If you follow this blog at all you'll have noticed that The Dublin Electronic Arts Festival rolled around the city again recently, and being sly fuckers two of us managed to squeeze guest list inclusions for quite a few of the gigs.
Despite the overwhelming hype around the festival, the stand out gig for myself was from outside its remit. Exile/Chevron was in many ways a warning of things to come. A relatively small club in the north-side of Dublin and a gathering storm of the disaffected, to witness a musical highlight amidst the chin-strokery of so many gigs. Chevron was especially given the shiteness of the Dorans he had played, the crowd at this one was well up for it. One of the more interesting things about the gig was the sense of present antagonism towards DEAF from the organisers, with the flyers stamped with the slogan "we're not DEAF - we're just fucking ignoring you."

Completely taken by surprise with the UR gig, I don't think many were expecting it to be that good at all. I was fairly sozzled, but I was very taken by the Japanesse guy who was on before Galaxy 2 Galaxy, especially with the weird vocal choppings. I thought the crowd were pretty off-putting, and looked like they weren't going to drop the muso attitude all night, but chrsit that changed during G2G. The Filmbase thing had me worried before going, it reminded me at some stages of standing around an art gallery, where the purpose was to peer at DJ's on the same level you would a painting.

But yeah, my back was shivering after the thermin one, that basement was like bing trapped in the soundtrack to a seventies sci-fi movie. Annoyed I couldn't actually see what she was doing as I was led to believe it was rather freaky. Max Tundra sucked, I didn't really know what to expect at it, but fucking hell it was dinner party music. And as someone I was with said, it was as if the crowd were too young to admit to their freinds that "yeah-this sucks." More than two people I know fled and ran straight up to Traffic for the Afuken gig. The guy on before Tundra was great though, as was Herv by all accounts.

Overkill was, well, to be as cheesy as half of the costumes worn by the partygooers there - it was WRONGTASTIC! Featuring just about every nutter you can think of in the British breakcore scene that has emerged around Shitmat in the past year. Two other rooms based around a Japanesse label called LittleBig and a UK based record label called Adaadat provided too many Slint/Fugazi templates to be reckoned with. Scotch Egg blew my puny drunken brain with gameboy filter gabber breakcore madness, spiralling into snakes before exploding out again in tense frantic bursts of distortion. Could you imagine the guffaws from audiences if a 1980's sci-fi movie attempted to present futuristic kids getting their kicks off pumped up gameboy music?

Labels: festival, Gig Review, Music