Dance music festival’s last hurrah showed why the peculiarly English delights of techno at a holiday park deserve to live on somehow
After years of eagerly shoehorning techno into an environment designed for middling family holidays, Bloc has shouted its last hurrah. The dance music festival, held at a Butlins holiday camp in Somerset, has finally flamed out and will now focus on its excellent club space in London. And as the ship went down, the orchestra played loud and long, gunfingers held in the air.
The lineup cleaved to techno’s grandmasters, and there was plenty of haughty austerity at the top of the bill. Carl Craig’s Modular Pursuits set was a study in civil engineering as he layered Martin Luther King over mature – and ever so slightly stiff – synth work. Jeff Mills’s peak-time set on Saturday night coasted on his star status – he has always skated a line between hypnotic and prescriptive, and here he slumped on to the wrong side, a trap Nina Kraviz also fell into. One punter gamely waved a prosthetic leg draped in fairy lights around but couldn’t conjure much energy.
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Continue reading...by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian
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