What I Did on My holidays part 5: Dinosaurs, a bookshop, and a play by William Shakespeare

The final instalment in my fascinating account of time taken off work last September. The previous episode can be read here.

The next day my friend C— took me to Crystal Palace Park, where I saw the empty space left when the famous Crystal Palace burned down in the 1930s (it was very big) and more importantly the park's collection of dinosaurs. These are models made in the 19th century by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of Richard Owen, at a time when dinosaur fossils first started being found in quantity, causing a sensation as they made plain that the world was much older than the Bible suggests and once contained strange animals not mentioned there. I've been fascinated by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs since first hearing about them as a child. Part of their charm comes from their reflecting a mid 19th century understanding of dinosaurs, with the animals being depicted in ways that do not reflect current views of them. As a result none of them are feathered and their colouring is fairly monochrome. Also, Hawkins and Owen made some choices about how the animals' bodies worked that would soon be out of step with scientific opinion, most famously depicting the iguanodons as four-legged and rather fierce looking when we know now they were bipedal herbivores. But there is a definite appeal to seeing the sculptures peeping out from behind bushes, and they do bring home how fucking enormous even small relatively dinosaurs like the iguanodon are.

Then into London, where on autopilot I did a circuit of the shops I typically visit in London: the LRB bookshop, Gosh comics, Sounds of the Universe, and Selectadisc. I bought nothing in these places as these days I find myself struck by the feeling of having too many records and comics, and in any case I don't really know if I actually like comics any more, and can never remember what I am looking for when I am in these places. Also it was hard not to shake the idea that everything these places were offering was available in Dublin, so why carry it all home? Nevertheless, I did stop for tea and cake in the LRB cakeshop (tasty, even if they are now using teabags (O Tempora! O Mores!)) and "availed of the facilities". I realise now that I forgot to check out Fopp, whose prominent display of mid-price CDs might have tempted me, as might their range of DVDs (I've been thinking for a while now I'd like to pick up a copy of problematic Doctor Who fave The Talons of Weng Chiang). But I did my bit to keep the London retail economy going in Foyles, where I picked up two things I have been looking for in vain here in Dublin: William Godwin's Caleb Williams, which I intend to reveal as the next subject of our gothic book club, and (from the handy music shop that nestles within Foyles) Glassworks by Philip Glass.

In the evening I met two old pals from the Bowlie Forum (one of whom is also one of my Frank's APA buds). We discussed the Frank's festival divide (Le Guess Who v. Primavera) and I did find myself wondering whether we might need to set up a festival exchange programme. Then I had to rush off to the Globe Theatre for a performance of As You Like It, one of those Shakespeare plays featuring cross-dressing. In this one as well as having female characters disguising themselves as men for reasons, the play also had some characters being played by actors of the opposite gender, which led to no end of confusion for me. Weirdly though I think it was less gender fluid than stagings in Shakespeare's own day, where having boys playing women who would then be disguised as men was par for the course.

The play itself is fairly light, featuring some funny stuff and some mild danger before a happy ending that sees key characters falling in love with each other while legitimate rulers are restored to their inheritance and estranged siblings reconciled. You could argue it is a bit slight but those Shakespeare semi-comedies are always good fun. The play does also feature one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches (the one about all the world being a stage, which goes on to deliver that whole seven ages of man thing).

Two other things struck me about the show. I've been to a good few Globe performances, but this I think was my first time going to an evening show. As a cheapskate and as someone used to standing for gigs, I always buy groundling tickets for the Globe, which means that you are much closer to the action than the people who have paid more for the seats. This though was my first time experiencing what might well have been the authentic Elizabethan groundling experience: the crowd was full of yappers. There were a bunch of talkative younglings behind me and looking sternly at them with finger on lips only shut their yap temporarily. I did think of going full "SHUT UP YOU CUNT" on them but i) I naturally avoid confrontation and ii) maybe as noted above a degree of audience noise is part of the authentic cheap ticket experience. So I moved to another bit of the space, and so found myself near to a couple of somewhat yappy girls, who at least were kind of good-looking.

The other thing I was struck by was how the Globe has drifted a bit from what I took as its original mission of serving up performances that approximated closely to Elizabethan staging, making their shows both entertainments and windows into the past. For this while the costumery and so on seemed fairly vintage, the musical accompaniment was based on pop songs of our era, breaking the Elizabethan spell. Is this good or bad? You be the judge.

And then it was back to the wilds of South London, where I was staying with C—. After another night of being slept on by a black cat I got up early, made my way to Euston and took the train to Holyhead and the ferry home.

My exertions led to a certain fatigue and, more ominously, I found myself with a cold that I kept wondering about from the point of view of the dread Covid, so I ended up missing both of the Saturday night Dublin events I had rashly promised to attend (the Mindfuzz club night, at which Andy Votel was to feature on the decks, plus birthday party of Dublin's coolest person, at which a live karaoke was due to feature). For similar reasons I missed the Mick Harvey Dublin concert I had become aware of just before leaving for London. I did make my first gamelan class of the autumn session but by then I was back at work and my holiday was over.

Did you have a holiday? What did you do on yours?

What I did on my holidays part 4: jazz/improv, a gothic mansion, and promenade theatre in London

I am recounting what I did and experienced on a break from work in September. You can read the previous episode here.

In my short break I also travelled to London for the first time in a while (apart from an overnight stay last year on the way to Le Guess Who). I was only there for three days but it was pretty action packed. On the night of my arrival I went with friend C— to Cafe Oto to see a performance by John Butcher, Chris Corsano, & Florian Stoffner, respectively playing saxophone, drums, and guitar. Corsano was the one here with whom I had previous, as I remember seeing him in Dublin some time back when he might have been based in Glasgow.

I have in the past suggested that the boundary between jazz and improv is defined by the skills of the musicians, but this concert rather challenged that assumption, as it did seem to be billed as essentially improv despite the astonishing chops of the performers. Corsano's charismatic playing attracted considerable attention, which is not too surprising given how great it always is to see a topnotch drummer really go for it, but the others all deserved top marks, with Stoffner's guitar textures and Butcher's sax all worthy of praise.

The next day I went out to see Strawberry Hill, the gothic revival mansion Horace Walpole had built for himself in the late 18th century. In his lifetime Walpole was a noted man of letters and minor Whig politician, but there days he is most famous as the author of The Castle of Otranto, a faux mediaeval narrative that conjured the gothic novel into being. If you've never read it then I can reveal that it is a hoot; few books begin with a key character crushed to death by a giant helmet falling from the sky, which gives something of a taste of how the novel progresses. The house has an endearingly crazy quality to it, with funny little turrets and internal ornamentation that makes you imagine ghosts stepping out of portraits or phantoms appearing from behind hidden panels. It's an intriguing spot and well worth a visit.

That evening saw me travel out to Woolwich for what was the main driver of my trip to London: attendance with C— at the performance of The Burnt City, a piece of immersive promenade theatre served up by the Punchdrunk theatre company. This work was based on the Trojan War. In case readers are wondering, "immersive promenade theatre" means that instead of sitting on a chair and watching actors do stuff on stage, the audience wanders around the performance space, occasionally encountering the actors doing their stuff, with cast members identifiable because unlike the audience they are not wearing masks. Because the space is big and things are happening simultaneously, audience members will have unique experiences. It also means that the order in which people encounter scenes can be a bit random, which will disrupt more usual notions of narrative flow. Punchdrunk shows also use lighting and music to great effect.

This was my second Punchdrunk show, the previous one being The Drowned Man, which I now realise I saw in London almost ten years ago. That was to some extent inspired by Georg Büchner's Woyzeck but it also drew heavily on Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and had a Dark Hollywood vibe to it, with the sets evoking a vague kind of Americana that felt like it was from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps a bit earlier or later. Oddly, the staging of The Burnt City was quite similar, with the audience arriving initially into the Troy part of the set, which instead of feeling like something from antiquity evoked more the atmosphere of a 1930s film set with its cheap hotels, business premises, and pokey homes. The Greece (or Mycenae) part of the complex was a bit more abstract, with more in the way of large open spaces (but all still indoors and generally shrouded in darkness except when they weren't). And it is probably worth noting that although billed as theatre, the event was heavily dance based, with I think no actual dialogue spoken by the cast but a lot of movement.

And did I like it? Well it did make for an engaging evening but I think maybe I was a bit underwhelmed. I'm not 100% sure why that was. It might be that having previously seen another Punchdrunk show, this one did not have the shock of the new. But it might also be the nature of the performance. The Drowned Man had Dark Hollywood themes and a 1930s-1940s setting, but despite its Bronze Age setting, The Burnt City also had a 1930s-1940s feel to it. I think also that greater familiarity with the source material might have paradoxically made me enjoy the show less. With The Drowned Man, I had at that time no familiarity with Woyzeck or Day of the Locust, so I was approaching it with a blank slate, experiencing scenes from first principles in an impressionistic manner (I enjoyed reading The Day of the Locust some years later and recognising scenes from the show in it). But Greek myths and the Trojan War are things I have been familiar with for a long time. That meant that when I found anything happening in front of me I was trying to work out which bit of the Trojan myth I was watching instead of just letting the show wash over me.

What I did like was the bar. C— and I had a drink before we went into the show proper and then in the middle I came back for a cocktail break, cursing the fact that we had not pre-agreed a time for an interval drink together (you basically lose your friends in the show so you won't have a chance to day "Drink?" to them in there). Aside from the expensive cocktails, there was music from a band reminiscent of the synthpoppers in La-La-Land (the best music in the film I seem to recall) and a cabaret show tenuously linked to the Greek myths. At one point I was handed a spotlight I then had to keep on the performer, which is the kind of audience participation I am down with.

All in all an interesting and broadly enjoyable evening, but I would have to think a bit before I went to any further Punchdrunk shows.

What I did on my holidays part 3: a funeral

Part three of my account of my action-packed break from work. You can read the previous part here.

I mentioned going to see the three DruidO'Casey plays. During a break from these my beloved received a phone call informing her that her brother-in-law's condition had worsened. David had been sick for a while and had moved into palliative care. Now the final stage was approaching. The next day my beloved went to visit him in the hospice while I met some of my friends, expecting (or hoping) that I would be able to see David myself the next day. It was not to be. As I walked home I saw the message telling me he had passed that evening. He was a good man and everyone that knew him will miss him. Looking at his death notice on RIP.ie and then seeing his shrunken body in the coffin engendered thoughts about the transience of life; we are not here for long. Seamie O'Dowd's rendition of "The Parting Glass" at David's funeral made for another emotional moment.

image source (RIP.ie)

What I did on my holidays part 2: Hellfire and Clowns

My account of my amazing break from work continues. Read part 1 here.

It's nice to meet people when you are on your holidays. Fortunately my friend K— was home from New Zealand with his partner and son while I was off work. We went up to the mountains and had a look at the ruins of the Hellfire Club, where 18th century rapscallions engaged in all kinds of depravities until on one occasion they discovered that the mysterious stranger who had joined them for cards was in possession of cloven hooves; this may be linked to a reputed fire that subsquently turned the clubhouse into a ruin. One thing that struck me about the building was how small the rooms were, suggesting a somewhat intimate scale to whatever depravities the young bucks engaged in.

That evening we visited our friends A— and F— for dinner and had more fun. We may have played some boardgames but no cloven-hooved stranger joined us.

I also made it to the cinema, where I saw Apocalypse Clown. This recent film sees a bunch of clowns thrown into jail after brawling with some human statues at the funeral of celebrated clown Jean DuCoque. But then solar flares cause a collapse of the electricity grid, leading to a breakdown of society that leaves the clowns trying to make sense of the absurd situation. Caught up in the mayhem is an ambitious TV journalist who had been sent to cover the clown funeral. "Didn't you fuck a clown once?" her boss says, "I thought as a clown fucker this job would be right up your street". And indeed Bobo, her previous paramour, is keen to reignite their romance while she is less convinced this would be a good idea. For plot reasons, the journalist finds herself in the company of the Great Alphonso, an older clown whose successful TV career was cut short following a boy band incident, while Bobo and two other clowns (Pepe, a useless mime, and Funzo, an evil clown) pursue her and attempt to evade the human statues. The jokes don't always land but when they do they are very funny. I think there is definitely something to be said for Donald Clark's idea that this film will play to stoner students forever. And while many have singled out the impressive performance of Natalie Palamides as Funzo, for me the film hangs on David Earl's moth-eaten performance as sad clown Bobo and Amy De Bhrún as the journalist (with her ambition and general air of "Get me away from these fucking clowns"). Fionn Foley as the terrible Pepe also deserves praise. So I encourage people to seek this film out.

What I Did On My Holidays Part 1: DruidO'Casey

I took some time off work in September and did various things. On my first day off my beloved and went to the Abbey for a theatre triple bill, as the Druid theatre company was performing Sean O'Casey's three plays about the dawn of independent Ireland: The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and then finally Juno and the Paycock. These have the 1916 Rising, the 1919-1921 War of Independence and the depressing Civil War of 1922-1923 as their backdrop.

Some years back we travelled to York for another theatre triple bill, where the Globe was touring all three of Shakespeare's plays about Henry VI. Both trilogies are similar in dealing with historical events and not having been written as a trilogy, but in other respects they diverge markedly. Shakespeare was writing more than a hundred years after the events he describes, while O'Casey was writing almost contemporaneously with the turmoil of independent Ireland's birth (The Shadow of a Gunman premiered towards the end of the Civil War, with Juno and the Paycock hitting the stage in 1924 and The Plough and the Stars marking the Easter Rising's tenth anniversary in 1926). And crucially, while Shakespeare's focus is on those who directed the historical struggles of Henry VI's reign, O'Casey is looking at the ordinary people who are caught up in the conflicts swirling around them, sometimes as minor participants but more often as bystanders or people trying to get on with their lives in a time of chaos. O'Casey is looking in particular at the working class people inhabiting the grotty tenements of central Dublin (though The Shadow of a Gunman felt like it might be looking at a slightly more prosperous strata of boarding house residents). His sympathy for his subjects means that he is ambivalent or hostile to the supposedly heroic struggles wrecking their lives (the 1916 Rising is presented as a pointless bloodbath directed by a raving madman while the Civil War comes across as little more than a tit-for-tat gang war).

What is stylistically strange about these plays is the way they mix tragedy and comedy, with scenes of great pathos preceded or followed by chortlesome drunken buffoonery. These are the only O'Casey plays I have any familiarity with, but awkward juxtapositions of laughs and tears is for me almost the defining thing of his stagecraft. And it's not easy to stage successfully. Back in the 1990s I saw another production of Juno and the Paycock, which played up the laughs so much that the moments of tragedy were like awkward interludes to be run through as quickly as possible so that the actors could get back to the laughs. In the Druid production however, the direction of Garry Hynes does not shy away from the sense of tragedy, with the final scene in Juno not being a return to roffles but empty laughter as the hangman places the noose.

One other point of similarity with the Shakespeare plays strikes me, this being the historical resonances of their staging. One of the major characters in the Henry VI plays found himself executed at York, his head stuck on a spike outside the walls near to where we were staying (it had been removed by the time of our visit). With the O'Casey plays the historical resonance comes more from seeing them performed in the theatre they had originally been staged in, as their first stagings had themselves been historical events, particularly for The Plough and the Stars. Its first performance in 1926, the tenth anniversary year of the Easter Rising, apparently went well, but on subsequent nights increasing numbers of Republicans appeared in the audience, making their displeasure at its non-observance of nationalist pieties known. On the fourth night, the audience was packed with Republican malcontents, including many who had lost relatives in the 1916 Rising. They progressed from hissing to full-blown rioting in the second act, which sees a prostitute interacting with various members of the cast in a pub while an unnamed off-stage orator delivers some of the more deranged lines from speeches by Patrick Pearse (the future leader of the Rising and still a hero to many); the Abbey's director, W. B. Yeats, addressed the crowd, saying "You have disgraced yourselves again" (a reference to the outrage that greeted The Playboy of the Western World in 1907).

One final thing struck me about the three plays. O'Casey was a socialist, but there is something strange about the way he portrays his working class subjects. The women are generally presented favourably, holding down jobs and keeping families together. But the men are typically a bunch of drunken wasters. You could argue that in an oppressive capitalist society drunken fecklessness is a way of striking back against the man, but when it leads to the further impoverishment of your nearest and dearest it has elements of cutting off your nose to strike your face. And even if you were to imagine that somehow 1920s Ireland had seen a socialist revolution, it is very hard to see the men of O'Casey's plays working hard to build the wonderful new society of tomorrow. More likely an Irish Stalin would have sent all the tenement dwellers off to the Gulag (i.e. Longford) and created a new proletariat out of the industrious sons of our peasantry.

images

All photographs by Ros Kavanagh

Gabriel Adewusi, Liam Heslin, Sean Kearns and Garrett Lombard in The Plough and the Stars (Druid)

Caitríona Ennis, Marty Rea, and Rory Nolan and in The Shadow of a Gunman (Druid)

Zara Devlin in Juno and the Paycock (Druid)

Aaron Monaghan and Rory Nolan in Juno and the Paycock (Druid)

Le Guess Who 2023: epilogue

You can read my previous Le Guess Who post here and all my 2023 Le Guess Who posts here.

Monday saw us making a long, depressing, and surprisingly stressful journey home by plane. The possibility of travelling back overland next year was discussed, though I suspect it would be a bit impractical. It was however nice to receive a welcome at home from cat name of Billy Edwards.

Some Le Guess Who things I did not see but wish I had:

• Caterina Barbieri + Space Afrika with MFO: partly just for the name.
• Decisive Pink: someone who was formerly to be in the Dirty Projectors and someone who was not.
• Alan Sparhawk: I think this could have been quite emotional. Plus Low were always one of my favourite live bands.
• The Good Ones: My beloved saw them and said they were great, as did a guy we were talking to at Le Feast. They are from Rwanda but were not playing traditional music of their country, but instead tunes of a somewhat more globally informed variety.
• In Solidarity With: This was not a performance at all but a gap deliberately left empty in the programme in which people could sit in Hertz and think about all the bad things happening in the world. If I remember correctly the time slot was meant to be filled by a Palestinian musician from Gaza but he is now trapped there and fleeing for his life from Israeli bombing.
• Model/Actriz: As previously noted, this Brooklyn bunch were recommended over brunch. I will investigate them.
• Stereolab: I have seen them many times and while I do not regret seeing other things instead of them I would still like to have seen them at Le Guess Who.

Thanks to anyone who has made it this far. If you want more you can see all my terrible Le Guess Who pictures here.

Le Guess Who 2023 part four: Sunday

You can see my previous Le Guess Who post here, and all my Le Guess Who 2023 posts here.

Sunday morning at Le Guess Who means it is Le Feast day, where you go for brunch in the home of someone who lives in Utrecht and have fun interacting with strangers, if you have signed up for this (my beloved and I always sign up for this while our friends never do). This year we were hosted by a Brazilian-Dutch couple (with the Brazilian woman doing all the cooking I think) and their delightful dog. Delicious food was served. There was quite a large group present, to the extent that once we sat down to eat you could only really talk to the people in your immediate vicinity. I found myself chatting to an Irish woman (small world), a guy from Portugal who lives in Liverpool, and a woman who appeared to be from a number of different countries, one of which was the Czech Republic. We talked about David Lynch films and the Twin Peaks; I felt sad about the fact that I still have not seen the recent Twin Peaks series. We had such fun that some of us repaired afterwards to Café Derat, which has become our Utrecht local to the extent that we met more people we know there, including a visitor from London who wasn't even over for the festival.

Tempting as it was to spend the day skulling pints (or whatever passed for pints in the Netherlands) we had music to see, so we bade farewell to our new friends and went back to the hotel to freshen up. Then it was music time. The first thing I saw was The Harvest Time Project: A Tribute to Pharaoh Sanders (who I am going to stop referring to as Finbarr Saunders). This saw loads of people playing jazzy stuff. I liked it. It reminded me of the all-star jam that closed off the Jeff Mangum-curated All Tomorrow's Parties in 2012. Later I would realise that to some extent this was basically a very expanded version of Irreversible Entanglements, although I am guessing that the various other players present might have had their own views on this. But certainly Moor Mother's very deliberate beat poetry was an important element here. I was struck by R—'s query about how long some randomer who gate-crashed the stage would take to be found out.

Memorials sounded like a good idea (with the presence of Verity Susman of Electrelane being the big draw for me), but I found them underwhelming. The big problem for me was the amount of recorded backing material, which undermined any sense of this as a live performance. Not everyone would see things this way and I can imagine that they might still be worth investigating on record.

So I cut my losses and raced down to grab a place near the front for Irreversible Entanglements. This lot are great, managing to make weirdo art jazz that you can dance to. I'm sorry I don't have more to say about them, considering they were one of the weekend's highlights.

Afterwards I tried to get into the Pandora stage to see Model/Actriz, who had been recommended over brunch by the Liverpudlian Portuguese guy, but it was way too full up there. So I drifted into the Grote Zaal to see Faiz Ali Faiz, some Pakistani Qawwali lad. Holy fuck this was pretty full on. He was onstage with a load of other guys who were either joining him in testifying about how great Sufi Islam is or else playing instruments (drums and harmoniums) or doing handclaps. It was all pretty in your face but definitely the kind of thing that would have you deciding to become a whirling dervish. At an intellectual level I find the whole thing of devotional music being played for the entertainment of the non-religious a bit weird, but you can't argue with the awesomeness of Faiz Ali Faiz and his buds.

Following that we looked experimentally at trying to sneak in to see some of Stereolab but it was too crowded and I did not fancy being stuck at the back. Instead after a quick nightcap we repaired back to our hotel, though I did pick up a Stereolab t-shirt. And that was it for another year of Le Guess Who.

More Le Guess Who pictures

Le Guess Who 2023 part three: Saturday

You can look back on my previous Le Guess Who post here, and you can see all my Le Guess Who posts here.

By now I was getting the hang of the hotel breakfast and was carefully balancing my intake of bread, rolls, egg, poffertjes, croissants, coffee, and cava to ensure an optimal start to the day. I think we may also have visited the St. Catherine's Museum today, educating ourselves on some of the more entertaining aspects of Dutch religious history (in particular the secret Catholics who had to build hidden churches for themselves while feuding with the Vatican over definitional issues). An early dinner in the afternoon saw us washing down a tasty Tilt veggie burger with some Belgian beer. Then we went off to The Drain, one of the faraway venues to the south of Utrecht, outside the moat that protects the city from attack by barbarians.

We were there to see Khorshid Dadbeh, an Iranian musician. We kind of assumed that relatively few people would make their way to such a remote location, arriving just before she was due to start, but sadly we were wrong and had to queue to get in to where she was playing. We then found ourselves stuck at the back of a venue without a raised stage, which meant that although we could hear Dadbeh playing we never actually saw her and I am still not entirely certain she was actually there. Music was pretty good, if you like the sound of people playing Middle Eastern stringed instruments similar but not quite identical to the oud.

Back in the Tivoli Vredenburg I saw Moin, a band featuring drummer Valentina Magaletti (of various other bands) and some other people. They were pretty good but looking back on it after a couple of weeks I fear they might have been one of those acts you enjoy seeing at a festival but who leave no lasting impression. Maybe I should check them out on record.

Who definitely left an impact was Colleen, a French electronic musician based in Barcelona who has adopted an Irish (or Irish-American) name. She was playing in the Janskerk. She was playing on a Moog and her music seemed very analogue, with a lot of having to patch through wires between pieces. It was all very enjoyable in a wibbly wibbly way, making good use of the Janskerk's acoustics. It also can't be denied that Colleen radiated such an appealingly pleasant personality that it would have been hard to dislike her music. But there was still a sad moment, with Colleen reporting that she was playing the last ever Le Guess Who concert in the Janskerk. Perhaps the Dutch Reformed Church had put their foot down after ATTILA CSIHAR's invocation of the day before.

And then when she finished, a funny moment: the stage was rushed by members of the audience who wanted to inspect the kit and ask Colleen how it all worked. God bless them.

That was already quite a lot action for one day, but there was more. Next up I saw ESG, the minimal dance sensations from New York. They only have one original member left now, a somewhat frail Renée Scroggins, with the line-up filled up by her daughter on bass, a son on percussion and dancing, and a session musician on drums. Scroggins herself did vocals and played some guitar. And it was amazing, with the grooves being totally infectious. My friend R— was saying that he finds ESG a bit thin on record and sees their being endlessly sampled as indicating how their music suits having more stuff built on top of it, but that it still works live. I'm not familiar enough with their recorded output to judge but they definitely work as live performers. They are definitely one to catch if they ever come to your town.

That was kind of it for me on Saturday night. I saw in Hertz for an electronic set by ZULI & Omar El Sadek, who are I think from Egypt and then caught a good chunk of Nihiloxica. People were very enthusiastic about the latter but once I start thinking it is time for bed I find it hard to engage.

More Le Guess Who pictures

Le Guess Who 2023 part two: Friday

And so we come to the second day of 2023's Le Guess Who. You can look back on day one here.

The first people I saw on the Friday were the Pankisi Ensemble, who were playing in the Jacobikerk. They release music on the Ored Recordings label, who I recommend investigating if you are interested in weirdo folk and and folk-adjacent music from the Caucasus or the Circassian community. The Pankisi Ensemble are a mainly vocal group of Kist women from the Kist, with Kists being a Chechen or Chechen-adjacent people living in the Pankisi gorge area of Georgia. I had previously heard one of the Pankisi Ensemble's songs on the Mountains of Tongues compilation of music from that part of the world. My beloved was particularly interested in catching this lot; she has an interest in Georgian polyphonic music and although the Pankisi Ensemble are from a different tradition, there is a definite air of cross-pollination here. The music features the members of the ensemble sometimes singing on their own and sometimes in the kind of multipart choral harmonies with long sustained notes that to my untrained ears sounded very like Georgian or Bulgarian choral music. Sometimes one of the women accompanied the others on a guitar-like instrument or accordion and sometimes she didn't. The music was beautiful and deserves a wider audience… check them out on Bandcamp.

Following the Pankisi Ensemble there was a general sense that the place to be was the Stadsschouwburg theatre, where Kali Malone was going to be playing her Does Spring Hide Its Joy album with Lucy Railton and Stephen O'Malley. Malone was going to be starting very soon after the Pankisi Ensemble finished so I felt that speed was of the essence if any of her set was to be caught and I headed off to towards the theatre with some despatch. My colleagues headed off with somewhat less despatch and so I found myself arriving at the theatre on my own, whereupon I joined a long queue. That moved off pretty quickly but alas the venue filled before I gained admittance. However, I was now sufficiently near the front that I reckoned I would gain admittance before too long when attendees started leaving after realising that Stephen O'Malley being in the line-up did not mean they were going to be getting a Sunn-O))) greatest hits set. And while I did have to wait for a bit I was able to get in time to catch an hour or so of Malone's long set, and to sit in a comfy seat while doing so.

So, Kali Malone. Readers may recall me saying that initially I was not quite so impressed with an album of her organ music but that I grew to like it during the early days of the Covid pandemic as its gentle sounds proved quite soothing in that difficult time. This time she was not playing the organ and she was playing with her buds. The three of them were widely spaced out on the big and largely dark stage, Malone in the middle and the other two on the flanks. Malone was playing some kind of synthesiser thing while Railton was on cello and O'Malley played occasional guitar. It was all very drone and beautiful in its restfulness. And I was amused by how O'Malley was probably the most famous person on the stage but the least essential (unless he was doing more than I was aware of), with his guitar only coming in very occasionally as an augmentation to the wider sound. Definitely a highlight of the festival for me and I was glad to have caught as much of it as I did.

The curse of Le Guess Who's massively multi-tracked programme meant that I had to miss various interesting-sounding things in order to catch Kali Malone, but I did manage to get up to the front of the Janskerk for ATTILA CSIHAR, VOID OV VOICES. Mr Attila is a Hungarian grunty metal vocalist who spent some time performing with evil Norwegian band MAYHEM (managing to avoid committing suicide, eating any of his bandmates' brains (so far as we know), murdering any of his bandmates, or being murdered himself) and has more recently provided vocals for Sunn-O))) (I saw him performing once with them in a tree costume). When he came on he was in full corpse paint and wearing a costume whose hoody top seemed to merge into his hair. His set was almost entirely vocal, exploiting the amazing acoustics of the venue. He used some electronics to treat and loop his voice as he went along, but beyond that it was all pretty minimal. The overall effect was like being present at some kind of Black Mass, particularly as he was performing behind what looked like an altar bedecked with some occult symbols, and I did find myself looking over into corners in case some obscene horror was starting to manifest. I also wondered if there was any danger of a Dutch clergyman storming in to denounce this blasphemy (while also wondering if the non-English vocals might contain some controversial content, given MAYHEM's association with disturbing far-right sentiment).

The concert ended on a funny note however, with ATTILA responding to the rapturious applause by giving us a big cheesy grin and two thumbs up. He didn't quite say "Thanks! you've been a lovely audience!" but he might as well have done.

Friends had bigged up the Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective, another orthographically challenging act who had played the night before and were on again tonight. So I went to see them. This lot are from Vietnam and they were playing in Cloud Nine, the highest of all the venues in the Tivoli Vredenburg (although there are rumours of a secret venue above it, so high that attendees sometimes complain of altitude sickness). And they played on the floor with the audience around them. It was good fun, with guitar sounds that reminded me of heyday Sonic Youth. Their recordings might be worth investigating.

After checking out Rachida Nayar in Hertz (interesting) I repaired to my bed like the lightweight I am.

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Le Guess Who 2023 part one: Thursday

Previously I wrote about my journey to Utrecht for the Le Guess Who festival. Now at last I can start to talk about the festival itself

The festival starts on Thursday. That meant we picked up wristbands and did a bit of strolling around before slipping into Café DeRat, where I met a beer snob who berated me for my pedestrian choice (I was drinking an Orval). We also checked out the two DeRat cats, one of whom came over for pets but then complained because I was doing it wrong. Wisely we opted not to stay and lorry strong beers into ourselves and instead went off to catch some music.

And what strange music it was. The Le Guess Who organisers had come up with the crazy idea of having some of the performers play inside an opaque box onto which images were projected, with the programme not telling you who the performers were but hinting that they were probably someone really famous that you would definitely want to catch. There were three performance of this Anonymous Project, all on the Thursday evening. I caught two of them, the first and last, and I broadly enjoyed the experience. The visuals were pretty trippy, and in the latter case the lighting occasionally made the performer inside the cube semi-visible, suggesting to me that he was a black bloke playing keyboards and possibly also singing (if the singing was not by someone else). And they were different to each other, with the first anonymous performer being kind of spacey ambienty while the last lad featured a bit of piano and some non-verbal vocals that annoyed my friend K— so much he had to leave. I was more forward thinking and enjoyed being able to relax in a nice chair and let myself be mesmerised.

But I did not just watch people playing music inside a box. For I journeyed over to the Janskerk, where Brìghde Chaimbeul was playing the small pipes. These are a Scottish pipe instrument but not the big bagpipes the country is famous for, rather a device where the air is pumped by the elbow rather than being blown, so somewhat akin to the Irish uilleann pipes except sounding a bit different. They are quieter and softer than the big bagpipes ("better suited to indoor playing" as Wikipedia puts it). Chaimbeul is a Scots Gaelic speaker from Skye but is not some died in the wool traditionalist. Rather she pushes the envelope while remaining rooted in the tradition, emphasising drone and pushing the music in new directions. The Janskerk is an atmospheric venue with great acoustics and it suited her music very well, making this an exciting first concert of the festival where I was actually able to see the performer. Consider investigating her Carry Them with Us album or her guest appearance on Caroline Polachek's "Blood and Butter".

Beyond the Anonymous Project and Ms Chaimbeul, Thursday was a bit quiet for me. I saw some of African Headcharge, who did a bit of raising people's consciousness. I particularly liked the bit where the singer talked about how happy to be back in Belgium because he just loved Belgium despite everything (that everything probably being a reference to the Belgian Congo, the official most horrendously terrible European colony in Africa); debate ensued as to whether he was actually mixed up as to what country he was in or whether he was taking the piss in some way. Both of these are possible; all those European countries are kind of the same. I also caught a bit of Rəhman Məmmədli, who is from Azerbaijan, where they use the Roman alphabet but with a couple of extra letters thrown in. He plays the guitar in an appealingly liquid way, but part of the fun came from his accompanying musicians (on piano keyboards and a hand drum), who were his sons. The pianist in particular had great chops and kept threatening to overshadow his dad, to the extent that we were imagining him getting a clip round the ear backstage once the concert was over.

Peaking too soon is never a good idea at Le Guess Who, so after that set I made my excuses and repaired to bed.

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