BLOC Weekender - Butlins Minehead 13-15/03/09

Load of crap.

I decided to go because I had a free ticket. I decided I'd miss the Ramesses gig at the Old Blue Last on the saturday because there would be enough stuff at BLOC to make up for it. I made an incorrect decision.

Rather than go through and explain that almost everything was shit, and not just shit, but somehow shitter than when I went two years ago and had a terrible time, I'll just highlight the highlights. Because there's no need to say that Carl Craig was shit. Or that FSOL were shit and didn't even come to the festival, opting instead to play from their studio on a shit webcam. Or that pretty much dance music has just gone to shit. Or that the Butlins staff were once again being complete fucking assholes... ok I can sympathise to an extent this time, I suppose, because the punters were mostly wankers. Wankers in hats. But still, Butlins police, no thanks.

So yeah, I'll do the highlights, here goes:

Friday night - Big Alan insists that this one kid is really amazing, this one kid who's playing at fuckin' 5am or some shit. So I endure the rest (gay cowboy dancers?) and wait for Rusty. And yeah Rusty is actually dead good. Mixing all kinds of bass heavy stuff in very odd and inventive ways, with that crisp baseball cap and oversized cartoon t-shirt smirky attitude that only a genuinely talented eighteen year old can pull off. Yeah, I'm glad I stayed up for that, I'd go see him again.

Saturday - Egyptian Lover was a laugh, dead old in a fancy black shirt doing the shit you'd want to hear him do, his old electro shit. And he was dancing, which was entertaining, and he picked up his 808 and went "you know what this is? Eight-Oh motherfuckin' eight" and played with it and that was entertaining. He was a dude.

Aphex Twin and Hecker, one of two reasons I thought it would be worth coming, turned out to be disappointing. I believe the idea was to have Hecker do surround sound effects while Aphex played whatever he wanted but they hadn't tried this out beforehand and it was all a shambles and didn't work properly and was very underwhelming and the set was a disjointed load of stops and starts and hard techno and kind of naff. I got a nosebleed towards the end which I suppose counts for something.

Sunday - The second of two reasons I thought it would be worth coming, Russell Haswell, DJ'd on sunday evening and didn't disappoint, thank fuck. He did his anti DJ thing of like mixing nasty techno really badly and then abruptly stopping it to play some fucking really quiet bee swarm sounds or a helicopter ride or something. I really like it. It's completely fuck everyone.

He was followed up by DJ Bennetti aka William Bennett of power electronics legends Whitehouse, who stood there in a fur coat and mixed really bad italo disco for an hour. I was intrigued but it was no fun, and so I left.

So there you have it, an almost complete waste of time. And apparently Ramesses were amazing. Fuck you world!