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Once a year the small university town of Nijmegen is the host to around forty-thousand people from all over the world who come with the purpose of walking forty or fifty kilometers a day for four days in a row. Whatever the significance of this event, during this invasion the natives are placated with a week long festival of cheap beer and bad music. Luckily for the more discerning natives, a number of less mainstream outlets host a small festival of their own amidst the ruins of an old palace of Charlemagne. Usually the line-up of this small festival contains at least one act worth seeing, but this year the organisation was especially kind to lovers of forward thinking electronica: we got a staggering total of two sumptuous performances, one by a collaboration between two acts on the renowned UK label Fat Cat, and one brought to us by the good people at Cologne-based A-musik records.
The Fat Cat performance consisted of a battle of the powerbooks between Main and Antenna Farm which was commissioned expressly for the occasion, as a collaboration between Fat Cat and the legendary Dutch label Staalplaat. Unfortunately, the fact that it was a commissioned performance was painfully apparent: the sounds unleashed in the incoherent mix by Main and Antenna Farm (the band of Fat Cat boss Dave Howell) were rather uninspired and tepid, to say the least. Of course it was nice to experience a broad spectrum of different gradations of noise, but the noises that truly grab you and enhance your life meaning were sorely lacking. Perhaps this was also a bit much to ask for , seeing as that all the samples were constructed during the previous week, but it would have been nice to see representatives of such an influential label treat us to a bit more than mere filler. To make matters worse, the performance was poorly structured, wandering aimlessly from one grating mesh of sound to another, without any discernible form of progression. Only towards the end did the performers deign to add some low end to the mix in an effort to try to get things moving, but by that time it was too late. The audience of about ten people (not counting the drunk pary-goers who would walk in, wait for about five minutes for some form of beat and walk out again - hehe) had resigned itself to the fact that it would get nothing more than an unobtrusive wash of lukewarm hiss and limp-wristed roar as background music for an evening of pleasant drinking and conversation. Too bad.
Luckily, Cologne's A-musik brought us a performance by Felix Hoefler aka FX Randomiz (also known, by the way, as one half of Holosud) on the following Tuesday that more than made up for the half-baked attempt of Dave Howell and his friends. Standing motionless behind his laptop, staring intently at the screen without so much as blinking once during his set, he gave the audience (twelve, this time) a carefully structured, earth-shattering lesson in the emotive powers of electronica. Building up his mix with breath-taking precision and maddening patience, FX Randomiz proved all those people wrong who claim that you need clearly defined beats to be hypnotized. With sublimely crafted roar and subtle rhythmic crackles a la the softer moments of To Rococo Rot, Felix Hoefler steered his audience towards a magnificient finale where he engulfed them with warm, throbbing basses and ripping metallic fuzz. Having arrived at this finale, he quickly put an end to proceedings in a manner more becoming to his timid appearance than the casual brilliance of the previous proceedings. It didn't matter, though. Souls were cleaned, new converts were made and FX Randomiz had decisevely established himself as an act that's most definitely must see if you get the chance. And, just to set the record straight, I was sober when he did it as well.
http://www.kindamuzik.net/live/main-vs-antenna-farm/live-beats/597/
Meer Main vs. Antenna Farm op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/main-vs-antenna-farm
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