Digital Wanderer

Cute decorations at the entrance

I took almost no photos, and there are a million reasons for that. For instance, I absolutely suck at taking pictures, my camera is crap, I don't want to bother the musicians with flashes, and myself with getting distracted from the music. Fortunately, my friend, who might actually not be a fake punk at all, but a fake emo, not only took photos himself but also found some taken by others on the net. The photos with the stylized borders belong to a guy named Gatis Graudins, and I'll borrow them for this post in accordance with my views that everything on the internet can be used as permitted by the CC NC-BY-SA license, unless explicitly forbidden by the author.

Ticket with stamps

I arrived super, super early, thanks to the wrong ticket (some kind of evil fate). I managed to walk through the Riga market, impressed by the abundance of vegetables, fruits, and the good weather. After that I arrived ten minutes later than the official start, but inside nothing was even thinking about kicking off. On the contrary, I walked in without a ticket and just dumbly wandered back and forth until I was softly and politely escorted out of the big hall, where the musicians were setting up.

In strict accordance with the principles of counter-culture, the festival took place in cheerful buildings like this

Eventually, in the electronic hall (the smaller one), a middle-aged Turkish dude Analogue Suicide started his set, with maybe 20 people around, and the windows weren't even covered. We heard the noise of analog synthesizers against the backdrop of an old Japanese horrer (I spell this word like that, and I don't give a damn what you think about it). I liked the horrer, even though I generally avoid them on principle (I find no pleasure in them), but the music — not so much, too boring, just non-aggressive noise without a kick. So I'd rather mention the plot of the movie.

A shot from the movie

 

In it, a young man hallucinates that he is a creature made of tubes and wires. And then he hallucinates that a girl he met is such a creature. In the end, it turns out that he's the monster after all, and with a drill he has in place of his penis, he drills the girl to death.

Nearby, on a tributary of the Daugava

The next to perform was the Latvian musician Kodek. This was a young guy who danced ferociously and rocked out to a breakcore mashup of pop, metal, and other genres.

Kodek

You gotta envy his enthusiasm, but the music was just as boring as the previous guy's. If the first one had a lack of variety and a dreary main idea, this one had an overabundance of it, coupled with the exact same dreariness of the main idea. Shredding mountains of other people's music can't replace creative thinking, as pretentious as that might sound. Besides, after Sataniccultworkshop it's hard to say anything new in this genre.

 
Kodek and his coworker

 

 
In the center hangs a recommendation to leave the hall if it's too noisy for you

 

After Kodek, the Ukrainian girl Kateryna Zavoloka performed. She is a true master, so I was looking forward to her set with anticipation. Unfortunately, the crowds that were present for Kodek suddenly dissolved without any visible reason. But on the bright side, this allowed me to sit on a chair right in the center and enthusiastically listen to electronics with a very original rhythmic structure and backgrounds in the form of heavily stretched and distorted Ukrainian ethnic chants.

Zavoloka

Kateryna's music doesn't stick to the ears and soul too much, but it gives food for the mind. It's a shame that besides me, only two Russian-speaking dudes appreciated the set. After the performance, we were shouting "fucking awesome" with them. One of them, a musician named Vyacheslav,  knew Zavoloka and chatted a bit, while I, having personally expressed my admiration for the music at the beginning of the conversation, then stood modestly to the side and eavesdropped.

 

Zavoloka @@@@ Skaņu Mežs 2008, Riga, Latvia from Vladekk on Vimeo.

 

As it turned out later, the electronic hall had emptied out because the crowd went to the big hall — the project Antarktīda had started their set there. It represents a collaboration of Gas of Latvia, whom I wrote about last year, as well as a noise artist named Jēkabs Voļatovskis and a vocalist named Imants Daksis.

Antarctica, for greater effect, was blowing a breeze on the listeners

One of the comrades hummed on a synthesizer with the word "Elektronika" written in Russian, the second one — hummed with a guitar, and the vocalist hummed with his voice, if you can say that. Judging by the brochure, Imants is known for psychedelic folk and pop, and Gas Of Latvia produced his album. From the inscription on his website: "The world needs a shaman," you can roughly understand what line of work he has chosen.

The shaman

I arrived at the end of the performance, when the instrumentalists also approached the microphone and started making a long, drawn-out sound of a shamanistic nature.  And that's how they ended it.

The musicians are helping the vocalist

By the way, several people have already told me that the performance by Gas Of Latvia  and his cohorts last year, which I praised so much, was considered an absolute failure by the majority. Then again, among these people is the indie rock fan placebokid and a fan of the dance-experimental band Mouse On Mars, so we'll just write those opinions off as a matter of taste.

Meanwhile, something was also brewing in the electronic hall, but I wasn't there, so I'll continue talking about the main hall. In it, we were shown rectangles and stripes to the drum machine of Optical Machines, whose cunning machinery  in the form of a lamp and various-sized meshes was connected to a synthesizer. The lamp's light was projected onto a screen, and the meshes, moved by one of the band members, modified the photon stream, creating different patterns, and ones connected to the sound, too.

The ingenious contraptions of Optical Machines

Optical Machines @@@@ Skaņu Mežs 2008 from Vladekk on Vimeo.

It's easier to show than to tell, honestly. In the fragment there are two parts, each 30 seconds long.

 

 

The musicians, performing after the optics lovers, demanded that the audience stand, because that's necessary for the proper perception of their music. I had already thought we were going to dance, but the threatening title of the set somewhat dampened this thought.

 

Haswell & Hecker UPIC Diffusion Session (Warp Records, Warner)

As it turned out, I was right on both counts, as strange as such a statement might seem to you. Comrades Haswell and Hecker are specialists in digital noise, but not simple noise, rather, with laser-light effects. This time the set's title  matched its content perfectly — it really was a session of noise diffusing into the brain, backed up by beyond-the-limit volume, ubiquitous green lasers, and the absence of chairs.

Despite all this, or maybe because of it, I wasn't particularly moved. Like, it's extremely powerful, professional, and penetrating (pun intended), but it doesn't get me going. Maybe I should have taken some dope, but I haven't been drinking since the new year, and I haven't consumed anything stronger than caffeine for a long time at all. But caffeine — in large quantities — at least three mugs of strong tea a day. And at the festival I was drinking evil, that is, Coca Cola Zero, and for almost the first time in my life — energy drinks, and solely for the temporary purpose of maintaining an alert state of body and mind. To make you feel how intense the set was, and how much my ears hurt after it, I'll post a video twice as long as usual for you. Watch the whole thing, it's all different in there.

 

Haswell & Hecker UPIC Diffusion Session @@@@ Skaņu Mežs 2008 from Vladekk on Vimeo.

 

After the merry noise-makers, who poured a tub of cold digital noise from the glamour era over us, Lokai performed, but more about them and the headliners — tomorrow. By the way, the first point about dancing is true because at the end of the set a girl danced a slow dance to this music. Truly, the attendees of the Forest of Sounds are strong in spirit.

Listeners