Le Guess Who? 2024 – Competition Evaluate

Le Guess Who? 2024
Utrecht, Netherlands
7-Tenth November 2024

Le Guess Who? 2024 pageant created magic once more this 12 months, with excellent gigs from Bo Ningen, Titanic, Nik Colk Void and Klara Lewis, and Kim Gordon.

It’s usually mentioned that music festivals are there to deliver us collectively; though that sentiment isn’t at all times a precedence if you’re standing in a queue. Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? is likely one of the few main festivals that may steadiness numerous disparate and numerous experiences in a significant metropolis, and create a story arc that has credible socio-cultural which means. Even when we punters can’t at all times “come collectively” in the best way that’s supposed, all of us have wildly completely different tales to inform: a course of that feeds again into the entire, over time.

What have been the tales from Le Guess Who?’s 2024 version? One is that Bo Ningen, certainly one of this version’s curating acts, are one of the crucial fascinating and highly effective bands on the planet. Over the weekend they fused sound and imaginative and prescient in three outstanding reveals, every completely different and stunning, and infrequently spectacular. Their “massive” occasion – enjoying the stay rating they wrote primarily based on Alesandro Jodorwosky’s movie, The Holy Mountain – blew minds within the very grand Stadsschouwburg theatre on the Saturday. Retinas, maculars and optic nerves have been rearranged alongside the best way, due to custom-made visuals from Noriko Okaku, Daisy Dickinson and Pedro Maia. For his or her half, the band created a noise that scaled the partitions; sounds turned colors that reformed in new shapes over and over, akin to somebody throwing a number of full tins of paint at a canvas.

A day later, Bo Ningen guitarist Yuki Tsujii and sensible Swedish experimental musician Klara Lewis performed their latest file, Salt Water, on TivoliVredenburg’s Hertz stage, and – sure – in entrance of one other shifting backdrop of reduce up visuals. This gig allowed different, softer, if denser and extra gnomic, buildings to take centre stage: the scrabble, scratch and fuzz of Tsujii’s guitar dovetailing with Lewis’s sensual washes of sound. Issues felt barely sinister, a soundtrack to a misplaced ’70s spy thriller, maybe.

Maybe probably the most sensible second got here on the Friday within the cavernous Ronda, on the most un-rock hour of six-o-clock. We had popped in to catch a few of artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori’s MESSENGERS, a stay “film-in-the-making”, with mild artist Charlie Hope beaming wild stuff onto the large display screen. The movie appeared to softly berate us in regards to the strobe we smartphone addicts “can’t flip off in our minds”. Effectively, sure…. Such was our digitally-induced passivity that we solely regularly seen there have been extra individuals on stage than Salvadori and musicians Kenichi Iwasa and Maxwell Sterling. There they have been, Bo Ningen, sitting quietly within the corners, every just like the ghost on the bus cease in Spirited Away. Every was additionally known as on to run via a solo – I feel we additionally received the bit from the GAISTER collaboration, which ‘Ningen’s drummer Akihide Monna performs in – after which the band kicked into life with a fully-amped rock present. The mix of viciously flashing strobes, dry ice, howling guitars and thunderous percussion turned these fortunate sufficient to stay round into jelly. A real house ritual. And definitely the shock of the weekend.

If there’s one factor Le Guess Who? is excellent at, it’s turning unsuspecting people onto new, beforehand unheard music, or gigs, mixtures and collaborations you could by no means see once more. One completely unbelievable present got here from the One other Time Ensemble up within the sweatbox of TivoliVredenburg’s Pandora stage. Drummer Asher Gamedze and Cairo’s jazz behemoths Maurice Louca, Alan Bishop, Cherif El-Masri and Adham Zidan laid down a superb set of free-form skronk that was unafraid to dip into mellifluous, barely rocking grooves. I could have been tripping however I swear we went from Riley and Cale to Can by means of Zappa and Steve Reid, and again once more. Their final monitor, clocking in at round twenty minutes, was a monstrous, atmospheric exercise that typically – when the gang all joined in – seemed like a kitchen cupboard collapsing.

Elsewhere, enamel have been rattled with the legendary King Jammy and Aba Shanti-I’s righteous units at new out-of-town spot KABUL à GoGo’s; industrial ranges of dry ice and gargantuan sound techniques served to present becoming tribute to those two legends of dub.

One other legendary act, Latin GRAMMY-winning Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto turned Ronda into what might have handed for a jumbo-sized, post-wedding celebration knees-up. Los Gaiteros used the formal choreography so beloved of sunshine leisure (introductions, matching costumes, hit numbers, and band chief and vocalist Rafael Castro calling the photographs) with incredible aplomb. That they combined these substances with some masterful, infectious enjoying made the set nearly transcendent to be a part of: you may’t simply watch; shuffling alongside, nonetheless badly, is unattainable to withstand. There once more, this band is the last word era sport, they’ve been in existence for the reason that Forties and if they’ll’t do it, no-one can.

Guitar-based rock music is commonly castigated for being outdated and boring and out of contact by those that assume music tastes ought to change like the most recent road meals craze. It could be effectively previous its bus go age, however rock remains to be usually a righteous artwork type. Proof of this was via two excellent reveals from Kim Gordon and Blanco Teta. Kim Gordon, backed by an all-Fem band was frankly magnificent on the opening night time of the pageant. Gordon’s deadpan vocals and breathy incantations (which jogged my memory of Suicide at instances) offered a hard-hitting commentary for a black and glossy lava-flow of dub, lure, growling guitars and incredible rhythms. This was the sort of massive, all-enveloping rock gig filled with poise and resolve that acts like rain after a drought. Everyone knows Gordon’s pedigree, however typically it’s price reminding your self to not get too dismissive or know-it-all in regards to the issues others assume are now not “hip”.

Deep on Saturday night time, Blanco Teta scorched the EKKO membership with white-hot blasts of utter contempt. The digital howls and groans of the amped-up cello was underscored by wealthy, melting bass traces, a battery of drums, and a set of regimental orders screeched out by singer Josefina Barreix. They’re such a full of life, giving band and have that uncommon knack of imparting precisely, and straight, how they really feel with out sounding cloying or lumpen. I really like them.

Three different gigs needs to be talked about: Titanic (the undertaking of Mabe Fratti and Hector Tosta), was predictably excellent within the sedate Hertz, the soulful and infrequently highly effective enjoying of the band an excellent counterpoint to Fratti and Tosta’s dreamy, romantic songwriting. Even the continuous motion of the crowds, anxious to see as many reveals as potential, couldn’t dampen the gloriously cinematic chamber pop that, because it discovered its ft, unfurled and blossomed like a flower turning to the solar.

The identical venue had earlier hosted a extra hushed crowd for Wadada Leo Smith. The parched rasp of a solitary trumpet word, or the quizzical poking of a piano key was set in opposition to intervals of silence that by some means added nice which means and never a bit of humour. The present, particularly the abrupt switches between devices, was mesmerising.

And on Sunday night, simply on the level we have been all starting to show inexperienced and fuzzy via lack of sleep and an excessive amount of quick meals, Nik Colk Void and Klara Lewis turned up the tempo with an absolute free-for-all of funky, humorous, bassless digital dance music. The backdrops sizzled and fried: large samples of what appeared like handled analogue movie scorched our pupils. And the quickfire adjustments of temper, texture, tone, and supply materials – the outcomes of a collective heist that stole, begged and borrowed sounds from completely all over the place it appeared – served up our heads on a plate. It was the type of energising gig that makes you realise simply how creative and daring trendy music could be. Like what outdated Coleridge mentioned, innit. It’s important to preserve your coronary heart in your head.

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All phrases by Richard Foster, you’ll find his writer’s archive right here.

Pictures on the Le Guess Who? 2024 offered by PR and courtesy of Jelmer de Haas (Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto + Kim Gordon), Maarten Mooijmann (Blanco Teta) and Noah Schielen (Yuki Tsujii from Bo Ningen).