Review – deaf 08 (pt 1)

Here be the first part of my look at this years Dublin Electronic Arts Festival

After a couple of years steering clear of big names and big events this years Dublin Electronic Arts Festival re-emerged from semi-obscurity to reclaim it’s spot as one of the highlights on the Irish musical calender. From a few months ago it became pretty clear that Eamonn Doyle and those at D1 recordings were planning what seemed to be a return to the larger scale of earlier events. Last year the closing nights headliners, Interstellar Fugitives, was a last minute booking, seemingly there to bolster a roster made up of acts most people had never heard of. This time around the closing night guests Model 500 and Laurent Garnier were announced months in advance, suggesting that a bigger, more exciting festival was to await us this October Bank Holiday weekend.

Many different nights, films and workshops were to fall under the DEAF banner this year, which kicked off on the Thursday evening. As with a festival as busy as this one, it was always going to be impossible to make everything, but I did my best to squeeze in as much as possible. Due to my late night excursions I missed pretty much all of what went on during the daytime, including most of the documentaries and workshops being held around the city, but to kick things off I did get to check out the Arthur Russel documentary “Wild Combination” on the Thursday evening. A concise and enjoyable look at the interesting life of one of modern musics true mavericks, this interesting, sometimes plaintive, sometimes humourous documentary did it’s best to cram in much of Russel’s busy musical life into 70 minutes. I feel it could have done with an extra 20 minutes as it skimmed over some of Russel’s achievements , but somebody with as massive a body of work as his meant some elements would have to be left on the cutting room floor.

After, I headed around the corner to Andrews Lane Theatre for the official opening night party with Nurse With Wound. I was unsure how this gig would go, would it be a case of lots of people hanging around the back, just there because it was the opening party, or would they actually watch the gig? Thankfully it was the later, though personally I was only partially satisfied by the performance. The dense layers of sounds and instrumentation at times proved too much, more distracting than involving. To break up the building intensity an amusing incident involving the performance of a song from the sitcom Father Ted raised a few chuckles before they continued down their path towards a superb and claustrophobic finale. Next up, I headed up to catch some of ISM favourites Tr-one/Broken Audio Movement, spinning a disco heavy set in Bia Bar. The guys as ever provided some great music coupled with some fine technical skills – you don’t see disco twelves getting double copy action everyday – and while the crowd was a bit thin on the ground their enthusiasm wasn’t.

To round the first days shenanigans off I exited the Bia Bar and strolled across town to catch the enigmatic Ultradyne perform a rare live set in Kennedys.  Not the most well known of electro acts, and it being a thursday night meant the gig was far from packed but the now army-of-one ‘dyne kicked out the jams in fine style. Bursting with energy (and a bit of a mouth on him) his set fluctuated from the abstract to 140bpm bangers, his slight over-riding of the system nearly something you’d expect from an Ultradyne live set. Uncompromising all the way. Instead of heading home, straight afterwards I hooked up with some friends and decided a good way to keep myself in shape for the rest of the weekend would be to stay up till 7 in the morning getting hammered. Hmmmm.

Unsurprisingly I stayed in doors curled up in bed nursing an uncomfortable headache for a lot of Friday, missing out on the daytime events ( a reacurring theme over the weekend). Once I got myself together properly I headed up to The Village for Trans Am, a band I actually hadn’t listened to in quite some time, but nevertheless thought would be worth checking out. Their mostly instrumental songs either performed on bass/drums/guitar or dual synthesizers lifted me out of my grubby hangover and though the set was a little short it was a good break from what would be a long weekend spent in clubs. They do a pretty good job of melding frenetic rock n roll with some electronic/krautrock touches, and one of the best bass-sounds I’ve had the pleasure of hearing in a while. Sheer metallic. Once that was done I headed down to The Button Factory to see one of Irelands leading lights in dance music, John Daly, djing. I think the first act up was Soul AD, playing live, who were “pumping” out some pretty horrific tech house, which after a while moved into more breakbeat territorty which was as equally bland. John followed, kicking things off with some great deep house – pitched about 15bpm slower than the previous act – following through with some acid, disco and a little italo. I’ve seen John dj a few times over the years, mostly in small pubs in Cork, and his time spent playing around Europe has developed a tighter more cohevise style (one i’m sure he’s less bothered about when playing in pubs anyways) and it was definitaly one of the highlights of the weekend. Chymera was on after, but I’m not a fan of his overblown tranced up techno, so I headed off back to Kennedys to catch Regis’ live set.

I got in just before he started and the place was jammers with a fairly wild atmosphere. Our blogging counterparts Test were throwing the gig and it was the first one of their gigs in a while I’d seen so busy, which was great. After a few tracks  – which started off, surprisingly, on quite a detroit techno tip  – I realised that it was more of an Ableton Dj set as the acid classic “Seawolf” by World Power Alliance appeared. Personally speaking I found what he played to be somewhat hit n’ miss, though I was definately in the minority on the night. O Conner was subdued the whole way through the set too, which probably added to my dissapointment a bit. No grabbing anyone in headlocks or screaming into the crowds faces.

Another late night on Friday meant I missed a Sun Ra documentary in the afternoon and a series of goings on in the Digital Hub up by Christchurch, which I heard a few glowing reports of later on that day –  which involved amongst others, a BBC Radiophonics Showcase. Gladly Saturday would not involve any running around town as Bodytonic’s new venue The Twisted Pepper was playing host to a free party over two floors. When I arrived there was some shenanigans upstairs involving local collective Synth Eastwood, with different local guys competing against each other playing short head to head sets. It was fun, and the winner was chosen by the a good old fashioned “stand on this side of the room if you like A, stand on the other side for b”. After this the three main sets I wanted to check out later was Shawn Rudiman’s live set, Rob Hall and Dj Skurge.

Rudiman did not dissapoint, playing a fully live hardware set, that didn’t let up for the whole hour. I especially enjoyed the first half or so, lots of great acid. His live shows in general are a lot more stripped down than most of his studio productions, many of which are often too busy for my liking. Sadly, Rob Hall and Skurge were going to be clashing, and having seen the excellent Hall before, I opted to go downstairs. This room has to be one of the best club spaces to arrive in Dublin in a long time.  The actual layout hasn’t changed much since its earlier days as Traffic, but the celiing is lower, its jet black and the soundsystem is easily the best in the city. D1 artist Baiyon was on downstairs, playing that fucking awful “summersmash” SIS – Tromopeta, which he followed with a bunch of other bland europoean house ditties. 30 long minutes later Skurge finally appeared, kicking straight into some fast paced electro bombs, quicky erasing the memory of Baiyon’s Villalobos-lite muck. Skurge finished off the night with a hard edge, throwing in some great oldies like Basic Channel’s “Phylyps Trak II”, UR’s “Final Frontier” and one my favourite lost classics; Suburban Knight’s “By Night”. His set was perfectly suited to the dark surroundings, and finishing with Inner City’s Good Life was the only foot he put wrong, a bit too chirpy and  overplayed a track considering his thoughtful and less obvious choices previous to it.  It was fun seeing Rudiman giving it loads while Mike Banks and Cornelius from UR wandered round chatting to folk too.

With little energy left, I had to call it an early night and headed straight home to bed after the gig, as I didn’t want to be heading to the closing party the next night with my head hanging off my shoulders. More of which later (this post is long enough as it is) …