Well this was totally pleasant. I enjoyed walking around it for sure, just a big white room with some speakers set up playing some noises which I'm sure Hecker put a lot of effort into creating and which probably represent some precise concept involving the science of sound and space and all sorts of fascinating mathematical ideas I don't know about because I couldn't be bothered picking through all the sesquipedalian guff on the accompanying info sheet.
One of the pieces bounced off some tiles stuck on the wall, another came from overhead, another came from a row of speakers at undulating heights... I mean, I have no idea what he's saying, unless all he's saying is check out these interesting sounds, but I had a thoroughly pleasant time until a couple of 2.4 nuclear families who apparently hadn't seen each other for a while happened to meet by chance in there and decided it would be an appropriate place to catch up on their life stories. It wasn't.
Here's a video where you can experience what Hecker's carefully sculpted pieces sound like when recorded on the shitty little mic on a flip HD mini camcorder. It's perhaps more effective as a document of how people move about in a big room when guided by their ears. It stars Horacio Pollard, both members of Kayaking and Joel from Wet Sounds/Trash Club. Enjoy!
Showing posts with label hecker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hecker. Show all posts
Monday, 29 March 2010
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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!
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!
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