Ultimately, the main player in the night's performances was the venue itself: the luxury of a huge screen for a lineup of musicians with projections, and the novelty as a show-goer of sitting in a quiet auditorium to view seven hours of performance. It was a novelty that echoes back to the earliest notions of rock concerts and dance halls- take the seats out of the place and let the audience run free. Now that we've had the liberty for a few decades, and now that breaking the fourth wall is as quotidian as octave bass lines, it was novel to recluse back into one's cushioned seats to take a night of esoteric electronics and percussion, doubled with equally challenging video projections, sitting down. Ultimate Reality and Matmos, easily the two biggest draws for the evening, both benefited immensely from the massive screen, which was big enough to encompass even peripheral vision, and the hypnotic visuals (the former based in psychedelia and cultural appropriations and the latter in a more minimalist pattern aesthetic) moved from accompaniment to main attraction.
But the strangest and most challenging set of the night was Nautical Almanac's. While that band has survived a decade and a half of existence (says its website), in its latest incarnation, the duo performed behind a massive sheet with projections shooting from onstage, behind them. This left the audience with vague silhouettes of the performers and outlines of tree branches and refracting light to accompany electronic belches, crickets, hums, wheezes: it was like the guttural ticking of some handmade artificial intelligence slowly being summoned then, as the set closed with sounds emerging from inside the performers' throats, being put to rest with something uncomfortably and intimately human.
More on: blue leader, casey kasem, festival, mark hosler, matmos, music, nautical almanac, negativland, teeth mountain, u2, ultimate reality, whartscape
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