Electric Frog Weekender @ SWG3, 10-11 September
Saturday’s instalment of Electric Frog is very much about house and techno, with the day’s programme perhaps lacking the multiplicity of styles offered at previous events. Opening the Pressure Street Stage, both Slam and Len Faki air the kind of routine techno fodder that can captivate for a while before beginning to seem formulaic.
Levon Vincent’s arrival on the Melting Point Stage provides the first glimpse of promise. The New York native appears as comfortable playing stripped back, percussive numbers as he is dropping full-on house and his set is satisfying, despite the fact he plays to a relatively sparse crowd through a poor sound system.
As Pressure’s flock multiplied, Derrick May injected some much needed variety and melody into the proceedings outside. Detroit’s innovator of old seemed able to find a balance; playing the kind of rigid techno ubiquitous nowadays, punctuated with more imaginative material representing the bygone heyday of the genre.
By the time Joe Claussell does his thing for Melting Pot, the warehouse begins to look like the kind of party the promoters would have anticipated. As his set peaks with classics such as Octave One’s Blackwater and Marshall Jefferson’s house anthem Move Your Body, the crowd is in sing-along mood and suitably prepared for the headliner.
As it transpires, Frankie Knuckles might have slightly frustrated house purists and fans of his early work. Despite some highlights, his set is littered with commercial sounds and overcooked edits of tracks which would have been best left in their original form. More than a few people would have scurried to the dancefloor on hearing a fragment of the Daddy’s Favourite track I Feel Good Things for You. Alas, Knuckles opts for a filter-happy, hiccupping re-interpretation, lacking the style and character of both the original edit and the Patrice Rushen hit it samples.
True to form, Detroit pioneer Jeff Mills builds his closing set patiently, only unleashing harder tracks Step to Enchantment and the menacingly dark Suspense late on. While The Bells is the most predictable selection in Mills’ sets, hearing his classic anthem augmented with a thunderous Roland TR-909 track is an invigorating experience. He can create more energy with that one drum machine than many modern techno acts can with a full armoury of sounds and effects. With that mastery of the 909, Mills brings to a close a day of mixed results at a festival which may be approaching a crossroads in its development. [Ronan Martin]
Although they look at little soggy around the edges, Glasgow’s post-electro favourites Errors aren’t going to let the torrential rain outside slow this Sunday down, neither are they going to let their 4pm stage time nip the balls from their hook-laden delight of a live show. They play a set packed with the hummable jewels from 2010’s Come Down With Me; and although there’s little difference between the live sound, and the sound on the record, tunes such as Supertribe, Beards and A Rumour in Africa knock the Sunday afternoon ennui firmly out of the Electric Frog crowd. When the band reveal their next album is already in the can, and will be released early next year, there’s a palpable hum of excitement.
The Fall’s Mark E Smith has never been a man to court such human warmth, and as such you can think of better bands to wish the rainy-day clouds away, though the tightness with which his group of post-punk survivors play is admirable, if not always accessible. Not that the raw bass, the squawking keyboards, the rasping throat of tunes such as White Lightning were ever meant to be easy listening, the band turning in the trademark mix of snarl, sneer and delight that’s seen them right ever since the late 70s.
There is something far more debonair about the lake district’s Wild Beasts; these guys are far more snooty fox than wild cat, and their nigh-on note perfect melodies, and 80s synth-pop crooning, certainly keeps the crowd happy, even if the band’s slick delivery seems so polished that at times it comes over a little passionless.
Which is a charge that can never, ever be levelled at Mogwai, especially when guitarist Stuart Braithwaite bobs and weaves onto the stage like a pumped up Ricky Hatton. They open with white noise, throw in a violin – played by Venus As A Boy novelist and Orcadian Luke Sutherland – force a clutch of intense new tunes into the squall, before falling back to old favourites like Sine Wave and even older classics such as almost full-length 15 minutes of Mogwai Fear Satan. A juddering, shuddering Autorock drops a ten ton full stop not just on a solid hour from Blantyre’s finest, but on an stimulating and entertaining afternoon’s tuneage. [PJ Meiklem]