Report: Sugar Mountain 2015

CHRISTOPHER LEWIS chooses his own adventure through Sugar Mountain’s sprawling first year at Melbourne’s VCA, which means passing over heavyweights like Swans, Ariel Pink, Body/Head and Iceage but discovering some stunning underdogs. Photos by KATIE FAIRSERVICE.

Sugar Mountain has returned, but not as we knew it. In 2013 we shuffled between makeshift stages on the concourse of The Forum and piled into the upstairs theatre to watch Kirin J Callinan push artistic and moral boundaries. The festival already felt like it had a unique identity; it was avant-garde in its artistic aesthetics and created a space where art and music could co-exist harmoniously.

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After a year off, that tradition has continued at a new home, the Victorian College of the Arts, a setting where organisers could make sure that the comfort of the crowd was paramount. It’s clear the candy mountaineers would rather us wander the site without people’s elbows in our rib cages and stabbing pains in our bladders. But this is a luxury in itself at a music festival, and one that few take for granted on a sweltering summer day; it also creates the welcome flow-on effect of short queues for Mountain Goat ales and zesty pork Banh Mis.

Under a powder blue sky and a piercing sun, Dodds Street in South Melbourne is pummelled into submission by the ruthlessness of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. When the revisionist history begins on Australia’s psych scene, the reptilian magician overlords might not be remembered as the most influential band of their time, but perhaps they will be recognised as one of the most important. Their recorded output is undeniable, but it’s their philosophy that is the most refreshing as they bring a looseness and authenticity to performance that only further sets them apart from the fly-back-to-America-to-re-record-drum-tracks perfectionism of Tame Impala. Their 15-minute, flute-infused sprawl ‘Head On/Pill’ only further underlines this point and makes sure the festival begins with an exclamation point.

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With nothing but a drum machine and her looped vocals for company, Banoffee swaggers onto the carpark stage with her R’n’B-lite pop songs. Constantly afflicted by sound issues, Martha Brown is delightfully natural on stage and handles it all with aplomb, using the crowd to soundcheck her volume levels in a cute matter-of-fact fashion. Her production recovers towards the end of the set and by the time she drops ‘Ninja’, the percussion is biting and her voice is crackling over the beat.

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Over at the Boiler Room, party collective Wax’o Paradiso are hosting a vinyl-only get-together and the flavour of the day is Spanish salsa and soul records. With a small Venus de Milo statuette sitting where the 45 adapter would normally be and incense streaming out of the smoke machine, the DJs drop rare cuts with their backs to the crowd, facing the camera for their web stream. For a day so occupied with the act of watching, it’s a lovely area to drop your head, find the Catalan rhythm and cut some shapes.

Chela is probably as close as we are going to get to our own Bat for Lashes. With a full band behind her and two synchronised dancers mimicking her every move, she bounces on top of an early Madonna beat as her drummer tries his hardest to split our eardrums. Her throwaway pop shtick is perfectly suited to the early-afternoon nervous/excited buzz of the festival, and the Caribbean steel drums, collar-popped attitude and stylised movements create a strange juxtaposition to what is coinciding metres away. On the wall next to the carpark stage, Ash Keating is putting the finishing touches on his mural, spraying bright paint out of fire hydrants to run down the wall. It’s one of those moments where everything that is unique and wonderful and important about Sugar Mountain is suddenly clear, as we groove to Chela’s vocals and watch the living artistic experiment unfold. Who said pop music and abstract impressionism can’t be the best of friends?

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Such is the confidence of Sugar Mountain that they can give a 2pm slot to a couple of lads that are hopping on stage together for the first time. Slum Sociable is a name you should commit to memory: they tell us this is their first official show and then they go ahead and kill it. The theatre they occupy is a throwback to the space the upstairs of The Forum provided two years ago; it’s a respite from the sun and a rare spot to rest your feet and immerse yourself in an audio-visual experience. With 150 people maxing out the room and the queue to get inside growing, Slum Sociable use atmospheric synths and off-key pianos to create some arresting, left-of-centre pop music most akin to Spoon. And I love a band that knows the strength of a tambourine.

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How to Dress Well = How to Arrive on Stage 20 Minutes Late and Act Like a Precocious Fool.

Heading back to the theatre for some more sweet, sweet darkness, Rat & Co play the set of their career. With shades of Explosions in the Sky, the euphoric mix of psychedelia, electronic ambience and soul is a head rush and all the more enjoyable because they never disappear off the deep end. With backdrop visuals that render the band as silhouettes for the performance and pay homage to your favourite Windows 98 screensaver, the Melbourne boys work through tracks with precision and exploratory vigour. There are moments where they reach a genuine transcendence in instrumentation usually reserved for demigods like Spiritualized, Primal Scream or Sigur Rós, and after an all-too-brief 40 minutes they vacate the stage, having cemented their position as one of Australia's most underrated bands.

Maybe it’s a case of “It’s not you, it’s me,” but the lackadaisical charm of Twerps is wearing thin. The (not so) new drummer Alex Macfarlane does provide more punch to their sun-sapped sound, but the set drags. ‘Who Are You’ is still a fantastic pop song though; I’ll give them that.

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As if aware of my disappointment from the mess of twangy guitars, the Sugar Mountain gods provided an immediate cure in the form of dance music. The fact that The 2 Bears opted out of their cumbersome costumes in the 30-degree heat was pretty disappointing, but the feel-good house and hip-hop party is a crowd-pleaser. There is a moment when Raf Rundell starts recounting a prophetic dream that he had to the crowd and asks us to yell the word ‘kangaroo’ over and over … things get pretty weird, but they pull it back and the carpark is transformed into an outdoor version of their XOYO residency.

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If The 2 Bears get the job done with the sleight turning of a record and a subtle head bob, NO ZU are a far more extroverted beast. And with Sal P of post-punk/post-disco legends Liquid Liquid joining them on stage, the mid-afternoon collaborative extravaganza was a showstopper. The call-and-response vocals and the triple threat of drums, congas and bongos match a horn section capable of letting loose an acid-jazz wigout at any moment. Their unpredictability is exciting, like if The B-52’s were into experimental jazz. It’s cheesy, but it’s so good and when ‘Evil Eye’ hits its crescendo, you know they’ve hit their zenith. NO ZU will perhaps never again have a set that is this electric, but it’s clear they savoured every minute of it.

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Back to dance music mode, Horse Meat Disco win everyone over with the sheer passion they have for their music, spinning everything from Depeche Mode to MJ to Diana Ross. It makes for the best-commissioned stage of the day: five hours of feel-good disco. With James Hilliard loving every minute of his own set and screaming every word of ‘I’ll Let My Heart Do the Walking’ by The Supremes and ‘The Boss’ by Diana Ross, it’s clear he respects the wax he’s touching. His enthusiasm is infectious and provides one of the day’s highlights. Disco will always reign supreme.

It’s with this mentality that the zeitgeist electro of Odesza falls short. Maybe they are victims of being programmed after DJs playing back-to-back house classics, but the new kings of washed-out electronica just seem a little old-hat. Their debut arrived at the same time as Flume’s and whilst the big drops and warm, fuzzy waves might be still breaking ground in some parts of the globe, we’ve definitely had our fill. There’s not an inaccessible beat in the hour and the fact that they sample Lily Allen says it all; it’s indie-Avicii. The Juan Maclean have a song called ‘Happy House’ and Odesza is somehow happier, but at times it feels overproduced. And if you’re going to bring a homogenised sound to our shores, you need to do something interesting with it. The show comes alive in the brief moments when the two are duelling on different drum pads over the pre-recorded beat, and as they finish with ‘Say My Name’ the crowd erupts. So I don’t think anyone was judging them for being a two-man Flume.

With Dexter starting late, struggling with his scratchies and finishing too soon, there’s an over-anticipated time for the swelling crowd to wait for the bona fide headliner. Nas has everyone in the palm of his hand before he walks on stage – with a living legend touring an indisputable album like Illmatic, how is anyone supposed to think of anything but superlatives? Thankfully, his performance deserves them.

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Dropping the showman catchcries a lot of his peers use as a crutch, Nas lets his rhymes do the talking, working through his untouchable debut with efficiency and a flow that, incredibly, somehow makes the record sound inferior. In the first 20 minutes he drops ‘N.Y. State of Mind’, ‘The World Is Yours’ and ‘Memory Lane’, a suite of classics few other MCs in the world could match. This is Sugar Mountain trialling its first-ever headliner. Sure, Dirty Projectors were interesting and cool in 2013, but they don’t have the mass appeal and artistic legacy that Nas and that debut does. This is uncharted territory for the fledging festival and it’s a resounding success for all parties involved. Nas projects an air of invincibility and importance that he hasn’t demonstrated for years, and Sugar Mountain shows the industry how to book and tour a premier hip-hop act.

Finishing with some back-catalogue classics including ‘If I Ruled The World’, Nas indulges a crowd already soft in his fingers. And the success of the day is on the lips of every exiting punter. Sugar Mountain has returned as a new goliath of the festival calendar, and thank god for it. We can no longer take for granted experiences as unique as these.

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