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Rating: Subtitle... self-satisfaction. Or rather, subtitle: "Wow, look how cool I am, a genius and intellectual wild card, but so cool because I do drugs and dance like Francis... I'm young from the tip of my toes to the branded hair".
No, well, in the end, I'm even glad I went to this Dissonanze thing, I saw Patton up close (the same spit he uses for his hair), I saw the Battles, the best band of this year, and a bunch of other people, but this festival could have been organized better. Story time: I leave Bari at 5 in the morning on June 1st, I arrive in Rome and reach the Eur, first impression: the Palazzo dei Congressi is fantastic, monstrously huge, with three halls: the Aula Magna, the terrace, and the Salone della Cultura where the entire Pantheon could fit. In each of these three locations tonight there will be four concerts for a total of twelve concerts per evening, and the next evening they do twelve more... up until now, it's great.
At 11 PM I'm under the stage watching the Battles for the first concert of the event: one hour and a quarter of rhythmic segmentations, perfectly squared sound segments, precision in music, intelligence and phenomenal intuitions married simultaneously with both technology and passion. I've finally understood what math rock is: it's precision, mathematical accuracy in music, but they're great because they add immediacy and real sincerity to this precision, it's called passion, and when you combine it with something called genius, you have the Battles. John Stanier beats mercilessly but has a metronome instead of a brain, sweats like Galeazzi but the passion is united with a millimeter-perfect precision in the strokes, with that absurd drum set, with a single cymbal two meters high, just to let the front row feel his armpit. Tracks from the fantastic"Mirrored" roll on, as well as from their first EP collection: "Ep cb Ep" and people dance with mouths open in awe, and it's not often that you combine these two actions. After "Atlas" there's an ovation and they're even smiling, satisfied, not even those four drops of rain worry them, in short, sensational concert.
After that, there will be someone named Apparat, a German DJ unknown to me, nothing particularly impressive in my opinion, whereas with a certain Nathan Fake things will go better, this young fellow probably is barely twenty and starts with Kraftwerk sounds but reworks them in an entirely personal way, blending them with ideas that could be from Mr. Aphex or the local dealer, not trivial names after all.
At this point, I come down from the terrace and head to the Salone della Cultura and my blood runs cold: here it's pure nightclub amusement, hundreds of Italian youngsters with monkeys in their brains dancing to the worst house music I've ever heard and I realize that the Salone della Cultura is to be avoided like the plague, twelve-year-old fashionistas with heart-shaped sunglasses even in the dark and buff guys who never have to ask for anything, dancing like Verdone when he had a rockabilly tuft slicked back. So, I go to seek political asylum in the Aula Magna, along the way (hundred meters) at least twenty people stop me offering paradisiacal but very fashionable merchandise; I will accept something, but that's none of your business. In Aula Magna, the Modified Toy Orchestra is playing, which means: five exhausted Englishmen in pinstripe suits playing toys, yes, only toys, not even one normal instrument. Imagine Golem III by Mr. Bungle? Their songs were in that style, so 'these broken souls' were also good, but even if someone manages to make music with the English little surgeon kit, to me, he is a legend. After them, Alva Noto will play, and the Aula Magna will fall into a devotional silence, there's a megascreen behind him projecting images of nebulae and distant galaxies, people are divided between enraptured and bored, for me... the latter category applies. I like Alva Noto, I had heard quite a bit of his work before, but live he gets too caught up in the graphical aspect, and little in the musical one, it's not even ambient music, which might not appeal to me, but it's music. No, it's about sounds and atmospheric noises stretched over three quarters of an hour with images in the background... "admire me for how cerebrally complex I am!"... but also no, my reaction is... yawns.
Having recovered from the Alva Noto disappointment, I await Ktl, meaning Peter Rehberg together with a certain Stephen O'Malley, who plays with a provincial band named Sunn O))), one word: spectral, O'Malley's crow sounds a guitar with two valve heads behind him, but the sounds coming out seem like those of a synth and the alienating effect of the background images do their job along with Rehberg's sound centrifuges. After them, I return to the Salone della Cultura, just to confirm that, aside from the terrace and Aula Magna, everything else is dull, and it infuriates me that the organizers thought of blending the caviar of the various Battles, Mike Patton, O'Malley, etc., with the ketchup of a simple crappy dance music with hundreds of idiots swaying eagerly behind a Tyondai Braxton smiling embarrassed by the difference between "them" and "all the others".
The next day the situation in the Salone della CULTURA (!?) does not change, so I head straight to the Aula Magna and sit in the front row because at two o'clock a guy with slicked-back hair, who has done some of the best music offerings of the past fifteen years between one thing and another, will arrive. Before him, these Pe Lang & Zimoun take the stage, two exhausted guys who did the strangest thing I've seen in these two days: they had glass plates that vibrated thanks to a motor, put a different material on each plate: nails, shards of glasses, thumbtacks, etc., and from the vibration of the underlying glass plane they extracted each material's atmospheric sound which was combined with the sound of the other plates, creating "music", up to reaching the intensity of a single whistle summarizing the vibrations of all materials... you have to be out of your mind to conceive such a thing. The only rivals in their exhaustion were two Japanese (the FM3) doing something, if possible, even stranger: they had some sort of walkie-talkies and each emitted a different sound, either a bass loop, a rhythm or an atmospheric sound, they combined these walkie-talkies around a table with two microphones on the sides as if they were playing cards and made "music" this way... absurd. After these experiments, you will return to listening to music made more conventionally as the Giardini di Mirò take the stage, it's the second time I see them, and I have to say I liked them much better this time: they start with an instrumental piece that immediately makes it clear that the usual definition ignorant people attribute to them: "indie pop-rock", is somewhat reductive. They mix to the guitar, bass, and drums triad also trumpets, violins, keyboards and samples thus giving their best in tracks without singing. In short, they managed not to feel out of place in an environment not very congenial to them like that of an electronic music and avant-garde art festival. But now it is two...
Mike Patton arrives triumphantly without paying attention to all those shouting "Michele, Michele... Merdallaro" and things like that; Fennesz is serious as a sphinx and together they set up everything necessary for the performance, Fennesz plays a guitar linked to a laptop and various synths, Patton has at his disposal the usual arsenal of vocal effects plus also his own laptop and various samplers. Let's say it right away: the sound in Aula Magna was terrible, and the sound engineer even managed to piss Patton off after the nth time the great one had asked to raise his volume and he had done nothing. But Patton is god and can say "fuck you, motherfucker, gimme more" even to my sister, let alone if I get shocked if he says it to a sound technician. The concert was phenomenal, Fennesz's sounds were children of a warm, enveloping but clever electronic, with disconcerting intuitions that would turn on you as soon as you thought it would head somewhere completely different. Patton, on his part, seasoned everything with the usual flair, terrified and panicked screams ala Fantomas more hardcore, shards of vocalizations reprocessed in loops, sighs and cries and noises and beatbox filtered by a thousand additional sounds, all generated from one single uvula and then reprocessed by myriad effects and a genius mind. Only three "pieces" if we can call them that, for a total duration of three quarters of an hour. You sense a Patton irritated both by the continuous screams directed at him in an environment that would require much different gathering and by the terrible acoustics. After the third piece, he turns to Fennesz and goes "one more or shall we go? Let's leave, right?" and so off he goes after greeting "all the Roman jerks". He will come down later to collect his arsenal, with dozens of kids wanting an autograph on their Angel Dust copy... he's annoyed, he didn't like how he was treated, he didn't want this, collects his stuff, makes the youngsters laugh a bit by imitating that exhausted woman performing on the stage dancing and singing on a chair, promises to come back and sign autographs, of course, he won't.
It's not nice to do an enveloping and intelligent electronic concert with people shouting "Merdallaro... ah Michele" and then come asking for an autograph, the genius who at thirty-nine has created the best music surrounding himself with the best musicians in the world came to Rome, gave his pearls to the swine, they didn't treat him as they should have, and he left, without even playing humble, simply with the certainty that "I'm right". That the guy has style was known, and damn, he has it even when he leaves angry.
Sorry for the excessive length, but there were twenty concerts at this festival, there was a lot to tell.
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