Attended the first day of the latest Forest of Sounds.
Performing were
May 3rd, in collaboration with O!Germany
19:00 Hauschka (Karaoke Kalk / Fat Cat)
20:00 Altera Veritas performs Līga Celma's piece Waves
21:00 Marcus Schmickler & Farn (A-Musik, Editions Mego, Karaoke Kalk)
22:00 PuseH PuseW
23:00 Laub (Kitty-Yo, AGF Producktion)
There was an anime festival happening in Riga too, but I missed the bus and didn't make it to "Tales from Earthsea" by Miyazaki Jr., based on the book by Ursula K. Le Guin (a pretty good book, by the way). There were no tickets left for the next bus (I knew it, but my punk and anarchist friend messed with my head and I didn't buy a ticket in advance).
The concert took place in the old factory workshops again, but not the same ones as before — on Andrejsala — but near the Grīvas mēbeles furniture store. As it turned out, not even near, I was right in the same building as the store; at the entrance you could even see the furniture through the glass doors.
We arrived after the concert had already started, but it was delayed by an hour, so we managed to catch the first performer. We did have to stand for a bit, though, because all the little chairs (this time regular ones, not cardboard stools) were taken by the audience. Hauschka is this guy who prepares a piano by hanging nuts on the strings and sticking them on with tape. Judging by peer-to-peer networks and the festival brochure, he’s famous and influential. It was funny watching the alternative folks and indie kids politely sitting on their little chairs in front of an intellectual man at a grand piano and listening to him attentively. They even applauded really hard, Volker Bertelmann even came out for an encore and played a cheerful little piece without the preparation.
To be honest, his music stirs up few emotions in me. To my mind, he didn't modify the piano radically enough; it just sounded like it was beat up and slightly broken, and not at all like a different instrument. I think it's a bit boring, I don't get the hype around this sort of thing. But Volker himself walked around the venue during the breaks between other people's sets, chatting with the audience and smiling kindly.
After Volker, Latvian performer Gunta Davidchuk sang an avant-garde vocal piece almost a cappella, with small electronic sprinkles, written by Līga Celma. Gunta's voice is piercing and pure, you could say slightly operatic. I don't know the details about the girls, but judging by the booklet, both are known for their work in the popular genre too. The piece sounded like "Beauty and the Beast". Gunta held one or more long vowel sounds of high volume and intensity, then faded out with the sound that dying people make. She was answered by a low-roaring, uneven bass of medium volume and electronic origin, and during this the performer quietly clicked her tongue, as if gasping for air. The piece itself, titled "I am a lonely lighthouse", was composed by Līga specifically for Gunta's voice. Overall — excellent, just a shame it was so short — barely 15 minutes. Then again, I'd fear for Gunta's vocal cords if she sang with such intensity for long. Curiously, unlike the other sets, the sound was very acoustically sparse, which created a strange effect of insufficiency. However, it was more than made up for by the vocalist's strong voice.
Next up was the well-known guy Marcus Schmickler, accompanied by visualizer Farn, who provided the visuals on three screens. We were sitting comfortably, and we could see all three very well. The sound was a dense, high-volume structured noise, clearly reminiscent in character of the "wall of sound" from Marcus's Pluramon project — oh, Schmickler has a soft spot for that stuff. The video was more interesting — white dots, resembling both stars and flies at the same time, pulsed, multiplied, swirled, and faded to the beat of the music. For the first ten-twenty minutes I watched without looking away, trying to understand the ideas and software implementation; it was interesting. Then Schmickler really turned up the heat, so much so that an elderly gentleman sitting nearby ran away. Then many glamorous party girls ran away, and the remaining folks plugged their ears from the unbearable loudness. What I can't understand is — why torture people with such volume if the essence of your music isn't dumb noise, but something more advanced?
Then something completely unpleasant started, at least for me personally. It turned out there were spotlights on the edges of the screens, which started blinking and blinding the eyes — as a computer geek who has spent his whole life sitting in a dark room, I find such special effects highly unpleasant, so I closed my eyes, and barely saw how the dots turned into stripes and triangles.
On the other hand, my friend, the fake punk and anarchist, who slept through the entire set of Ural Owl (which I liked) at the last Forest of Sounds, was thrilled with Marcus and was glad he hadn't stimulated himself with active substances — because then he would have had a really hard time. By the way, the elderly gentleman's companion, a middle-aged lady, sat through the whole set, even though she was plugging her ears with her hands and covering her eyes with a newspaper.
After Marcus, the Latvian psych-folk musicians — PuseH PuseW — performed. The resemblance to bands like Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Vibracathedral Orchestra was hard to miss, but overall the music was up to par, if not for the excessive "cement mixer" bass and the general blurring of the sound into a low-quality hum. I'm totally for "plasma" and "fluidity", and not at all for a constantly pretty, bright sound, but when all the music sounds exactly the same in the style of a "bubbling cauldron of bass and non-aggressive noise", it gets tiring. On the bright side, when PuseH PuseW took out and tinkled instruments like a saxophone, flute, and bells into the microphones, it got more fun. This whole sacred ritual was accompanied by an amusing video — a zoomed-in shot of a mouth and a tongue twisting in different directions. But what impressed the audience the most was the live performance — a girl in a black cloak with a Greek statue hairstyle held a paper rose in her mouth and made graceful, flexible movements to the beat of the flowing music. In the middle of the performance she threw off her cloak and remained naked. Her body was rubbed with white makeup and she looked more like one of those living statues you often see in European capitals than a human. Overall, the performance was excellent, totally world-class, whatever that mythical class might be.
The last to perform was the well-known duo Laub. I only found out about them from someone's LJ post, but I couldn't find who wrote it just now. Laub is a girl, Antye Greie-Fuchs, also known as AGF, and a man, Von Jotka. The girl was wearing black glasses, black pants, and had her hair in a bun, and the man played the guitar. Here I am expressing myself as idiotically as the beloved reviewers of walkabout_d. The musicians stood behind an aluminum table with Apple laptops, performing clicks-and-cuts pop, bright and unmalicious, though quite noisy in places. Generally, Antye can go pretty wild with the avant-garde too, because she has plenty of collaborations with the Japanese and other champions of overly complex music. But this time we finished up with sweet lullaby pop for the night. I have to say, at first the audience reacted coldly and didn't even respond to the musicians' attempts to ask them things. At the very beginning, Antye asked if they could start, trying to see if there were many people in the venue, but the crowd huddled in the corners and couldn't be seen. I tried to tell her YES, but my squeak sounded quiet and stupid :-) The musicians were clearly offended by the cold reception and left the stage very quickly, obviously not thrilled with the Baltic temperament. At this point our sweet alternative kids showed persistence and once again applauded furiously. The musicians cheered up, crawled back out, and played what were, to my taste, the best pieces of the set — long and meditative ambient noisemakers with small sprinkles of whispering — one old and one new. Antye shared that they hadn't performed the old one at concerts for a long time. Maybe they decided to play it when they saw how gratefully the audience swallowed even Marcus Schmickler's harsh noise. At the end, Antye thanked everyone for the warm welcome and said it was their first time in Latvia.
Afterwards I walked a bit in the light rain and flagged down a taxi, which brought me to far-off lands — all the way past the Rīga sign. The driver navigated by GPS and asked me for directions — just in case there was a shorter way. But there wasn't a shorter way. And also he didn't have any change, so I had to scrape together everything, even the lats coin with the snowman on it.
This is the only picture in the post because my camera battery died completely, and I only ordered a new one today.
Overall — not bad, but no one sparked any real thrill. Looking forward to Friday and Saturday, when Zavoloka, Colleen, Six Organs Of Admittance, The Bug and even superstar nu-folk diva Marissa Nadler will be playing.