Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge
There’s everything from b-boy dance and a Spice Girls-inspired art installation to party funk at this woolly but wonderful party in deepest Cambridgeshire
Wysing Arts Centre is a residential set of studio spaces in the middle of the Cambridgeshire countryside, and once a year it hosts this underground music festival. An assortment of archimage-level hipsters are bussed out to the venue, where the musicians are united by a common theme: this year it’s Space-Time: The Multiverse, on “altered states and multiple identities”. This is a bit of a woolly get-out to allow absolutely any style, from brooding techno to post-punk, but no matter – the quality is almost uniformly excellent.
A set of electronic drone by Bruce Gilbert, of Wire, and the duo Beaconsfield ArtWorks is ponderous, but the main stage then hosts far more emotive work. Beatrice Dillon proves why she is British techno’s brightest prospect. Using a generic dance palette that you might hear in a white-leather cocktail bar, she splashes it with brilliant authorial touches: a scrape of jazz guitar here, a wail of live sax there. Drill Folly provides icily bracing industrial attack, while Klara Lewis is the highlight of the festival, dragging us from an inky ambient wash into the clouds of a techno climax. James Holden’s collaboration with contemporary dancer Lucy Suggate is a little overlong, but constantly arresting. Suggate moves like a blend of b-boy, toreador and ballerina, centimetres from the crowd, to silky live breakbeats and Holden’s modular and digital synthesis.
Continue reading...by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian
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