ATP - Nightmare Before Christmas

Butlins, Minehead, throughout the train journey from London the recurring thought is: “God knows what shithole Thurston Moore has sent us to”. The answer comes after getting off the train at Taunton and catching the bus, together with John Moloney of Sunburned Hand Of The Man as we'd discover in hindsight, all the way to this mythical Minehead, supposedly a charming seaside town on the Atlantic coast. Butlins turns out to be simply an amusement park.

Absolutely hideous. Fake beyond belief, gloriously grotesque and improbable, especially once it fills up with freaks from all over the world. What's more, the park is set right next to a sea that in winter takes on a sickly grey colour, matching the muddy beach, in total contrast with the natural surroundings. The structure is basically one enormous marquee, under which sprawl disorienting rows of shops selling assorted trinkets, fast-food stands, video games and other entertainment amenities. Besides that, there's obviously Stage 1 (Centre Stage). Outside there are two more sheds, which turn out to be Stage 2 (Reds), tucked beneath the main hall, and Stage 3 (Crazy Horse); all around stretches an area full of chalets - prefab wooden bungalows, not exactly gorgeous but pretty cozy, and just about a notch above the Arezzo Wave campsite. All things considered, Moore didn't screw us over as badly as we'd feared, seeing as they even provide cable TV with two channels run directly by the organisers, plus a handy All Tomorrow's Parties TV guide (which we obviously keep as a treasured memento).

At check-in we're shown to our accommodation and given ID wristbands (yellow, meaning we'll be able to see Sonic Youth on Saturday and Iggy with the Stooges on Sunday), a CD (a compilation featuring ATP Recordings acts) and a handy little booklet with the full schedule of bands and films. An unthinkable level of organisation for an alternative festival, which partly makes up for the serious flaw of shows almost always overlapping, forcing us into difficult choices, but also gives the considerable advantage of never having a whole hour to waste with no interesting bands playing anywhere.

After finding our lodging (the furthest away, of course) and grabbing something to eat, we choose to kick off this three-day run with Nurse With Wound. I'm not particularly interested, but the choice is between them, Ashtray Navigation and Family Underground. We choose history.

The band's performance had essentially already been announced, since it was known that Stapleton would be joined by his friend David Tibet and that they'd be revisiting "The Dead Side Of The Moon" along with a reworking of "Two Shaves And A Shine". So, an ambient-industrial descent, with particularly meticulous sounds, the result of electronic instrumentation and the use of various objects as percussion. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I enjoyed it all the same.

Then it's straight on to another painful choice: Richard Youngs or Flipper? We opt for the Scotsman's solo set (not least because we're left wondering how many Flippers are even still alive). This is how we get our first taste of Stage 3, the Crazy Horse: the room is basically the space dedicated to the free-folk crowd. Western-style setting, very little lighting, people sprawled out more or less everywhere, a low stage with no barriers. Shortly after we sit down on the floor, Youngs arrives, introduces himself very politely, then starts playing a shakuhachi (a long wooden flute of Japanese origin). Personally I'm left rather dumbfounded, so much so that the first thing that comes to mind is "what on earth is he doing?" and the second is "how much longer is this going on for?". Just a few minutes, as it turns out. Then, very carefully, he cleans and puts away the flute while the crowd applauds enthusiastically, picks up the microphone and, with no accompaniment whatsoever, starts singing ("Life On A Beam"). The same two questions from before pop straight back into my head. And yet I find myself captivated by Youngs' voice. The show carries on like this, with long sung pieces interspersed with instrumental ones.

It was a strange performance; at the time I wasn't quite sure what to make of it, and its length certainly caused a degree of tedium and repetitiveness in the themes, yet the concert lodges itself in our heads to the point that "Life On A Beam" becomes our own personal earworm of the festival [and here the "second reviewer" is forced to step in in the first person to stress his appreciation for the concert, which was instead immediate and unconditional: the most daring performance of the three days, and one of the most successful too (yes, Youngs really did have some nerve pulling off a concert like that, ed.)]. We rush out and head back to the main stage, it's time for Melvins.

I'm not quite sure what to expect, I know little about the band's history and discography, but my doubts are swept away in an instant. King Buzzo and Dale Crover, joined by Jared Warren on bass (a King Buzzo ten years younger) and Coady Willis on second drums, launch straight into the bombardment without hesitation. I have few clear memories, I don't know the songs and the Melvins certainly aren't known for stylistic variety. Still, the wall of sound of pure granite, thanks above all to the double drums, isn't something I'll forget easily.

With ears still ringing we head back to the Crazy Horse for Islaja (mainly because we can't catch the Stooges and Sonic Youth shows tonight, and because Deerhoof have completely packed out Stage 2, with people queuing outside).

Islaja showed up with a full-blown rock band behind her, "enhanced" by the ever-present Ian Anderzen (Avarus, Kemialliset Ystävät, Tomuttonttu and god knows what else) on electronics, which however was completely out of place with its genuinely disturbing retro-analog interference - so much for the poetics of imperfection! Overall things didn't go quite right: annoying microphone feedback, the sweet Finnish singer blinded by a spotlight that was too strong, and the choice to play much more muscularly than on record are the ingredients for a performance that was anything but memorable. We stick around anyway for Charalambides.

The former Carter couple, despite a less-than-brilliant start with "There Is No End", don't disappoint at all, soon diving headlong into the long guitar drifts we know so well. I make my way to the front row and, as the music flows, I get more and more drawn in, captivated by the melody radiating from Tom Carter's bluesy style and Christina's circular sighs. For me, without a doubt one of the best performances of the festival. Once my mind clears from the blankets of guitar, I discover that some of my companions left the room to pop over to Bardo Pond, who posed serious problems for their indie-snob leanings by serving up a ponderous psychedelic hard rock crammed with all the worst, and rather tacky, clichés of the genre. Nothing to do with the healthy, glorious ignorance of the Melvins, then.

It's now half past midnight and the excitement is building for the most anticipated band (at least for me), Dead C. We hurry to the main stage and security lets us up even though Sonic Youth are still playing, in a five-piece lineup, with former Pavement man Mark Ibold on bass. We arrive just in time to catch "Schizophrenia" and "Shaking Hell", two undying classics that whet our appetite for the following night's show - if only we hadn't...

We find a spot in the front row and notice that the New Zealand trio's gear isn't as lo-fi as you might expect from their studio records. The very first impression is that Russell is not remotely easy on the eyes: hunched over, with a belly that tilts his guitar upward, wearing a filthy grey t-shirt and smoking cigars non-stop. Morley and Yeats, on the other hand, look like a couple of quiet middle-aged gentlemen.

The three of them come out swinging straight away: Yeats on drums keeps things basic but fairly driving (seems like since the days of Trapdoor Fucking Exit he's actually learned how to hold a rhythm!), while the other two's guitars throw up an impassable wall of feedback and distortion. Morley, more of a genuine musician, seems to be thinking things through, while Russell just lets himself go, toying with his guitar by battering it with various objects (a beer bottle, a cigar box, drumsticks). Over the hour and a half of the show (they blew way past their allotted time) the trio essentially improvises, letting a hint of an actual song show through only a couple of times ("Love" and "Helen Said This"), and putting the audience's stamina to a serious test. It was without doubt an intense and satisfying show (even for the bouncers, who at least got a good laugh watching a sea of crazed young freaks losing it over three old guys just making a racket for ninety minutes), but given the sense of historic occasion surrounding the event (Dead C shows outside New Zealand can be counted on one hand), we would have liked a bit more attention paid to the band's classics (I'd have paid a fortune to hear a "Sky" or an "Outside", damn it! [and indeed you did pay, ed.]).

On the second day we run up against English efficiency again, pleasantly so: a note slipped under the chalet door offers the organisers' apologies to those left outside the hall for Melvins and Deerhoof, and announces that the staff have convinced both bands to repeat their sets for anyone who missed out (we really are on another planet here).

We decide to kick off the new day with something heavy-duty, namely New Blockaders/Haters. Names essentially unknown to us, which the ever-precious little booklet describes as pioneers of the noise scene. I finally get the chance to check out Stage 2, the Reds, which - fittingly all done up in red, with various slot machines and other gaming devices at the back - has the air of a rather seedy joint, a kind of One Eyed Jacks for the noise crowd (before long, given the names involved, we'll rechristen it "the torture chamber"; incidentally, a fitting sticker on the mixing desk read "no music here today, thanks").

We arrive on site with the performance already underway, and alongside Nate Young of Wolf Eyes we enjoy these four shady figures dressed in black with matching balaclavas, busy delivering an extremely harsh bout of post-industrial noise carnage. But it's not just gratuitous racket: there's a kind of underlying design at work that keeps boredom from ever creeping in, despite how forbidding the material is. Reluctantly we leave the room after about twenty minutes, to preserve our hearing and take a look at Deerhoof on the main stage. The room is packed again, with the crowd in a festive mood for the trio's pop rock. Nothing especially noteworthy: the three of them are good, they slot in a couple of genuinely gripping tracks ("Milk Man" in particular) and work well as a release valve before we throw ourselves back into the Reds tent for Hair Police (whom we'd caught, on the ATP channel, delivering a devastating live TV performance while we were having lunch). We watch the quartet's set (with John Olson of Wolf Eyes on sax) for about twenty minutes, and the band, despite kicking up a hell of a racket, never quite finds the right gear: Connelly goes wild on guitar (the next day, with Wolf Eyes, he'll be in even better form), the others follow suit, but despite the huge din we get a little bored. Personally I would have stayed until the end out of curiosity to see how it would turn out, but Wooden Wand was already looming on the main stage.

The man, a sort of lumberjack in a checked flannel shirt (instantly an idol in my eyes), backed by a guitar and a decidedly cute singer [his girlfriend Satya Sai, ed.], offered up his Dylan-esque folk repertoire. Sitting somewhat off to the side, we enjoy a sequence of songs as simple as they are beautiful, played with tremendous emotional commitment.

Once our melodic-sentimental streak has been satisfied, the self-destructive spirit that brought us here soon reawakens. At the Reds tent there's the amusing pairing of Mats Gustafsson (sax) and Yamatsuke Eye (screams and various electronically-sourced noises). I walk in and hear exactly what I expected: sax, pause, screams, pause, sax, pause, screams, and so on. A giant load of crap, in short.

I'm not sure if we stayed inside for more than five minutes, but for us that was enough (here too I was a little curious to see how it would end - I was hoping Eye would engage in behavior harmful to himself and others, but apparently there was nothing to report), yet reading comments around the web it seems to have been one of the most appreciated performances...

No messing about: it's almost time for Sun City Girls on the main stage, with Double Leopards playing the Crazy Horse tent at the same time. After some unrepeatable personal deliberation, I choose to watch Sun City Girls, with the option of dashing over to the other side if the show doesn't win me over. I catch about fifteen minutes in which the trio, unmasked, delivers a chaotic instrumental improvisation. Here my path and that of my companions part ways: once the piece ends, I decide to go listen to Double Leopards. The double couple serve up their usual droney material. Nothing I haven't heard before, and yet they're fascinating - noisy but not noise, monotonous but not boring - there's certainly something meditative, ecstatic and ritualistic about them, and in the end I find myself dozing off, swept away by the steady wave of sound.

To wake myself up I head back to the torture chamber for the trio made up of enfant prodige Chris Corsano (drums, and damn does he know how to hit them), the shaggy Paul Flaherty (sax) and C Spencer Yeh aka Burning Star Core (violin, electronics). The three of them immediately start pounding away hard, venturing into free-jazz territory embellished by Yeh's blistering runs. After about twenty minutes, though, I start to have had enough: they're good, sure, but once the initial sonic blast has been absorbed, the music starts to feel repetitive, with no noteworthy shifts in register.

I find my companions again, grinning ear to ear over Sun City Girls, making me regret having left, as they crown the trio's performance the best of the festival so far (Double Leopards were good, sure, but I doubt I'll get another chance to see SCG again).

The Seattle trio had in fact wiped the floor with the competition, drawing partly on well-known song repertoires (Indonesian and North African ones especially), before dragging an enchanted crowd through the tangled improvisational threads of the show's second half, which ended with the appearance of none other than Uncle Jim (played by Alan Bishop), who didn't miss the chance to good-naturedly take the piss out of the festival's other acts.

Around eight in the evening it's time for the new wave of Gang Of Four. The four of them still have energy to burn, firing off song after song without a break, and the huge crowd goes wild. People dance, jump around and have a great time during the festival's first proper rock moment. "Damaged Goods" and "Return The Gift" are the highlights of the evening, along with "He'd Sent In The Army", during which Jon King kept time by pounding on a specially amplified microwave oven.

After the excellent Gang Of Four show wraps up, we wait for Dinosaur Jr. J Mascis shows up sporting a long mane of white hair and a wall of Marshall amps imposing enough to inspire genuine awe. The set kicks off with "The Lung" and then runs through the band's various classics, from the inevitable "Little Furry Things" - during which Lee Ranaldo came up on stage to sing backing vocals - to "Freak Scene" complete with crowd sing-along, the surprise "Feel the Pain", and then "In A Jar", "Budge", "Forget The Swan", and the "Kracked"/"Sludgefeast" medley, during which it was something of a small miracle the amplifiers didn't collapse. The volume, in fact, was something absurd - it hit you in the gut and made your clothes shake - but that's fitting, because in the end that's what Dinosaur Jr are: simple songs and indecent volume.

Having lived through (for yours truly, a mystical experience) Dinosaur Jr in the pit up front, no longer understanding a damn thing, I find myself outside the hall queuing for Sonic Youth (the area was being cleared and only those with the right wristband could get back in). "Schizophrenia" and "Shaking Hell" from the day before had raised our hopes for a set dipping deep into the historic catalogue for the occasion, and the concert opening with "Candle" only fed that anticipation. None of that materialized, unfortunately. Plenty of songs from the last few albums, a few things from Goo and Dirty ("Mote", "Kool Thing", "100%"), but beyond the setlist, it was the performance itself that failed to convince. There was a gap between the band's conviction and the actual result - not bad, but flat, not gripping at all. If we had to point a finger, the blame would surely fall on the song choices, but it's hard not to wonder about the quartet's actual form on the night (a quintet on this occasion, as noted, with Mark Ibold on bass). The crowd, however, seemed to love it - the only moment across the whole ATP where particularly obnoxious fans made themselves known. Only at the close did Sonic Youth pull it together, and only because "Teenage Riot" (dedicated to J Mascis, who would turn forty-one the next day) is a song in a class of its own. The closing wall of distortion, during which Moore and Ranaldo wielded their guitars like swords, smashing them against each other, reminded us who Sonic Youth are (were?), only deepening our disappointment.

As we head for the exit with a bitter taste in our mouths, we hear an announcement from the stage: Gang Of Four would be playing again in half an hour, and Dinosaur Jr would repeat their set the following day for everyone who'd been left outside.

We open the third and final day with Major Stars, and the start couldn't be worse. Live, the band delivers, with an awful lot of arrogance, a fourth-hand hard rock that's dreadful enough on its own, but to complete the sorry picture, after two songs one of the three guitarists runs into technical problems. The singer then decides to entertain the crowd with jokes as bad as the band itself ("a dog stole a watermelon from me, must be a mellon collie..."). We flee to get a drink while waiting for Aaron Dilloway's set.

Seated, with a microphone cable poking out of his mouth and various electronic gear laid out on the table, the ex-Wolf Eyes man treats us, for about forty minutes, to a long noise drone that's anything but gratuitous or throwaway, full of carefully crafted, clean sounds, closer in spirit to certain post-industrial musique concrète experiments (ID Battery, Illusion Of Safety) than to his former bandmates' playful goofing around. Staying on the theme of drones, but flipping the sound completely, we head to the Crazy Horse tent for Skaters. As is their custom, the Californian duo are hunched on the floor amid their pile of junk (pedals, bongos, microphones and other gear of dubious quality), busy producing their trademark lo-fi howls. Despite a bit too much chatter and quite a crush at the front that keeps us from actually "seeing" the performance of the celebrated Clark-Ferraro outfit, Skaters manage, in no time at all (and here lies their greatness within a genre of sound that usually struggles to really take off), to plunge the entire room into a primordial sonic broth, as unsettling as it is subtly fascinating and narcotic.

Pleased with the performance, we decide to stick around for White Out with Nels Cline. I don't know My Cat Is An Alien at all, but we figure we'll have an easier chance to catch them back home. In hindsight, maybe it would have been better to go see the Italian duo. For the little time we stayed, the trio served up a kind of impro-rock that was rather tedious and short on ideas [the second reviewer only partly agrees, and appreciated - beyond Cline's "real" musicianship - the courage of a band that stood out from the rest of the festival, with a more serious approach in line with late-'90s avant-garde currents], but who cares, it was as good a way as any to kill a quarter of an hour while waiting for Wolf Eyes.

The most brutal trio around shows up, presents itself as the standard-bearer of "fuckin' Michigan" (and indeed the day was all about "fuckin' Michigan", with them, Dilloway, Negative Approach, the Stooges and MC5), spouts a bunch of nonsense (four "fuckin's" per word), and amid screams and industrial-noise blasts, introduces the first track "Stabbed In The (fuckin') Face", to be followed by "The (fuckin') Driller". We weren't able to identify anything else (we dare you to do better, ed.), apart from "Burned Mind". Seeing these three phenomena live, for better or worse, is an experience.

The atrocious result stems mainly from the deafening volume, with the bass hitting straight to the gut and making everything inside you shake, and from the monolithic nature of the songs, which, apart from a couple of forays into degraded-ambient territory, are more or less all the same, made up of a slow, crushing beat onto which power electronics and bestial screams are piled with absolutely no restraint.

Meanwhile the band thrashes about as if they were playing metal, complete with utterly convinced expressions, headbanging, crowd incitement, and Connely doesn't even skip the Townsend-style windmill (incidentally, it was basically impossible to tell what sound his bass was actually producing, let alone Olson's piece of wood with a single string on it...). On top of that, it seems that Wolf Eyes, given the "little" time available, preferred to cut things short and focus on their beastly side.

In short, a rather disconcerting contrast between the music and the stage moves, one that can provoke different and opposing reactions; personally I preferred to laugh it off and enjoy being deafened while those three fools thrashed around on stage, but there's no doubt that among the crowd there are also plenty of people who really "live" it and take it seriously.

Wolf Eyes' performance, as predicted, manages to sum up the ultimate meaning of the three days, namely the pleasure that the crowd of rock fans who showed up (and we count ourselves among them) takes in proclaiming themselves listeners of shit music, which would then be the unlikely, shambolic invocation of the spirit of rock'n'roll in 2006.

Rather tired and dazed, we take a break and decide to skip Negative Approach (a huge mistake, apparently, as Sonic Youth and Wolf Eyes were busy pogoing on stage and with the crowd), and so we make a quick dash to see just how bad Mouthus are. Very. They're two chancers, one on drums and one on guitar, playing stuff with neither head nor tail, and with a generally lousy overall sound to boot. If only they were at least entertaining...

I forget about Mouthus instantly when I realize it's time to get ready for Iggy & The Stooges. The Asheton brothers (Ron on guitar and Scott on drums) and Mike Watt on bass are already on stage; tucked away behind the guitar amps is Iggy. Bare-chested and in tight camo trousers, he arrives at the center of the stage jumping as the Stooges kick into gear, and from there on it's pure delirium. Without a break and for the entire duration of the show Iggy screams his lungs out, jumps here and there, throws himself onto our heads (literally), and simulates having sex with an amplifier during "I Wanna Be Your Dog". At sixty he's still the quintessential stage animal. Behind him the Stooges, joined at one point by Steve Mackaye on sax, were no less impressive, grinding out mighty riffs non-stop. The icing on the cake was "No Fun", during which Iggy called about thirty people up on stage to dance, while he kept stage-diving into the crowd below.

A properly kick-ass Rock show, in short.

Drenched in sweat from head to toe, exhausted and by now completely deaf, we run towards the Crazy Horse where No-Neck Blues Band has already been playing for about ten minutes. A necessary caveat: NNCK live is something mystical, an ancient ritual that blends with the New York underbelly, where the shaman of the moment uses everyday garbage (in this case a Stella Artois box) to disguise himself and carry the ceremony forward, a ritual that fully expresses itself in the right kind of settings. Arriving after the show has already started, shell-shocked by the Stooges and unable to see much, is certainly not the best way to let yourself be carried away, and so I only manage to fully enjoy No-Neck Blues Band after a settling-in period that coincided with the start of the more rhythmic part of the improvisation. Suffice it to say that despite the less-than-ideal circumstances, NNCK drew me into its spastic liturgy once again.

We stay at the Crazy Horse to close out the Nightmare Before Christmas 2006 with a massive dose of freak-out madness: Sunburned Hand Of The Man are on. We immediately notice the double drum kit and a disproportionate number of people fiddling about on stage. Once that shapeless mess that is their music gets going, we count about fifteen of them, though it's only an estimate since many kept climbing on and off the stage. Two drum kits (one manned by Chris Corsano), an unspecified number of basses and guitars, various electronic gadgets, a few sticks fitted with rubber gloves, a mannequin's torso, wind instruments, several people singing (or rather declaiming phrases), including a trans performer with a fuchsia wig going by the name of Herb Diamante, who's supposedly some kind of crooner (in 2006 he released a solo record on Abduction, the Sun City Girls' label, and was in fact spotted several times wandering around under the Butlins tent in the company of Alan Bishop). Out of all fifteen people, maybe two or three had any idea what they were doing; fortunately Corsano and, I assume, a bassist had found some vague common ground and managed to keep the general chaos reasonably contained. We now have a visual answer to why certain of their records sound the way they do. On the other side of things, the crowd was in total adoration (one guy was staring at his hand against the light, others struck more or less studied plastic poses) as the musicians stage-dived, and above all as the mannequin did, which was then beaten with sticks, skewered and waved around until, inevitably, the guy ended up hitting himself in the head with it and starting to bleed profusely. A show that was more visual than musical, though in the end it was anything but bad, and it was a fitting way to close out our experience across the Channel.

Three days, then, three days in which I saw, between full sets and quick glimpses here and there, twenty-six bands (one fewer than my own personal record, ed.). As already mentioned, such abundance meant tough choices had to be made: for instance, people speak very highly of the MV & EE performance, and I would have loved to fully experience the ghost of 1969 Detroit with the Stooges opening for MC5. I wanted to see what kind of mayhem Magik Markers or Prurient would have stirred up, I was curious to dive into Hive Mind's magmatic drones, to get my fill of rock rowdiness with Comets On Fire, to fry my brain completely with all that glorious shit-music on offer (Dead Machines, 16 Bitches Pile Up, Lambsbread, Monotract etc.), or more simply I wished I'd had the time to finish watching what I'd started watching.

Another downside was the organizers' miscalculation of the ratio between crowd size and venue capacity, which caused long queues, although, as already mentioned, they managed to sort it out by convincing bands to play a second set.

But aside from that, it was a memorable festival, starting with the once-in-a-lifetime line-up, for which a statue should be erected to Thurston Moore and to the web of contacts and friendships he has built and kept alive for over twenty years. But the atmosphere itself also played a crucial role. The amusing contrast between the funfair setting and the music on offer, the crowd's simple desire to unwind (a world apart from the bitter pseudo-political gatherings we're used to back home), living through it all without stress (queues aside, but overall they're a minor detail; personally I only had to deal with two), or even the peaceful coexistence established between musicians and audience. Several times we crossed paths with King Buzzo wandering around with the pissed-off expression that suits him so well, or happened to catch Dinosaur Jr grocery shopping and witness Barlow and Murph arguing over which biscuits to buy, watched Sun City Girls goofing around on video games, swiped chairs from Christina Carter's table, or kept running into the Finnish contingent that escorted Islaja everywhere. Simple, trivial things, but telling of the relaxed, playful mood in the air.

A great festival for this too.

(08/01/2007)

Ride the wave of great music

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