Matthew Levinson

the aftermath

Published on 07/10/04
by matt

this isn’t going to be the most thought-out, considered piece of writing i’ve ever laid down. in fact, it’s rather rushed. but i’m back from newcastle’s this is not art festival and, it has to be said, i’m drained. emotionally and physically. but it was a fantastic experience, so many great artists, musicians, vjs, and just people in general.

ben frost and khalid – beautiful reflective music from frost complemented by khalid’s exquisitely understated visuals.

vj skatter – north american vj, who has been residing in canberra for the past year unbeknownst to anyone who lives here! beautiful heavily abstracted visuals that seemed to guide the music rather than the other way round.

scott horscroft ensemble – a host of extremely talented guitarists on stage together. all playing one guitar line, building and building until suddenly it was all over. 40 minutes early. which was brilliant for us, adding a bit of extra time to the schedule. and cool too – i like that they couldn’t really plan how the artists would work together, the only explanation given was that they peaked too early.

bec paton, low ki and scotch fingers – the 3 canberra kids did a back to back set sandwiched between boom bip and mike paradinas. and blew everyone away. jungle, breaks, fucked up glitched out beats, hip hop, electro, weird ass electronics. these guys know how to rock it – as the guys from alchemy radio agreed, with word going round that bp + lk might be brought in to a residency on alchemy. scotch fingers visuals achieved that rare thing for visuals of having a consistent theme that worked with the music and develop conceptually as well.

chrism and fenris were cool, edseven is a bomb dj, blastcorp is spectacular (you’ve all heard me rave about him too much already), ollo were in full live mode – brilliant crystal electro pop, sofie from southern outpost played a cool set of detroit electro/techno using this cool software called deckstacy for laptop mixing (i want a try!). boom bip and jeremiah were brilliant, though i missed some of it running around and trying to get decks for the next set.

greg davis played beautiful melodious music drowned in depths of glitch, jean poole and ova played very cool sets, toydeath, ele-mental, faber castell, hydatid, joel stern and anthony magen, damn so many people played! unkle ho had adam from phonku-bot and urthboy along for his merry carnival-esque ride. the visuals were incredible.

aki onda from japan played noise like a true rock star, dsico had the gall to call people’s bluff that his karaoke was the work of a rock star (most believed him). eric singer’s set was great at the launch on thursday with the novelty of a robotic guitar, but the set on friday descended into awkward wackiness.

all in all a brilliant weekend. though for some reason i can’t really remember much of it! more than 2000 through the doors of the cambridge, no beer and not much spirits left in the bar on sunday morning.

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