It was the best of times, it was the beast of times
Description
20jazzfunkgreats returned to Primavera Sound in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago, and it was like a bit of a comeback home after harsh times at small-hours Sonar last year (not that we didn’t enjoy some frankly fantastic stuff there!).
This festival fits most definitely the scattershot taste of your 20JFG nerds, both in terms of the range and quality of the line-up, albeit we perhaps missed a little bit of disco, well, at least Simian Mobile Disco played I Feel Love by Donna & Giorgio, only to be punished by rain, undoubtedly delivered by a merciless & reactionary god angry at the image of thee 20JFG rolling around the floor like a malnourished hog chocking on the proverbial truffle, alas, that was the end of it all, not the beginning, let us tell you quick what happened, so that we can convince you to come with us next year if you didn’t do this one (sucker!).
The highlights shone bright under the benign dome of a deranged Mediterranean night
Zig zagging skipping trashing noise commandos mauling, stretching and stitching that bitch sound, a fury of bony limbs crawling over the stage turned joypad like coffee pumped schizoid otaku fingers pushing that colossal dada djinn all fire and brimstone into a berserk fury of killer combos against which there is no possible defence, it’s a psychedelic holographic super-immersive version of Street Fighter with you at the receiving end, and one of the best live acts out there right now, standard.
They sounded more noise, more punk and more rock than anyone else in the festival. The beginning of the revolution is some kid listening to Public Enemy in his walkman, staring from the windows of the bus at the towers of power erected by the captains of commerce around which normal people like you and me walk stunned like puny ants, looking at all this crap as the lightning bolt of a thought illuminates a graffiti still shining wet in the inner wall of his skull, you know what gives, ‘FIGHT THE POWER’.
Picture this- Portishead start playing the signature riff that kicks off Public Enemy No. 1 and Chuck D climbs on stage. This is one of those reasons why we go to festivals. Portishead have all the tunes, and their show made me feel like a teenager impaled by the shadows of a bedroom in an alien home, someone else’s life. This music is a diagnosis of sadness and a prescription of its cure, beholding together, hopeful, a wandering star of pure incandescent light which passed over us in the darkness of the night, a memory to be laid inside a little box lined in velvet, to be held safe and cherished, taken out and held close to the heart on those occasions when the world feels like a dull structure of papier mache collapsing upon itself.
Pissed Jeans played like a horde of cavemen smashing the skull of a giant snake coiling slippery at the bottom of a prehistoric tar pit, cosmic conflict sex music that would make Hawkwind and Flipper proud, can there be any higher praise than that?
I can’t say much about Devo because I spent the whole gig dancing like a mongoloid. Apparently, a glowing energy dome was seen floating above my head at certain climactic moments (of which there were at least a dozen), just beautiful.
Fuck Buttons set up their equipment against each other as if they were titans getting ready to battle for the destiny of the universe in a psychedelic equivalent of chess played with pieces that crashed against the board loud like hammers shaping planets in the forge of the void. And so they became a noise reincarnation of Brahma and Ahriman, and they fought, and we danced in a dialectic spiral of gargantuan drones which enveloped us like the rings of a worm-hole, we walked under its portico like fervent pilgrims and came out at the end cleansed, raving crazed to the tribal stomp of a tom beat.
Getting Pablo to do his thing between two screens full of cut-up projections of party kids and pixelated trippy shit was the equivalent of dosing the 3.00AM Primavera crowd with kerosene, dropping a flaming zippo on the floor and running away with a manic laugh. Now that was a dance to remember.
Times New Viking light a cigarette and get down to work, mopping the floor with the corpses of mainstream indie clowns while whistling a c-86 tune, best straight up guitar show of the festival
Bradford Cox came on the stage alone and powerful, like a Sorcerer’s apprentice burning with a secret of which he could only reveal us snippets, hints lost in the golden clouds of ambient, the humming of ghosts summoned in a camp-fire seance-playing the guitar with Panda Bear- and the optimistic revolution of Motown rhythms, all of it suffused with his own unsettling obsessions.
Anyhow, he jokingly played some “samples” from the Deerhunter gig which took place afterwards, (and we had to miss-boo!- because it clashed with Throbbing Gristle), so we are cheekily posting below a song that finishes their new album ‘Microcastles’, another apotheosis of pop touched by the glorious finger of the Gods. With its soulful progression, first tip toeing shyly into a ring of haunted beauty, growing bolder, eventually harnessing the power of eight & setting it on fire with fluorescent grey shards of distortion, it would have fit perfectly in an Atlas Sound set that put us in a very weird zone, as Cox was playing a ship set sail towards a place pretty and Brian Eno, somewhere, must have smiled not sure why.
Deerhunter- Twilight at Carbon Lake
By the third day of Primavera I was starting to feel a little bit out of my depth, what with all those crazy full-on emotions and shit, anyhow, I spent half of Young Marble Giants’ show crying my heart out over the sweet music that they created in the Auditori stage, exquisitely pretty and heartfelt, melancholic and, all the more beautiful for its humility, this is the sound that imperfect bodies make while moving awkward in the kitchen of a house in the suburbs on a rainy Autumn afternoon, washing some coffee mugs after a break-up for which no-one is to blame, music soundtracking, standing for and representing the emotions, hopes and sadness of real people, small, yes, but real.
It touches upon a truth that burns in every beating heart once you get past the grandiose illusions and fake dramas staged by the automatons of the society of spectacle, and in its confident return to the roots of what binds us together, is deeply political, just thinking about it makes me feel all warm inside, I love it so much.
Throbbing Gristle, the band I had come to see at Primavera, didn’t pull any stops in a show that kicked off with Slug Bait and followed up with Maggot Death, this was a frankly scary and exhausting affair, difficult to describe in its intensity, the word is perhaps ‘ominous’, ‘satanic’ would seem to imply some sort of devilish deviousness absent from it, this is the sound of a dull blade chopping eternal through skin flesh and bone to the metronomic rhythm of a drone which is pure base nastiness, also of emotion infecting and corroding, unaware of social conventions or mores as it chews through them, rotating in the darkness, unbearable and portentous like an iceberg of awfulness part of some Lovecraftian clockwork mechanism of torture, ready to crush your bones and suck your marrow, to survive.
People kept dripping out of the auditori as the gig progressed towards its peak, which was the projection of the COUM Transmission’s ‘After Cease to Exist’ film, that’s when things got bad.
Throbbing Gristle- Slug Bait (ICA)
(I saw many more bands but these were the ones that hit me harder, perhaps I will tell you a bit more in another post)
United States
