After a three year break, the Time Festival made its return to the summer festival schedule with a line-up that consisted largely of various electronic music genres — ranging from tear-the-club-up trap to moody atmospheric sounds — but included a couple indie rock acts and a rapper for variety.
Initially, it looked like the festival might be a bust. Two of the headlining acts — Charli XCX, who rescheduled her tour, and Death Grips, who are no longer a band as of earlier this month — being dropped from the line-up at the last minute and the weather moving between drizzle and downpour, the odds were stacked against it, but somehow, the artists involved managed to pull it out of the fire. Or water, in this case.
Here's what we saw:
1) A Q&A session with Majical Cloudz's Devon Welsh
In between songs, Majical Cloudz frontman Devon Walsh fielded some questions from the crowd, although he didn't do a very good job of answering them. Our favourite was when he told us that he always wears the same thing when he plays, because he always plays the same songs, which makes a certain kind of sense.
2) Jon Hopkins' broad, expansive brand of electronic music
We were only passingly familiar with Jon Hopkins' brand of electronic music. We were more familiar with his resumé: producing for both Coldplay and Purity Ring, doing a handful of film soundtracks and working with Brian Eno.
We were mightily impressed with him live. He's able to move from pretty, piano driven sounds to crunchy industrial ones and even pulsing trance vibes. We get why everyone wants to work with this guy.
3) Some funny fish-out-of-water stage banter from the Smith Westerns
Technically, there were three indie rock-ish bands on the otherwise electronic music-heavy bill Saturday — Haerts, the Smith Westerns and St. Lucia. In reality, though, two of those bands are synthy enough that they blended in quite nicely. The Smith Westerns, on the other hand, are straight-up guitar rock. Poppy, catchy guitar rock, but guitar rock nonetheless.
They clearly found the situation sort of amusing. Our favourite quote from them was, "If we'd known, we would have brought a DJ. Then we could have been like Linkin Park."
4) Kaytranada getting the crowd to move
Montreal-based producer Kaytranada came out with a set that brought together sounds ranging from disco to '80s inspired synthpop to rowdy trap, coming to a climax with his hit "At All," which is an absolutely undeniable good time of a song. The crowd had danced in short bursts throughout the day, but Kaytranada's set was the first ones where we saw people having a hands-above-their-heads and dance-like-no-one's-watching moment.
5) St. Lucia dancing through the rain
The weather hit its absolute low point during St. Lucia's set, when the mildly English-style dampness that had been going on all day switched over to downpour. But even in the terrible weather, the Brooklyn-based, South African-born singer/keyboardist/guitarist went for it with reckless abandon, busting out high kicks and rockstar poses while delivering sunny '80s-influenced synth-rock. It was almost enough to make us forget that our shoes had soaked though.
6) Action Bronson's stage antics/refreshment breaks
You have to give it Action Bronson. He knows what his audience is there for. He knows that they care less about how well he raps on stage, and more about what stunts he's going to pull between songs. In this case, that involved eating a sandwich on stage, then rapping his way through the crowd over to the beer tent to get something to wash it down with.
7) Flume's all encompassing live experience
From a weird and wonderful visual display behind him — part of it seemed to have a boy skateboarding through some sort of wasteland — to chest shaking bass and a set full of slightly downtempo but compelling dance music, Flume was the sort of set you could get yourself lost in.
8) The wonder that is Grimes
We've never seen a performer who likes his or her job as much as Grimes does. As she smiles and dances and interacts with her dancers and talks to the audience, you really get the sense that there's nowhere she'd rather be. She seems genuine. That impression was furthered when she treated the crowd to two new songs from her next album — one of which she hadn't memorized yet, so read the lyrics off of a sheet of paper, the other of which didn't have a second verse. Very few artists would make themselves vulnerable enough to share in-progress material with a crowd of thousands. But that willingness to just be herself — along with an innovative approach to songwriting and remarkably haunting voice — are what's made her one of the country's most interesting artists, and someone worth standing around in the rain for.
by Chris Dart via Electronic RSS
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