Features
Report: All Tomorrow’s Parties Day 1
By Aaron Curran
ATP revisits Australia after four years, this time with deafening guitars, marathon post-rock, crazy-tight garage and damaged sound in Melbourne's Altona suburb. AARON CURRAN takes it all in on the festival's opening day. Photos by KATIE FAIRSERVICE.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] After the artistic success but economic failure of 2009’s Nick Cave-curated Mount Buller and Cockatoo Island shows, the much-heralded return of All Tomorrow’s Parties to Australia has been met with such great press and strong sales. So why were so many people in Melbourne desperately trying to flog off their tickets in the days leading up to the event? The market was flooded with spare day tickets and weekend passes at discount prices, great news for last-minute attendees but a bit of a pisser if you’re the kind of person who buys an extra ticket for a mate, just in case.
Was it the breaking news that an oppressive heat wave was about to grip the city and send the mercury rocketing discomfortingly skyward? Or that the relatively distant location of the Westgate Entertainment Centre and Grand Star Reception in Altona, far from the inner-city venues where the bands on this bill would normally appear, may take a modicum of extra effort to reach? Perhaps it was the realisation that what looks good on paper might be a bit much to take in the flesh. While the festival featured an enviable line-up of innovative acts – My Bloody Valentine, Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Dead C, Einsturzende Neubaten – experienced cumulatively it was going to be loud, dour and unrelenting, particularly the opening Saturday line-up programmed by ATP’s Barry Hogan and his Australian wife Deborah Kee Higgins.
This doleful intensity was in place from the outset, with Strangers From Now On first up on Stage 2, a dark and comfortably air-conditioned bar space which is easily the festival’s preferred venue and a sanctuary from the scorching heat. The local four-piece get a positive response from the early arrivals, with their slug-like crawl of a sound conjuring thoughts of Tiny Tim fronting Berlin-era Birthday Party, as frontman Gabriel Santos’s voice moves from tremulous croon to enraged scream over the course of a track (best scream of the day, perhaps?).
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There’s no respite at the next-door cinema, a beanbag-filled room at the top of a grand staircase which is showing one of the most harrowing films ever made about the nightmare of war, Elem Klimov’s Come and See. While a masterpiece, it’s a bit much for so early in the day. There are laughs to be had instead in the Grand Star Bar, where “magosopher” Sunny Leunig and his assistant Enigma Smith combine theatrical magic with philosophy and mordant wit. This bar proves to be a popular meeting spot, where you can get a plate of risotto or even a dram of fine whiskey while participating in music quizzes and bingo games. “Life can only be wonderful if it’s a little miserable,” says Leunig at one point, which could be the motto for the entire festival.
It’s a long walk to Stage 1 for North California’s Sleepy Sun, a spot that seems more massive school gymnasium than an ‘entertainment centre’. It’s like an oven and stinks of the sweat of a million indoor cricket games, making it difficult to enjoy the music. And Sleepy Sun’s heavy pop metal, with its classic rock structures and declamatory lyrics, fails to engage despite the band’s best efforts.
There’s a good crowd in place for Civil Civic’s first performance on home turf, the band comprised of two Melbourne lads who have based themselves in Europe. With a ‘robot drummer’ nicknamed The Box between them onstage and a desk of effects planted on top, they whip up an exciting hybrid of surf instrumental music, pub boogie and electronic beats, as if Midnight Oil’s Martin Rotsey and Jim Moginie were jamming with Orbital.
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Though the room is packed and the audience appreciative, a notable exodus occurs three-quarters of the way through Civil Civic’s set as people flock to see Thee Oh Sees, creating the first major bottleneck between the two stages. While at first it seems like the organisers have failed to adequately account for the flow of the crowd, they change the number of entrances and open more thoroughfares as the day winds on. This is a notable quality of the festival, actually: the problems inherent with the space are gradually identified, with efforts made to address them. Things don’t go perfectly to plan, but there are a lot of people working hard to make it so, like the hardy stage crew who change over Oh Sees main man John Dwyer’s amplifier mid-song after it overheats and starts exuding black smoke that makes Dwyer cough and gag. It doesn’t slow him or the rest of the band down, their playful, crazy-tight garage rock careening at full speed to an emphatic response.
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After the uncomfortable congestion between stages during Thee Oh Sees, it becomes clear that the best way to experience this festival is by avoiding moving between the two venues at the end of sets, instead getting there early or staying late until the crush dissipates. Or, just ignoring some of the music to instead find a comfy place to grab some food – lots of good options available – or indulge in “extracurricular activities” like playing giant-size chess or hanging around by the bouncy castle in the games room. This keeps the sanity levels in check but means some good music is missed (sorry, Standish/Carlyon, Ben Frost and Oren Ambarchi).
The Cave Disco has a spongy rubber floor, designed to break the fall of any indoor rock climbers but just as useful for those wanting to bounce up and down to the turntable stylings of DJs such as Bruce Milne and Jack Shit, or to power nap. It becomes another oasis of calm in a desert of disquiet, no matter how noisy the stuff being played on the turntables.
Michael Gira of Swans seems to relish the oppressive conditions in the main room. (He has been known to turn the air conditioning off at his shows to create the right mood of malevolence and unease.) The band is a juggernaut of noise and repetition, a beast of damaged sound. Remember that scene in Conan the Barbarian when Schwarzenegger is enslaved and chained to a millwheel for a decade or two? Interminable grinding: that’s Swans
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A bare-chested percussionist plays gongs and cymbals, but these high-end glimmers of difference are swallowed by the relentlessly thrumming low-end sludge. Gira stamps across the stage aggressively, arms waving like some mad monk, soaking his head in water when the heat becomes too much, shouting at the musicians if they veer from his unspoken instructions; at one point he shakes his guitarist, making a “look-at-me” gesture, insistent that the musicians stay connected to the group mind. Playing tracks off last year’s stunning double LP, The Seer, alongside older material like ‘Coward’, Swans certainly aren’t much fun live but that seems to be the whole point.
New War bucks the prevailing trend of the day by having songs with actual verses and choruses, which is welcome news for this listener at least. There’s an icy calm at the centre of this Melbourne quartet’s music, reminiscent of Vega and Rev, Joy Division or perhaps Mark Almond fronting Mezzanine-era Massive Attack. Singer Chris Pugmire paces continually, crooning imploringly over dub grooves: “Proud are we, proud are we.” Urgent drumming propels these danceable songs, anchored by melodic bass and washes of Kawai KC20 keyboard.
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A large crowd gathers for a reformed Godspeed You! Black Emperor but only a hardy few make it to the end, as a couple of hours of glacially slow, moody post-rock is challenging to endure at the best of times, let alone in this heat. The band has its fans though, who are visibly enraptured to see these Montreal musicians in Australia at last, playing epic anthems like ‘Hope Drone’, ‘Behemoth’ and ‘Sad Mafioso’. Vintage film loops are projected behind the unmoving musicians to mesmerising effect, but the subtleties of their meditative soundscapes are lost in the hangar-like expanse of the room. The ever-shifting stillness and symphonic dynamics would be far better suited to a seated concert hall.
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New Zealand trio The Dead C have been praised for their pioneering free-rock improvisations by magazines like The Wire and musicians like Thurston Moore, but it’s difficult music for the neophyte to engage with, sounding scratchy and unhinged, thwarting comfortable listening. One of them wears a ‘Who the Fuck is Mick Jagger?’ T-shirt, which is ironic given that these guitar-dominated works are about as far from blues-influenced Keefisms as one could imagine. Upstairs in the cinema, Robert Mitchum leers luridly from the screen in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, his tattooed hands reaching out to cause menace and hurt, while the Dead C’s amplified unease ekes its way through the thin walls.
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Unsurprisingly, the biggest crowd of the day gathers for headliner My Bloody Valentine, making their first visit to Australia since the release of Loveless 22 years ago. Having seen that tour’s first Perth performance – a disappointing one, as the band played with ineffective borrowed gear, their instruments lost en route – I was curious to see if these legendarily lackadaisical musicians had lifted their game a bit. No fan would have been disappointed with the setlist, which included some of the best-known tracks from Isn’t Anything, Loveless, their classic EPs and new LP M B V, but there were many mutterings of discontent about the mix, with the quietly sung vocals of Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher fighting for balance with the predictably deafening guitars.
The band seemed more comfortable playing the sample-driven material, like the bouncing breakbeats of ‘Soon’, rather than the sparser, earlier tracks like ‘Cigarette in Your Bed’, even though the latter proved to be more engaging in some ways, revealing that the interplay between the four is a work-in-progress at this stage of their reunion. Still, not many bands can finish with a trio of songs as strong as ‘Soon’, ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’ and ‘You Made Me Realise’, even if the infamous ‘holocaust’ closer of 15 minutes of white noise has perhaps become redundant through overfamiliarity.
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Fears of transport problems back to the city are unfounded, with buses leaving promptly and regularly, yet another major plus to add to the list (fast-moving queues, lots of toilets, dickhead-free crowd). Now if only Barry and Deb can sort out all that fucking sunshine before tomorrow’s reprise…
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