not another self-indulgent gig review!

After a day spent throwing stones at other stones on Aldeburgh beach, Mat, Dave and I went to the Faster Than Sound Festival at a disused airbase just outside Woodbridge. It would be safe to say that this festival does not yet have the pull of, say, Glastonbury. Perhaps some form of advertising would have helped - I only found out about it by examining Venetian Snares tour dates in the back of The Wire magazine. For a while we found ourselves standing at a perfectly ordinary bus stop in a High Street from which hardcore ravers were conspicuously absent. When a colourfully-dressed elderly woman appeared I joked that she was definitely attending. And she was. ‘I used to play lacrosse’, I heard her tell one of the (fifteen or so) hip kids of Aldeburgh. Because they had actually started to accumulate around us by now, all greeting each other as they arrived. It was starting to look like this would be that social nightmare, a festival where everybody else already knows each other.

As the coach pulled into the airbase, having taken an enormous detour to pick up nobody in some village or other, the old woman turned to us and asked: ‘Is this a rave? I hope not!’ Mat smiled sheepishly and shoved his glo-sticks further down into his pocket.

It was not a rave. It was a neo-rave. All kinds of electronic artists were represented: the kind that hide behind their equipment (literally, in Mira Calix’s case), and the kind that dance madly and make bad jokes (Max Tundra, whose music is also a kind of joke: a good one). Even those who didn’t seem to be trying too hard were still performing. Luke Vibert pursed his lips around a very thin cigarette and stared at his laptop with some intensity. Venetian Snares looked like an overgrown adolescent who never leaves his bedroom without a barrage of frantic beats and screams to protect him. His music is a lashing out, against everyone - especially, in this instance, the sound man, at whom he glowered and muttered throughout. Not enough bass. True: Luke Vibert’s had reconfigured our internal organs.

So, what with one thing and another, Shitmat proved to be the more intense experience. In baseball cap and sleeveless vest, gawping at his monitor, he looked like a slack-jawed work experience boy thrust in at the deep end. The monitor delivered, however, and he jumped around, delighting in his achievement: gabba hardcore drill n’bass, who knows? A happy chaos, anyway. A stuffed penguin we’d seen earlier was hoisted aloft, and snogged - I may have cheered at this point. Certainly I danced, if you can put it like that. Alright then, I reacted unselfconsciously to the music; Dave reacted so unselfconsciously that he all but destroyed his foot. Wreathed in completely unironic glo-sticks, we knew we were having a good time. So did the white rasta from the bus, who’d been at virtually every act we attended (dancing strangely or just staring fixedly at one point on the ceiling) and who now decided to break down the final barrier and join Shitmat on stage for some incoherent ‘toasting’. Shitmat took it all in his stride - you would, with a name like that - and only belatedly wrestled the mic away from him.

No doubt it was a disaster in real terms, and questions will no surely be asked in the Aldeburgh Gazette. They should not, perhaps, have targeted elderly ladies quite so much, even though the hardcore mash-ups were interspersed with Bach and the King Edward VI School Choir singing Vaughan Williams. Unlike the white rasta our own old lady never made the return bus. Lying in a ditch somewhere, off her face on pills, we imagined. Until informed that she’d got a taxi home. (No amount of lacrosse had prepared her for this.)

They’ll get it right next year: Coldplay will be headlining (instead of a computer performing indie hits) and the whole thing will sell out in about five seconds. I’m just glad we were there when they forgot to invite anyone.