drinking an Orval). We also checked out the two DeRat cats, one of whom came over for pets but then complained because I was doing it wrong. Wisely we opted not to stay and lorry strong beers into ourselves and instead went off to catch some music.

And what strange music it was. The Le Guess Who organisers had come up with the crazy idea of having some of the performers play inside an opaque box onto which images were projected, with the programme not telling you who the performers were but hinting that they were probably someone really famous that you would definitely want to catch. There were three performance of this Anonymous Project, all on the Thursday evening. I caught two of them, the first and last, and I broadly enjoyed the experience. The visuals were pretty trippy, and in the latter case the lighting occasionally made the performer inside the cube semi-visible, suggesting to me that he was a black bloke playing keyboards and possibly also singing (if the singing was not by someone else). And they were different to each other, with the first anonymous performer being kind of spacey ambienty while the last lad featured a bit of piano and some non-verbal vocals that annoyed my friend K— so much he had to leave. I was more forward thinking and enjoyed being able to relax in a nice chair and let myself be mesmerised.

But I did not just watch people playing music inside a box. For I journeyed over to the Janskerk, where Brìghde Chaimbeul was playing the small pipes. These are a Scottish pipe instrument but not the big bagpipes the country is famous for, rather a device where the air is pumped by the elbow rather than being blown, so somewhat akin to the Irish uilleann pipes except sounding a bit different. They are quieter and softer than the big bagpipes ("better suited to indoor playing" as Wikipedia puts it). Chaimbeul is a Scots Gaelic speaker from Skye but is not some died in the wool traditionalist. Rather she pushes the envelope while remaining rooted in the tradition, emphasising drone and pushing the music in new directions. The Janskerk is an atmospheric venue with great acoustics and it suited her music very well, making this an exciting first concert of the festival where I was actually able to see the performer. Consider investigating her Carry Them with Us album or her guest appearance on Caroline Polachek's "Blood and Butter".

Beyond the Anonymous Project and Ms Chaimbeul, Thursday was a bit quiet for me. I saw some of African Headcharge, who did a bit of raising people's consciousness. I particularly liked the bit where the singer talked about how happy to be back in Belgium because he just loved Belgium despite everything (that everything probably being a reference to the Belgian Congo, the official most horrendously terrible European colony in Africa); debate ensued as to whether he was actually mixed up as to what country he was in or whether he was taking the piss in some way. Both of these are possible; all those European countries are kind of the same. I also caught a bit of Rəhman Məmmədli, who is from Azerbaijan, where they use the Roman alphabet but with a couple of extra letters thrown in. He plays the guitar in an appealingly liquid way, but part of the fun came from his accompanying musicians (on piano keyboards and a hand drum), who were his sons. The pianist in particular had great chops and kept threatening to overshadow his dad, to the extent that we were imagining him getting a clip round the ear backstage once the concert was over.

Peaking too soon is never a good idea at Le Guess Who, so after that set I made my excuses and repaired to bed.

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Le Guess Who 2023 prologue: Journey to the East

Somewhat belatedly I am now going to start telling you about my annual trip to the Netherlands for the Le Guess Who festival. In this instalment I will mainly be talking about my journey to Utrecht, so come back tomorrow if you want to hear about music and stuff like that.

This year we decided to once more travel over to Utrecht without flying. The first leg was a ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, although in practice it felt like the journey had really begun when we boarded the special bus to the ferry port. Our friend Mr B— was also travelling on our ferry. The journey over to Wales was a lot of fun.

From Holyhead we got the direct train to London. Some slight Holyhead dawdling meant we weren't able to grab a four seat table, so poor Mr B— was stuck on his own for a bit. But in London we went out to Drummond Street for tasty South Indian food (dosas for the others, thali for greedy me) and then to the Doric Arch for a couple of ales.

Like a crazy person Mr B— got up super early the following morning, but our Eurostar was at a more leisurely hour. Check-in and security flowed much better than last year… they might have resolved the post-Brexit post-pandemic staffing issues. This time we took steps to make sure we weren't caught by the onboard bar shutting down at lunchtime for a staff changeover at Brussels: we bought sandwiches in London and then picked up wine on the train to lay into when lunchtime arrived. And so like debauched plutocrats we drank French wine and ate sandwiches on a train for our lunch. We also like how the train announcer from Brussels had a great "in reality perception" accent.

Arriving in Utrecht we checked into our hotel. No view of the station this time round, but we could star out our window at the cycle track heading up to the Tivoli Vredenburg, which was almost as mesmerising. For dinner we went out for a fancy/expensive meal: a vegetarian rijsttafel (big spread of Indonesian food). It was tasty stuff and we ate it all (or almost all). I'd be on for something similar next year again, but might try Blauw then instead, as it seems to be Utrecht's premier Indonesian restaurant while only being slightly more expensive. But I think what I would really be hoping for is more in the way of Indonesian ambience, by which I mean gamelan: I was a bit disappointed that our restaurant (Selamat Makan) was not treating us to the ringing sounds of the popular music.

And so to bed, in preparation for the musical onslaught to come.