Summer holidays
The first week of this years summer has passed and quite an eventful week it was:
2CV Meeting
Every year aficionados of the charming little Citroën 2CV, meet up somewhere in the world, to show off their cars, trade parts and just generally enjoy summer in each others compnay. After meetings in areas such as Boston USA and last years Scotland the time had come for Sweden to host the event, and we went to the little town of Borlänge to check out more orless 2000 participants. Imagine something like Woodstock, but with cars instead of music. The 2CV owners really are a colorful bunch, if you own one you don´t mind showing off, that much is clear after seeing the multitude of painted and modified tincans breathing of French engineering and 40s design.
Norberg electronica festival
After cars and Borlänge we were just a short drive away to our next stop, Norberg electronica festival! We went to this glorious event for the first time only yesterday, and were hooked at once. It is a meeting place for all kinds of electronic music that brathes fresness and innovation. The sets are consistently of high quality and always interesting, altough maybe not always understandable, or indeed possible to listen to for long periods of time.
It is so cool to see how different people approach electronic music from such a variety of points, of course the normal setup for an artist is a MacBook and some kind of Mici controller, making for a pretty poor live shows, but there were many notable exceptions
The acts that made most impression this year was:
P2 Ström, From the Swedish public service radio P2 comes this incredible electronica lineup. The best of the best. Everyone not paying their radiolicense should be thoroughly ahamed of themselves. We only cared for the Live acts, Anders Ilar and Håkan Lidbo, we love you. Bonus points to Håkan for trying to make some kind of annoucment through the voice-effect later to be used in the music, it sounded very cool but was utterly impossible to understand. Setup: MacBooks and midicontrollers, but who cares, these guys and girls rule all.
Pamela Kurstin - Theremin! This set ended the festival, at 2.30 in Mimerlaven, and was totally amazing. Armeed with nothing else than a theremin and some Echo pedals we were offered layared theremin compositions with an absolutely stunning degree of virtousity and elegance, World class.
http://www.myspace.com/pameliakurstin theres also some cool pics she took are here
Volds stod umager - On stage, a table with four people sitting quietly, each have an opened radio set in front of them, and each is reaching inside. Touching components, short-circuiting and generally disturbing the electronics, a short distance from the table the resulting sound gets the final treatment of 1 (or two) guys wrecking a mixerboard with extreme physical abuse. The result? The most brutal in noise I have every heard at a volume I didnt think possible. Putting your hands to your ears did nothing and each burst of noise from the mixerboard guys felt like a jab in the ribs. Super-hard noise with unexpected elements of hiphop, possible because one of the radio tunings?
WinterStormer - These guys really stood out, when most of the others had 1 laptop on stage, these guys actually brought their entire studio, complete with 2 huge modular synths. Not only did they bring it here from Norway, but their setup all their nice stuff on the main floor, on the same level as the public. Which is another nice thing about Norberg. The artists are always accessible, if you want to ask them about something there are there and really willing to chat. I bought a studio album from these guys so a review of that is coming.
Fylkingen - in one very cool set we got introduced to the full madness of a Buchla Module 200e huge synth with hundreds of leds on it, and it alone produced a kickass set under the able hands of a member of the swedish collective Fylkingen. We had a good look of it from the top floor in Mimerlaven, and even after seeing it being used, the layout and leds made absolutely no sense to us, and we do know something about synths.. even more insane than the Modulars from WinterStormer.
Robot Cowboy - sweet set, check him out!
FJG - Fantomsmärtor - We asked the guys sitting in the tents next to us what time it was, and they literally threw this CD on us. The term “What have I done to deserve this?” springs to mind. Anyway its related to frenology and recorded in Uppsala so Ill give it a listen later and post something about it.
http://www.myspace.com/fjgall
Keiko and Tone - very very nice sets indeed.
