Jeff Mangum ATP Part 5: Syria

More Jeff Mangum curated All Tomorrow's Partiesaction

I have surprisingly little by them on record, but on the strength of their live appearances Low are one of my favourite bands. As you know, they are a clean-living husband (vocals, guitar) and wife (drums, vocals) joined by a succession of hell-raising bassists [libellous supposition, your honour]. And they make music that is basically a bit miserable. I think of them as the Carter Family of our times. It seems like an age since I last saw them so I had almost forgotten how good they are, to the extent that I suggested to my beloved that we would be well advised to rest our little feet by sitting at the back while they were on. That stupid idea lasted about two songs and then we had barged our way up to the front. OK so I then had to put up with some fuckwitted Dutch people near me having a stupid conversation about some foreign language shite while Low were playing 'Sunflower' (current candidate for greatest miserable song ever), but being close to my heroes more than made up for it.

One thing you may have noticed from the news is that in the faraway country of Syria people have been engaging in protests and the government has been killing them. Around the time of All Tomorrow's Parties this had escalated to a new pitch, with government forces using heavy artillery to flatten the disaffected city of Homs. This has attracted relatively little attention from the kind of people who protest about things, I suspect because events in Syria do not fit the narrative of seeing everything bad that happens in the world as being the fault of the US government and its British catamites. Where is this going? Well, Alan Sparhawk of Low mentioned the Syrian crisis a couple of times on stage and seemed genuinely quite cut up about it. He was not saying anything like "We should send in the Marines", more stuff like "That shit is fucked up". And he is right, it is. No other performer mentioned Syria or alluded to any political event occurring outside the festival.

more festival action coming soon

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A post about bikinis

This blog has the word "bikini" in its URL, but I have never posted about bikinis - until now. For it has reached the time of year when shops start to advertise clothes that people might want to wear on their summer holidays. As happens every year, the chain H&M have put up posters advertising bikini tops for sale – for the eye catching price of €4.95. However, they continue not to run advertisements for bikini bottoms. This has me wondering what mysterious game they are playing.

I have two theories. One possibility is that these items are being advertised as a loss leader, and should a woman want to buy a complete outfit she would have to spend €500 on a bikini bottom. The other is that there is a whole secret world of holiday resorts where women wear only bikini tops. The former appears most likely, as the models in the advertisements are clearly photographed wearing bikini bottoms. But I wonder if any Inuit Panda readers can shed any further light on this mystery?

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Spring Cleaning

Like I promised I would, I have deleted almost all of my 2009 and 2011 Nanowrimo attempts from this blog. If you are some kind of weirdo and find the fragments so intriguing that you want to read the rest then contact me and I will send you the whole thing as a PDF.

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Cate Le Bon sings a song

I have been going on about Cate Le Bon to anyone that will listen for some time now (albeit without saying too much about her here apart from one album review and a couple of other mentions). But now the Welsh neo-folk sensation has a new album out which maybe will mean that this astonishing talent starts getting the attention she deserves. The Guardian at least seem to have caught up with her, inviting her in to sing a song for them. And here it is:

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 4: Real Festival Write-Up Starts Here

My adventures at the Jeff Mangum curated All Tomorrow's Parties continue

By now you may be wondering – did I actually see anything at this ATP? Well, yes, I did. See Executive Summary for a full list. But let me talk about a few of these acts in a bit more detail, starting with some people who were completely new to me.

Feathers proved to be an interesting proposition, being an all-woman band playing music that nodded back to synthpop of yore without sounding like electropop revivalism. They also were striking in their visual appearance, being done up to look quite glamorous, none more so than their lead singer Anastasia Dimou. Now, I am a bit suspicious of bands comprised entirely of beautiful women ["O RLY?" – Reader's voice], but there seemed something a bit different to this lot that made them come across like a fascinating art project than just something for the dads. It also helped that in Ms Dimou they have a striking and unusual front person. I feel this band would repay further investigation and I note that they have a some songs people can listen to on the YouTube.

I had not heard of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble either, but they do what they say on the tin, being an ensemble from America and playing contemporary music. But of course, you have to be wise to the lingo – contemporary music does not mean all music that is contemporary, so they were not playing Katy Perry covers, but rather it is contemporary classical music [And yeah, I know some people do not like the term "classical music", but do they have an alternative?]. And they were playing at midday on Sunday morning, so it was like one of those concerts at the Hugh Lane Gallery I sometimes go to. They played a couple of pieces, but the biggie was this Gavin Bryars thing called Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which features a sampled voice repeating some little song about how Jesus' blood has never failed him yet, over which the musicians play their stringy modern sounds. It was very involving and in the darkened environment of the Crazy Horse venue it made for an affecting and otherworldly experience.

Now let me move on to talk about people I saw at ATP whom I have seen before. Maybe you have seen them before too. We wandered along to see The Fall with no great expectations – they had been a bit below par last time we saw them in Dublin. People always seem to tell me that The Fall are patchy live but up until that time they had always been exceptionally good, so for me a below par concert raised the worrying prospect that this once great band are in terminal decline. But they turned out to be great, huzzah. The line-up was apparently more or less the same as when we saw them before, I think, so maybe they have just become more used to Mr Smith and his funny ways. In fact, the band generally were great, playing out the songs well with a great "who gives a shit, we are not long for this band" demeanour. And the latest Mrs Mark E. Smith on keyboards seemed less visibly terrified of him than the last time, which was nice. Mr Smith himself was flying, rambling incoherently in a most engaging manner. An emblematic moment was when between songs he muttered "[something-something] Joanna Newsom [something]". Could he be already lining up the elfin harpist as the next Mrs Mark E. Smith?

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Have you seen this tortoise?

A Dublin family are missing their 100-year-old tortoise. Florentine seems to have slipped out of their garden in Rathgar when a member of their family left the side-gate open. The family believe Florentine to be still alive – if he had been run over on the road you would know all about it, and tortoises are otherwise rather robust and can survive for astonishing periods without food.

Tortoises have been recorded as living for 177 years, so it is possible that Florentine's break for freedom represents some kind of midlife crisis. If you do come across him, you can contact his owner via Twitter.

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EDIT: Panic over - Florentine has returned home. Or, rather, he has come out from where he was hiding in the garden.

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Art v. Puppies

Germany took another step towards a return of fascism this week, when a court in Berlin stepped in to ban a show by an unnamed performance artist. The show was to have featured the live strangulation of puppies by the artist, as part of a protest by him or her against the strangulation of puppies. The artist had argued that the German Basic Law guarantees artistic freedom, but the court told him to "Gehen Sie weg und scheißen Sie!", pointing out that the harming of animals on stage is illegal.

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 3: Bands I Did Not See

Being a continuing account of the occurrences at the Jeff Mangum curated All Tomorrow's Parties

By now you if you are still reading you will not have come across any discussion of bands I had seen at this event, apart from the Executive Summary. Let me keep it like that for a bit by talking about some of the artists playing the festival that I did not see. First up we have Charlemagne Palestine and Robyn Hitchcock. They were not playing together, which would have been awesome, but they were playing at the same tyme, so it would have been necessary to pick seeing one or another, but as both of these fascinating acts were playing before our bus arrived at the festival this was a choice we did not have to make. We were talking to a Glaswegian gentleman who was at Charlemagne Palestine and he was being annoyed by some people who were yapping away to each other through it, so he had to use the magic of being from Glasgow to say in a threatening tone something like: "Good sirs, I have politely requested you once already to refrain from disturbing me with your inane chatter. Now I am asking you again, with the warning that if you continue to upset me with your prattling I will not request your silence a third time but will have no option but to take my cane to your persons and administer several sound thrashings". That did the trick, but he did feel like he had done the reputation of Glasgow no favours.

I also did not see Sebadoh. I think maybe we were on the point of drifting off to see them after a wonderful set by Group Doueh when someone said to us that they had heard that an all-star jam featuring all the forward thinking bands on the festival line-up was about to take place, so we stayed for that instead. It would have been nice to see Sebadoh again, but fundamentally less appealing than seeing the Sun Ra Arkestra playing with Boredoms and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.

We went for a pizza when Magnetic Fields were on. I mean, come on, I have to eat. I suppose we could have got a takeaway pizza and sat at the back eating it, but maybe we needed a break from music. And ultimately, while I like Magnetic Fields, I have seen them quite a few times and do recall getting diminishing returns from their live appearances. And don't they play really quietly now as a result of some hearing problem Stephin Merrit has? So we probably would not have been able to hear them over the sound of our munching (and nor would anyone else), so it was probably best for everyone that we stayed away. I'm sure they were great.

I stayed up really late to see some of the kewl Oneohtrix Point Never, but as soon as they started I thought "I am too tired to enjoy this", so I went to bed.

And I also did not see Jeff Mangum. I do not really know too much about Mr Mangum. I understand he used to be in a band called Neutral Milk Hotel, who were around in the early 1990s or something. They somehow passed me by, but the ATP programme says that people liked them a lot. And people did seem to be very interested in seeing Jeff Mangum play, as both times there were huge queues to get in to see him, queues sufficiently long that we decided not to bother and go see something else instead. It did not help that anyone we knew at the festival said nothing more compelling about Mangum than that he was "alright", so I am not sure if we were missing much. I may at some stage acquire a copy of the classic Neutral Milk Hotel album (which has a nice cover) to see if I might just have missed the gig of the century.

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Subordinate Meerkats Solve Problems

Meerkats are cute little animals who live in southern Africa. They are famous for their cooperative social structure, but their society is not egalitarian. In a given Meerkat troop there will usually be a higher ranking male who bosses around the other males of lower status (I am not sure where female Meerkats fit into this hierarchy).

Now scientists have discovered that the subordinate Meerkats are better at solving problems than their higher status fellows. Meerkats were presented with openable glass jars containing scorpions (a tasty treat for the social mongooses). High status Meerkats rapidly gave up trying to extract the scorpion, but the lumpen-Meerkats would toil away until they had the jar open and the scorpion scoffed.

Persistence seems to be the characteristic that allows the subordinate Meerkats to solve problems. They appear to open jars by trial and error, and when presented with a new jar identical to the old one they spend the same length of time fiddling about with it until they open it, suggesting that they are incapable of learning and remembering how to do it. But scientists believe that this persistence is an important characteristic of junior male Meerkats, as they are the ones who leave their home troop to go off in search of mates. High status Meerkats, meanwhile, are like high status humans – they do not need to solve problems as they can profit from the work of others.

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 2: Introductory Chit Chat

Let us go back. I have long been saying that I would love to go to another Spring All Tomorrow's Parties. The Christmas ones are great and I always like going away then, but that time is often a bit busy for work and I am always afraid that I will be told at the last minute that I cannot take time off. Spring is much better work-wise, and the stories I have been hearing of the fun people have had at the Matt Groening and Pavement ATPs have reminded me of how nice it could be to travel to a festival then. And then they stopped doing Spring ATPs, so it looked like I would never get the chance to go to one again. So, when the Jeff Mangum curated ATP was suddenly postponed from December to March I decided that this was a once-off opportunity that had to be grabbed, particularly given how much fun we had at the recent December ATP. Also, I found myself with the creeping sense that the whole ATP thing might just be coming to an end, making it important to grab any last of their festivals that look interesting.

I was fortunate in that in this matter my beloved's thoughts were similar to my own, so I did not have to try and bunk in with strangers or put together a full chalet at short notice. And we did leave it pretty late to commit to going, so we had no time to look for chalet-mates and instead booked one of the two-berth non-self-catering chalets. The festival mocks you as you approach these, as the way to them brings you past the really swish elite chalets the bands are in. "Maybe we have been upgraded and put into one of those", we wondered, before turning a corner and finding ourselves in the part of the campsite dubbed [REDACTED] by one of my friends.

We were slightly lucky in that we were given a four bed instead of a two bed, which meant more room, and I would have to say that the chalet did the job of providing a comfy place to sleep and so on, but it was not the kind of place you would hang out in, which meant that we spent little time lounging around watching ATP TV and lots of time out seeing bands – ROCK. Oh yeah, one final thing about the chalet – if there are four of you, do not under any circumstances ever get a four berth non-self-catering chalet at ATP, unless you like only being able to access the bathroom by walking through one of the bedrooms.

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