Blog archive December 2019
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02.12.19 / 01 / astral industries at cafe oto
I had booked a three-night weekend ticket (29/11 - 1/12), but after all the wait I was ill with flu so couldn’t make the Friday night.
[Cafe Oto is about an hour and a quarter from Ealing - and the weather is freezing]
I was well enough to go on Saturday. It was ok, no more. Musicians with scrawny-armed middle-aged bods should not perform in singlets. Vladislav Delay finished the evening with an unpleasant barrage of industrial noise. I’m no wuss about noise per se, but I wondered about the sensibility behind this fascistic onslaught. Not helpful. A lot of people left early.
Sunday was wonderful - what I had hoped for the whole weekend. O.utlier did good background between sets. I sat next to a whole Dutch family - white haired mum and dad and their married children. And then two of them got up to perform. Wanderwelle had brought their parents! Isn’t it hard to perform for an hour in front of your parents? Who of course took photos. Sweet.
Then Samuel Van Dijk as ‘Multicast Dynamics’ - a harder set with some beats, but well-textured and varied (good noise).
And finishing off, the two Italians as LF58 (everyone in this scene has so many aliases!) - cosmic. Shimmering space music. It meshed perfectly with the generative visuals - which had been behind other acts, but never as perfectly appropriate.
On Sunday there was no particular reason why any of the acts should end - they would all have been good for much longer. Samuel said he likes to play for four hours!
When the lights go up a little at the end, most of the guys are in black hoodies of course - even me - not deliberate, I was just wearing the warmest thing for someone recovering from flu with a long journey on a freezing night. So black hooded coat on top of black puffa on top of black hoodie on top of black long sleeve merino!
It was a Surfers Against Sewage hoodie. Which is ok, but I should have a techno hoodie with a suitable word or symbol for these events. It occurred to me that the Grace logo would do well big on a black hoodie. I will investigate manufacture. Also good for presenting Grace of course.
