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 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.

Le Guess Who 2022: Friday

My account of the amazing 2022 Le Guess Who festival continues. See part one here.

On Friday we tried to go to a screening of a film about the Chelsea Hotel. Unfortunately so did everyone else, as this was one of very few festival events taking place during the day, and we were unable to squeeze into the small cinema auditorium. I hope the more organised people enjoyed themselves. So instead we trekked down to the Centraal Museum to catch a LGW-associated exhibition called Double Act, which combined video art stuff with paintings from the 17th century. Video art is a bit hit and miss and, truth be told even some of that 17th century stuff is not all that, so there was no guarantee that this was going to deliver the goods. It turned out however that there were some real corkers here. The video of the guy scooting around Puerto Rico on a moped with a trumpet attached to the exhaust pipe (there was parping) was amusing, even if I did not really buy it as a commentary on how imperialism is bad. I was also struck by how quite a few of the other video pieces just featured people walking purposefully.

The actual hit of the show for me though was Irish artist Richard Mosse's The Enclave, which presented footage shot in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo during one of their wars there. This was shot on some kind of infrared sensitive film that renders green colours as pink, giving the landscape a strangely alien look. And the way the images were projected was deliberately disorienting, with this exhibit using six screens, four arranged in a rectangle and two diagonally outside. Sometimes the same images were projected on screens facing each other, and sometimes not, with the viewer always having the sense that they are missing something. The images themselves showed soldiers moving around, people in a small town or refugee camp, and sometimes the aftermath of violence (dead soldiers triggering the mild curiosity of their former comrades and/or non-combatants). But there was no narration or explanatory text, indeed no soundtrack of any kind, leaving the actions of the people in the footage (and indeed the choices of the filmmakers) largely inscrutable.

A key sequence for me was the long section inside some kind of village hall, where initially it seems like a large group of civilians have gathered for entertainment, until you realise that the event seems to be mainly taking place for the bunch of guys in military fatigues sitting at the front. First we have music and dancing, then kids jumping through flaming hoops of burning petrol, and then a woman with the most amazing presence strides in from the back of the hall and marches up to the stage, only before we get any sense of what she is about the lead army guy gets up and leaves, with the camera following him out. This to me embodied the whole baffling incomprehensibility of the piece and, by extension, the confusion that must come with living in a conflict zone.

We also popped in to the Speelklok Museum, where they had some things available for LGW attendees. As you will recall, the Speelklok is a museum for mechanical musical instruments, and the big thing they had for us this year was the Klappermobile. This was like what you would get if John Carpenter's The Thing ate a load of bicycles and then turned them into a musical instrument. It required at least two people to operate: one person to wind a handle and keep the contraption going and then another to press keys that depressed baffles against spinning bicylce wheels designed to rotate at different speeds and so create noises of different pitches. My beloved was able to make it play something approximating to "Raglan Road".

The first musical performance I saw on the Friday was Noori and His Derpa Band, who were playing in Janskerk (which is a church). They had played previously in the Grote Zaal and I think that might have been a better place for them, as this was uptempo good time music (albeit with something of an edge, as Mr Noori is from Sudan's downtrodden Beja community).

Back in the Tivoli's very comfortable Hertz venue we then saw Alison Cotton, a spooky folky gothy lady. She played violin, did stuff with electronics, and used her voice to create a distinctly eerie atmosphere, to the extent that friend Brian was afraid that she might accidentally summon something from another plane of existence. I was struck by how she covered Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair", but it was the tunes where her vocals were almost completely non-verbal that sent shivers down my spine.

We were then faced by a dilemma. Dry Cleaning were playing in the Ronda, and while I am unfamiliar with their work I have heard of them and was interested in checking out this big name band. Also my friend Mr B—'s repeated comments about how the Dry Cleaning singer is great while the rest of the band's music is rather plodding had me curious as to how bad it could really be, especially when you consider the eccentric nature of Mr B—'s tastes. But they were playing at the same time as Širom, whose programme description as weirdo avant folkies from Slovenia made them sound like a hard to resist option. And we could not resist, climbing up to Cloud Nine (and successfully accessing it) to see most of their set.

And basically Širom, gave good weirdo avant folk, with an added side order of drone. They played a variety of strange acoustic instruments while also providing us with some vocals, though whether these were of the Slovenian or non-verbal variety remains an unsolved mystery. They also had a carpet on stage and I understand from other reports that they might have thrown lentils at people. It all sounded a bit like those Finnish Fonal people (who may or may not still be going). And they appear to be from the Karfeit and Carso areas (possibly called something else in Slovenian), sites of the famous 11 battles of the Isonzo in the First World War.

But then we did go to the Ronda to see Clipping (who may actually call themselves "clipping." but it's not my fault if they don't understand punctuation and capitalisation). You have heard of this trio: two blokes on productiony stuff and one on rappy vocals. The music is pretty glitchy and the overall effect is a bit like if you had someone rapping over a record by Squarepusher. I think a lot of the appeal here comes from Daveed Diggs's rapping, with his quickfire vocals carrying the music along. Great as it was though, I did find myself wondering if this might be hip hop for white people (though as a white person myself maybe this is not a problem).

And thence to Hertz to see Nancy Mounir's Nozhet El Nofous. She is an Egyptian musician and like Nadah El Shazly her work involves a certain interrogation of the musical past of her country. As a performance, Nozhet El Nofous was an odd beast. Mounir herself played both violin and theremin, but she was joined by a gang of local classical musicians. And she had a man and a woman projecting photographs of Egyptian singers of yore (less famous ones than Um Kalthoum) and explanatory text. The musical also combined samples of the old singers with the music being played live, to create a sound that might be described as hauntological. It was all rather fascinating and strange, with the frequency with which the olde singers seem to have played against gender roles being an intriguing aspect of their biographies. I found myself thinking that this could do with being released as a nicely packaged CD set with an accompanying book containing all the details of the singers, as there was too much to otherwise remember.

As with the first night I was by now too tired to go on to BASIS so I made my way instead to BED.

Images from Richard Mosse's The Enclave (National Gallery of Victoria)

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Le Guess Who 2022: Thursday

You know the drill. Le Guess Who is that festival of Wire-reader music that takes place each November in the picturesque Dutch town of Utrecht, with most concerts taking place in the Tivoli Vredenburg complex but many also happening in various satellite locations. I previously attended in 2021 and 2018. This year for crazy person reasons my beloved and I decided that rather than fly over we would travel by a combination of boat and train, so you'll have to put up with some yap about our travel arrangements before reaching the music festival chat.

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.

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Le Guess Who: Part Two

This is part two of my account of November's Le Guess Who festival in Utrecht. Part one can be seen here. This part deals with Friday 9 November, the second day of the festival.

The main part of the festival was taking a break during the day, which left us with an opportunity to visit a place called BAK to see an exhibition entitled Forensic Justice that was being shown in conjunction with Le Guess Who. This had been put together by Forensic Architecture, a radical architectural organisation headed by Eyal Weizman, whose work has previously appeared in the LRB (the other paper of record). We watched a series of videos where the Forensic Architecture people carefully dissected video and other evidence to investigate official narratives of events. These were interesting as examples of how the panopticon society in which we live does not just lead to a Big Brother society in which the State continuously watches us, but one in which non-state actors have the tools to expose illicit state action.
Some of the Forensic Justice installations were pretty intense, like the reconstructions from multiple CCTV images of a hospital in Aleppo being bombed by the Syrian air force, which showed people being thrown around by the force of an explosion, or their analysis of the killing of two Palestinian school children (unarmed, not obviously taking part in rioting or even demonstrations, apparently on their way home from school), which showed they were killed by Israeli soldiers firing live bullets but falsely claiming to have fired only rubber bullets.

For me though I think the most upsetting was an analysis of the fatal beating of Pavlos Fyssas, a Greek anti-fascist, by members of the Golden Dawn, with the analysis of Forensic Architecture showing that the Greek police had stood by and let the attack happen. What made that the most disturbing I think is that crazy things (hospitals being bombed or soldiers shooting school kids) seem almost normal in crazy places like Syria or Palestine, but they are much more unheimlich in an urbane and democratic country like Greece. Good job nothing like that happens closer to home, eh readers?

The last examination we saw by Forensic Architecture was something of a relief as it did not involve anyone losing their life. Instead by careful analysis of several video clips they appeared to disprove the assertion of the Italian coast guard that a sea rescue vessel was operating in concert with people smugglers.

There was more of Forensic Justice that we could have watched (something to with the unfortunate plight of Orangoutangs) but I can only take so much, so we left BAK and headed off to Lombok, which is another area of Utrecht where a Le Guess Who satellite festival was taking place. Beside an impressive mosque there was a food market taking place, with stalls selling a variety of tasty noms. We sampled their wares. Lombok seems to be multicultural bit of Utrecht so we were also treated to some guys walking around playing drums and those squeaking trumpets they have in the Orient. There were also some children doing some class of traditional dance for us; I think they might have been Turkish rather than Arab but it's hard to tell. I definitely admired their intense concentration.

And then we strolled around Lombok looking for further excitement. And we found it in the form of some class of Dabke flashmob taking place outside a church. If you do not know Dabke, it is the traditional dance thing from Syria and Palestine and other places round there, typically done by guys joining arms, often forming rings that rotate frenetically. This is what was going on here, with some attempt to bring home to Whitey that Dabke does feature actual steps and is not just all about the speed. We watched amusedly from a distance, careful not to be drawn into the maniacal gyres.

At some point we were sated by Dabke, so pretty much at random visited a place called the Ubuntuhuis, where some chap called Cengiz Arslanpay was going to be combining electronic music with his ney flute (ney!). The Ubuntuhuis turned out not to be a place for people to hang out working on the latest Linux releases but rather some class of centre for homeless people and persons newly arrived in the country. The venue where Mr Arslanpay was playing was living room sized and we were all more or less on top of the player but that made it all that bit more entertaining. Sadly he was unable to treat us to his electronics for reasons but he did play a succession of different Turkish flutes.

My Beloved and I reunited with our spiritual guru Mr B— in the Tivoli complex and went to see some chap called Serpentwithfeet (I think he might call himself serpentwithfeet but I do not hold with proper nouns beginning with lower case letters; frankly he should be glad I am leaving the spaces out of his name). Mr Feet is not actually a serpent, footed or otherwise, but an impractical red anorak wearing fellow from the USA. He apparently used to be a choirboy but now he makes music that is sometimes classed as experimental but seemed to me to be a fairly accessible form of R&B. The real joy of his performance came from his persona as presented to the audience, which was basically camp and endearingly positive. Everyone who saw him was happier than they were beforehand.

We then split off to the Janskerk again to see some of Vashti Bunyan, the lost folkie sensation who is now back in action. Ms Bunyan whispers very quietly between songs but then when singing projects at an audible but restrained volume suiting the delicate nature of her songs. She is also a bit of a roffler, quipping at one point that back in the day she was told her music had no commercial potential before launching into 'Train Song', from whose relentless use in films and advertisements she has made a mint. Overall though I wished that scheduling had meant that I arrived early enough to get a good seat at the front.

Back in the Tivoli complex I let myself be brought to see Paddy Steer, wondering if I had made a terrible mistake. For the first song I thought that maybe I had but then either he got better or I was reprogrammed. Mr Steer's music is an odd combination of analogue synth sounds and live drumming, with his vocals affected by the vocoder type thing he has in the space helmet he wears for some of the songs. I was intrigued by the question of whether all of the music was strictly live, as the drumming seemed pretty intricate and hard to imagine someone doing while also playing synths but it was impossible to be certain either way as he had a bank of equipment largely obscuring our view of whatever he was doing with his hands. We nevertheless did get to see his impressive space suit. Overall Paddy Steer hovers gamely on the borderlands between weirdo art music and novelty shite, staying I think on the right side of that boundary.

I stuck my head briefly into where Blanck Mass were playing and was a bit surprised by what I saw. Blanck Mass have a membership overlap with Fuck Buttons, but the my sense of how they divided was that Fuck Buttons played the more heavy beaty stuff while Blanck Mass play music that is not entirely dissimilar except that it is a bit beat free, making the music a weird kind of in your face ambient (use your Babbage machine to compare Fuck Button's 'Brainfreeze' with Blanck Mass's 'Chernobyl'). But on the face of this performance Fuck Buttons and Blanck Mass appear to have converged, with the music on offer tonight featuring lots of big fucking beats. I reckon this would have been great to dance to if you were so inclined. Even as listening music it was not unentertaining, but we were a bit *tired* so we repaired to our house and caught some Zzzzzs.

Day three coming soon!

Exhibition image source:

The Omar Bin Abdul Aziz Hospital in Aleppo (Forensic Architecture: Forensic Justice)

More of my Le Guess Who photographs

More of my Utrecht photographs

Le Guess Who: Part One

Since the demise of All Tomorrow's Parties many have wondered if something would ever arise to take its place. Earlier this year my old friend and quaffing partner Mr B— asked me if I was interested in attending Le Guess Who in Utrecht. I was curious and as always am eager to hear exciting sounds, so I agreed to go, with the promise of a line-up based around strange weirdo music being the draw. This is an account of what happened there.

Le Guess Who is a city festival, with concerts taking place in venues across Utrecht but particularly focussed on the Tivoli Vredenburg, a central complex of multiple performance spaces, ranging from ones reminiscent of the Barbican main stage down to more intimate locales. As a city festival, Le Guess Who does not provide convivial chalet accommodation to its attendees; rather they must find their own places to stay, scattered across the attractive Dutch town. In our case we were staying in an Airbnb house in the university quarter, we being Mr B—, my beloved, Mr McG—, and myself.


If you've never been to Utrecht and are wondering what it's like… well it's a bit like Amsterdam. Or rather all those olde Dutch town are like each other: canals, dinky buildings, sudden bursts of modernist architecture. Utrecht has less tourists than Amsterdam, but it makes up for the lack of stag party dickheads with another menace: out of control cyclists. It has also has a strangely non-Euclidean street layout that keeps feeling like it is approximating to a grid system when actually it is not. I think other people of less logical minds (and a willingness to let Google guide them around) found the city easier to navigate; for the first couple of days I was reduced to following them around hoping they knew where they were going. Anyway, let me adopt a day-by-day approach to the festival which may turn out to just be a list of people I saw as I am writing this a good bit afterwards and did not take any notes back then because I am a fule.

On the first night of the festival (a Thursday) an initial bug/feature of the event became apparent: it is massively multi-tracked. If you are lucky there are only five things to choose from at any one time, but there were sometimes more. So it was that I found myself missing DRINKS (sadly not a drinks reception but a two-person band featuring Cate Le Bon and someone else) and instead found myself in the Domkerk seeing an ensemble called ONCEIM performing a piece called 'Occam Océan'. Who were they and what was this? Well ONCEIM are a contemporary music ensemble, the name being some class of acronym (in French, so I won't write out the words as you would not understand them). 'Occam Océan' is a collaboration with Éliane Radigue, the French composer being bigged up by many cool members of Frank's APA, the paper of record. The piece was a fascinating piece of edgy contemporary classical music, which broadly speaking might be my favourite class of music, and atmospheric environs of the church were a great place to hear it.

ONCEIM were going to be playing again with Stephen O'Malley of SUNN-O))) but the festival's multi-tracking and our own craving of varied experiences drew us away from the Domkerk to the Tivoli complex where after some exploration we settled down in front of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, legendary political jazz figures of yore (well they appear on that political jazz comp from SoulJazz). They were playing in the big main venue in the Tivoli, where every seat has a good view, and we looked down upon them like Olympians.
Then we hightailed it to another church, this one being the Janskerk, where the Jerusalem In My Heart Orchestra were playing. They had already started when we arrived and, as is traditional with church venues, bad sight lines meant it was a real struggle to actually see anything of the performance. Eventually though I managed to reach a point where I could see some of the musicians and some of the images being projected behind them, which looked like they were portrait photographs from the 1950s and 1960s by Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani, about whom I remember reading on the BBC News website; his photographs are mostly portraits, of individuals (sometimes posing with guns) and friends. Musically Jerusalem In My Heart play Middle Eastern classical music. On this occasion they were joined by an orchestra from Beirut (suggesting that normally they are not actually an orchestra) and were playing some 1928 piece from Egypt. Readers, I liked it and wished I had caught the whole concert from a comfy seat with a good view of the stage.

At that point we could have headed back to the Tivoli to catch any number of acts who were playing late into the night but instead we heeded the call of bed.

Scratched photograph image source:

Mrs Baqari, by Hashem el Madani (BBC News Magazine - Zaatari and Madani: Guns, flared trousers and same-sex kisses)

More of my Le Guess Who photographs

More of my Utrecht photographs