Guildhall Arts Centre,
Gloucester
For a decade, Ochre Records
has existed in a backwoods wilderness of its own design. Even at this, the
Cheltenham based label’s tenth anniversary all-dayer, which took place in the
civic confines of Gloucester’s Guildhall — its spiritual home, having hosted
the label’s fifth and seventh birthdays — it all seemed unfussily homespun and
low key. A sure sign of confidence from any cottage industry.
Nowhere was this better
personified than in opening act The Serpents, Ochre’s very own ‘supergroup’‚
whose ranks have previously been swollen by members of Super Furry Animals,
writer Jon Savage and even reality TV model Catalina. This time out there were
eight people up there, mostly culled from Ochre acts scheduled to play later
on. Their one minute’s noise for the late John Peel whipped up a glorious storm
of rustic Prog clatter, augmented by bass clarinet and singing bowl. The
extended piece that followed magnificently cascaded through a landscape of
interstellar fairground space rock disco and Druidic cut-glass incantation. It
was tastefully restrained, mind, alive with dewy-eyed pastoral wonder.
Improv duo Grace &
Delete’s set found Chris Cundy’s bass clarinet sparring with the primitive
electronics of James Dunn over a screening of the Japanese kill-’em-all movie
Battle Royale. Despite the novelty value of the pairing, Grace & Delete’s
call and response burps and squiggles didn’t really take us any places we
hadn’t already been.
90° South’s prettified
guitar and laptop generated travelogues, on the other hand, diverted
Kraftwerk’s sentimental open-road psychogeography down a more higgledypiggledy,
if equally charming route. Over a projected backdrop of trains, boats and
bikes, we were propelled into Boys’ Own-style romanticism tinged with
nostalgia. Longstone augmented their cracked electronics with the ubiquitous
Chris Cundy on laidback soprano sax. While this initially brought to mind an
unfortunate image of twilight zone TV softcore, it was mercifully subverted
enough to transcend such a horror.
Forsaking the formal
posturing of a rock group, Applecraft’s Don Mandarin and Mike Mooney pulled up
a chair for an acoustic experience of bite-size vignettes, a mixture of
perfectly enunciated spoken word and 57 varieties of generic strum accompanying
a slide show of reptiles, land formations and other natural wonders. As
Mandarin raised his hand aloft to signal the next visual, an impressionistic
Jackanory-style concept was revealed. Slide shows being the temperamental
relics they are, alas, things slipped out of sync and the effect dissipated.
Things only really turned
sour when Thighpaulsandra’s New Age Gary Glitter shtick stamped its feet,
though fortunately Acid Mothers Temple’s headlining show stole his thunder by
showing the festival audience how to really let its hair down.
Glide’s early evening set
had already led the way, as Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant’s
‘psychedelic tripscape’ project set the controls for a magnificently teeth-rattling
whoosh of dub sh’boom. Camouflaged in an army helmet with the word Friction cut
and pasted over its original Prog legend — symbolic in itself of Glide’s
gearshift - such euphoric melody-led electronic goo finally made use of the
Guildhall’s sprung wooden floor, even if most of the audience only felt the
reverberations through their prone stoner backsides. It was a sublime joy
nevertheless.
The Wire, issue 250, December
2004
ends
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