TUSK Festival 2013

HACKER FARM

Lee — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:07:36 +0000

West Country Agricore, if you will. Failing machines and corrupted beats, their method is perfectly flawed. Glimpses of The Orb in post-nuclear nightmare, or a warehouse party with a pithcfork repeatedly assaulting the sequencer. Rhythms bent out of shape and furnished for sinister fun, torn between anger about ‘now’ and a yearning to smoke it all away. Industrial and radiophonic comparisons abound but its very much Hacker farm you’re listening to, feeling the hilarity and the angst merge and confuse.

In your mind’s eye you can see the bits of tape and string straining to hold the hardware together til the end of the set, happily accepting that success or failure will be equally satisfying now you’ve landed safely in this parallel universe.

http://hackerfarm.net/

ENDLESS BOOGIE

Lee — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:05:46 +0000

The savouring of the groove. The long drive down a hypnotically unchanging road, staving off any kind of arrival or climax, frill or flurry; just existing in the fat-bottomed, rhythmic moment, blues as raga, serene restraint multiplying the pleasure manifold.

There are moments on Long Island, Endless Boogie’s most recent offering, where it sounds like Raw Power and High Voltage simultaneously, perfectly captured glimpses retold longform and with relish. The chiming, crunching in-and-out-of-harmony of 3 guitars. Sometimes this strictly strings and skins affair summons echoes of Kraftwerk , confounding at first but then the cruise down the blues autobahn makes perfect sense.

From New York, several albums in and largely (happily?) ignored, the core quartet bring to TUSK occasional member Matt Sweeney, forever hailed by us for his genius Gibson all over Superwolf. Sweeney fits Endless Boogie like a glove, or is it the other way round? Whatever.

May it never end.

http://noquarter.net/bands/eb.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpIb7pWLz3Y

SMEGMA

Lee — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:04:08 +0000

40 years. Most of the TUSK audience aren’t even that old. But that’s how long Smegma have been doing what they do. That day when you first discovered the idea of DIY culture, producing your own records/gigs/zines – Smegma had already been doing it for decades, had pretty much invented it with their Los Angeles Free Music Society cohorts in the early 70s.

Smegma define limitless musical adventure, masterfully slicing through surf, out-jazz, garage, tape abuse, deck mangling, noise, collage and all points between, usually simultaneously. Notably named on the Nurse With Would list, Smegma love the mainstream and want to disembowel it, paving a golden highway between formulaic funtimes and freeform brainfrying, helping catalyze emergent Japanoise and being heartily cited by the likes of John Olson and Thurston Moore.

Watch and learn.

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/smegma-mn0000036269

OREN AMBARCHI

Lee — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:01:30 +0000

Some of the most hair-raising listens pumping through TUSK HQ over the last couple of years have been the slowly growing collection of double albums by the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi. Hell of a line-up just on paper, but on vinyl this trio takes the term ‘power trio’ to uncharted galaxies. Backboned by Ambarchi’s ecstatically sparse drums, he can pilot you through the most intense musical hour simply by riding the cymbal and snare, eschewing all frills and devotedly straddling the groove.

Ambarchi isn’t only a drummer of course, but those performances see him almost personify the eternal truism “what you don’t do is as important as what you do”, an approach that runs through his unbounded oeuvre, taking in the electric, electronic and acoustic and focusing on the sonics, the warmth, the feel that can be wrung from them. No surprise then that regular partners in crime include Sunn O))) and the Touch label, though who else could be so perfectly suited to both those outfits?

http://www.orenambarchi.com/